Category: Poems

Dear Father, I love you, what can I say?
These eyes I have can see only little
Sweet Gum covered hills,
But the eye of my soul can see through a million endless
Nights kept alive by the fire of your hearth.
The heart of the mountain that peeks through the clouds
Of our misty laughter has been still for two million years,
But who is freer, us or it?

I’ve fallen into the Ocean
Of Kepler’s fountain, and the whole
Universe has sprung up silver,
Light through water, stars singing.
For silver is the colour of crossing
The ocean, of the Soul meeting its betrothed,
Piercing through the world that says “Life Stops Here”
In Jason’s ship of Destiny.

Since you left my whole
Being seems to be in free
Fall back into the Whale’s belly.
It feels like I’m fleeing the Gods,
Painting the birds their different colors
With my fire
That you lit.

Sometimes you dream so hard
The clocks of your mind begin
To melt inside a Dali painting,
And the continents of your heart collide,
Pushing up mountains on which the hunter inside
You searches for the sacred white deer.
White mountains, white snow, white Buffalo, white sorrow;
The land’s blood is white, and the white moleskin bison skins
Flap in the wind as crystals soak the mountain.
We are sucked through the river’s white pipe.
Tobacco like water, river like smoke,
Our black walnut branches freeze
Fruit into the shadow Mother’s feathered bed.

But when we beat our drums,
To remember what we danced
And sang and the silence glances
Between her shadowy apparition and vapory vanish,
What will happen to those snow ringed owl nights
Darkened by just her eyes,
Blown by grasses and anchored by stone?

The white deer of our spirit was in the mountain
And also rested on her shoulders.
How many generations she will breed
Be run off cliffs
Pierced by the insatiable arrows
Dragged away by a mountain lion mouth?

Then we shall flank the grove of milky white pine
And fill its lungs with Arctic animal spirit.

We will ever dream so intensely,
And love so dearly, our tears
Will become rain and our desire blackened soil,
And golden leafy dreams will spiral down,
Floating through the stars
Giving birth, like an angel,
To the next door we open,
And the path of dreams blossoming in
The dew of the night’s first dawn.

Then our song will never
Be written, but instead,
Be sung.

©2009 Stephen Pickering. All rights reserved.