8 June 2014

Welcome News

This Rain Harp endeavor feels blessed from the outset. I’m not ready to weave too much of it together yet, but I can share some of the many good signs. I do love to wonder about such things:

The theme I used for my previous blog was simple and I liked it, so I used it again for this one. Before, the stock photo in the header was of a tree with white blossoms, which suited me, so I just kept it. This time, the stock photo is what you see above. It first turned up when I posted a blog briefly some time ago to commemorate a death in the family, and was so appropriate it immediately became part of the spookiness of that passage. Lo and behold, here it is again, and still just as good. I will soon be posting photos of my non-literary work, the real Rain Harps. They are meant to be reminiscent of branches and blossoms in rain. And even curiouser, see the two sheep off to the left? I live in town, but from my window I can see a yard where two sheep are grazing even now. I work to the sound of their calls.

Last week, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I was sat at my work-table making beaded chain-links when seemingly the same large, noisy bee flew in through the open window, explored my front room thoroughly, including me, then flew out again. I don’t recall this ever happening before. Bees that chance to fly in usually seem confused and stay by the window. This seemed almost purposeful. It frightened me a little, because it was so forward. This morning, I awoke to email from a friend called Bee, the first news I’ve had from him in many months. He’ll be visiting my town in a week or two. He usually lives somewhere in Europe, and hasn’t been here in I don’t know how long. We have collaborated on projects before; I’ve been thinking of trying to find someone to work with again.

Not that I intend to post everything, but this is what came last night:

 
7 June 2014

6

The Spring from which Songbirds Arise

As all the old waltzes wheel round in our memories, all the dear rock doves wheel round in near flight.
Calling all day, and then waiting on ledges for evening to fall and for songs to play night,
their lyrical wings whistle music through magical spiralling-upward designs while I stare.
Sometimes I turn to a pillar of stone, far too frightened to move, but when asked if I care,
I know I would die many thousand times over if love worked its will and it left me alone.
Rough morbid music, perhaps; ancient magic, forgotten at times; bodies turned to grey stone,
but with very strange beauty alight in each countenance dreams ferry back from their burial place.
I shall have sat here forever, as long as you’ve known you exist, and I’ll keep weaving lace
as long as the dear souls around you keep breeding. Music and laughter and all flesh to come—
that’s how you’ll catch us and keep us. You love us; we’ve learned how to weep where the strangest words hum
like a cordon whose eerie electrified sacred enclosure is this, as you hear all I sing.
Aye, we’ve all waltzed round and round; this time is the birds’s. It’s their blossoming, aye, and their spring.

(and then before the end begins:)

A little, sacred, ancient piece of very precious word-lore girls
were given so they’d never have to turn their eyes aside—Who twirls
her life away, behind your eyelids, dancing as if life could end,
but smiling just to show you it will not? You know your lives-long friend.