Saturday 24 September 2011

Cold Planet


That Messenger god, that playful god
I was Mercury whose ankles ferried
the passionate fire of fleshly suns
volcanoed up so long ago in butterflies
of star-candied bliss.

That trivial god I, the firefly,
winged close in wild eccentric orbits
until she pulled me close into her fire.
She unfurled around me through the long,
slow arc of hungry years,
igniting me with bittersweet berries
until I strangled on them and died.

So I blew her fires out
and she folded space to trap me
through long, slow aching revolutions
dusted by angry flares of hungry ashes
butterflying up like moths of coal.



Copyright ©1997 and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop
All Rights Reserved
This poem first appeared in the Sangreal Limited Edition Chapbook

Ghosts


Time passes, and time leaves ghosts,
ghosts came when the asteroids cooled in early seas.
Ghosts swirled the soup with ladles of molten ice,
shifting carbon and hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen
until single-celled life emerged and matured,
worms and bony fish and plated amphibians.
There are sea-ghosts of squids and lung fish.
Chambered nautiluses drift like spectres.
Forests remember change, distant shaking,
the tread of narrow-eyed, knob scaled kangaroos
and scurrying, egg-stealing mammals,
the meek would one day rule the world –
world rulers can be meek no more.
The skies remembered the asteroids.
The dinosaurs sprouted feathers
and remembered the skies.


copyright (c) 1997 and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop
This poem was first published in the Sangreal Limited Edition Chapbook

Evensong


No sour note its beauty marred;
I heard the music from afar
And hastened in the orchard night
To dancing candles of fox-fire light,
Where the heavy moon cast silver globes
Upon rings of mushrooms glistening fair
For faerie folk that held court there
Amid the drops of swirling light
In gossamer and cobweb-robes.

Faster and faster the fiddlers played,
Dancing within the enchanted glade.
Round and round the faeries whirled
And in the moonlight madly twirled
To the skirling of their magic song.
The apple trees waved with breeze
By mortals unfelt through autumn leaves
Until, slow-rising there came the dawn,
And with the night the host was gone.

In the orchard’s new-day glow,
I heard the music far below.
I heard the sound of dancing fair,
And wished aloud that I were there.


copyright (c) 2002 and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

This poem was first published in the Winter 2002 edition of Fables


Monday 19 September 2011

Touching You



between us and through
this smoky glass wall
            I thought I saw you
            clearly
clearly it was only glass-
distorted shadows playing god
            with my subliminal desires
            on funhouse mirrors

copyright (c) 2000 and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop

Thursday 1 September 2011

Cold Planet


That Messenger god, that playful god
I was Mercury whose ankles ferried
the passionate fire of fleshly suns
volcanoed up so long ago in butterflies
of star-candied bliss.

That trivial god I, the firefly,
winged close in wild eccentric orbits
until she pulled me close into her fire.
She unfurled around me through the long,
slow arc of hungry years,
igniting me with bittersweet berries
until I strangled on them and died.

So I blew her fires out
and she folded space to trap me
through long, slow aching revolutions
dusted by angry flares of hungry ashes
butterflying up like moths of coal.



Copyright ©1997, 2008, and 2011 Daniel J. Bishop