soft sitting and wheezing alongside his stick,
so mysteriously carved of his person.
With sparkling eyes, tussle-hair uncapped,
cravat wrapped in a silver beard grin.
The rock of ages in a cracking man.
Ailing in body that pain invades the mind,
voodooed into every ancient artefact,
real ancient, care come, look see.
The lore of lords and of the people's people,
reborn in the telling of their aplomb.
Sweet oil of sweat glowing in the each of them.
The house is weaving a spell web
down upon your quiet breathing and deep
into the sofa of warm wood hearth and home.
A time machine.
For time it is, as we creak to our feet
for the badgers are awaiting, awoo.
The owl-quarried woodwards path and
down the night into the night
we roll deep, we do, we do.
Sit there he says, the pavilion porch,
hush and dip your light, for they come!
Moon-striped and black as pitch.
Dumb quiet, tree delled, and grass swarded,
fox dark on the daisies wane.
Magic it is.
Deeper into the garden dark and
deeper into the night he calls to them.
The wary hello badgers guzzle in for supper.
Wrapped in dark and by another path,
his heart hangs runcible on studio walls,
carved in art, and dream catapults for kids.
From the child in this man they see
the magic running to time way back
when it was - oh boy it was!
In the lone night when the deep pain insists,
his heart returns to art wood-edged.
Alone in t'wee hours fired thoughts and
music lying on the blinking night.
Fireside music and be damned! The pain is easing,
and so in damp grass steps to bed, perchance?
Fathoms deep in artefacts
that hang here and everywhere,
and peopled there within,
by name or touchstone tactile feel.
His jackdaw eye will never relent,
to have and to hold them, all iridescent.
It was a privilege to glimpse his creative verve,
which did this poem so to make.
My visage singular of a singularity,
burning in an epoch of never may care.
And so he does.
But ...
... like so many stars in the firmament,
around which the black dog swirls,
with doubt undoubted, dwelling there too long,
does drag down the joie de vivre.
The joie de vivre that is so far away
in the lonely hours, in the still of night.
Carving away at the black dogwood,
or sculptured in his ceramic dreams,
all we see is the beauty of his stoicism.
Recruited we are fellow buccaneers, for
when the black dog howls at the raging moon,
golden bound we holler on the tumbrel of life
In all these things he holds THE secret.
Do you think he knows it?
For, by my soul he shares it.
We see it in his towering mind,
in artisan hands that carved a life,
that sculpted the man that is ...
Our dear Paul Llewellyn
No comments:
Post a Comment