How dare I speak?

Raggèd rocks, weathered like the skin of my belovèd wrestling with himself,

rough and grooved and sharp with linear agonies borne over time

and no conclusion

Abiding like an outrage of completely opaque mirrors,

too shocked by the truth to reflect it, hiding

The rocks reveal the inner tissues of our bullet-riddled souls,

the marrow’s holes, where marrow sits now only as a polka of shadows,

cast by an aghast sun

How dare I speak for or against those who attack, those who defend,

when I don’t know the difference between those words, those actions?

When I’ve so much violence within myself?

Nor, if you kill me, will you rid yourself

or the world

of the virus

One way only can subdue it embrace it in yourself, bind it, befriend it,

show mercy to the beast that inhabits inhabits inhabits

wrestle befriend show your self unknown compassion

unknown compassion unknown

It takes practice more quiet

eventually it comes

Listen to no one,

cry

Thus I teach, reach

even myself

– Silke Heiss

All photos by the author. Graffitti on rock captured 18th October 2023

More than

Across the summer grasses' fattened heads,
the wild herbs' yellow blooms -
two pigeons at the bird-bath,
sipping in turn.

They spot me pretending
not to be watching. I can see
they don't totally mistrust, nor do they trust me.

It's a healthy state of being
for pigeons and humans - that state
of being neither one
nor the other, but between,
between two poles of feeling.

Are we the only species on two legs -
obliged to hold those poles
in balance? It could be.

It could be some humans
are birds more than mammals,
and Darwin and Linnaeus' wondrous achievements
perhaps need updating.

Anyway. So across the big-headed grasses and blooms
I sit, noting the segments of cloud
in the sky, and how they resemble
an insect's belly. Remember Foucault
and his 'Age of Similitude'.
Is my thinking that archaic?

For those of you suckling babes,
or welding gates, or taking bookings
from holidaymakers - the Age of Similitude
refers to the Renaissance, when people found
resemblances, connections between things.

Whereas Darwin-and-them thought
in categories, you know - like lists,
and generally linear systems.

It's all of it useful
to us, more or less.

Anyway, the fat-headed grasses.
The birds so full of summer
they can't stop twittering.
All that
is so much older
than the baby humanity -
Nature's most recent invention,
God's last contribution.

Suddenly a pigeon hurtles
gurglingly out of the Dogwoods
and, like a flustered arrow,
shoots by at the level of my ear,

soon followed by his partner,
equally absurd: a metre off the ground,
wings spread, chest out -

as if she were some joke
on Virgin Mary
finally beyond the blues.

I cannot help but laugh.
I laugh as if I were
in company, with fellows
of my ilk.

And I am that: yellow flowers,
seed-plump stalks; the Robin practising.

Nature talks more than I can say
in one poem
at the end
of a day.

- Silke Heiss, 16th November 2018