Four-footed Fire

I want to re-ignite momentum on my blog! 

Through a series of blessed synchronicities, I find myself here again, at last, after almost seven months.

Today eleven years ago I formally wedded that beautiful soul, the poet Norman Morrissey and, in the wake of that event, I created a hand-made book of poems for him - most of which have never seen the light of day.

I'm moved to share two of them with you. 

They are quite distinct in their energies. 

Four-footed by Silke Heiss

Four-footed

My ring has four loops
round the green eye

of the centre stone.

Wisdom is an animal:

four paws on the earth

keep the heart humble

and the mind

uninterested

in suffering.

        *

The above poem was written in Grahamstown, where I was staying with my fifteen-year-old son, who was not at all happy, at the time, about my marriage to Norman. Norman, for his part, had his youngest son staying with him in Hogsback, so we were both, during and very shortly after our wedding, more or less absorbed in parenting, more than we could be in one another. This was painful to me, but the ring (which I had designed myself) gave me strength, it gave me the sense not to indulge myself. At least, my poem led me there, to a better self, you could say.

The second poem is entitled Fire. I like it because, as far as I'm concerned, it reveals me to myself more articulately and more wittily than I could do. If that makes sense. Here it is.

Fire by Silke Heiss

Fire

Hestia and Aphrodite

- the virgin goddess of the hearth

and the brazen goddess of love -

in me

somehow combine -

Hestia's fire keeps

my loins loyal,

while the love goddess' spark

illuminates my kitchen

and all I conjure

in the heat there.

Ag, it probably sounds very grand and unlikely.

But it's true

my eggs are in two baskets -

both very 

near fire. 

    

       *

Hmm. I shall be curious as to whether this little bit of breath on that little bit of tinder does, indeed, re-ignite my blog.

Strelitzia - my chosen wedding flower,
blooming in Sunrise-on-Sea, where I now live.

Facts of Blood

The fourth draft of Greater Matter is complete. I spent this morning contacting a number of people to help me with the way forward and am feeling frankly excited.

At the last minute I decided to change the title of the final (eighth) section from Blood in Ink to Facts of Blood - the former poem was published in the latest Ecca book, Throw in your Song; but the latter poem is more permanent in its meaning. Here is an extract from it:

"[...]

see the pink lamps

of flowering wild grasses bending

on long stalks in a kind of ecstatic submission to

the sun, as it turns

iron-red the luminous trunks of pines in

the plantation [...]"

- from Facts of Blood, title poem of section 8 to appear in Greater Matter later this year.

As it happens, I've simultaneously just switched off an overnight bisque-firing of a kiln-load of ceramic parrot-broaches, ordered by the Cape Parrot Project for taking along to Ohio next week, to a parrot-lovers' indaba. Why is there a feeling of such beautiful order in all of my creative chaos? 

Some of last year's batch of parrot  broaches, photo taken in October 2018.