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
I
All my life I’ve loved
beaches and the beauty of
being on the edge
*
Where senses merge like
sex in sand and sky in eyes
we are everywhere
*
Feeling a moment
like lifetimes of loving light
from intense shadows
*
While feelings blur like
sea in sand and sky in air
we’re here everywhere.
II
All my life I’ve loved
beaches and their hot bodies
heating everyone
*
(Save folks or times with
lack of lust for life in sex through
mood or age or choice)
*
All my life I’ve loved
soft warm curves that turn things hard
tangling everything
*
All my life I’ve loved
those days when outlines grow so vague
you shape in the flow
*
Like waves washing worlds
that wishes made whole, oceans
smooth and connect us
*
All our lives loving
beaches and bodies and love
make us all hotter
*
And all our lives’ love
lifts us from life’s heaviness:
makes our lives lighter.
III
All my life I’ve loved
light, I’ve left darkness behind
when stuff got murky
*
At dawn if things got
sweaty I might stay on till
stuff got cool again –
*
– I get dark sometimes
too, we all do, but try to
leave darkness at dawn
*
**
*
Omm
September 2020
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
Meditations of Philippe de Saint Maurice, which I’m turning into English haiku, will be published by Mad Bear Books. The Meditations give insights into spiritual growth, so I’m posting a few here, interspersed with other work.
The first was gulls, the second surf, and the third is dialogue:
dialogue’s great but with
each their own idiolects
words spin their own worlds
*
**
*
freddie omm
october 2019
The spider sculpture is called “Maman” and is by Louise Bourgeois who associated her mother with spiders (“spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother”). This casting of the sculpture (there is one original in stainless steel at the Tate Modern and six in bronze that go on tours) is visiting the lawn outside Museum Voorlinden in The Hague.
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
