Idiom-Magic

            A SEED

Your sweetstill silence lurks
      deep
inside the shadowed confines of a seed.
In noiseless patience it
      waits
under the warmfilled days of your rain.

In that newtime of year your spring
      comes
with its rare gift of April,
the smile of your sun.
You sigh and it happens:

     Only the wind has known
you have parted your shell
      and have grown.

           MEASURED TIME

With closed eyes
our lips collecting equity
we feel the pulse of time
as it sifts and sorts with cold-turned hands
the gold of minutes
         as a miser counts his ecstasy.

The hands move themselves on to remind us
that man has created this long an hour
and nothing more.
The diffusion of lust and such little time
has deepened the groove beside the roads
     where lunas die at the feet of snakes
     and desires fall dormant beneath the thistle.
There is such little time, such little time
for the dying of roses in scarlet shades
or the embrace of sands along my dreams
     such little time, such little time
for the building of dreams in ladder steps.....

The hands that have moved past yesterday
they find us today without a miss
     or a map
     or someone pointing direction signs.
We reach up to touch those arrows of time
                  as they point for us
                  our destiny.

                         FAN THE GRAVE LIGHTLY

Chinese custom demands that a widow wait until the soil has dried on her husband's grave before seeking the happiness of another love. An ancient tale tells of a young widow spending her time fanning the soil of her husband’s grave in order that she may more quickly seek a new lover.

           Along these soundless paths where once we
                  walked,
           in that landscape green, pacific blue which
                  as our island
           within a comforting world of floating lights,
         the pearled horizon,

           a skillful butterfly weaves in the sunlight
           and sketches its shadows where now you wait.

           Fan lightly this grave of yesterday's dream,
           listening to the echoes of forgotten words;
          touch the sound of its pulse still beating
                now, and forever,
          beyond your will or comprehension.

           Fan the grave lightly
           on yesterday's love.

PREMONITION

Outside
a cricket and
in the harbour winks
a light while the heavy
breathing of the wind
sighs in the night. Yet
where is the wonder in that
remembering that Dylan died
expressing and defining his
world far better than I,
and knowing, too, he is
safely embalmed
in a critic’s jar:
a spent insect
labelled
Specimen
Poeta
mediocris.
Time
will not change but
enforce that cognomen
my dears, my poor dead dears,
and all the while sprinkling
the residual crumbs in the
streets and paths
of my way
too.