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Growing the grey

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        Splendor is stolen.

I call high but am dammed

to the form of a lesser magic.

In captivity it is harder to communicate

the truth, to find the altar of happiness.

        All things I have are stolen.

From a ship dismounted, I landed

and stole. I am always stealing and losing

God, cracking the cup of my direction.

        Bodies exist to understand the brutality of loneliness,

to yield first to breath, then to sex and then to death.

        When I was a candle I had the courage of a candle.

Planets I once walked upon are dead. Could I have been a child,

and now I am not? How is it possible to give up

the solidity of imagination?

         Take me back through the ice-cross in the skylight, into the glow,

sniffing cool blue-green spores – smells purer than spin.

        Caves and stars, coloured covered canvases

melting into unison. Alchemy as I walked, dissolving

into the flesh of constant spring, as I walked,

sprouting the nuclei of many mountains.

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Copyright  © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “Ehanom Review”, February 2014

   

 

 

http://ehanomreview.wordpress.com/?s=allison+grayhurst

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Click to access 20151023No_Raft_No_Ocean_by_Allison_Grayhurst.pdf

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http://scars.tv/cgi-bin/framesmain.pl?writers

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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

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“Allison’s poetic prose is insightful, enwrapping, illuminating and brutally truthful. It probes the nature of the human spirit, relationships, spirituality and God. It is sung as the clearest song is sung within a cathedral by choir. It is whispered as faintly as a heartbroken goodbye. It is alive with the life of a thousand birds in flight within the first glint of morning sun. It is as solemn as the sad-sung ballad of a noble death. Read at your peril. You will never look at this world in quite the same way again. Your eye will instinctively search the sky for eagles and scan the dark earth for the slightest movement of smallest ant, your heart will reach for tall mountains, bathe in the most intimate of passions and in the grain and grit of our earth. Such is Allison Grayhurst. Such is her poetry,”  Eric M. Vogt, poet and author.