Extracts from Issue VII



Instrument of Nature
On whom the Shadow Falls
And Chaos Calls …

 

Instrument of Nature

You have been witnessing the inner brush
Painting back and forth,
Stroking the oil of consciousness.

Nature’s our lady, nature’s almighty:
Destiny working minus the glory
Freezing the blade of logic’s injustice
With instinct pure and simple
Let the raven rise higher
Climbing the shivering spine
Skimming the hatred of the double world
As the magic winks his harlequin eye
And the future presents herself
Bang on your eldritch doorstep
Ringing the bells of Gotham
As the soul mates with your flesh
Like the king checked by the queen:
Nature’s almighty, nature’s our lady.

The darkest hour will beautify
Like oysters yawning mother of pearl
We are the gods, the gods are we
Free to indulge in the art of creation
Right here and now in the land of the living.

Now we are focused.

Martin Buckley

On Whom the Shadow Falls

He’s robed in sun, his hours are grains of sand
Roaring through a glass that cannot be
Reversed; and every bell’s the toll of noon
And midnight in the belfry of his brain.

Wearing the quick consumptive glory of
The doomed, he feels the worm’s cold kiss
Of fishes’ touch; a monster in each room
He enters squats behind the door and waits.

His face is fever-bright; he moves outside the stale
Orbit of common peace; no one can tell
The secret rosary that presses on his throat
Or tune in to the clanging in his mind.

A paradox, he takes an evening stroll,
But, as he pauses by the trellis gate,
The bells begin like babel round his head
And taloned harmonies peal from the night.

For him alone the music of the darkness
And, in the empty pauses when his thoughts
Erode the unreality, pale voices
Chatter in a tongue that none but he

Can understand who tastes both life and death,
With butterflies of panic in his soul:
Time takes him up, clothed in a desperate brightness,
On whom the margins of the shadow fall.

R. L. Cook


And Chaos Calls …

Aligned in pure geometry
Of worship to a streamlined land,
As labouring and numbered hoards
March fox-trot onwards hand in hand,
Four hundred years this empire grew
Nourished by greed and breathing power,
Yet ghosts of want still prowl its core
And decay thrives ‘neath gilded towers,
Waiting for chaos to call …

The fields all yoked to endless growth,
The parks enslaved by soldier towns,
Like plague a sickness rears its head
From trampled ideals, broken ground,
Monkey-rebellion dances blind
And through relentless communed crowds
Apathy spreads to neuter will,
Compliant to ominous clouds,
Called up by chaos.

While superstition breathes anew
And childsplay drowns like swollen vales,
The dying beasts and crashing dreams
Are buried with a face so pale,
Anaemic now the nation bends
To stack sandbags, shrug off all blame
As fatalism wraps each mind,
Where Hell’s own fire ignites no flame
A little chaos is called for …

Serena Shores