migrant, writer, work in progress
Look seaward west where
Sun’s gone down pale mauve striped pink
Cloud dimming shadows
*
That photographer
With his spotlight on the beach
Where people are shades
*
The silver ocean’s
Rippled blue reflecting waves
Whishing softly by
*
Offshore windmills stand
Like far off crucifixes
Harvesting the sky
*
Spirits whisper power
To earth and air and water
Resurrecting time.
*
**
*
Photos of Scheveningen Beach, The Hague, by Freddie Oomkens
when we want to live
a life more lit and touched with
fire we need the beach
*
where sea throws us waves,
surf singed with feels we can’t share
like words lost in storm
*
light snow drifts on dunes
while wind blows cold and dry, we
walk down to the shore—
*
foam flies from the waves
like smoke, rolls on soft wet sand,
the dog sniffs, bites it;
*
sunlight’s lying on the beach–
wet, shining now the ash-curled waves sink
reflecting sky:
*
clouds of flame and ash
float through blue, hidden heaven
soaking into earth
*
sky, flames, snow and wind, waves, foam and sand,
they and all of it are never still not ever but they move us
through us as we walk, wish, stand–
*
what I see, I write,
and with my words I try to
catch the snow and light
*
**
*
Photos by F. Oomkens
Sounders of the Depths is Emma Talbot’s exhibition at GEM in The Hague (next to the Photography and Kunstmuseum). It features brilliant, visceral installations (photocollage of selected works above). The show’s soundtrack, serendipitously, is a recording of Hurrian Hymn 6, the earliest piece of transcribed music (c. 1400 BC) – and it’s serendipitous because I wrote this haiku chain about it, some of whose preoccpuations resonate with Talbot’s work:
hurrian hymn
as we humans sing
for the goddess of the moon
singing creates us
*
now we come alive
in a forgotten language
past and unsurpassed
*
words from long ages
of birth, death and love relived
make us only us
*
being an offering –
the oldest song in the world
written in our blood
*
printed on this clay
by god through genes of humans
words and melodies
*
our voices swelling
the endlessly singing silence
breath of timeless sound
*
thirty three centuries
in a blind eye’s blink – always
we sing of presence
*
always we are song
mostly so when discomposed
in discord suffering
*
we’re never to be
silenced or wiped out as we
sing ourselves alive
*
**
*
omm
all our holy ghosts
live in us, and we in them –
love’s eternal haunting:
*
blithe spirits spook us
from deserted dunes – singing
sands, rustled by winds –
*
heartbeat-storms roil round
the beach, rouse stomping wildness,
clamour in our veins:
*
we are the children
– and parents – of the past
in love’s family
*
whose children succeed
give birth to generations
for eternity
*
mother father child
live and grow and give their love
timeless trinity
*
all our holy ghosts
live in us as we in them
we are love eternal
*
Omm
Spring 2018
Floris V van Holland
Early in January 1296, Floris V leaves his court in The Hague for Paris, where – against his better wishes – he switches Holland’s ancient alliance with England to one with France. This sparks off treachery among some of Floris’ nobles, leading to his murder in June.
*
in his hall of knights –
mental topers, tumblers, ravers
– mad din of needy bingeing gluttons
*
smoke-shrouds cling to blackened beams
minstrels mock those braying, belching goblet-brandishers
ranting voices drunk
*
alone in that crowd
and at its centre, he sits
a silent moment.
***
*
thoughts like words unborn
in a womb of forgetting
flit through his spirit
*
scared of too much thought
(which drinking puts a stop to
– as if thoughts could drown):
***
*
sacred hopes, our wished-for dreams
float off like swans when we awake
they glide off on the glossy glassy lake
*
worn out by living
(which dying puts an end on
– as if our lives first wear, then strip us bare).
*
as if as if as
if, in drinking, sleep and dreams
and thoughts and words all drowned like shipwrecked memories
*
and yet and yet and
yet we live and breathe and feed our fates,
our lives float free of us.
***
*
he sits with his knights,
his ladies, fools, his dogs and serfs and clowns
one sated, bloated, slumbering moment
*
comes as if to himself
in the din of that great hall
on his island in the lake –
*
sees in that moment
the ghosts of future feasting,
woken when he wakes.
Omm
twelfth night, 2018
Binnenhof The Hague in about 1290
Hall of Knights (Ridderzaal), Binnenhof, The Hague in the eighteenth century
from boardwalks buried
in the bed of that steep dune
you step on the beach –
*
sandscapes shift, air-borne,
you’re a visitor here, as
timelessly moving
*
as sea waves wash off
infinite fictions of earth –
mere specks on a spot in space.
*
Omm
october 2017
