Self Portrait as Reflection

Self-Portrait As A Reflection Slowly, slowly, I come to the waters And am set down in deepness Shallow as a mirror Burnished as gall My eyes are bluer now Are they not? But not grey, not grey As the clipping soundless owl Coin-bright for Hades But blue as a sky-painted egg Smashed into novas Into broken white stars by Sophia Nugent-Siegal ©

July 12th, 2016|Tags: , |Comments Off on Self Portrait as Reflection

Rough Sleepers

Rough Sleepers Our dreams are ragged Sold by the rag trade Sweated over like a brown-edged book Gilded with bodily imaginings My fever dream under this shadowed roof Is of a home I ate to pieces like a caterpillar eating its carapace For we are not snails And the angel stands with his flaming sword Between dream and truth A line thin as a needle Parting my hair Sleeping

July 12th, 2016|Tags: |Comments Off on Rough Sleepers

The Substance of Dreams

The Substance of Dreams ‘We have left all the rest behind, one after another. It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded.’ ‘Not to me,’ said Frodo. ‘To me it feels more like falling asleep again.’ -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings I—Remembrance of the Storm Hack off a limb of the Jesse tree Dead standing simulacrum of the veins Turned from the shape of history to history’s

July 12th, 2016|Comments Off on The Substance of Dreams

The Promised Land

The Promised Land From the fevered labyrinth of the repeating mind Rises the architectural dream The green jade city guarded by the Evangelist’s lions They hold in their symmetry to the ruled horizon They hold the idea of order in their reposing paws And though they never shall turn their flat eyes They could if they so wished as they never will There are no people in the geometric city Its

July 12th, 2016|Comments Off on The Promised Land

Journey to the Centre of the Mind

Journey to the Centre of the Mind I—Fire “I know thee, thou clear spirit and I now know that thy right worship is defiance.” -Herman Melville, Moby Dick The scientists have a hellfire dream of the centre of the world The earth looks to them like a clear glass eye And they say its heart is crushed fire Weighted with itself For nature’s blood is fire, they say, And its unstable

July 12th, 2016|Comments Off on Journey to the Centre of the Mind

Beauty is a Joy

Beauty is a Joy They bring from the earth’s end and lay at feet And then the phantoms fall And we stand alone on the skinned plain Seeing The stars are everything You can lie on them like a penitential bed How do these illusions profit us? Should we not swear off poetry like the philosopher? Scooping out our chests to resemble the empty tomb? But this soft feathering of these

July 12th, 2016|Comments Off on Beauty is a Joy

Kaddish

Kaddish - A day when there were services for a centenarian, a suicide and murdered children Oh Brutus, should we mourn for the happy life or the sad one? Is it the despair which lingers like miasmic mist Or only the one wise thing the Delphic woman said? And when the self-slaughterer lies by the unshriven child’s side are there dreams in that sleep? Should we ever mourn for the

July 12th, 2016|Comments Off on Kaddish
Go to Top