Jonathan Beale- Three Poems

Yet less

Those sparse cracks in the days-end

Where the air- although thin

Can be enough to fuel an idea.

A free moment taken to relish in -

The making of the form

Not pervading what is given.

Taking sculpting with ones hands.

Clouds from keyboards

Horizons on screens.

The mode is never known the feeling is post operative.

The red blood poured to anoint

By crossing the ‘Ts’ and dotting the ‘i’s.

Those moments have eluded for a short time

A lifetime in a poet’s eyes.

Do not lose a life time in your eyes.

Untitled

The landscape – a canvas

How they live among us

In their private places.

Contorted as we

In their strangeness.

That we think about but never see -.

Their past – monumental – and silent

Remains emblazoned across

The light of a day

In a seemingly sinless way

Walk along a street, any street

Spend a minute – and look.

            Against the background

Disguised in Latin and in myth.

Their place is raw and silent

            Structured to anothers architecture!

            Grown contorted as if planned to.

Unable to forget their pasts – 

The failure and the errs of their being.

Walk along a street, any street

Spend a minute – and look.

                      

                        In Brueghel’s Triumph of Death

The delicate balance is unerring

Allowing the fear that is to draw you in – and then

Draws upon you;

Its magnetism – is its strength. 

            The vast barren landscape

Pointing back to what is to come.

The relentless red harshness –baron as the cud.

            If those

Sketal bearers of the news

Could somehow fail or fate could overlook

Failed by only the lack of life,

        Would slowly drown as if even by

A darker more sinister hand 

And take it only as any course 

To be written in:

Across the foreheads or the forbears

Invisible to the known eye

Walk along a street, any street

Spend a minute – and look

And today:

             As the idle state of the motionless giants’

Live amongst us.  Another world within a world;

The trees like a doppelganger – hanging around.

A dark silent sinister shadow

Of ourselves - Once and when or just 

A reflection of a past life lived or forgotten.

Dead tree in landscape

After Jan Wijnants

1.

Look at the trees whose life has past

Somehow still exists – deformed as death it-self

As it has no stone nor epitaph (except a shadow)

The skeletal reminder across the sky – where.

You have walked across on every summer’s afternoon with that so loved one

Have fallen in love, against or – just stared at – and wished to be near by

Its monumental stance is immortal

The humankind blindly thinks it is better. In always.

So the ashen branches contrasted and becoming a home

The mysterious ivy divines, calling out and the white grows ever smaller

Like life is just remade and never fully born –

Perhaps that’s what we cannot understand.

2.

Jan Wijnants so indicated in absolute definition.

This is what is to come. 

The view shows the shadow that we understand

We know by a total absence that’s intangible.

The trees old decrepit and of course a monument to death

The old man near than the young and the others are their

Dogs, cattle and so on....

Cast your eye a little wider it’s the birds in the empire of the blue

And the fish in their own private cosmos – they understand.

Everything revolves around the shadow cast upon the track.

It is life we are all going to pass on by, on in Jan’s view of inevitability.  

So delicate and so insightfully brushed in each stroke.

3. 

Pass by the land that is home

And see the death that remains

Not in an ideal or momentous way

Just as everyday cattle and dogs.