About…
The poem is about the destruction of the rowan by a confederacy of abulents and
chance - where the rowan represents [culture/happiness/a person you might know/ etc]
delete as applicable and if that leaves nothing then enjoy it or not as you choose
It is intimately linked to the antimusic
The land of rowena
.
Book 301 is intended to be a collection of poems by Mike Burr for 2010 with no thematic precept.
The land of the rowan
bright day
bright day
where did your brothers sisters go
upon this month of may
when winter turns and thinks of august
its images of evenings fire across the sky
bright and ashen thin
you burst against the backdrop of litter
with layered,lacquered and spatter-sprayed currents of colour
red that ran like berry-beads
their pentagrams among the electric thread
read bright across the web of deconstructed reality
against the dark you said
against the dark
the deathly silence of a forest paused
for shock to see the gingered tree
its thin ash lathes a wandering the dark path
perspective gone, dissolutely into the void
into the void it seemed to leap
that firework night of stars and heaven bright
like diamante-paste, false against its clustered sapphire
and emotions that explode lay wasted
violet spun last, their dark columns
rising to the cloudless night
as heat through thin vapour passes, hissing, wheezing
its bosom rending currents, passion coloured
through the endless nebula above
where volcano-stars erupt
mere human blood courses its elliptic path
forever in the stasis of its poor dimension
beating, slowly weakly,
its physic limited as only dull regimen can limit
its purity as thin as scattered ash
against the dark you said
and as becomes both fire and water
so all knowledge liquid-fled, and now is gone
forever cast
and feelings reign supreme and may times strong
somewhere beyond the autumns forest
some where moist and orange-green its leaves do flow
and roots do bind a more
for where the rowan stands again
counterfeit against the will of logic or
counter to the ken of man
in her isle of light upon the dawn of hills
she, the rowan tree, draws aside the man
on that spot, regard a saviour or a cursed
the tree that saved the gods
herself saved from the witches tune
her berries all scattered to the floor
she seeks no praise, she saunters off
her thin ash lathes supple, elegantly weaving
the path a wandering
her bright bark pitched against the settling dark
ashen thin against the dark
again the dark
her wandering
bright day
bright day
where did your brothers sisters go
they say
here in deepening autumns grip
snows trickling down upon the hills
we see sadness in violet flares within its shadows
bright day
bright day
mountain ash upon the fire
its limbs flare upon the sky
we see the colossus earth circling round
and the moon is in the day