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Nov 2023
"ELECTED SILENCE,SING TO ME..."



"Skin"
as they used to call him


is( like me )
up a tree


the very topmost
tip of it.


Wondering at this
great height


"What must it be
to be

someone  
else?"

I too a boy
at one with the sky  

sharing
a branch with a bird

who accepts me
as just

another( if odd )bird
of a different feather.

I wonder if the bird wonders
what it must me to be - me.

Esse quam videri  
( to be rather than
to seem to be)  

words carved into the living
tree
the wounded bark.


Clouds too
are my friends.

Feel as if I could
step on one

have the wind
roll me about.

Fields...
a green patchwork quilt

River...
a silver thread.

House---
a mere toy.

Time spreads out
endlessly.

It is always and  
only forever.

The created and uncreated
map of Now.

"Skin" or
Gerard Manley Hopkins

as I will get
to know him

both up  
our respective tree.

He in 1853.
Me in 1963.

Drinking in the world
with our eyes

and one big  
gulp of the mind.

*

REALITY'S UNRAVELLER

Charles Luxmoore on Gerard Manley Hopkins...


"...a fearless climber of trees, and would go up very high in the lofty elm tree, standing in our garden...to the the alarm of un-lookers like myself."


I on the other hand climbed trees to escape the world of my young sister's death...here at this great height I could be both in and out of the world...longing to be someone else...somewhere else....anywhere else...anyone else...even a bird if that could be...the map of the world spread below me...high above this bitter grief. I would "vanish" into bay windows and sit for hours whilst aunts and uncle stood a few feet from me and wondered where "the boy has gone" and call my name that didn't seem to be me anymore. I remember sitting between two silver milk churns down in Cork and everyone unseeing of me as if my grief had made me invisible. I was "Of reality the rarest-veined unraveller..."
Donall Dempsey
Written by
Donall Dempsey  Guildford
(Guildford)   
67
 
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