Writers/poets/philosophers/musicians/artists/people who have inspired me: Rainer Maria Rilke, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, Kyp Harness, Van Morrison, Pablo Neruda, Nietzsche, Mozart’s The Requim, Yoko Ono, Rodin, Taylor Jane Green,Van Gough, Elizabeth Fraser Williamson, Jane Goodall, Kate Bush.
your influences name all of my fav’s but one that I am not familiar with so- o.k how do you feel about, Roland Barthes, H. Arnendt, Bauderlaire, Lyotard. Foucault. Sontag, Byron, Bishop, Pinsky, Frost, Rimbaud, Camus, Fuller, Gibran, Chardin, Soutine, Louise Bourgeiois, Goya, Ingres, Giacametti, Chrissie Hyde, X, Gang of Four, Mitchell, B.Holliday, N, Young, S. Nicks
books-Camera Lucida, The Penal Colony, In the Cave you live in, The Archology of Knowledge, Being in Time, A wrinkle in time. I’m sure you did not get close to naming all. until I got sick, full blown vegan!
I love this one, Allison. I’ve been looking for yr more recent work, and I feel as though I’ve hit the jackpot.
Yr site here is quite unique w/ the sound of yr voice belting ’em out
(strong, sure, sharings is more like it) Thanx for yr bold intimacies. G.R.
“Follower of Jesus. No church. No religion. Just the Gospels.”
Wow. I’m not so conceited as to think I was the only one to believe this way, but thank you for laying it out plainly. It’s good to feel a little less alone.
peace, –Dan
This is really a good poem to read. Awakenings from periods of great pain are hard to come by and sometimes take a long time, but, as the poet David Agnew said in one of my favorite poems by him, “That is where I found the poems.” where the light of healing and a new path opens up the spirit. It is brave of you to post this series of poems, but the journey through them is powerful.
“This balcony to stand on” kills me, it’s a powerful, very sure and powerful
metaphor, or title to a major novel, or major film, or major song
yr major words talk to me again, thank you for writing, filming, & singing
do you know Beethoven’s late quartets where you (or I certainly) don’t know where the music is going to but it grows and develops and you follow this process, listening without understanding…
it’s like listening to his mind, especially since he was deaf.
ANYWAY sorry about such a long roundabout comment but I read (then listen) to your poems in the same sort of way
My own heart let me have more pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet
Amazing poem. The dark undertones are brilliant. My favourite: Like a crinkled cloth left on the subway floor, I waited – dry, malformed, avoided. So incredible.
I like ‘ let the mad ones go to India ‘; I like ‘congealed thoughts” I like the hesitation between ‘You can be anyone’ and ‘you want’; I’m not sure whether ‘Without’ means ‘outside’ or ‘not having’ and whether it is the title or the first word or both but I like it enough to think about it.
I’m getting the hang of your titles at last! And the shape/structure/ momentum/cadences/rhythms of your poems. That final couplet, for example – the urgency of the two commas round ‘now’ then the release/surprise of the last line:
“Put salt on my lips, paint me, now, please
in turquoise.”
Why ‘turquoise’?
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ‘s all-in-all in all a world of wet
From the start I believed
in never bending, but now I am a weather-vane,
guided by singing.
Starting from here you end up living by impulse and the pity of God…It is time to love the gargoyles and create/a new form of beauty.”
This seems to be to be a poem of metamorphisis, moving from rigidity to extreme flexibility to a place where gargoyles can be loved and new beauty created. Again, this is wonderful poetry.
Your voice in this poem is so strong that it shouts to the mountaintops. The center of the poem is in the line
God, I am getting older, younger
somehow then when I started.
This is a poem of aging in conversation with God.
I need you (God)
final in my palm
But, of course, you have
only
this spoonful and a house too quiet in the
early mornings, not enough connection – a wave
that never crests, metal made into nothing.
while you long to
soak myself in this feral blizzard
approaching, always just approaching.
Why is your love so tenuous, powerful
sometimes, and then, wispy, hardly registering?
You remember, and this is the most powerful part of the poem, a planet
spiked, clustered
grass, almost blue
filled with rawness you want back, but instead age has taken you
away from sensual flavours and the mountains’ pulse.
You are getting older, younger than when I started.
Then the prayer/wish:
Put salt on my lips, paint me, now, please
in turquoise.
Good Lord, what a poem!
I like ‘my ever-ghost’ – the title, the idea, the poem
and the alliteration – ‘formed my fingerprints’….’violence void of every meaning’ …. it has the touch of Anglo-Saxon poetic techniques
“Find me like science is found enhancing the faint glow of an almost-faith” – awesome. Nearly every phrase contains the essence of the poem, and it’s both beautiful and desperate. More soul-medicine.
Peace, –D
Stunning as usual – your eye for the DETAIL of life’s phenomena and the using of it as metaphor is … stunning and often uncomfortably visceral in it’s power to put forward the intensity of the pain which makes the release all the more potent. Thank you.
I especially like:
“An enemy is at my table.
A horse is buried under American sands.
My heart is water:
It longs to quench the hot summer skin of sparrows.”
I, too, want to be exposed as a lighthouse, to tear at the tendon heels of uncertainty/
gosh, you’re pleasing, as the sun comes ’round again, and one is trying to get one’s bearings abit. Thanx again
It’s like a sonnet without the rhymes and without the stanzas – no, it’s like a piece of music – crescendo, diminuendo, largo, andante….. I can see and hear its shape
and then that sublime ending: ” There will be raspberries
and grapes on every corner. Someone,
will say your name. ”
Makes me smile!
Hi, Allison. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve nominated you for the Versatile Blogger Award. If you would like to continue passing the award along, the instructions are here http://wp.me/p24rMG-3Z
” I knock down garbage bags, pocket unsharpened pencils,
buy myself some tea, thinking today I will let go,
rid myself of your domination, purchase a splendid fantasy to replace
your magnetism – saw at roots, trust the broken staircase and climb.”
The creativity within this poem affects me in a strong way:
Plastered with glue,
sticking like betrayal like a spider’s eggsack
to a branch. I watch your gorgeous
pontificating, watch you mourn just a little. The injury
rips only part of your body, fragments you. Grief becomes a tremor,
an uncontrolled twitch under your left eye.
The poem starts out as a startling portrait, then develops a counterpoint to the portrait, describing in wonderful language how the poet wants to let go and rid themselves of the domination of the one drawn so skillfully in the proceeding stanza. The it becomes a powerful love poem, ending in a stanza as impressionistic as the art of Van Gogh:
…but you
are still in my mind
pushing, ploughing through and through,
saving me a plot beside your plot
beside the potpourri covering a stranger’s grave.
The whole angst of the modern age seems stirred up in this stanza, negating, but confirming, emphatically, the love part of the poem and the poet-self part of the poem in the same breath.
You are a wonderful writer.
I don’t know about hiring you for my obit, but I would like to ask you to consider writing a short blurb for the back cover of my book that will publish this summer. And by the way, this is a ‘stellar’ poem, I came here to tell you so. Marvelous!
A wonderful exploration of what poetry, beneath words, rhythm, rhyme, lines, and even meaning, is.
… it is being intoxicated with the fullness of seeing God there
with every thought – in the swimming pool while treading water,
or at the hair dresser, drinking coffee, waiting for a turn.
… True intensity is subtle,
is equal in its magnitude as it is to its intricacy – It commands exploration.
Even death, sometimes your sister,
cannot revert humanity back to that interval
before God exhaled, altering the playing field, resulting in
such a mighty fusion.
The themes in this poem are so large they seem to encompass both the self and the self in God. In the end the poet, you, all humanity, is part of the mighty fusion that the poet sees when they see God with every thought during every moment of the day no matter how mundane the moment.
Life begets life:
a forceful synergy of the round and the sharp,
splicing, splitting, until more splicing and splitting until
dependency on oxygen is born.
begets what the poet who sees the self subsumed by poetry misses in their concentration on self and self subsumed. This is fascinating, vital poetry.
Reblogged this on The ObamaCrat.Com™ and commented:
Allison Grayhurst is a poet. She has emotions uncharted. She uses words to guide me from darkness into revelation. That is what a good poet does well. Stop by her blog: “Allison Grayhurst”.
I did not talk to a single person today that did not tell me here in New Mexico that they had trouble sleeping last night. We have finally had a couple of nice, reasonably warm days, but mostly days of rain, snow, and cold, and they’re predicting more of the same for this weekend.
I think we humans are always affected by weather, rain or snow, as the post office says, but also by
…spiders
that creep and curl along the
ceiling, hovering with the stillness
of death…
and our troubles and this is all true:
…To watch a love-one suffer is worse
than shame, worse than feeling
futility collapse on your throat
or a weapon held at the head…
at least in my life. It is also true that
Little by little the terror rises,
and the world outside remains unchanged.
For all the world encroaches into our head and leaves us with our troubles, the world does remain unchanged, moving from season to season, year to year, decade to decade, century to century in its endless circles. As usual, Allison, this is really good poetry.
I am not sure to say about this one, except that it is up to your usual high standards. I am old now, though still in love with Ethel after 44 years of matrimony, and though our passion is different, slower, longer, less filled with breath, I remember when we were young.
Your sure words, forthright, intense, are bold with gutsy sensual & spiritual
symbolism, It all stirs up a spell of delerium at this end
Thanx, from another dizzy reader
How we’d like the world to stop spinning, for even a moment, just a moment, to show us that our pain matters…as a child when I experienced a great loss, a death, I wondered why the world didn’t stop. At such a young age, I felt the passing endlessness of days.
I sense a merging here with God as well as man. I think about John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14. In fact, in many of your “love” poems I find myself floating in and out of flesh to spirit, what can be a love relationship with a person is also, somehow, one with God. At least this is my sense in your poems. They carry an intensity which feels to me like the kind of longing or love one has for God, but this intensity is also in our home, in our beds.
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Allison Grayhurst at the self named blog: “Allison Grayhurst” has done it again folks….another elegant yet simple group of words arranged in such a way to make me think. I love that about her poetry.
“What speaks of holding on when the world is pale/ with grief…” though there’s no description of color, and it’s a stripped down idea, there’s really striking imagery in there. The first commenter said it..
“on the rafters a single flower is born”…to me, this poem is all here in this one line. That flower emerging from the rafters is the unborn fetus in the woman who cannot find her seat…and holding on when the world is pale with grief…the rain in the rafters, the flower…beautiful.
I understand you are not into accepting awards, and that this blog is all about the work, and not you, that aside, since you inspire me and my blog, I nominated you for The Very Inspiring Blogger Award. What you do with this award is entirely your business….but you have been given this based on how your words effect me….which is what writing is all about, reaching someone.
I often feel that your words start with a trickle and end with a down pouring, and end again with a trickle but with the sense of a “sigh” or “breath”. Reading your poems usually has this feeling of oncoming rush and then a pause…
Allison, this poem starts with a dark, dark vision that is almost frightening:
In the whisper of tomorrow
the wood is burning and the trees
have died.
You then take the hinges off the door, doors being the instruments we humans use to keep the outside away from our inner lives while allowing us to go outside.
…waiting as my hunger works like
midnight in my stomach, dictating
the flavour of the coming stars.
These are powerful lines! You are waiting to see what “outside” comes through the door, not afraid, filled with hunger, letting that hunger dictate the flavour of the coming stars.
Then you ask a powerful question:
…will the answer come before the grave
or will obscurity greet me every new dawn
like a hand unheld or a gate torn down?
A question which probably drives all of those who become poets.
It is humming, the sound of this underground sorrow.
It hums of poetry and the earth and the bug eaten leaves.
It burns and cannot bloom in bookstores, will not bloom
in the silence of a single decade or in the darkness of
a closed drawer.
The craft of poetry in these lines, with the repetition of the It, is wonderful. The question, and the feared answer, humming an underground sorrow: It burns and cannot bloom in bookstores…
(poetry, of course, not matter how great the poet, seldom does)
But then your triumphant ending, at triumphant from where I sit:
Outside, the children go inside, readying for sleep.
I tread waterways in my mind
and send my kisses mid-air.
For in spite of the eternal question you have asked, you watch the children inside, reading for sleep, and send your kisses to them–and perhaps all of us, “mid-air.”
The previous poem deserves comment to, but when I read this one I could not help myself. I had to comment on it. Ahh, for only more time during the day.
You’re a sculptor too! Wow! Am I impressed. You are like Ethel! Art pours out of you in multiple ways endlessly. This is fascinating work! I hadn’t noticed the sculpture link on your page at the right before.
This is a love poem, Allison, but has both angst and sadness mixed in with the love. There is beautiful, original language, as in all of your poetry,
sorrow like a grey October morn
stretches between us, leaves us each
alone watching out the same window.
fascinating ideas:
We are locked like the shore to the sea,
perfectly different and merging in natural
rhythm – each shell and struggling fish
exposed, until we hide in separate elements,
bonded to our own.
“each shell and struggling fish/exposed,” talking about the inner being of human beings! An idea that stops you in your tracks and makes you think about what the poet is really saying. Each of the lovers expose themselves to the other, and then they “hide in separate elements…”, trying to escape the exposure.
and the counterpoint of a complex relationship:
Often I am bruised by your laughter,
counting pennies on the table with fierce concentration.
Though you with your hands,
hold all the mystery my heart can fathom,
pressing with gentleness my folded brow,
or blending your legs with mine, sure and warm
as the summer earth.
where the laughter of the lover bruises and causes a retreat into the “counting of pennies on the table with fierce concentration,” but also presents hands that “hold all the mystery my heart can fathom…”
What I get out of this is that the mental/emotional part of the relationship is difficult, but the physical part is “sure and warm/as the summer earth.”
The questions raised by the poem are the old ones: Can the physical excitement of love last? Is that enough? Or does the physicalness of human beings translate into a rhythm powerful enough to overcome the emotional/mental difficulties we all face? Can love of any kind break through the “separate elements” and build a bonding that is strong and lasting? What is the nature of love?
This is, as usual, powerful poetry with a sting that makes the reader examine his/her universe.
Poetry does not have to stir hymns and hosannas to be poetry. Sometimes poetry gets under the skin and smashes the reader in the face and forces confrontation that is not to be quickly forgotten:
The ground that grows
the wasteful blight and
estranges the kiss and hiss of wildlife
is in me like a slaughtered tribe
that has no face.
Whew! This is one powerful description of a blackness that has descended singing angrily into the spirit.
I am in the nightmare cloud, wrapped
in tar and rotted wood. I hide
beneath the blanket, undone.
But poetry, if it is any good never stands still, but moves:
Sickness has walked around me, mile
around mile and names me this stone chiselled
in two. It is the beginning, but it is midnight
and I am marked to be unmoved.
There is a hint here that there is a “beginning…” of sickness, of stone chiselled in two,” but a stirring beneath the blackness even though “it is midnight/and I am marked to be be unmoved.”
This is not the poetry of dazzling light, but of the spirit’s darkness. Still, there has to be a beginning out of darkness even though it cannot move and the spirit hides under a blanket, trying to be unseen. Sylvia Plath wrote powerful poetry that sizzled with emotion. We feel the fire in her lines, but, in the end, she needed to find a new beginning, a path out of despair and the darker emotions. This has the power of Plath, but I see in it more hope even if the hope is lightly stated and perhaps half meant. I recognize you as a poet, Allison. A significant poet.
I like your use of language. . .very effective I think. Reminds me of Ferlinghetti and his Beat Poetry in the 60’s. Also (for me) has a Dylan quality to it. I really like your poetry!
I’ve seen a lot of insipid, cliched “love poetry” on Word Press but this I like.Tender and honest, with some beautiful lines, “blending your legs with mine, sure and warm etc-
I hope your loved one appreciates it.
I wonder what the process of sculpting a face is like? is it tender? is there a sense of reflection? those and other questions arise…the feel of clay under fingers, malleability…wet and cool.
What cathartic comfort for angst!
You are the queen of cathartic comfort!
Certain lines should go down in Bartlett’s Quotations.
They boom like thunderous sharp true insight!
“I drink necessity’s authority.”
What a wonderful prayer to read on Easter morning! No matter what faith tradition anyone might follow. The two poems I’ve read today, Allison, are as clear and fresh as water tumbling over stones out of the San Juan Mountains. Achieving that clarity is as difficult as any other task a writer might take during that lifetime. It is not a necessary component of poetry. The puzzles spun out by Jim Heinz, ExtraSimilie, have their place in the body of poetry as do more complex poems that are not as challenging as those done by Jim. You are a true poet. These two poems are worth celebrating, although the truth is that much of what you write is worth celebrating.
You write wonderful poetry up here. Well done! 🙂 Keep penning and keep inspiring! I am sure one day the door will open for you and that lots of readers will find your poetry both entertaining and interesting! 🙂
In the spoken version ‘the hollow log’ becomes ‘death’ and woods becomes ‘words’…?
“Tomorrow is a keyhole/ that shapes my hopes with tiny possibilities” – I just like that for the way it sounds and flows and changes meaning as it goes
Well, I’m ending my Saturday night with beautiful poetry from Allison Grayhurst…but, I must go to bed and tomorrow I will finish reading the poems I haven’t read yet from April. I’m glad to end my evening here.
It feels classic to me from the first lines onward.
I lift the bullfrog from the waters.
Bread, parables and staying close to a legend –
these are things of joy…
If I heard that at night around a campfire beneath a shining silver moon, I would say, softly, amen, amen. But of course this is a poem of grief, of the grave by the willow tree, a sailing ship with no port, and it gains part of its power from the contrast between the opening lines and the following lines. There are so many metaphors and such limbic power in the early lines of this poem that you could almost write a book about the poem and how metaphors relate to its emotional content and the human heart..
My father, I dream of your flame. I miss the woods
and your kind goodbyes. Tomorrow is a keyhole
that shapes my hopes with tiny possibilities.
These lines are so meaningful, telling us so much about your father in his kindness expressed through goodbyes, and how time has shrunk to a tomorrow of key holes that is left with only tiny possibilities.
The ifs at the end are exquisite in their expression, reminding us that inside grief there are always ifs, but they are not the ifs of possibility and hope, but impossibilities that fill us up with remembering.
This is a great poem.
Allison, I just read the poems I hadn’t read since my last comment. I always do that, then choose one or two on which to write a comment.
I actually found this to be a difficult poem. It starts with two questions;
“Was I bound by the artificial?
Driftwood down an interceding flow?”
Are you real? Or just driftwood flowing from a direction you cannot control? Then the poem takes a leap:
“Horse stance, back muscles rolling, lines of twine, and fishing.”
almost as if you see yourself in a great river like the Columbia out in the current tossing lines over and over again into roiling waters. This is an answer to the questions about how you really are. Then the poem leaps again with two declarative statements:
“I will not fish or tighten my spinal cord for the appearance of strength.
I will not bask relaxed in hot spring nobility or lick the nose
of prey I someday plan to devour.”
At this point you seem to be defining yourself by denial, contradicting the vision of “Horse stance, back muscles rolling…”
You will not give the appearance of strength through strenuous action or bask in the hot spring of nobility or lick the nose of prey you may someday devour in order to be who you are.
Then the poem leaps again, telling us of a 2:30 a.m. dream that fits into this contemplation of self and who you are:
“Loudly, my name was spoken. It was God, I am
sure of that. And it was angry, pressing, urging me
to wake and take nothing lightly or so hard.”
This “angry, pressing” voice lifted you “from the gardens of my despair.”
And when you understood the voice, you had inside yourself “a permit to build, to trap the past inside the future…” to “absolved by the fact/that nothing can escape the impact of eternity.” This last quotation, as an aside, is a powerful line.
The reason for including igloo before mansions escapes me, but the next part of the poem essentially says that mansions you once erected inside yourself, “cerebral justifications of indignant loneliness,” are natural and cannot be dismantled.
Then comes the affirmation in answer to the questions at the beginning of the poem:
“I heard my name spoken, calling me to dart alert
from a shrinking sleep, to walk the hallway, carve
myself an inclusive center, to answer boldly,
unconditionally step
into the dictates of a personal command.”
The voice in the dream gave you permission to be active in life, carve a center that is inclusive of life, the world, others, inside yourself, “to answer boldly,” to follow the personal commands from your inner voice, your self.
This is clearly mystic poetry as opposed to the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, et al. It is closer to what William Blake wrote than it is to much of the contemporary canon and thus has a tone that is commanding while, at the same time, giving an answer to the self about its reasons for existence. This takes a careful reading to “fish” out its multiple meanings. The word fish, for instance, in the early lines is not only there for image, but for the idea that you are not going to fish for who you are or for the meaning of life, leading to the vision that you describe in the poem. But a little effort gives substantial rewards.
I am on part 3 and will read more of this — your awakening. It is very intense. The humility is very apparent, the willingness to receive, the willingness to be loved and known, loved and fully known…
For some weird too-literal reason, I’m reminded of Spike Milligan:
Things that go bump in the night,
shouldn’t give one a fright,
it’s the hole in the ear
that lets in the fear.
That,
and the absence of light.
Just to say, in case anyone has the flicker of doubt, I didn’t mean to suggest Allison was in any way borrowing from Spike; it’s just that the words “hole” and “fear” in the same line, took me back to Milligan’s poem, which uses them entirely differently. This is what happens when I drink in the morning.
You write wonderful poetry up here. Well done! 🙂 Keep penning and keep inspiring! I am sure one day the door will open for you and that lots of readers will find your poetry both entertaining and interesting! 🙂
I have a joyful ride in your blog, and now I’d like to invite you to visit mine. Thank you and have a wonderful day, my friend! 🙂
This is incredibly beautiful, Allison. It does not need a long scan to understand it, so I will refrain from doing that and will come back tomorrow if I can and try to do a proper comment, but I could not leave this evening without letting you know how wonderful this poem is.
The start of the poem, with its formal phrasing, leaves me breathless:
At the end of the day, the pears will be ripe
and the ones I loved and died will float before me
in waves of growing beauty.
The formal solemnity of this gives it an unearthly beauty that I’m sure you meant, brewing contemplation and making us remember back on all those we have loved who have died.
Then you talk about yourself,
At the end, when all of this leaves, then I will breathe
an owl breath, still in my tranquil sky.
“I will breathe an owl breath…” wow! What an idea.
Then the poem gets more complex, stating your intent to find someone who left you in chaos, a garden hit by storm. The whorl of these two lines leads to:
I will give life again to the little birds, insects that have no
use or concept of glory. I will return with you
to the Buddha waters, happy to know so much love.
and an expression of love that wraps all of us up in Buddha waters…and the beauty of your thoughts. Then you say that you…
will walk out my door and there will be summer,
and you and your love will
…will walk into the warmth:
ultimately loved, unequivocally whole.
Beautiful poetry! Even though it still has that complex whorl in it that gives us pause and thought.
“I have been the caterpillar/Not for one more day.” These two lines say it all. Metamorphosis. The way everlasting…though, I grapple with these things (as far as not knowing, not deeply experiencing whether or not I “believe” in the sewer anymore…but, I understand it. Yes.
In this poem, I see failure alongside new beginnings, but perhaps it is only perceived failure, a kind of failure that constantly waits for the “answer”…
I’d like to know…did you really hear a voice? This poem is like a testimony. “Into the dictates of a personal command…” This line raises the hairs on my neck. I once saw freedom in such “personal commands” and “dictates”…but now, just not so sure. This poem seems clearly about an awakening, a calling into a new kind of way of being, away from cerebral justifications that lead to loneliness and despair.
”Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.”
Your use of ‘hangnail’ brought this D.T. poem to mind. I’ve always liked it.
This is a wonderful poem, Allison. The start of it is mysterious:
You who saw the
morning fall on leaves
all rotted and brown but
kissed this darkest turn
and threw your coins to the sun.
Part of its mystery comes from the fact that it is incomplete sentence. The stanza leaves us hanging in the air–who is you? There is some sense to it. The you is a person when morning fell on leaves all rotted and brown, kissed the darkest turn and then turned around and threw coins (your coins) meaning special coins, wealth, into the sun.
As we read on we find out a lot more about “you”:
You who loved and always learned
that love is nothing earned.
You who opened your heart to a child
and let her wed and weave her own.
There is a wonderful truth about love in these lines, the idea that love is nothing earned, but is a gift that you then have to let go so that the child to which a human’s heart is opened, can then go on to weave her life.
Then the darkness:
You who felt the wanting grave
when you felt the skeleton hand of a friend
unchained.
The wanting grave, the skeleton hand of a friend unchained (from life?), the sorrow that happens even in the midst of love and goodness. The unchaining of life from death, the last remains of a friend even if they are still a friend with a skeleton hand…
Somberness leads to my favorite lines, as you might suspect of me:
You who beheld your wife like a sunrise
and gave her everyday a new light to live for.
I have failed to achieve this ideal, but I have beheld Ethel like a sunrise, and I have tried to give her light, even though I am afraid that my attempts have not always met the mark. But what wonderful thoughts–that giving her everyday a new light to live for might be possible even in the face of the darker moments in life, the losses we face in life.
A person who could achieve that central blessing deserves the next lines:
You who are so beautiful and always beginning,
like a band of circling swallows, like a whale
first seen in the wild, like the scent of home.
They are like the glory of the earth, beautiful, and always beginning, and a you that the poet describes is the sum of a thousand good men on a walk, like a chapel bell awakening, a man
…sweet and deep
as the true belief in miracles.
This is not the most powerful poem of those I just finished reading, but it is the most wonderful, Allison, and therefore I felt like picking it out for comment. There is goodness and an observation of goodness in this poem, and though I deal with trials and tribulations of people everyday at the college as they try to deal with complex lives, I still appreciate goodness when I run across it and believe I should notice it when I encounter its presence.
Thank you for this poem. It made my day.
I just dropped by to let you know that I’ve nominated your blog for the Inspiring Blog Award http://decumminspoetry.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/inspiring-blog-award/
I know you don’t do the awards thing on your blog, but yours is definitely one of the most inspiring blogs I’ve read. 🙂
“Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is spread out against the sky
like a patient etherised upon a table…”
(I think I’ve quoted this before in some other comment, about Eliot’s ‘Objective Correlative’ probably) but what he is saying through his ‘metaphor’ is not this is how I see the sunset but how the sunset makes me feel – it’s a bit like trying to explain the impact of Munch’s ‘Scream’ – in fact it’s so hard to explain an artist’s use of imagery (“the invisible worm/that flies in the night”) it’s sort of stupid even to try! Liked your poem though…
wonderful, again/ I intend to enter an american bookstore sometime soon and
plop down my filthy lucre for clean & sure words in a book of poetry
good job, allison
Allison, once again, I find your responses to darkness quite atypical. How is “exposure” and vulnerability and such (almost surgical) light the answer to our nightmares? to the darkness in us? It is quite the opposite from what you want — to hide. Freedom comes from being known, I do know that, from allowing your darkness to be seen and loved even, yes even loved.
Just the right level of allusion for me. Atmosphere of claimed contentment, seeing things positively, punctured by “One more day without”. Bathe in blessings is beautiful, and then- afterall no matter. Those last two lines bring the sense of loss crashing in on me, Saying what the person was without would puncture it. More anguish would lessen the effect for me. Without “no matter” I would forget the “without”: just quiet content, no harmonic of Anguish. I love the way you have put this together, I take a lot from it.
Again, you set and asure a sure tone/ a listener & reader feels a soul’s downshift/
Yr trustworthy words reach a hand back..to lead us solomnly on to yr declarations
Oddly, my favorite lines were introductory to yr messages, but I like ’em
“In the evening, close to dark,
hair-clipping all dishevelled expectations,
pin-pointing a place to lay down, to rest and witness the uneventful view”
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Allison Grayhurst is a magician with the written word, I suggest you buy or read her books. They will leave you uplifted.
Allison, I ordered two of the books, and Ethel and I will eagerly be awaiting their arrival in the mail. I did not realize you were going to publish all nine at once. I’m in awe. We’ll get more when we have the funds to do so. Congratulations, although the editing must have been herculean. I actually enjoy editing, by nine books in one go? Wow!
It’s also about time I bought some books to show my support for the poets I enjoy here on WordPress — Thomas and Ethel included. Perhaps I’ll buy them together and they’ll come in the mail all at once to my reading pleasure ; ) Congratulations, Allison. Excellent.
What makes your poetry so special, Allison, is the way you marry language to idea so that both the language and idea become surprising or unique. The start of this poem
Cradle the handle under the sleeve
and watch as the sun changes shadows.
reminds me of that magic you have. The first line is mysterious when you first read it. What handle? Under a sleeve, and then the second line, watching the sun as it changes shadows. Then the word, “Blue,” to start the second line, blue as related to shadows, but also blue related to
…the private everafter with
the future under my fingernails and an orange seed
in my throat…
This is not just the everafter that we all must face in our everyday lives and at the end of life, but the private everafter, the handle under the sleeve, the shadow on the sun, where the future is under your fingernails and an orange seed–which is a symbol of fertility in some cultures–in your throat. Given your recent publishing feat this symbol or orange seed and throat, indicative of speech out of the throat, seems appropriate.
Then the questions:
Will it happen or will it always be ‘the wait’?
Waiting in the moment just before bloom
but never arriving into full colour? Or is it only
a long pause, gathering breath for the final
swing that will bury all dullness that has gone before?
Each question queries the self, as I read this, or your personal life. Ethel once wrote a poem with a line that went something like,
Is it to be a woman?
To always look on windows instead of doors?
These questions seem to strike the same poignancy, the wondering about life and what it means in its fulfillment. These strike to the heart of who all of us are in confronting ourselves as human beings.
Then the answer to the questions and the poem’s powerful denouement:
I see a tree I have walked by many times before. This time
I noticed it and smiled.
Maybe this is not darkness at all,
but a line to follow and focus on
like a child watching rain drops – one at a time.
Perhaps if we learn temperance, patience, and only look at a tree we’ve walked past before and notice it and smile, then we will find that we are not in darkness, in dullness, in the everafterlife’s end. Perhaps, the tree and life is a line to follow and focus on “Like a child watching rain drops–one at a time.”
This is absolutely wonderfulmagnificent.
Brilliant. Thank you for reality check after reality check to help process truth for awareness and healing so that we may wake up and at least not do it to ourSELVES.
It stays and the surface is its meaning…what does this say about the depth of things that need to be forgiven? this image of the rock has both solidity and transparency in it and I think this is wonderful, Allison. It is both hard and vulnerable, hidden and all apparent.
Over the last year you have challenged, stimulated and delighted me daily. I love your shimmering, mercurial metaphor, and your spirit wisdom. Thank you. I wish you deep wells of creativity, and delight in your work.
I saw your books in person, held them in my hands, opened them and read at random. They are so, so lovely. I loved the covers with the photos of your sculpture – all people, mostly faces. They were presented as they are – with no intention to manipulate, just straight-up, fresh-faced for all to see. like children are, so very dear and unaffected, your sculptures are beautiful. Just like the writings, full of consideration, questions, and trust (nakedness, whatever one wants to call it…there is great strength in vulnerability).
Thank you.
Just keep doing what you do.
Jordan.
Oh – I forgot to say one thing…I just took another look at the sculptures and there is “someone home” inside of each one, there is someone alive in there, inside of all of them.
Beautiful. Don’t change, stay pure.
Jordan.
There are some lovely lines in here; the way you capture ‘that one hour’ and the simplicity and complexities of love. I think the image at the end is wonderful.
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Good to see Ms. Allison Grayhurst out & about in the bloggersphere….she is much missed when she is gone.
Allison, what a wonderful interview! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it especially your answer to the question, “What is the best thing about being a poet…and what is the worst?” Fabulous.
I can also really connect with the quote, “Reading it fills me the strongest with my own voice — which I think all great art and true inspiration, should do.” I have yet to find my list of poets who do this for me…I can think of one.
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I am happy and thrilled at Grayhurst’s success and even more amazed with the depth and scope of her talent. Check out her work.
O, Allison, I do not usually follow a poet after reading just one poem, but you have the gift and I must see your next masterpiece or two or three… 🙂 Eric
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If you love poetry, you must visit Ms. Allison Grayhurst….she is a phenomenal talent. Thank you for sharing your poetry with us Ms. Allison. I wish you, your family & friends a wonderfully joyous and healthy, safe, fun Happy New Year….Namaste
The poetry continues to grow and writhe into shine after shine in it’s depth, passionate cry and beauty.
“Let it come like the wave with
the salty foam. Let it reflect
my insides like a face held towards
new cutlery. Let it take my rhythm for
its own, express it in the wings of angry crows
and the trees in communion with the wind.”
Allison, this is a powerful poem about change with many very salient and tangible images that tug and tug at what the change means, what if feels like, how it assaults our senses and every part of our lives. I enjoyed it very much.
‘hardly solid, like butter left out of the fridge’ – what an exact image for such an inexact state! – and there’s a rhythm and sound to ‘hanging on hinges’ that makes you nod and smile
Beautiful, breath-taking, powerful tribute to one gone – and how life is not in this dimension or another, but both, through the poetic painting of our true consciousness.
This poem really grabs me this evening. It has such agony in it and to have held it in your hands for its last breaths…the image of a “feeble resurrection” is one that has never occurred to me and I find it very striking. How can a resurrection be feeble except that somehow we bring our weakness into heaven…
Congratulations – a breathtaking poem alluding to a breathtaking experience!
The rhythm of this poem seems to capture the moment and then release it. Beautifully written. 🙂
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Check out Ms. Allison Grayhurst latest published poem…In The Gloom Cupboard. Congratulations Ms. Allison. ❀ Ciao Bella ❀
Reads like a dream, like a song, like a touch – a tenderness filling my heart like a strong feather.
“I live inside the gentleness of your mind.”
“In dreams I find you
beside me for always,”
AND OH MY GOD…
“your eyes rich as the colours of earth
Myself feeling torn, weighed down, distracted, pulled apart by various pressures and desires of my own heart–I found this very comforting…thank you for a good read.
This says so many things to me, and I feel like I can identify with so much of it. I read a few times and I’m saving it to read some more. There’s real beauty here.
A CLASSIC – a true love poem not only to a personal breath-taking love, but to the love of humanity and to the articulation of our shared human landscape for glory.
Brilliant! Full of Meaning, feeling, reelingly stunning language capturing the poinancy and complexity of exquisite, if not always comfortable, human emotion!
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I Love this….thank you Allison. You brighten up a blog dedicated to politics and current news events, which are not always happy subjects, with your word magic. Thank you.
I really enjoyed this interview Alison, I always enjoy the concepts in your poetry even if it takes me 5 times to read. Sometimes it seems like your trying to release the elements of the spirit and sometimes its like you want to imprison it but life tears it away.
Allison, I really enjoyed seeing your face and listening to your soft voice while you read your poems and your answers to the questions. All — very engaging.
I really enjoyed how this builds and builds, and the final lines are like an epiphany : ‘I open a room …’
Wonderful poem, and so appropriate for springtime too. 🙂
I hope the sun shines for you today, Allison.
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Without the magical words of artist such as Ms. Allison Grayhurst, this blog would be all doom & gloom. Thank you for slivers of hope Ms. Allison.
Nothing is perfect in life with absolutism … However … “True love is blind and hard to find” … It is like the amazing course of a river that never ends … But … Goes on and On … And …… *That Is a Perfect Flow* … Thanks Allison for sharing …
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You are becoming so famous and widely read…when you are a big time wealthy author, remember us little folks!!
OH MY GOD… this is sheer poetry – about one of the most sacred of human experiences FINALLY being done justice to in one of those rare instances when it is DONE JUSTICE TO. Thank you for your depth, your breadth, your breath, your words and your fleshly soul.
Stunning! Allison Grayhurst shapes words like she shapes clay – with passion, compassion, wisdom and worth – making life sacred – time, human, shape and form.
I love this – it reads like a song, like a warm and soft poetic blanket, like a hum, like a beauty ever so intimate and profound and real and true.
“He hurts with uncommon intensity –
Loved the music – kind of hoped for a slightly mournful Dylanesque harmonica in the background (er but not the sharp harmonic type), But I guess you will both know what I mean
Imagination is all we need to reach the climax … Thanks Allison … I can’t fully describe … How thrilling this poem is feeding my special thirst and hunger … 🙂 …
So beautiful! An explosion of the intensity within compellingly written, as usual!
A toast to the power of the interior sensual world that so needs it’s erotic world spoken of in these terms, as opposed to the shallow and hence toxically hiding cover up expressions of pornos or pornography – versus the true eros of erotica being shown, exposed and honoured in this way.
THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN is a Must-Read! June 14, 2013
We each read poetry in our own way. We read words from a different angle, a unique vantage point, and like the four different disciples looking from different sets of lenses we discern what stands out to us as of most importance and pen our gospel in our own very personal and spiritual way. I prelude this review with a disclaimer: if you read Allison’s book and see its Light differently, embrace it as affecting you in your unique way. In this review I will embrace what has stood out to my eye.
When I started to read Allison Grayhurst’s collection of poetry entitled THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN, I was expecting it to contain verses of the highest quality. I was expecting it to be a journey through spirituality. I was expecting this book to speak of God. I was not disappointed.
Yes, it is a journey: a journey of the heart through youth, anguish, struggle, spiritual awakening, grief, death, love, loss, guilt, struggle, despair, hope, surrender, God, sensuality, imperfection, motherhood, aging, the vanquishing of the devil, indeed, many devils, the inevitable fall from perfection and the casting off of old wineskins for a new one.
Perhaps speaking of this book as a chronicle of spiritual maturing would be more accurate, the realization that there is spirituality within imperfection and that handmade temples cannot hope to compete with the spiritual temples within each of us. By the end of the collection there is a spiritual ascension, a victory over demons of the past now slayed. There is height in Love and Forgiveness in guilt. There is an embracing of the chaos of life and a positive hope for the future. And, I believe, the realization that God is higher than chaos and the Creator is more permanent than perfection.
This journey touched me. It is a journey that every person makes at sometime in their life. And this trail we trod does not end. There is beauty in the trail and its many aspects just as there is beauty from every vantage point of the admirer of a diamond.
THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN is a diamond. It is a beautiful collection of insights and I appreciate the many nuances of meaning to Allison Grayhurst’s poetry. Her thoughts and writings are a deep well. Drink from it, for the water is clear and crisp. This collection is a MUST-READ.
—-Eric M. Vogt, author of LETTERS TO LARA and PATHS AND POOLS TO PONDER
We each read poetry in our own way. We read words from a different angle, a unique vantage point, and like the four different disciples looking from different sets of lenses we discern what stands out to us as of most importance and pen our gospel in our own very personal and spiritual way. I prelude this review with a disclaimer: if you read Allison’s book and see its Light differently, embrace it as affecting you in your unique way. In this review I will embrace what has stood out to my eye.
When I started to read Allison Grayhurst’s collection of poetry entitled THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN, I was expecting it to contain verses of the highest quality. I was expecting it to be a journey through spirituality. I was expecting this book to speak of God. I was not disappointed.
Yes, it is a journey: a journey of the heart through youth, anguish, struggle, spiritual awakening, grief, death, love, loss, guilt, struggle, despair, hope, surrender, God, sensuality, imperfection, motherhood, aging, the vanquishing of the devil, indeed, many devils, the inevitable fall from perfection and the casting off of old wineskins for a new one.
Perhaps speaking of this book as a chronicle of spiritual maturing would be more accurate, the realization that there is spirituality within imperfection and that handmade temples cannot hope to compete with the spiritual temples within each of us. By the end of the collection there is a spiritual ascension, a victory over demons of the past now slayed. There is height in Love and Forgiveness in guilt. There is an embracing of the chaos of life and a positive hope for the future. And, I believe, the realization that God is higher than chaos and the Creator is more permanent than perfection.
This journey touched me. It is a journey that every person makes at sometime in their life. And this trail we trod does not end. There is beauty in the trail and its many aspects just as there is beauty from every vantage point of the admirer of a diamond.
THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN is a diamond. It is a beautiful collection of insights and I appreciate the many nuances of meaning to Allison Grayhurst’s poetry. Her thoughts and writings are a deep well. Drink from it, for the water is clear and crisp. This collection is a MUST-READ.
—-Eric M. Vogt, author of LETTERS TO LARA and PATHS AND POOLS TO PONDER
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Ms. Grayhurst is not only a great Canadian poet, but a great poet for the world. She belongs to all of US.
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I lived through a devastating flood in 2008 in Iowa, took everything of value and left things that were valueless. You do survive & move forward.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant languaging of things – so exquisite one cares hardly the meaning of the words – they fall so perfectly on the surface of the subconscious mind. Meaning is clearly innate and yet the poetry of the sheer aesthetics of the word formations is enough. No one in my experience, captures and creates artistry of emotions like Allison Grayhurst.
“It fell by the curb
Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” move over. Wow… I love this. Poetic majesty draped around an Heroine in a haunting and yet intimate Maxwell Parrish painting.
Brilliant poem on the nature of addiction and the collective cultural sleep driven by the mass hynosis of the mass media – is what it brings to mind for me – not to mention my struggle with junk food addiction and my addiction to junk or negative thinking – innocent, driven, inadvertent – yet consequential. This poem is a helpful stepping stone for me to hold fast to wakefulness while also holding onto my compassion.
“I allow myself to be extravagant
where I should be frugal, losing
my energy like blood into the tiger’s expanding jaws.
Your endings are great – here the image and the pause after ‘falling’ and the consonant pitter-patter of the last line…….”a poem should not mean but be”
I’ve had a few days away Allison and this is such a wonderful piece to come back to – the clay line was spectacular and the rythmns just perfect. Best wishes Jim
Passionate support of a colleague – vehement affirmation of the cry of justice and truth in a crazy world.
Uncanny ability to blend physical imagery and metaphysical concept seamlessly.
“You make us
drum hard
on the back of a beautiful fire.
You hold us near your mind, embracing
rooftops, stairwells, the upper half of
the sky.
There is nothing
as terrible
as your writer’s hands
that strike with light
our narrow hates
& wounds.”
Wow! Now THAT’S a love poem – fervent, deep to the interior.
“the one
celebrated by each breath.”
“Be for me a living arrow, a communion
of conviction and gentleness.”
“spiritual
decision.”
Okay, that’s it. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better. Thank you, Allison Grayhurst for cleansing us, edifying us – being a beacon in a pornographic world of meaningless shallows that would take down the human potential depth and breadth in this most critical and sacred area of life. Thank you for your living will to do us better.
“Because you are
my vowel, my “welcome home’ and
my sea in summer, I will sit
naked for you, never needing someone else.”
“Because you give wounds without evil,
a perspective of beauty in the weeds
and worries . . . because your faith
is unbroken by bitterness and others stand
against you trying to defeat
your incomparable strength”
Images rich and dripping with the majesty of their meaning!
“We jog through bitter uneatable harvests.”
“Jackets buttoned to the neck, we move in these sewer shafts”
“On our bed, we are broken, letting our arms rest”
“We tell each other these things are worth
the horror of abominations
accepted as societal norms, atrocities justified as a soldier’s directed bullet.”
“messaging
our blood vessels with deep oxygen, curing, learning
to make saliva and swallow.”
“We tell ourselves sometimes we wish
we could be like those who live
never knowing an intimate tender beauty”
“At times we wish this love didn’t exist, then we could give in
to what lies beyond the cliff, defend our exit, salt the Earth
with a dramatic departure.”
Ode to a cat – beautiful, stunning, embracing. Saw it like I never saw it – through this expression of affection and communion with the soul of one’s
cat.
It is, in the end, all that we who stand in life’s struggles can do. We just do not know what a few lines of hope does for another heart plagued or impassioned. Or impaled.
Hello Allison — just a quick note to say that it’s a nourishing place to be — here — reading your words on a Friday after my first full week of teaching again ; ) I’m exhausted and find my mind in a good open space to read poems. Thanks for being a WordPress poet ; ) and a great Canadian one.
There’s a painting by Peter Doig called ‘Pelican’ which he’d painted from seeing a man catching a Pelican at sea and the man giving him a stare as he passed holding the Pelican out of sight – and this narrative you know because he wrote it all down but there is no trace of the Pelican in his painting and it doesn’t need the narrative to explain its effect.
A fine end to this poem, although God has become all part of yesterdays furnishings, as I believe God transcribed by various authorities, is not to be confused with what God is to the individuals own interpretation of existence.
Oh Allison, heart-achy yet heartmoving ahead w/cool clean thoughts, soft clanging symbols & staring into a steamy mirror before stepping out into the hallway. love
wow, for me this presents a new angle, supporting a new POV/
Hope as the bad guy, antagonist. Thanx again, friend.
“..never runs alongside something spectacular..” is my favorite/ I liked yr reading, G
Beautiful, Allison. You traverse such long corridors, probing to ponder over possibilities, touching your way to the sunshine. Souls searched as such are sacred soil, sanctuaries of thought and Edens to the eye. E
Breath-taking, heart-felt, strong like wind, tears of joy, meaning, feeling – this poem waters an orchid deep inside me. At a time when pornographic advertising, music videos and the general pornographic imaging matrix we now live in is short circuiting how young people understand the individual self, love and human sexuality – this kind of witnessing and sharing about what is possible in human romantic relationship is critical, needed, hugely important for the sake of the continued existence of truth, hope and possibility related to human sensual and soulful love.
A litany to the wholeness of life – sweeping feeling with breath-taking moments of nature’s cathedral of existence and our tinyness of fragmented moments of purpose, blessing, frailty – comfort
“That is why some fear is good, is intimate as love.
And the sky is breathing and the oceans, the seas,
the rivers are breathing. And the beetle and the rooftops too.
A true soul moment on an authentic soul journey – finding the light in the dark through humble acceptance of all that we are and are not – blind moments, blind corners – the determination to not abandon self no matter what. Those moments when I cannot “even see myself.”
This poem is like a haunting painting to walk through – like a rain in poetic Paris streets – its aesthetics making it all bloom far beyond its words. Thank you.
Both sides of life and responses to life articulated in an amazing ability to appreciate and nail the essence of both the cerebral and the sensual – Go, Allison Grayhurst!
“We have these telescopes, our catacombs of understanding,
but we also have pilgrimage, crust, heartbeat, dying,
To the marrow of the bone description – one wonders how she makes it through a day with such intensity of observance of the subtleties of life’s moments both inner and outer: the fireworks of the earth’s outer displays (tree roots, crows, conjoined legs, “windows stubbornly closed”) and the human being’s inner life (“a relieving smile”, “unintended solitude”). Thank you for your witnessing of all the layers, moods and moments – all embraced by your eye and unflinchingly given ‘voice’.
“Flowers are small. I can hear trains in the morning
Part 1 – Intensely alive! Intense sharing! Honouring our own ‘quiet desperation’ journey (as Thoreau called it) – so incredibly articulated and laid out here; and as always, ending in jubilant revelation and resolution.
“Like a slap on the ocean’s ground, it came, rippling a great tide. The twisted face of misery lost its value. It was a miracle . . . to actually be plagued by nothing. There was no struggle, only sight. Only love. The seams of existence cracked, and along with them, the skeleton’s life I held and named from vast experience. I was alone, without potential, without hesitation. The panic of the heart, the scream of inner deficiency, all of that, past.”
Stunning description of my Intention stated this morning (intenders.com): ‘I intend that I always have what I need to be and do what I need to be and do for my highest good and the highest good of all.’ By that I mean I am seeking “the electric dimension of togetherness”.
“Find me
like science is found enhancing the faint glow of
an almost-faith. I am reeling with need, chosen to bend
into this desperation as hips bend forward,
seeking the electric dimension of togetherness.”
The most accurate, brilliant description of impatience I have ever seen:
Allison, you are carving out for yourself an indelible place in searing, profound social commentatorship, as well as being an eloquent poetic voice of the inner world:
“I know all animals are naked and people
think themselves clothed, but vanity and the undercurrent
of striving are photographs etched on their exposed arms,
necklines.”
Stunning description of the unconscious, abusive lover and the patriarchal model of lover relations enacted by either gender – as we make our way slowly to a partnership consciousness society (neither matriarchal or patriarchal) – thank Goodness she is speaking to the Universe, Spirit, God.
“Sometimes, I feel you like a prying lover, impatient with our
differences, anguished by the things that separate us. You have
no use for me, alone. You claim victory, destroy my shell
and make us join, make me not so small but swallowing
I love this line because it is to keep true autonomous, healthy love in our lives that we discipline ourselves to make no one in our own minds ‘an extension of us’:
“But I lost you and
it is good to lose extensions”
Brilliant way of describing the principle of gratitude or the art of appreciation UNDER FIRE, the truth of the ‘acceptance’ that is gift to ourselves ‘during times of lack’ – which one could argue always exists on one pregnant level or another of our multi-dimensional lives.
One of the most magical fantasy-reality, beautiful imaginings I’ve come across in a long time – pure, innocent, dynamic, deep:
“If I was a young starling neck deep in uncut grass,
pecking at exposed roots, I would be
sky, downspout, bush, tip of a cross on a steeple,
cured of isolation, taking flight and landing when I choose and
I would choose a fenced-in backyard
where a boy’s imagination owns the splintered bench, weeds
and a dug-up secret hole. I would watch that boy plot his course
and leap, knowing no separation,
I would spread, sing
and fold.”
Again, a master picture-maker … just goes to show Grayhurst’s ability to spendidly portray the easily seen and understood – even while she attempts to conjure recognition of the more subtle and complex layers of life she is usually tackling in her poems:
“f I had claimed myself a calling
as a chaplain – ritualized pacing in university halls, my arm
BRILLIANT image for social commentary for our “CULTURE” (for me what stands out is the demise of culture through the proliferation of pornographic images all around us – denigrating the feminine in us all and in the rape of mother earth) – the image of mold is so perfect and arresting to describe the “throne” of the matrix:
“The maggots are worshipping the corpse again
like specks of spotted mould settling on society’s throne.
I relate to the stone, and also to the sea
that thrashes against the stone and breaks it down.”
So well expressed and described – it’s reality said poetically of weather and storm – and then the underpinning of it all – time and movement of the seasons, the seasons of a year, the seasons of a life. I LOVE HOW IT ENDS in true stability:
“The road I base all my faith on is under my sleeve
Incredible the ways in which we learn mercy and humility through the rawness of wounds. And we are invincible through it all – for what is preserved preserves us, as Grayhurst implies at her end in this poem.
What an image – what a statement – reminds me of the horse running toward the train headlight coming toward it on the track – Grayhurst’s poems are like paintings – I wish someone would paint this:
I LOVE THIS. I read it like singing a song or doing a dance – the next line not necessarily comuting for my rational mind – but my heart somehow anticipating the next note, the next step – what IMAGES:
Wow… truly wow, what a ‘story’ – what a spectacle of feeling and caring and the heartbreak of feeling and caring, and how we are left to survive, to make sense of or simply to survive some experiences on earth.
I LOVE THIS. Another one that sings like water. I am swerving and gliding down a ski hill – it’s meaning ahead of me – but feeling it’s pristine symmetry in my veins as I descend – knowing I am going to a good place.
Cool track, easy money equally so too. It is a cool balm away from the plastic pop of today, but I guess I am getting old now and stuck in my ways now.
This poem is BRILLIANT. Full of words and images and moments so accurately captured, it takes my breath away to think my own moments and experiences can be so known and shared by another.
“The bell is amputated from its string.
There will be no more ringing, no more
afternoons of speaking my confidences,
smoking them out from my private interior, onto
lips and into this stark atmosphere.”
“that leaves a bloodstain of legendary proportions,
that turns everything into a symphony, never stops
electrifying the loins as well as
the imagination.
I am on the street and things are moving –
ten gulls circling in the sky, two bluejays in a tree, and people
I say hi to, smile at so strong, that for a time I am distracted
This is how I feel about every animal caged in a zoo – I understand he is permanently wounded and hence needs to be in an animal hospital – whichever the reason – this poem speaks it brilliantly – the “human-made” perch – human’s inhumanity to animal when it is for our pleasure and not to aid the animal – Thank you. Grayhurst has done it again – captured in unavoidable embrace the piercing essence of the situation:
Beautiful. I especially relate to the image at the end, age still desires, your phantom wings, still the same, touching the tips of a cumulus cloud. I have been thinking about aging lately, also about arms, strangely enough and agency. I’ve also never mentioned this but I very much enjoy the sexuality in your poems. It is a strong flavour in many of your poems. Courageous, too…perhaps.
Beautiful, soulful expressions of human and animal spirits – made by Grayhurst’s hand – the heartfelt poetry of her soul showing up in the physical “flesh” of sculpture – the feeling and power of these beings translated through her finger tips.
Profound images to describe the challenge of earth. The bowling ball and the chamber of the heart. The knowledge of the trees. The blessed slow moving worms who are up against the pressure of concrete. And it is all etched into the blueness of Grayhurst’s eyes.
Not to compare, but this is one of the most incredible of Grayhurst’s creations to me in the creation of its illogical imagery that FEELS like it makes perfect sense, and beyond! Incredible that we can get language to do this – take us so beyond the left brain into the multidimensional truth of our world, accessed only by our expansive right hemisphere.
“Waves and lions under the
sink”
This is so true! Thank god for the existence of the archetype of the Phoenix in our psyche!
“I rise like a rose
into bloom then lose all
my petals to the storm.”
Somehow these images mean the world to me:
“I live with my drink and the smell
of too many ghosts warming themselves
over my vent.”
Discernment! Perceiving clearly, making a choice, and taking a stand!
“I hear
them talking about the petty thing that keeps
days turning and leaves no one free enough
to walk the plank.
I stand outside for a moment
and plunge all I know like a stake
into dry ground.”
OH MY GOD, this is another one of those poems that is like skiing down a hill with swing and swerve of sheer elegance – the moves, the connections, the unlikely pairing of words gliding us forward. This is one of those poems that makes me look forward to returning to these creations again eager for the next savouring of artistry and more.
“I listen for the perishing wind
and declare to it a vigil
of telltale strength.”
I love this image and message:
“a belief
in the many shapes of heaven.”
Poetry within poetry:
“The journey knows its evening
has come and all the beautiful clouds will drop
one by one from the sky.”
Huge messages cloaked in poetry. With this first one I’ve been there many times and wish I went there more in my faith and focus of trust:
“In the serenity found with surrender,
and in the intense miracle, I pull
out my belonging and leave it there
in the thunder,
unharmed.”
This one is all about for me what Patricia Cota Robles is speaking of in her YouTube video “Downloading the Programs for the” … new earth:
“At the end of this season
the power of acceptance
will mount and the birds
will lift their wings up and over
the Earth. There will be no pattern, no regression.
Homes will grow like
happy flowers and each soul
will be in a stable balance.
Tenderness will govern activity
at the end
when the counting of days
is dropped.”
Ah! This is BEAUTIFUL!! Another masterpiece of a sensual poem – capturing the true potential of human sexuality. This is exactly what our mass media of pornographic innuendo everywhere, and porn as the default sex education of our time, hides from us. It does this by projecting out with alot of noise: surface sexual scratch-an-itch addictive distraction rendering us incapable of anything deeper. Junk food has become the order of the day when it comes to sex and food. Just as loving is a learned skill, so is depth sexuality. Wow! Thanks for revealing the possibility by rendering us a glimpse into true power and beauty in this arena. Reminds me somewhat of Nicole Daedone’s attempts to break out “surface mode” when it comes to this, http://omxperience.com/last-year/.
“It has been minutes maybe days since I felt
your warm tongue trace the blades of my back.
It has been too long in isolation,
away from your loins, the trembling
of your barely-believing hands and voice,
telling me we are larger than any love,
like druids or those so deep they have no religion.”
“when we are together, when our monastery re-appears
and your fingers flicker, strumming out a conversation,
honouring the strength of God – sensual as thunder lacing
the sky and all that lives under the sky”
I haven’t read this one/very strong symbol deliverance/mean shadows,thick vanity(& louder than prayer),distractions dissolving, & thread-bare desires/
continued love,g
This piece is colossal. Glinting, sparkling jewels that are blinding in their treasure – sentences that shine and wink in their light of depth and meaning. What a treasure Allison Grayhurst is. Her gift? To unfold for us life at this intensity of feeling and revelation. Who knew truth and beauty could be so intertwined and so passionate?
“The bells speak of a hurt
that is mounting the circumference
of a life”
“Begging to the stars to tell
a colossal fable, a majestic myth to solve this boring condition
of being here, away from the infinite sky, swallowing
mounds of dirt where many others have had their footprints.”
“There is ringing in my ears and a sorrow
triumphant … It is what I have chosen – to not pretend and to kindle
a primal inspiration.”
“Desire like a ceremony –
days of meditation long past, but trances and
swaying and throwing words out, guttural,
epidemic with desire, those days are here.”
“Believing we would be triumphant
made it so, and being dead we
learned a new way to rise and praise.”
Oh my goodness, I’m there, I see it, feel it – am stunned by it:
“The music lies down in the seas,
so I hear the dolphins hum
and see octopi sway.”
Line by line I image an entire book:
“Madness is part of our heritage
but also our navigating star.”
This sentence I could adopt as my anthem, paste it to my forehead as my best state of mind when I do achieve it:
“Whisper of the wonder we walk through each day.”
I just read last night that Patricia Cota Robles says the elemental realms (I prefer an inclusive term of balance versus saying: kingdom) have always been with us – though the majority of humanity think tales of fairies and other nature spirits are but fantasy and myth:
“Up and dancing, the ground and air
join together to say –
we were never alone.”
“Leaves and feathers we collect with our children,
graveyards we visit to look at lost names,
where our hands seed deeper into the Earth,
rise higher than the hawk-bird into the stratosphere of grace,
grace as wind we depend upon to navigate our footsteps,
to quilt together our four-way love,
cooling the cut of arduous days and pilgrimage.”
Yes, I have expereienced this and it is so challenging to do in our culture which preaches the opposite everywhere except places like here:
“Risk that comes out of despair
as a last ditch effort to not give up
has been told in chronicles, as surrendering stories
that rain away dust and heal the hunt of weighted hunger,
nourishing spiritual belonging.”
This is a stunning line by Anne Burke regarding Allison Grayhurst’s work. It helps me gain a whole new perspecitve on what this poetry indeed offers us. I’d never articulated and appreciated it in this way to myself. Anne’s proclamation captures one of Grayhurst’s essential gifts to us: to wake up and feel the concrete world around us, as well as the non-concrete world around us.
“If you seek the truth, the physical blood and bones, then,
by all means, open the world into which we were all born”
“Leaves and feathers we collect with our children,
graveyards we visit to look at lost names,
where our hands seed deeper into the Earth,
rise higher than the hawk-bird into the stratosphere of grace,”
I agree with your thoughts in the amazing poetry. Our children are like flowers. We water them with knowledge, protect them against the cold and we love them. Thank you for the outstanding poetry.
This is brilliant. I love the tone and message of this work by Grayhurst. I also love it when I can do the following:
“I will let my grief go first.
I will dispel it as energy
gathered between my palms, then blow it
like seeds of transformation out of my blood
and into a happy beginning.”
“I will make a collage of
my crashed expectations, peel away the crust
until I unveil a flower.”
One of the most profound and simply put and sensually imaged longings I have ever read … the river, the stones, the desire.
“I sit beside the narrow rocks
and count each weathered stone.
I hope for love inside a stranger
and long to feel with fingers and soul
the connecting thread
that binds me to my enemy’s door.”
When I read your poem ‘I long to know’ a sense of nostalgia flooded me, for 23 years I have not been back to my homeland-when I sit by the lakeside or go on trail working anywhere in North America- I literally touch and count rocks, and wonder… why am I in a strange land? What is my connection here? I love the symbols of ‘fingers and soul’ I see fingers as my flesh-longing to touch, to feel, also trying to understand ‘ the connecting thread’ and my soul searching for the answers of whatever binds me to this place…thank you! jjf
“I sit beside the narrow rocks
and count each weathered stone.
I hope for love inside a stranger
and long to feel with fingers and soul
the connecting thread
that binds me to my enemy’s door.”
I really enjoy the simplicity of this poem. And I can relate so well to those dreamlines that disappear in our everyday tasks, and how we reshape to the moment we’re in…which is also the long road home…and to God, too.
Perfectly depicts what I came to about my fear and worry over my financial survival and security. It just got this clear – Go Team!
I’d rather relax into the arms of fate with an innocent, hopeful and proactive heart – than spend my every moment eaten alive by worry – deformed and distorted by debilitating anxiety. Money is energy and as Abraham-Hicks says – emotional relaxation versus stressing over money is what helps abundance on every level – when I can discipline myself to go there. Tension just brings the opposite.
“I’d rather be lost
on the shark-infested tide than be beside you
in your boat of worries
with my limbs bound – mortal.”
“I will wrap a leaf around my face,
never again look and smell your makeshift hellish form.”
This is one of those Grayhurst masterpieces. Strong with the scent of sound philsophy and insight.
I learned greatly from reflecting on this line and owned how they each show up in me:
“We are but gestures sown
by particles of love, desire and greed.”
This next line is so true and so important for me not to fall into. My expectations about what is possible and my emotional faith in my desires is paramount to my well being. Following my inner intuition and outer synchronicity toward that which I think I next want – is vital to keeping my life force alive.
“There was a plague in my eyes
that has thinned my expectations, but
I am better.”
Amazing way of capturing what it’s like to dance with the various parts of oneself and one’s partner over time:
“Being in love this long is like a voyage
underwater, swarming with glorious and
dangerous beings.”
What images! What images indeed to describe something so familiar to so many of us – especially during adolescence – a state of being, an emotional experience – that can be so vague and confusing when we are actually in it – put to such vivid detail and concrete illustration. Thank you, Allison Grayhurst.
“I don’t know how long I will ride
upstream with my arms around this waning moon”
“Hope is a hair strand I lost in the waters,
far from any net or shore.”
Wow! How many of us feel this way about our sense of vocation in the world! What will I be when I grow up? Who am I really? What actually warms my heart? Illustrated eloquently and viserally as this:
“I travel this way, cold to my own heart – a piece
of rock in space, a business card wet in the gutter.”
“By light I try to commune, but like a thin cloud
that forms then fades, I have no idea how long I will stay”
gosh/ amazing/. another allison’s moving feast. I must confess two things; The 1st time I heard you read, i heard ,”my custard nerves”
(& tho’ I thot “Hmm, I missed that” I needed to go back, reread)
Also I couldn’t help but to wonder a bit about
the fool.
I don’t know how she does it – but through disparate images she nails the feeling, the testimony, the inner music of the hero’s journey-challenge upward:
“Living here
in elementary wealth – nothing but
old-world, nothing but chaos.
Will the angels sing to me? I have been waiting
on their love.”
Our galactic history-herstory inimated so often – no wonder the intensity of the soul’s anquish, shock, hope, longing and triumph.
“So heavy is the window I look through. Brick by brick
I count my way up. My memories belong
to another world.”
Brilliant. Surprising in it’s turn at the end – stunning, staggering in it’s implicaiton. Wow.
“When I was a baby child, it felt like there was a stone
stuck in my throat and a restlessness racing through my limbs.
I cried and cried when I was a baby, unfamiliar
with this daunting helpless form.”
I really like this expression. It reaches outward, like the spiderweb that if it was only outside we would leave to the delicate world of art in nature. But because it is in our home, we feel a need to tidy up. We need more outward in our lives. I know I do. 🙂
A classic. What word and meaning use! Weaving metaphor and psychological insight together like a braided pastry that is potent and goes down well. The voice of the poet remaining present in it’s unique and consistent tone of passion and forthright addressing the situation throughout.
“I should have held it in –
a nut within its shell,
prolonged its freshness to ward-off
its rotting.”
“the strike has torn, though
it was meant to mend. And the night moves on
as sleep beckons me
further into isolation, lacking the promise
of rest or resolution.”
This is a very sensitively written description of an inner transformation, psychologically strong but written so gently and humbly. I relate to this poem and enjoyed it very much.
I love Morgan’s comment above. Yes. What sharing the heart and awareness of your soul and hence poetry does for others is keep us sane. Thank you, Allison. I love the following image – your observance and comprehension of the nature and significance of things is awakening and empowering.
“I released
the bribe, and with it, the demon. Because God is with me
like a black cat who follows me from station to station,
is gentle and existing with tenderness and solidarity.”
I also love this image, it is so true – how we can be taken over but not down.
“It will take me over,
toss me like a weather balloon
and put me on the brink of a high fever.”
What a jewel to come upon this! SO well spoken. Well wrought words that go to the depths of the core of the experience:
“It is not the same as being limited
by loneliness, these feelings of broken fidelity,
abandonment. It is not enough to germinate
in this grief, pleading for a picture
of better times, appealing to
memory, sentiment”
What a way to put it!:
Wilting … “but never when mingled with your stature”.
Explains so much about why I fell into the mudpies I did – whether it was into a person, a body of work, a school of thought, an organization of dogma, a myth such as the modern one of the rewards of workaholism. No wonder, when we – like the aboriginal peoples – have been stripped of our natural connections (galactic historian, Andrew Bartzis) – as the aboriginals were when their personally strengthening rituals were stripped from them by being outlawed, and then they were given the addictive substance of alcohol/drugs as their ‘liquid mysticism’.
After periods of drought, no wonder we are led into experiences of elation and then sobering lesson. Yet, the experience of it can still feel higher than we go afterward… for a time.
And the riches of it we gain forever; ‘it is difficult to distinguish the person from the beautiful gifts they bring’ – especially when they first warn us of the dragon and then they become the dragon:
“ecstasy
just to listen, to share our minds – walking
on streetcar tracks at 4 a.m. and never sleeping.
I carried you like a book, wilting always in life, but never
when mingled with your stature.”
“I was delivered by your high forehead and
by your crazed emotions. I was celebrating.”
A stunning and extraordinary description of the journey and substance of the free person:
“in that time, I was
devoured by my own individuality, stripped
of my conditioning, a person to reckon with, lean on –
whole.”
What a way to put it!:
“salvaging a heartbeat from habit…”
I lived years like this, and now when I have it, I am marveling how I ever got through … those years!:
“just me with these crippled hands, bare feet, no mentor
to merge with, nothing
to follow.”
Such sadness in the air, mute but electrically charged, surrounding the reader as he paces with you. Love your images. Those beautiful full trees of our lives that are lost and cannot be replaced, grown by years and tending of the soul. There are no proper ceremonies or markers to quite equal such memories. Or loved ones lost. 🙂
Whoa … check out this image … of experience so profoundly done justice to:
“Catapulted into the future with no way back,
into another lightyear spinning, picking up pebbles,
putting down shoes. Hoods and earmuffs, locking
eyes with the cold, locking tight with the bluegrey anguish
that breeds explosives inside the flesh of my tongue,
but is buried too deep beneath the tastebuds to ever emerge.”
This feels so familiar – this feeling … so well described:
“adding a slight shock of unpredictability
to an otherwise stagnant formation”
When I hear the interview with Patricia Cota Robles on the Laura Magdalene Eisenhower and Dr. Dream “Awake in the Dream” radio show – the part about many coming to assist earth at this time from parts of the universe far lighter and more expansive … this part and so much of Grayhurst’s poetry makes so much sense to me as a feeling I have:
“Growth
once so great, celestial forms descended, joined
to contemplate and just listen.”
“These pinecones
remind me that I too have dropped, naturally, from
my source – laying flat on an unforgiving surface, unable
to dig into softness and sprout.”
Sheer poetry, magic and brilliance in words. Another one of those Grayhurst masterpieces that goes below cerebral into heart, hope, light, body, being resonating with a signature of truth, comfort and joy – like a well-aimed, in-sync down hill ski triumph at top speed in perfect symmetry.
“virtues that have kept me solid”
“knowing passion like
a labour – confined to a pattern, somehow
boundless. Joy. I stand a virgin in your honeymoon.
I am made up of sunsets and dreamy afterglows.”
“I should close these shutters, marry a
soft genuine smile.”
So well-described – yet another insight and clarity moment offered by Grayhurst:
“Miracles arrive, never in the way expected,
sometimes slowly, in small amounts
until you realize something merely accepted
was what was wanted all along.”
It is such a process to strengthen the connection between one’s body and soul without the regular use of addictions that only dull this connecting power of self:
“Darkness was my addiction, but I am done
with cantering through those hills.”
Wow, if this means what I think it does… I am working with letting go of old seductive habits that no longer serve me, and in retrospect this is a perfect clarity and description to help me do it:
“This wilderness
of power, purposelessness and extremes I laid down inside of
to be beside you and the softness of your mouth
and the elixir of your touch
became mine, grew like a second body
merging with my own like death does
with cold eternity.”
Oh, do I ever remember this as a poet in Toronto in days gone by – the magnificence of such ecstasy and intensity; lost to everything but beauty and loneliness, a sweet price:
“Pen and beauty, an inevitable
loneliness that victory cannot solve”
“Peeled of my own death,
entering a corridor of dawn”
“this guest that never comes, eats bread
or slips into the cradle of a comfortable
home”
“A woodland to walk through that inherits
a shadow canopy darkness. Walk through
regardless of doubts full-blown,
regardless of scrapes across your tender surface”
Oh, my god – this is incredible – Grayhurst’s observation and insight into life’s intricacies is stunning. The subleties and motivations and consequences she comprehends in her poems is remarkable:
“You are trying to reach me with an old painter’s words
of resignation and reluctant wisdom – words
I cannot make use of.”
I am there, next to that delicate dance of the breeze through tree leaves in that shimmering moment:
“a shimmering sensation or
a delicate fluttering of
nature’s delicate best”
I will come back and continue to comment on the rest of this poem.
I lived like this for years… I remember an acquaintance that I knew saw me from her car window as she drove by and later told me, “I saw you the other day, walking very … slowly. What were you doing?” she asked.
“Contemplating”, I answered. In this line Grayhurst helps me honour and understand more fully what I was doing… the “you” being spirit:
“I could walk faster than this, chat with the neighbours.
But I won’t. Because nothing is here but you, only,
and my feet can’t find the motivation to pick up pace.”
I will return again to continue commenting on this beautiful poem.
I had a talk yesterday where this is a brilliant description of exactly what I witnessed in the other person:
“You talk. My aura is a smog-filled season
where your sun’s rays barely seep through. Days
with stones in my stomach, rubbing against one another,
pressing their hard weight into places.”
Wow! Beauty on wheels is this poem about entering adolescence. Sheer beauty, along with her breath-taking way of capturing the interiority of things that is Grayhurst’s signature style.
“they came to snatch your heart
into a barren day, where conformity
would dry the void in your stomach
and the radio would be enough to hang your
curiosity upon.”
“But you, like a starfish,
swam slowly out of childhood – kindness intact,
individuality still pressing through your bones.”
“You kept the truth
you had when you were one, kept a depth and wonder
that refused to be buried.
After twelve affirming years,
the night still beats
softly for you.”
“I feel the civilized crowd, absent of judgment,
crossing streets, side-stepping grates”
“But my hands were made heavy and
I continue dragging my head like a rock, lifting it
into the sky, over airplane tracks,
and vegetable patch gardens.”
“to let my thoughts be devoured
by survival and sensation”
“Maybe this is just wilderness and burning,
but never once did I know stagnation or
was I afraid.”
This is a brilliantly written poem. Wow, the imagery, the feeling…
I remember experiencing exactly this, and there was a comfort in the awareness and acceptance of it:
“but I steadied myself
on the cold shell of repetitive expectations –
dead valleys here, dead heights there”
I lived years like this, incredible to pull this off as if by grace, as if by trial, as if by test:
“by-passing predator
tentacles and jaws by instinct alone, no journey-map,
stars or horizon to act as goal or inspiration
This is the best feeling description and insight into the might and depth and intrigue of underwater sea creatures I have ever encountered:
“rolling
through cross-waves with creatures captured
by a dark density like
myself, shaded, loose at the extremities, compact
at the core, thriving on plateaus of deep pressure,
salty flavours all around – so far gone from walking
that legs leave, replaced by fins, and language is not
sound, but a full-body resonance”
First of all, I must comment on the powerful sculptures on the side of this writing by Grayhurst. I love the lighting and the camera angles that bring out so much in these expressions of Allison’s human appreciation sculptures.
I feel a delight of creativity, hope and optimism in my chest upon reading this, and a warm smile comes to my face:
“angels under the bed sheets
and smiles in the afternoons,
of dreams that form, fade, then form
again”
I remember when this took gargantuan effort on my part, and I remember once imaging in my head stoning a negative voice within – which is all that would hold it at bay, and did indeed extinquish it:
“Days I will try to treasure like a
jar full of fireflies,
when I will not give in, not
give space to the dark pit within.”
This says it all in a world where god is money and the mall is the temple:
“Days that mean more than money, and more
than the power that it yields.”
What an image, what a beauty of an image – for the power of grief after the death of one, one so desires to still be living:
“Each day I wear my grief
like metal mesh.”
And what an image for those, such as Walt Whitman, who did just this with the wounded on battlefields – beyond my capability or understanding, but not beyond my awe of admiration:
“You try to comfort this field
of wounds. You tend the amputees
and bound the screaming with soft song.”
Each line of beauty stands on its own, strong and powerful, rich and meaningful – drenched in nature’s promise:
“I will contain you as more than memory –
in my harvest will bloom many sunflowers
of your great generosity.”
“And your fiery blood
will sprout the roots and flesh of passion fruit.”
“The maple tree will grow large like you, protecting all
within its strong and tender shadow.”
I am there, in this painting of mind and feeling:
“And children
will be drawn to this yard, to play there amongst
the tall dramatic grass, and then sit still to watch
with wonder the many shades of sky, reflecting
the warmth of your paternal sun-setting colours.”
I LOVE THIS. It says so much that to even comment on it doesn’t do it justice! This is brilliant. I love the wording, the love the imagery! So well said:
“to
hold your hand when the shelf cracks
and the books are all read, when the fridge
carries only last week’s fruit.”
“To lean my head on your heart and
let you speak your need, instead of curling
under the blankets like an angry, disturbed thing.”
“To be kinder than I’ve been,
to wrap a hand around the back of your cold,
delicate neck.”
“loving you better
when darkness inevitably descends.”
Will check in on all of the newer books. Leaving poetry…purchase too low to continue with the creation even though it was one of my “loves”. Time to move on…keep creating I love your work. ajm
“I have put the “poetry blog” to bed! Please check out my new site where I will begin a new journey into “fiction” based on sometimes “fact” and continue to follow your visits are important to me”. ajm
Nearing the end of September, I feel like this poem expresses some of what is going on inside. I saw a painting the other day of a woman in a glade…and I cried because I feel so far away from her solitude and silence and simplicity…listening and openness.
I love this whole piece, the little I have been able to read so far. It reminds me of a very visceral childhood memory – and as a child we can be so much more PRESENT to all of creation, every nuance and that is what Grayhurst’s work does for me – sharpens my senses to “all this is” to be seen, heard, felt, noticed.
“Light that drips down the turnpike, onto roads
and ways far away from any window.
Blocks to build shelters and shields. Flags on flimsy poles.
A neutral breeze busting cardoors and
personalized licence plates.
Paved over, I see a carcass dripping, a little yellow flower,
smaller than a thumbprint.
Rust-coloured shawl, poncho that holds
great sentimental significance holds
me to a memory, old now as a ten-year-old untended garden
or pavement cracks grown into fissures.”
This poetry is so rich – so transcendent – I can barely catch my breath to wrap concepts around it.
Rather, it is beyond words.
It uses words, to go beyond words.
I get transported, instead, to another realm.
I am catapulted to an understanding of earth experience that does justice to its layered potency.
Grayhurst gives us a place to refresh ourselves – in a cool, green valley – hidden from the dominant wasteland – where keeping head, heart, body and spirit together are seen, felt and experienced as being normal.
“Come upon me like a feather-stick –
sectioning my abdomen like a fruit. Suddenly
toddlers are conversing and the grey cat
takes in the morning. Bundle of weeds,
bundle of flowers. An opening
under the burning canopy. Lifetimes spent
collecting synergy, male rhythms and fixed lines.
God is coming down to hide in your loose-change-pocket.
I dreamt of owning your praise. Swinging from the rafters
in a game of hide-and-seek, I sought your breath,
hand of destined chores.
I played along inside the circle, inside a sack
I could hardly breathe out of. Languishing. A round bruise
forming on my left arm. Place me here. Crown me
or stake me on a tall spike. I am sand thrown mid-air.
No place to collect and land, not even a wave, a bucket,
the forelock of a horse. Not even
thinking in a straight continuation, but there, there, a pebble
between paw pads, then, a minor note locked
in perpetual repetition.”
This is brilliant! Brilliant. Reminds me of when I first read Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. And I wanted to stand up on the city bus and exclaim aloud: “Listen to this!” A comprehensive capturing of human earthly experience in all it’s dimensions without missing a beat – beyond the conscious mind – dancing with the levels of our knowing and sensing – that we feel but do not always recognize, and rarely, oh so rarely articulate. Clearly, Grayhurst’s poetic journey has taken her to the mountain top.
“Paved paths, brisk
storm of senses, an old
opening, endless as a dug-in arrow –
head in the weeping jungle, the coolness
of autumn air brushing tombstones,
the thin necks of geese.
So much night in a single glass, body
and name together, replacing
existence with this inheritance and no other.
Rows of ships crowding the edge of the lake –
docked and bearing down for winter. The distance
grinds, gravel on my belly, cracked shells
in subterranean pages writing down dawns and victories
This smacks of the kind of hope of the human spirit above the drudgery of this world – that I had to regularly engage as a young woman kind of lost in a big city and not with a lot of spiritual tools – boy – do I love his spirit!
Brilliant. Poignant. Sweet in more ways than one. Exactly how I am feeling today.
May we all sing as sweet. Thank you, love of Allison Grayhurst for expressing the life and love and fear of so many of us!
“Mostly I am a tree, solid in my roots,
proud of my leafy foliage.
Mostly I am grateful for the working
light bulbs, for the kindness of others that
pushes me along.
Mostly I am happy here,
pinned to this abundance of love, not looking
outside for a four-leaf clover.
Mostly my level is strong, but today
as I’m sinking – I relish the relief of tears it brings.”
Stunning insights articulated with precision. Twists and turns of perspective. Creaking, and then with the crack of a whip, a crack of light thunders through.
“I have loved badly,
pessimistic”
“the steady rapture that only comes with patience”
“I sat on the bus and I was alone.
Did I know how fragile sanity was”
The power of intention and speaking it aloud.
This is a mainstay of my spiritual growth practice:
“There are names.
and allegiances that triumph
when spoken aloud.”
This is where I so beautifully am right now – learning sweet surrender. Listening with focused intent, and the intention to follow the inspired action:
“before my shelter broke
and I could be saved by surrender”
I really liked this one. Time is thick though we are free…and I am tired, too, often of the things you mention. Your poems ends like the end of a long, heavy sigh.
What poignancy. A feel, a tapestry of experience. Showing us how life works – all the impressions, all the input, all the images, all the sensory stimulation, all the feeling experiences, all the emotions connected to imagery – all the poetry around us all the time, that makes up a life, that makes up life, that makes up a memory, that makes up the stunning wonder of memory.
I adore this! It is deeply healing to me to read these words this morning. Thank you, Allison, for your healing balm in the world.
“It is lonely to be loved by God,
stretched beyond capacity by laws
of magnets, hunger and inevitable reality,
to hold open a hand and have even that
security taken…
It is hard to keep
trembling with service and acceptance, to be at ease
and know the gift will come just when it is needed – God will
choose the music, choose which danger is real and what must
depart. It is hard to not cry, sometimes…I am free but time is thick…”
thanx once again, my friend. i serendipitiously ran into this image this morning and i guess, must include it here/
the best to you & yrs over the holydays, G
This poem articulates the way I often feel, too. I’ve just come out of a short New Year’s Retreat but feel that I’ve just scraped the surface of things, perhaps approached the “core” but am already back into the thick of things driven by something more like anxiety, survival, than other more simpler things. But hopefully this time of retreat (of core time) will find its way into these outer realms as I live my life! I enjoyed this poem. Still a poet…
Beautiful symmetry – so aware, so caring, so honest. Such a work of the observant eye. The one who SEES far beyond the exterior scenery and happenings around us. A thoughtful mind, a timeless time within this soul. Thank you.
Breath-taking! What a profound and beautiful witness to one of the heart-breaking expressions of the mystery of life. Thank you for your compassionate witness to Life and Death.
Wonderful, as always!! Thanks for the follow on Twitter, as well. Sorry that I haven’t been commenting as of late, I’ve been working fastidiously on my next book and driving myself crazy in the process. I’ve been going through a bit of a funk w) my own poetry as of late which I’ve been trying to reconcile it, (oh what rejections I have received). My publisher wants to put the poetry book out before the novel and I was hoping to get it in some of the Lit. mags ahead of time. Alas, said Lit. mags aren’t cooperating so I’ve been questioning the validity of the whole project. Anyway, I look forward to receiving your next poem. They are all great and set a high bar for my own work. All the best, Lawrence
Bravo, Allison.Your achievement here, and yr efforts displayed previously, truly bring awe.sometimes, you make me question my just-clever tricks/I personally feel that you stand alone, here in these wordpress poetry posts, admiringly,G
Odd to find your poem in the ‘Fishfood Magazine but I liked the lay-out and rhythms and the release of your last ‘verse’ – it reminded me of the effects you get from reading metaphysical poetry (especially Donne’s) – like your photograph as well as the poem!
I notice that when readers comment on your poetry their prose becomes very poetic (though I did like … “Intelligence rips through her work like white water.”)
Can’t reblog your post because my blog has been suspended. I don’t know why or for how long because Worstpress has not contacted me or replied to my inquires about this suspension.
Allison, you are gifted my sister! Your poems are deeply genuine and real…my heart is moved by the emotions of your spirit! Thanks for sharing your heart!
“….time held me green and dying/ though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
“I make one image—though ‘make’ is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be ‘made’ emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.”
I especially like the last lines….lost like the original light that still exists in some to help the rest survive…I hope I still have some of that original light.
Reblogged this on ANN JOHNSON-MURPHREE and commented:
I have followed and read Allison Grayhurst for several years and all of her work is enjoyable, check her site out.
OK… deep breath! I hadn’t realized I read it without breathing so as not to break my concentration. Do I “get it” – me, the poetry challenged? I’m going to have to re-read several times, then I’ll likely come up with a personal image, or interpretation. So far, you’ve given me a jumble of feelings that are literally all over the map. Key words that make my heart jump. Fear, anger, doubt, and choking. Not bad for a single poem. At least I had been “prepared” as I’ve been reading some of your material on “Mr. Militant Negro!”
Reblogged this on ANN JOHNSON-MURPHREE and commented:
Those times, we hear a desolate chorus rising
and we vanish completely into its volcanic siren wind. This is the outstanding work of Allison Grayhurst. Visit her site and enjoy many post of interest; beautiful words.
Thanks for posting this exquisite poem. It brought to mind “Barter” by Sara Teasdale, a lovely poem I committed to memory as a junior in high school and still know by heart almost 60 years later:
Barter
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.
There is something about the poet who writes for herself yet speaks volumes to someone far away that she is likely never to meet. Yet reading your words, I was transformed to back to NYC and some very dark times. Time is a great healer as is distance. I thank you for sharing your words.
Allison, I’ve taken liberties to use part of this magnificent poem as a prologue to my work today. If they’re no problem with you, thank you so, if so, it’s gone. Of course I’ve posted arrows back to you. gary https://wordpress.com/post/namelessneed.wordpress.com/7756
Compelling sculptures! I can’t tell if some of them are dead or sleeping but somehow it is as if it doesn’t matter. It’s only a matter of degree, after all.
I love love love this to bits. Both the poem itself (the last stanza is absolutely delicious, I bow to you), and the spoken poem. Thank you for sharing Allison.
This is a rich chronicle of what is is like to be woman. So much depth, color and feeling. It really covers a lot, encapsulates a lot. Everything from a tough childhood, being insvisible, finding love, creating life, letting go of the life and it’s identity building properties, finding yourself again and retiring.
Powerful stuff. Beautiful poem.
i once held sunday
in my pocket,
or perhaps
it held me,
fondled book,
like sinful prophet,
dreamt of
eternity;
but whispered joys
–promised by better days–
jarred-quick
reality.
Isn’t that what it is, this life? A yearning to break free of the boundaries, to scale the wall, each brick laid meticulously by our own hand? Ah, those limitations we place upon what’s limitless. Sometimes the only way to scale is to burrow. My kingdom for a pick or a shovel! ⛏
Through the mending of brokenness, the embrace of vulnerability, and the recognition of divine presence, we find solace and meaning in the simplicity of life’s quiet moments.
Heartfelt, haunting, beauty, sensual – wow, thank you!
“does not come
like tolerance, learned,
worked for”
How true and observant. Wonderful.
Hi Alison, I really like what I’ve read so far. All the best – sam
OH MY GOD…
you have just become a part of my morning spiritual practice!
I LOVE IT!
Wow… I LOVE listening to the audio – it takes me somewhere – profound and important and reminds me of what is most important in life
…the poetic majesty behind it all!
Oooh, steamy 🙂
You’ve been nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award 🙂
https://clsostarich.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/versatile-blogger-award/
Found a link on C.L. Sostarich wordpress – Like what I have read so I will come back again and read some more.
Brian (in Scotland)
brilliant cathartic description of devastation and loss…
making art from the things that hurt – beautifully done.
Awesome! I love especially:
“I should just learn to not be real, maybe
see a psychiatrist for all my pent-up disappointment,
for the way I want to shake the unshakable sea…”
“It will be a challenge to learn detachment where there should have been
connection and accountability.
I will not be connected, but be sweet, swallow
the stone in my throat and close the shop
with a smile.”
Excellent!!!
Wow! Now that’s erotica – clean, powerful and true!
unabashed sexuality.
Pingback: Desires | Clare Flourish
greatly unabashed writing!
Writers/poets/philosophers/musicians/artists/people who have inspired me: Rainer Maria Rilke, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Hardy, Kyp Harness, Van Morrison, Pablo Neruda, Nietzsche, Mozart’s The Requim, Yoko Ono, Rodin, Taylor Jane Green,Van Gough, Elizabeth Fraser Williamson, Jane Goodall, Kate Bush.
your influences name all of my fav’s but one that I am not familiar with so- o.k how do you feel about, Roland Barthes, H. Arnendt, Bauderlaire, Lyotard. Foucault. Sontag, Byron, Bishop, Pinsky, Frost, Rimbaud, Camus, Fuller, Gibran, Chardin, Soutine, Louise Bourgeiois, Goya, Ingres, Giacametti, Chrissie Hyde, X, Gang of Four, Mitchell, B.Holliday, N, Young, S. Nicks
books-Camera Lucida, The Penal Colony, In the Cave you live in, The Archology of Knowledge, Being in Time, A wrinkle in time. I’m sure you did not get close to naming all. until I got sick, full blown vegan!
this is a lot harder than it looks! Beautiful!
Rodin and Claudel ? love these!!!!
OH my God…
I especially like:
“my child-grip is short, as are
my obsessive desires.
Too far down is the raging river’s floor –
I am carried off. This time I will not panic,
but sink and imagine I am growing gills. I will relax the
burning in my mind and enjoy the end and then give in
to the continuous flow.”
I love this one, Allison. I’ve been looking for yr more recent work, and I feel as though I’ve hit the jackpot.
Yr site here is quite unique w/ the sound of yr voice belting ’em out
(strong, sure, sharings is more like it) Thanx for yr bold intimacies. G.R.
Really reached deep down into my soul and heart plucking at emotions and slivers of dreams ~ we are so very blessed by your gift ~ Thank You!
brilliant!! 🙂
Pleasure to meet you. I look forward to reading more from you.
Such artistry!
I especially like:
“Simply, I will keep my secrets,
be at peace with the darkness, knowing
my breath is still mine to take,
and grief has found its perfect spot to settle
and no longer control.
Everything that has died has been buried.
The moon paints a womb and the pulse of hope
sings like it hasn’t sung for years.”
nice self revelation , and moving on !… what’s the back story?
I feel like I learn new ways of using such beautiful words when I read your poetry. Thank you for sharing 🙂
Wow! You come up with word combinations that are so evocative, I wish I’d thought of them myself : )
It’s inventive yet still offers such a profoundly clear message – I love it – Thanks Allison! Best wishes
I particularly liked that jerky coming-to-a-halt ending…
Shiva-Shakti
“Follower of Jesus. No church. No religion. Just the Gospels.”
Wow. I’m not so conceited as to think I was the only one to believe this way, but thank you for laying it out plainly. It’s good to feel a little less alone.
peace, –Dan
powerful, and disturbing. “…one of those feathery few / who long to burn in your backdraft.” – brilliant
your poems are very beautiful
yes, cheers
I swim, too.
This is really a good poem to read. Awakenings from periods of great pain are hard to come by and sometimes take a long time, but, as the poet David Agnew said in one of my favorite poems by him, “That is where I found the poems.” where the light of healing and a new path opens up the spirit. It is brave of you to post this series of poems, but the journey through them is powerful.
Wow! Powerful and beautiful.
“This balcony to stand on” kills me, it’s a powerful, very sure and powerful
metaphor, or title to a major novel, or major film, or major song
yr major words talk to me again, thank you for writing, filming, & singing
metaphysical and musical!
Excellent. Some of your wording, for whatever reason, reminded me of Seamus Heaney. Very strong and certain – I think that’s why, come to think of it.
“stroked the molten skin of treason”- every word moves the image forward, reveals a new facet of it.
do you know Beethoven’s late quartets where you (or I certainly) don’t know where the music is going to but it grows and develops and you follow this process, listening without understanding…
it’s like listening to his mind, especially since he was deaf.
ANYWAY sorry about such a long roundabout comment but I read (then listen) to your poems in the same sort of way
I can see your passion for your work in these. Very expressive faces. I’m a sucker for figure work, so I’d have to say those were my favorites.
Brilliant. Brought me to tears.
I love especially:
“It is much more than an idealized place or perfect pillow.
It is what we made here, heroes to our own love,
bypassing blame, slaughtering resentments, screaming
through headlocks or when kneeling on the bathroom floor,
bonded to the midnight turn and years of heavy lifting.
My love, remember us again, don’t be acid or an orchard
of terrible ivy, fill yourself with renewed determination.”
My own heart let me have more pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet
For me, this was an unsettling kind of moving/ thank you again
amazing!! 🙂
Amazing poem. The dark undertones are brilliant. My favourite: Like a crinkled cloth left on the subway floor, I waited – dry, malformed, avoided. So incredible.
Oh, my god… the beauty…
You certainly make words work in a new way for you!
Especially love:
“You should let the mad-ones go to India,
trace a path up Tibetan mountains. You should be pleased to see them go,
away from your boarding school, not there to tug your pierced ears
or point out your visceral smothering of the gentle dreamers. They will go
anyway. They will stand in front. Not because they want to
but because they are not soldiers like that, forming their destinies
in boxes. You can stay in corridors, make trenches by pacing the patterns
of your congealed thoughts. You can be anyone
you want.”
Raw power, magnificent.
I like ‘ let the mad ones go to India ‘; I like ‘congealed thoughts” I like the hesitation between ‘You can be anyone’ and ‘you want’; I’m not sure whether ‘Without’ means ‘outside’ or ‘not having’ and whether it is the title or the first word or both but I like it enough to think about it.
this has a hidden power, beautifully written. The last stanza is stunning.
wow. finely crafted and disturbing, I guess intentionally; hope the madness did indeed become medicine…
I’m getting the hang of your titles at last! And the shape/structure/ momentum/cadences/rhythms of your poems. That final couplet, for example – the urgency of the two commas round ‘now’ then the release/surprise of the last line:
“Put salt on my lips, paint me, now, please
in turquoise.”
Why ‘turquoise’?
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ‘s all-in-all in all a world of wet
You are so on target with my experience of the spirirtual journey.
Especially love:
” I put away my grown-up philosophy
to live by impulse and the pity of God.
The task is done, the ice is swallowed.
It is time to love the gargoyles and create
a new form of beauty.”
I like your style. No reply needed.
From the start I believed
in never bending, but now I am a weather-vane,
guided by singing.
Starting from here you end up living by impulse and the pity of God…It is time to love the gargoyles and create/a new form of beauty.”
This seems to be to be a poem of metamorphisis, moving from rigidity to extreme flexibility to a place where gargoyles can be loved and new beauty created. Again, this is wonderful poetry.
Your voice in this poem is so strong that it shouts to the mountaintops. The center of the poem is in the line
God, I am getting older, younger
somehow then when I started.
This is a poem of aging in conversation with God.
I need you (God)
final in my palm
But, of course, you have
only
this spoonful and a house too quiet in the
early mornings, not enough connection – a wave
that never crests, metal made into nothing.
while you long to
soak myself in this feral blizzard
approaching, always just approaching.
Why is your love so tenuous, powerful
sometimes, and then, wispy, hardly registering?
You remember, and this is the most powerful part of the poem, a planet
spiked, clustered
grass, almost blue
filled with rawness you want back, but instead age has taken you
away from sensual flavours and the mountains’ pulse.
You are getting older, younger than when I started.
Then the prayer/wish:
Put salt on my lips, paint me, now, please
in turquoise.
Good Lord, what a poem!
“contrasts, a paint-by-numbers make believe” – really, really like this line. 🙂
I like ‘my ever-ghost’ – the title, the idea, the poem
and the alliteration – ‘formed my fingerprints’….’violence void of every meaning’ …. it has the touch of Anglo-Saxon poetic techniques
The pain of life so perfectly articulated
and then I love:
“Will you find me, honour the primrose on my veranda,
maybe even snip one, take it to your table and dream of a voice
other than your own?”
“Gravity like glue
or something more substantial like
the sigh of a sick child.”
is excellent!
Fantastic – I need to read this again and again..
“Find me like science is found enhancing the faint glow of an almost-faith” – awesome. Nearly every phrase contains the essence of the poem, and it’s both beautiful and desperate. More soul-medicine.
Peace, –D
Loved it Alison.
beautiful poem.. 🙂 love it
Stunning as usual – your eye for the DETAIL of life’s phenomena and the using of it as metaphor is … stunning and often uncomfortably visceral in it’s power to put forward the intensity of the pain which makes the release all the more potent. Thank you.
I especially like:
“An enemy is at my table.
A horse is buried under American sands.
My heart is water:
It longs to quench the hot summer skin of sparrows.”
It is time to love the gargoyles…fabulous. I will go there. Stare down the throat of darkness.
I loved this one. So intense.
I, too, want to be exposed as a lighthouse, to tear at the tendon heels of uncertainty/
gosh, you’re pleasing, as the sun comes ’round again, and one is trying to get one’s bearings abit. Thanx again
A wonderful poem with insight and wisdom. The question would be….would rebirth be the wish of our Lord in being able to rise closer to Him?
There are the odd rhymes – ‘shed’ / ‘bled’ and ‘one’/’sun’ – I was trying to work out how you structured the poem – liked it though!
It’s like a sonnet without the rhymes and without the stanzas – no, it’s like a piece of music – crescendo, diminuendo, largo, andante….. I can see and hear its shape
and then that sublime ending: ” There will be raspberries
and grapes on every corner. Someone,
will say your name. ”
Makes me smile!
Speaking the complexity and simplicity that lies within!
Hi, Allison. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve nominated you for the Versatile Blogger Award. If you would like to continue passing the award along, the instructions are here http://wp.me/p24rMG-3Z
Wonderful…
Especially like:
” I knock down garbage bags, pocket unsharpened pencils,
buy myself some tea, thinking today I will let go,
rid myself of your domination, purchase a splendid fantasy to replace
your magnetism – saw at roots, trust the broken staircase and climb.”
The creativity within this poem affects me in a strong way:
Plastered with glue,
sticking like betrayal like a spider’s eggsack
to a branch. I watch your gorgeous
pontificating, watch you mourn just a little. The injury
rips only part of your body, fragments you. Grief becomes a tremor,
an uncontrolled twitch under your left eye.
The poem starts out as a startling portrait, then develops a counterpoint to the portrait, describing in wonderful language how the poet wants to let go and rid themselves of the domination of the one drawn so skillfully in the proceeding stanza. The it becomes a powerful love poem, ending in a stanza as impressionistic as the art of Van Gogh:
…but you
are still in my mind
pushing, ploughing through and through,
saving me a plot beside your plot
beside the potpourri covering a stranger’s grave.
The whole angst of the modern age seems stirred up in this stanza, negating, but confirming, emphatically, the love part of the poem and the poet-self part of the poem in the same breath.
You are a wonderful writer.
Fine work/ not to belabor the point, but he’s a lucky man to have such
an eloquent reflector
can I hire you for my obit?
I don’t know about hiring you for my obit, but I would like to ask you to consider writing a short blurb for the back cover of my book that will publish this summer. And by the way, this is a ‘stellar’ poem, I came here to tell you so. Marvelous!
A wonderful exploration of what poetry, beneath words, rhythm, rhyme, lines, and even meaning, is.
… it is being intoxicated with the fullness of seeing God there
with every thought – in the swimming pool while treading water,
or at the hair dresser, drinking coffee, waiting for a turn.
… True intensity is subtle,
is equal in its magnitude as it is to its intricacy – It commands exploration.
Even death, sometimes your sister,
cannot revert humanity back to that interval
before God exhaled, altering the playing field, resulting in
such a mighty fusion.
The themes in this poem are so large they seem to encompass both the self and the self in God. In the end the poet, you, all humanity, is part of the mighty fusion that the poet sees when they see God with every thought during every moment of the day no matter how mundane the moment.
Life begets life:
a forceful synergy of the round and the sharp,
splicing, splitting, until more splicing and splitting until
dependency on oxygen is born.
begets what the poet who sees the self subsumed by poetry misses in their concentration on self and self subsumed. This is fascinating, vital poetry.
Reblogged this on The ObamaCrat.Com™ and commented:
Allison Grayhurst is a poet. She has emotions uncharted. She uses words to guide me from darkness into revelation. That is what a good poet does well. Stop by her blog: “Allison Grayhurst”.
Wow. Especially like:
” I have known death’s jolts, have known its harrowing cripple
and crack, and know it cannot revert humanity back to that interval
before God exhaled, altering the playing field, resulting in
such a mighty fusion.”
Intense, rich and many layered as usual – feels good knowing it’s to your Muse.
What a vocation being a passionate poet is!
Pingback: Breakthrough « Postcard Fiction
I did not talk to a single person today that did not tell me here in New Mexico that they had trouble sleeping last night. We have finally had a couple of nice, reasonably warm days, but mostly days of rain, snow, and cold, and they’re predicting more of the same for this weekend.
I think we humans are always affected by weather, rain or snow, as the post office says, but also by
…spiders
that creep and curl along the
ceiling, hovering with the stillness
of death…
and our troubles and this is all true:
…To watch a love-one suffer is worse
than shame, worse than feeling
futility collapse on your throat
or a weapon held at the head…
at least in my life. It is also true that
Little by little the terror rises,
and the world outside remains unchanged.
For all the world encroaches into our head and leaves us with our troubles, the world does remain unchanged, moving from season to season, year to year, decade to decade, century to century in its endless circles. As usual, Allison, this is really good poetry.
I am not sure to say about this one, except that it is up to your usual high standards. I am old now, though still in love with Ethel after 44 years of matrimony, and though our passion is different, slower, longer, less filled with breath, I remember when we were young.
Your sure words, forthright, intense, are bold with gutsy sensual & spiritual
symbolism, It all stirs up a spell of delerium at this end
Thanx, from another dizzy reader
Beautiful and intense, a salty fire.
How we’d like the world to stop spinning, for even a moment, just a moment, to show us that our pain matters…as a child when I experienced a great loss, a death, I wondered why the world didn’t stop. At such a young age, I felt the passing endlessness of days.
I sense a merging here with God as well as man. I think about John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14. In fact, in many of your “love” poems I find myself floating in and out of flesh to spirit, what can be a love relationship with a person is also, somehow, one with God. At least this is my sense in your poems. They carry an intensity which feels to me like the kind of longing or love one has for God, but this intensity is also in our home, in our beds.
Reblogged this on The ObamaCrat.Com™ and commented:
Allison Grayhurst at the self named blog: “Allison Grayhurst” has done it again folks….another elegant yet simple group of words arranged in such a way to make me think. I love that about her poetry.
Beautiful…Especially like:
“On the rafters a single flower is born.
I look to that single flower, like I look to spending
the afternoon with the ones who have endeared,
like the pulse and turn of my infant within
or a brief morning solitude –
open for interpretation.”
“What speaks of holding on when the world is pale/ with grief…” though there’s no description of color, and it’s a stripped down idea, there’s really striking imagery in there. The first commenter said it..
“on the rafters a single flower is born”…to me, this poem is all here in this one line. That flower emerging from the rafters is the unborn fetus in the woman who cannot find her seat…and holding on when the world is pale with grief…the rain in the rafters, the flower…beautiful.
I understand you are not into accepting awards, and that this blog is all about the work, and not you, that aside, since you inspire me and my blog, I nominated you for The Very Inspiring Blogger Award. What you do with this award is entirely your business….but you have been given this based on how your words effect me….which is what writing is all about, reaching someone.
Yes! Witness consciousness! Fearlessly seeing and feeling it all, not dissociating.
Especially like:
“I am far from a solid core,
far from the plane ride to paradise,
far from the sodium dream,
but I am here
and here
I am looking around.”
I often feel that your words start with a trickle and end with a down pouring, and end again with a trickle but with the sense of a “sigh” or “breath”. Reading your poems usually has this feeling of oncoming rush and then a pause…
Beautiful… I especially like:
“Outside, the children go inside, readying for sleep.
I tread waterways in my mind
and send my kisses mid-air.”
Great!!!
Allison, this poem starts with a dark, dark vision that is almost frightening:
In the whisper of tomorrow
the wood is burning and the trees
have died.
You then take the hinges off the door, doors being the instruments we humans use to keep the outside away from our inner lives while allowing us to go outside.
…waiting as my hunger works like
midnight in my stomach, dictating
the flavour of the coming stars.
These are powerful lines! You are waiting to see what “outside” comes through the door, not afraid, filled with hunger, letting that hunger dictate the flavour of the coming stars.
Then you ask a powerful question:
…will the answer come before the grave
or will obscurity greet me every new dawn
like a hand unheld or a gate torn down?
A question which probably drives all of those who become poets.
It is humming, the sound of this underground sorrow.
It hums of poetry and the earth and the bug eaten leaves.
It burns and cannot bloom in bookstores, will not bloom
in the silence of a single decade or in the darkness of
a closed drawer.
The craft of poetry in these lines, with the repetition of the It, is wonderful. The question, and the feared answer, humming an underground sorrow: It burns and cannot bloom in bookstores…
(poetry, of course, not matter how great the poet, seldom does)
But then your triumphant ending, at triumphant from where I sit:
Outside, the children go inside, readying for sleep.
I tread waterways in my mind
and send my kisses mid-air.
For in spite of the eternal question you have asked, you watch the children inside, reading for sleep, and send your kisses to them–and perhaps all of us, “mid-air.”
The previous poem deserves comment to, but when I read this one I could not help myself. I had to comment on it. Ahh, for only more time during the day.
What a cool thing, to have someone read your work to an audience. Congratulations.
Heavy.
beautiful and interesting sculptures…. congrats, Allison
You’re a sculptor too! Wow! Am I impressed. You are like Ethel! Art pours out of you in multiple ways endlessly. This is fascinating work! I hadn’t noticed the sculpture link on your page at the right before.
What an interesting body of work.
This is a love poem, Allison, but has both angst and sadness mixed in with the love. There is beautiful, original language, as in all of your poetry,
sorrow like a grey October morn
stretches between us, leaves us each
alone watching out the same window.
fascinating ideas:
We are locked like the shore to the sea,
perfectly different and merging in natural
rhythm – each shell and struggling fish
exposed, until we hide in separate elements,
bonded to our own.
“each shell and struggling fish/exposed,” talking about the inner being of human beings! An idea that stops you in your tracks and makes you think about what the poet is really saying. Each of the lovers expose themselves to the other, and then they “hide in separate elements…”, trying to escape the exposure.
and the counterpoint of a complex relationship:
Often I am bruised by your laughter,
counting pennies on the table with fierce concentration.
Though you with your hands,
hold all the mystery my heart can fathom,
pressing with gentleness my folded brow,
or blending your legs with mine, sure and warm
as the summer earth.
where the laughter of the lover bruises and causes a retreat into the “counting of pennies on the table with fierce concentration,” but also presents hands that “hold all the mystery my heart can fathom…”
What I get out of this is that the mental/emotional part of the relationship is difficult, but the physical part is “sure and warm/as the summer earth.”
The questions raised by the poem are the old ones: Can the physical excitement of love last? Is that enough? Or does the physicalness of human beings translate into a rhythm powerful enough to overcome the emotional/mental difficulties we all face? Can love of any kind break through the “separate elements” and build a bonding that is strong and lasting? What is the nature of love?
This is, as usual, powerful poetry with a sting that makes the reader examine his/her universe.
Poetry does not have to stir hymns and hosannas to be poetry. Sometimes poetry gets under the skin and smashes the reader in the face and forces confrontation that is not to be quickly forgotten:
The ground that grows
the wasteful blight and
estranges the kiss and hiss of wildlife
is in me like a slaughtered tribe
that has no face.
Whew! This is one powerful description of a blackness that has descended singing angrily into the spirit.
I am in the nightmare cloud, wrapped
in tar and rotted wood. I hide
beneath the blanket, undone.
But poetry, if it is any good never stands still, but moves:
Sickness has walked around me, mile
around mile and names me this stone chiselled
in two. It is the beginning, but it is midnight
and I am marked to be unmoved.
There is a hint here that there is a “beginning…” of sickness, of stone chiselled in two,” but a stirring beneath the blackness even though “it is midnight/and I am marked to be be unmoved.”
This is not the poetry of dazzling light, but of the spirit’s darkness. Still, there has to be a beginning out of darkness even though it cannot move and the spirit hides under a blanket, trying to be unseen. Sylvia Plath wrote powerful poetry that sizzled with emotion. We feel the fire in her lines, but, in the end, she needed to find a new beginning, a path out of despair and the darker emotions. This has the power of Plath, but I see in it more hope even if the hope is lightly stated and perhaps half meant. I recognize you as a poet, Allison. A significant poet.
I like your use of language. . .very effective I think. Reminds me of Ferlinghetti and his Beat Poetry in the 60’s. Also (for me) has a Dylan quality to it. I really like your poetry!
So deep and feeling! Thank you for your multiple expressions!
Intimate, throbbing, present:
Love:
“under blankets, more at ease
with the coming of private sleep than with trying.”
You capture moments in life with great intimacy.
HO-LEE! WOW! No one can write this stuff like you!
I’ve seen a lot of insipid, cliched “love poetry” on Word Press but this I like.Tender and honest, with some beautiful lines, “blending your legs with mine, sure and warm etc-
I hope your loved one appreciates it.
Sheer Beauty, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, move over 🙂
“We lift up our shirts, place ears over navels,
dwarfing any future with instinctual immediacy.”
PS – Yes, this is so true:
“Holding is indefinite…
With each lip-graze our fears are gradually disempowered.
They shrink, and then we shrink-wrap them before they fully decay,
offering them an honoured yet secondary place.”
A fine good friday posting/ God bless
Yes, I know these things, too.
I wonder what the process of sculpting a face is like? is it tender? is there a sense of reflection? those and other questions arise…the feel of clay under fingers, malleability…wet and cool.
I am really digging the soul and feel of this, I get it! great expression!
What cathartic comfort for angst!
You are the queen of cathartic comfort!
Certain lines should go down in Bartlett’s Quotations.
They boom like thunderous sharp true insight!
“I drink necessity’s authority.”
What a wonderful prayer to read on Easter morning! No matter what faith tradition anyone might follow. The two poems I’ve read today, Allison, are as clear and fresh as water tumbling over stones out of the San Juan Mountains. Achieving that clarity is as difficult as any other task a writer might take during that lifetime. It is not a necessary component of poetry. The puzzles spun out by Jim Heinz, ExtraSimilie, have their place in the body of poetry as do more complex poems that are not as challenging as those done by Jim. You are a true poet. These two poems are worth celebrating, although the truth is that much of what you write is worth celebrating.
This is lovely. It has shades of Dylan Thomas, and believe me that is a compliment.
🙂
“Every someone
wanders protected and important
in this long age of insanity”
A wonderful piece/ through & through
so beautiful.. 🙂
Your poem has uniformly short lines which cleverly mimic the wingbeat rhythm suggested by your title.
What a line!
” Bodies are not bodies but conditions of unique collaborations.”
You write so well and with style
Very nice poem Allison, you have a great voice for poetry!
David. L
Beautifully written and read
Very beautiful. To feel ones heart with love is the way to live a full life.
I loved the feeling I got when I read the “Then up!” line. 🙂
I wish I could write as well as you, I have been watching carefully where just put the words.
[21:31:45] Subhan Zein: Hello there,
You write wonderful poetry up here. Well done! 🙂 Keep penning and keep inspiring! I am sure one day the door will open for you and that lots of readers will find your poetry both entertaining and interesting! 🙂
Have a lovely day my friend! 🙂
Subhan Zein
Simply…Beautiful.
Love it.
“beside each other
faces are made real
inadequacies vanish
leaving no trace of murder
or time”
“no illness could alter
What you feel
briefly
as you join skin and souls . . .
“
Love it! What a majestic imaginational realm!
In the spoken version ‘the hollow log’ becomes ‘death’ and woods becomes ‘words’…?
“Tomorrow is a keyhole/ that shapes my hopes with tiny possibilities” – I just like that for the way it sounds and flows and changes meaning as it goes
Well, I’m ending my Saturday night with beautiful poetry from Allison Grayhurst…but, I must go to bed and tomorrow I will finish reading the poems I haven’t read yet from April. I’m glad to end my evening here.
Why is it that the colour red leads me to the colour white?
It feels classic to me from the first lines onward.
I lift the bullfrog from the waters.
Bread, parables and staying close to a legend –
these are things of joy…
If I heard that at night around a campfire beneath a shining silver moon, I would say, softly, amen, amen. But of course this is a poem of grief, of the grave by the willow tree, a sailing ship with no port, and it gains part of its power from the contrast between the opening lines and the following lines. There are so many metaphors and such limbic power in the early lines of this poem that you could almost write a book about the poem and how metaphors relate to its emotional content and the human heart..
My father, I dream of your flame. I miss the woods
and your kind goodbyes. Tomorrow is a keyhole
that shapes my hopes with tiny possibilities.
These lines are so meaningful, telling us so much about your father in his kindness expressed through goodbyes, and how time has shrunk to a tomorrow of key holes that is left with only tiny possibilities.
The ifs at the end are exquisite in their expression, reminding us that inside grief there are always ifs, but they are not the ifs of possibility and hope, but impossibilities that fill us up with remembering.
This is a great poem.
I appreciate being able to listen to the poem being read. It adds another dimension to the experience of the poem.
Especially like:
“so I would have no choice
but to lean on hefty roots, sleep at the bottom, wide as earth.
Will you keep me, stop me from compromising a cold solution,
from peddling the fruits of my incandescent plateau with weak convictions?
Or will you turn me wooden just to protect what is soft, and not,
interchangeable? “
You have real conviction in your words. Nice work.
David. L
Beautiful… and 23 years ago!
“My strength never lay in endurance, but in change.”
Like it.
beautiful!! 🙂
OH MY GOD – I love it!
“It is an emblem of uncharted kindness
that cannot fade even when I falter.
It is a name on a wall
that changes but is always mine.”
nicely put!
Beautiful Alison.
wooww!! very interesting… i like it.. 🙂
Inspiring poetry Allison.
David. L
Awesome…charged, clear, sharp to the point!
YES, THIS IS THE HEROIC JOURNEY STARING FEAR IN THE FACE!
“I heard my name spoken, calling me to dart alert
from a shrinking sleep, to walk the hallway, carve
myself an inclusive center, to answer boldly,
unconditionally step
into the dictates of a personal command.”
Allison, I just read the poems I hadn’t read since my last comment. I always do that, then choose one or two on which to write a comment.
I actually found this to be a difficult poem. It starts with two questions;
“Was I bound by the artificial?
Driftwood down an interceding flow?”
Are you real? Or just driftwood flowing from a direction you cannot control? Then the poem takes a leap:
“Horse stance, back muscles rolling, lines of twine, and fishing.”
almost as if you see yourself in a great river like the Columbia out in the current tossing lines over and over again into roiling waters. This is an answer to the questions about how you really are. Then the poem leaps again with two declarative statements:
“I will not fish or tighten my spinal cord for the appearance of strength.
I will not bask relaxed in hot spring nobility or lick the nose
of prey I someday plan to devour.”
At this point you seem to be defining yourself by denial, contradicting the vision of “Horse stance, back muscles rolling…”
You will not give the appearance of strength through strenuous action or bask in the hot spring of nobility or lick the nose of prey you may someday devour in order to be who you are.
Then the poem leaps again, telling us of a 2:30 a.m. dream that fits into this contemplation of self and who you are:
“Loudly, my name was spoken. It was God, I am
sure of that. And it was angry, pressing, urging me
to wake and take nothing lightly or so hard.”
This “angry, pressing” voice lifted you “from the gardens of my despair.”
And when you understood the voice, you had inside yourself “a permit to build, to trap the past inside the future…” to “absolved by the fact/that nothing can escape the impact of eternity.” This last quotation, as an aside, is a powerful line.
The reason for including igloo before mansions escapes me, but the next part of the poem essentially says that mansions you once erected inside yourself, “cerebral justifications of indignant loneliness,” are natural and cannot be dismantled.
Then comes the affirmation in answer to the questions at the beginning of the poem:
“I heard my name spoken, calling me to dart alert
from a shrinking sleep, to walk the hallway, carve
myself an inclusive center, to answer boldly,
unconditionally step
into the dictates of a personal command.”
The voice in the dream gave you permission to be active in life, carve a center that is inclusive of life, the world, others, inside yourself, “to answer boldly,” to follow the personal commands from your inner voice, your self.
This is clearly mystic poetry as opposed to the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, et al. It is closer to what William Blake wrote than it is to much of the contemporary canon and thus has a tone that is commanding while, at the same time, giving an answer to the self about its reasons for existence. This takes a careful reading to “fish” out its multiple meanings. The word fish, for instance, in the early lines is not only there for image, but for the idea that you are not going to fish for who you are or for the meaning of life, leading to the vision that you describe in the poem. But a little effort gives substantial rewards.
I’m enjoying your new wordpress theme. It is easier to navigate. The flow from one poem to the next is easier, smoother.
…and when it is found there is also a sense that it has always been there, waiting.
I am on part 3 and will read more of this — your awakening. It is very intense. The humility is very apparent, the willingness to receive, the willingness to be loved and known, loved and fully known…
I loved how you conveyed your emotions in this piece coined perfectly with such beautiful imagery. Lovely!
Dig it.
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Beautiful. From Ms. Allison Grayhurst
For some weird too-literal reason, I’m reminded of Spike Milligan:
Things that go bump in the night,
shouldn’t give one a fright,
it’s the hole in the ear
that lets in the fear.
That,
and the absence of light.
Just to say, in case anyone has the flicker of doubt, I didn’t mean to suggest Allison was in any way borrowing from Spike; it’s just that the words “hole” and “fear” in the same line, took me back to Milligan’s poem, which uses them entirely differently. This is what happens when I drink in the morning.
Hello there,
You write wonderful poetry up here. Well done! 🙂 Keep penning and keep inspiring! I am sure one day the door will open for you and that lots of readers will find your poetry both entertaining and interesting! 🙂
I have a joyful ride in your blog, and now I’d like to invite you to visit mine. Thank you and have a wonderful day, my friend! 🙂
Subhan Zein
Wonderful post today. Very nice job.
I look forward to your future writings!
Enjoy Writing? Writers Wanted
A classic. BROUGHT TEARS TO MY EYES. Thank you.
This is so very lovely Allison, the comparison to birds, the pear, the garden, and the ending – like a sweep through nature. 🙂
“Strange rhythms are risked, foreheads pressed,
giving way
to beautiful unadulterated disclosure.”
a perfect and beautiful image of unity
This is incredibly beautiful, Allison. It does not need a long scan to understand it, so I will refrain from doing that and will come back tomorrow if I can and try to do a proper comment, but I could not leave this evening without letting you know how wonderful this poem is.
The start of the poem, with its formal phrasing, leaves me breathless:
At the end of the day, the pears will be ripe
and the ones I loved and died will float before me
in waves of growing beauty.
The formal solemnity of this gives it an unearthly beauty that I’m sure you meant, brewing contemplation and making us remember back on all those we have loved who have died.
Then you talk about yourself,
At the end, when all of this leaves, then I will breathe
an owl breath, still in my tranquil sky.
“I will breathe an owl breath…” wow! What an idea.
Then the poem gets more complex, stating your intent to find someone who left you in chaos, a garden hit by storm. The whorl of these two lines leads to:
I will give life again to the little birds, insects that have no
use or concept of glory. I will return with you
to the Buddha waters, happy to know so much love.
and an expression of love that wraps all of us up in Buddha waters…and the beauty of your thoughts. Then you say that you…
will walk out my door and there will be summer,
and you and your love will
…will walk into the warmth:
ultimately loved, unequivocally whole.
Beautiful poetry! Even though it still has that complex whorl in it that gives us pause and thought.
Brilliant! Love it!
“I see the darkness fully. I face the sword
to slice clean the cancer blotting my soul.
I dive in the sewer, side by side with bacteria,
holding my face straight up. I let my fingertips be
severed so I can free the rest of my body.
I am frightened, looking beyond
the murky fear into a faith, small but glowing.”
Your endings are invariably good. How do you think you’ve changed as a poet from ’04 to ’12?
A wonderful ending, Alison, really paints the picture. 🙂
“I have been the caterpillar/Not for one more day.” These two lines say it all. Metamorphosis. The way everlasting…though, I grapple with these things (as far as not knowing, not deeply experiencing whether or not I “believe” in the sewer anymore…but, I understand it. Yes.
I, too, have been thinking about history, change and transformation lately. These poems a good to read at this time.
In this poem, I see failure alongside new beginnings, but perhaps it is only perceived failure, a kind of failure that constantly waits for the “answer”…
I’d like to know…did you really hear a voice? This poem is like a testimony. “Into the dictates of a personal command…” This line raises the hairs on my neck. I once saw freedom in such “personal commands” and “dictates”…but now, just not so sure. This poem seems clearly about an awakening, a calling into a new kind of way of being, away from cerebral justifications that lead to loneliness and despair.
A no-escape nightmare quality. Good.
”Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.”
Your use of ‘hangnail’ brought this D.T. poem to mind. I’ve always liked it.
Damn… What a wonderful capture. I enjoyed reading this very much. Thanks for sharing it.
This is a wonderful poem, Allison. The start of it is mysterious:
You who saw the
morning fall on leaves
all rotted and brown but
kissed this darkest turn
and threw your coins to the sun.
Part of its mystery comes from the fact that it is incomplete sentence. The stanza leaves us hanging in the air–who is you? There is some sense to it. The you is a person when morning fell on leaves all rotted and brown, kissed the darkest turn and then turned around and threw coins (your coins) meaning special coins, wealth, into the sun.
As we read on we find out a lot more about “you”:
You who loved and always learned
that love is nothing earned.
You who opened your heart to a child
and let her wed and weave her own.
There is a wonderful truth about love in these lines, the idea that love is nothing earned, but is a gift that you then have to let go so that the child to which a human’s heart is opened, can then go on to weave her life.
Then the darkness:
You who felt the wanting grave
when you felt the skeleton hand of a friend
unchained.
The wanting grave, the skeleton hand of a friend unchained (from life?), the sorrow that happens even in the midst of love and goodness. The unchaining of life from death, the last remains of a friend even if they are still a friend with a skeleton hand…
Somberness leads to my favorite lines, as you might suspect of me:
You who beheld your wife like a sunrise
and gave her everyday a new light to live for.
I have failed to achieve this ideal, but I have beheld Ethel like a sunrise, and I have tried to give her light, even though I am afraid that my attempts have not always met the mark. But what wonderful thoughts–that giving her everyday a new light to live for might be possible even in the face of the darker moments in life, the losses we face in life.
A person who could achieve that central blessing deserves the next lines:
You who are so beautiful and always beginning,
like a band of circling swallows, like a whale
first seen in the wild, like the scent of home.
They are like the glory of the earth, beautiful, and always beginning, and a you that the poet describes is the sum of a thousand good men on a walk, like a chapel bell awakening, a man
…sweet and deep
as the true belief in miracles.
This is not the most powerful poem of those I just finished reading, but it is the most wonderful, Allison, and therefore I felt like picking it out for comment. There is goodness and an observation of goodness in this poem, and though I deal with trials and tribulations of people everyday at the college as they try to deal with complex lives, I still appreciate goodness when I run across it and believe I should notice it when I encounter its presence.
Thank you for this poem. It made my day.
Very powwwweruful poem. Thanks for sharing it.
I just dropped by to let you know that I’ve nominated your blog for the Inspiring Blog Award http://decumminspoetry.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/inspiring-blog-award/
I know you don’t do the awards thing on your blog, but yours is definitely one of the most inspiring blogs I’ve read. 🙂
“Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is spread out against the sky
like a patient etherised upon a table…”
(I think I’ve quoted this before in some other comment, about Eliot’s ‘Objective Correlative’ probably) but what he is saying through his ‘metaphor’ is not this is how I see the sunset but how the sunset makes me feel – it’s a bit like trying to explain the impact of Munch’s ‘Scream’ – in fact it’s so hard to explain an artist’s use of imagery (“the invisible worm/that flies in the night”) it’s sort of stupid even to try! Liked your poem though…
wonderful, again/ I intend to enter an american bookstore sometime soon and
plop down my filthy lucre for clean & sure words in a book of poetry
good job, allison
Allison, once again, I find your responses to darkness quite atypical. How is “exposure” and vulnerability and such (almost surgical) light the answer to our nightmares? to the darkness in us? It is quite the opposite from what you want — to hide. Freedom comes from being known, I do know that, from allowing your darkness to be seen and loved even, yes even loved.
And…awesome publication!
wonderful this one, Ally
so beautiful!! 🙂
I agree, makes one wishe he could write so well to
You have great style, I aways enjoy reading your words
Just the right level of allusion for me. Atmosphere of claimed contentment, seeing things positively, punctured by “One more day without”. Bathe in blessings is beautiful, and then- afterall no matter. Those last two lines bring the sense of loss crashing in on me, Saying what the person was without would puncture it. More anguish would lessen the effect for me. Without “no matter” I would forget the “without”: just quiet content, no harmonic of Anguish. I love the way you have put this together, I take a lot from it.
floats on a sea of light sadness and resignation…truly tells a tale
Again, you set and asure a sure tone/ a listener & reader feels a soul’s downshift/
Yr trustworthy words reach a hand back..to lead us solomnly on to yr declarations
Oddly, my favorite lines were introductory to yr messages, but I like ’em
“In the evening, close to dark,
hair-clipping all dishevelled expectations,
pin-pointing a place to lay down, to rest and witness the uneventful view”
Thanx again
Another masterpiece – I adore it!
“In the early afternoon,
assembling the fragments of my faith
like the bones of a bird and then giving it the key
to fly.”
Thank you!
“God has provide me a horse to sit upon –
here with my companion there is a loyalty between us
that no despair can swallow. There is a connection that grows, that I know
angels and other heavenly creatures
will rush to defend.”
Dig.
Beautiful.
makes a musicfan guess some on his name & face
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More beauty from Ms. Allison Grayhurst.
Very nice
Beautiful. The journey down is indeed sacred!
beautiful amazing piece.. touched my heart!! 🙂
Beauty is curved like the wave of a rapid river
Great line!
This poem REALLY helped me TODAY.
I memorized the passion and dedication lines.
Thank you!
…timeless moments oblivious to thought…Like being at the place where
water and earth are like fingers massaging mud
into a vision – a weight
unattainable to the cerebral mind
These are beautiful descriptions. I think they are describing faith or belief, and the mystery of forming and being and creating.
lovely…so lovely….
One of my favorite.
Brilliant. Beautiful. Fortifying.
A light in the storm.
Medicinal!
excellent, to hear you say it imbues it with gravitas…love lines 12,13,14….
harsh common path…i avoid such a place, but cross it often…
Great poem Allison. I hope its not about you!
David. L
really good poem and reading
And out on the streets, away
from embraces, the sun
disturbs in its strength and independence.”
Very nice thank you for share this poem for us.
Nice! 🙂 ❤
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Allison Grayhurst is a magician with the written word, I suggest you buy or read her books. They will leave you uplifted.
Nice work. Well done.
Wow! What a host of Masterpieces – so hard won and Labours of Love —- FOR YEARS! We are thrilled and give you great congratulations as your readers!
Reblogged this on The ObamaCrat.Com™ and commented:
Ms. Allison Grayhurst.
I LLOVE this!!!!!!!!
Allison, I ordered two of the books, and Ethel and I will eagerly be awaiting their arrival in the mail. I did not realize you were going to publish all nine at once. I’m in awe. We’ll get more when we have the funds to do so. Congratulations, although the editing must have been herculean. I actually enjoy editing, by nine books in one go? Wow!
It’s also about time I bought some books to show my support for the poets I enjoy here on WordPress — Thomas and Ethel included. Perhaps I’ll buy them together and they’ll come in the mail all at once to my reading pleasure ; ) Congratulations, Allison. Excellent.
What makes your poetry so special, Allison, is the way you marry language to idea so that both the language and idea become surprising or unique. The start of this poem
Cradle the handle under the sleeve
and watch as the sun changes shadows.
reminds me of that magic you have. The first line is mysterious when you first read it. What handle? Under a sleeve, and then the second line, watching the sun as it changes shadows. Then the word, “Blue,” to start the second line, blue as related to shadows, but also blue related to
…the private everafter with
the future under my fingernails and an orange seed
in my throat…
This is not just the everafter that we all must face in our everyday lives and at the end of life, but the private everafter, the handle under the sleeve, the shadow on the sun, where the future is under your fingernails and an orange seed–which is a symbol of fertility in some cultures–in your throat. Given your recent publishing feat this symbol or orange seed and throat, indicative of speech out of the throat, seems appropriate.
Then the questions:
Will it happen or will it always be ‘the wait’?
Waiting in the moment just before bloom
but never arriving into full colour? Or is it only
a long pause, gathering breath for the final
swing that will bury all dullness that has gone before?
Each question queries the self, as I read this, or your personal life. Ethel once wrote a poem with a line that went something like,
Is it to be a woman?
To always look on windows instead of doors?
These questions seem to strike the same poignancy, the wondering about life and what it means in its fulfillment. These strike to the heart of who all of us are in confronting ourselves as human beings.
Then the answer to the questions and the poem’s powerful denouement:
I see a tree I have walked by many times before. This time
I noticed it and smiled.
Maybe this is not darkness at all,
but a line to follow and focus on
like a child watching rain drops – one at a time.
Perhaps if we learn temperance, patience, and only look at a tree we’ve walked past before and notice it and smile, then we will find that we are not in darkness, in dullness, in the everafterlife’s end. Perhaps, the tree and life is a line to follow and focus on “Like a child watching rain drops–one at a time.”
This is absolutely wonderfulmagnificent.
from “Fourth Meditation” by Theodore Roethke
…”What is it to be a woman?
To be contained, to be a vessel?
To prefer a window to a door?…”
I intend to buy book 9 when payday arrives
And I ordered two as well I figured it was an investment of my offline life as well, They should arrive by the time I get home from work
True.
Brilliant. Thank you for reality check after reality check to help process truth for awareness and healing so that we may wake up and at least not do it to ourSELVES.
Dig it.
I’m with Misfits a brilliant write
Hi Allison. Your poems are wonderful and I’ve nominated you for the reader’s appreciation award http://riverscribbles.wordpress.com/?p=126&preview=true
Your words speak so profoundly. Words beyond words. I love your writing!
It stays and the surface is its meaning…what does this say about the depth of things that need to be forgiven? this image of the rock has both solidity and transparency in it and I think this is wonderful, Allison. It is both hard and vulnerable, hidden and all apparent.
By the way — I bought four of your books tonight!
woow!! so much power in your words.. 🙂
amazing write.. 🙂 i always enjoy your poetry
yes it does some
The last verse is exquisite.
I want to be there too 🙂
I agree with Anne this is another high quality poem to grace me today and as I was saying on another blog I have been all over the blog sphere.
phenomenal
Over the last year you have challenged, stimulated and delighted me daily. I love your shimmering, mercurial metaphor, and your spirit wisdom. Thank you. I wish you deep wells of creativity, and delight in your work.
wooww!! great write… i always love your poetry.. 🙂
The whole thing is briliant and graphic and dances – and especially like:
” I could ride a train, take it across the border.
I could be like the young woman who fell – was she
dancing on the bridge’s rail and forgot the distance? or simply
bloated on drugs and insanity’s youthful wake?
How strange that her asymmetrical face
and lithe beauty remain, so you think of her
as one of the fortunate – because of the fall,
because she fell while dancing, and you have forgotten how
to surrender.”
Wish you every success with these book Allison. Always appreciate you taking the time to visit my blog. Beautiful covers too.
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New book by Ms. Allison Grayhurst.
the soul’s great yolk is a beautiful image…desire/longing grows until all gestures reveal it. I can relate to that statement, too.
OH MY GOD!
I LOVE THIS!
Powerful here, there and everywhere!
The circuitry of Experience and hallowed insight of the human heart amidst the unflinching Eye!
Your writing is remarkable.
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Ms. Allison Grayhurst’s Brand New Book.
OMG!
What a Title! What an Author! What a Gift!
WOW…
Awesome work! You Go Girl !
– Phyllis
Allison’s Poetry, Life, Love and Sculpture’s grace our lives with their passionate, heart-felt literary and artisitc offering!
I love the choice of one of her sculptures she chose for this cover!
I saw your books in person, held them in my hands, opened them and read at random. They are so, so lovely. I loved the covers with the photos of your sculpture – all people, mostly faces. They were presented as they are – with no intention to manipulate, just straight-up, fresh-faced for all to see. like children are, so very dear and unaffected, your sculptures are beautiful. Just like the writings, full of consideration, questions, and trust (nakedness, whatever one wants to call it…there is great strength in vulnerability).
Thank you.
Just keep doing what you do.
Jordan.
Oh – I forgot to say one thing…I just took another look at the sculptures and there is “someone home” inside of each one, there is someone alive in there, inside of all of them.
Beautiful. Don’t change, stay pure.
Jordan.
There are some lovely lines in here; the way you capture ‘that one hour’ and the simplicity and complexities of love. I think the image at the end is wonderful.
I check regularly for the possibility of recent work/ miss you & yr imaginable “nowness”
but yr powerful symbols plow on
so many questions
unanswered
Sound like an interesting read Allison
Remarkable! Congratulations here, Allison.
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Good to see Ms. Allison Grayhurst out & about in the bloggersphere….she is much missed when she is gone.
She just keeps getting better and better – language like a banquet, emotion like a symphony!
More from me later on this one…
Wow!
Wonderful interview.
You really come across as sharp and sure and full of substance.
🙂 XO
Sent from my HTC
Allison, what a wonderful interview! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it especially your answer to the question, “What is the best thing about being a poet…and what is the worst?” Fabulous.
I can also really connect with the quote, “Reading it fills me the strongest with my own voice — which I think all great art and true inspiration, should do.” I have yet to find my list of poets who do this for me…I can think of one.
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I am happy and thrilled at Grayhurst’s success and even more amazed with the depth and scope of her talent. Check out her work.
Congratulations Allison – this is is one of your most powerful yet translucent pieces.
This poem is incredible – like a rich gentle fierce painting – wow:
“Carelessly moving from place to place
but changeless as a brick under a porch
and strong as that brick”
“Take this mortal thinning and give nothing to regrets:
We sing for each other and you are free. I feel it
in the sparrows lined along the roofline and in
your tired features morphing into winter branches – richer brown,
moist – like just before a spring bloom.”
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Very nice sad and a dark ending I think
Ripe with the depth of life – language substance beyond measure Allison soars in her acing of the surf.
O, Allison, I do not usually follow a poet after reading just one poem, but you have the gift and I must see your next masterpiece or two or three… 🙂 Eric
Thank you Allison.
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If you love poetry, you must visit Ms. Allison Grayhurst….she is a phenomenal talent. Thank you for sharing your poetry with us Ms. Allison. I wish you, your family & friends a wonderfully joyous and healthy, safe, fun Happy New Year….Namaste
Intricate winding of many layers! Love the last line especially!
Brilliant! Soaring! Delicious!
Complex sophistication. Love it!
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Congratulations Ms. Grayhurst, on being publishes, once again.
very nice, there is always something personally spiritual about your poetry. It is somewhat calming
Very beautiful!
that’s a very ‘touching’ and exact image of tenderness and trust in the last 2 lines
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Congratulations,,,,and keep going, you’ll soon be way too famous for me!!!! 😉
The poetry continues to grow and writhe into shine after shine in it’s depth, passionate cry and beauty.
“Let it come like the wave with
the salty foam. Let it reflect
my insides like a face held towards
new cutlery. Let it take my rhythm for
its own, express it in the wings of angry crows
and the trees in communion with the wind.”
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Allison, this is a powerful poem about change with many very salient and tangible images that tug and tug at what the change means, what if feels like, how it assaults our senses and every part of our lives. I enjoyed it very much.
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That’s a great review – congratulations, Allison!
lovely, and of course I want to look over yr shoulder for the title
Breath-taking – luxurious!
‘hardly solid, like butter left out of the fridge’ – what an exact image for such an inexact state! – and there’s a rhythm and sound to ‘hanging on hinges’ that makes you nod and smile
this is splendid! i loved every line! 😀
Stunningly beautiful! True Eros – on the perfect Day!
“I hold you. You are my language
dying to be born.
You are the one I will never recover from,
the only companion my heart has known.
I cannot envy the stars, or
the soft-spoken trees.
For there is landscape
enough, here beside you,
where all of heaven’s disguises
glow bright,
transparent.”
Beauty, Beauty, Beauty! Of a rare Heart, Eye and Depth of Love and Eros!
Profound and deep and majestic as usual.
“Falling clouds, falling shadows
into the heart-nests
into the white morning flame.”
This is a great piece. I love the flow and the arc of it.
A classic. One of my favorite. Peaceful, brilliant in its beauty.
So intimately and grandly connected to this small animal life. A true gift to be able to sense at this level.
I like to be surprised by what I read – like a joke to be funny has to be really clever – and I like to be swept along to somewhere I want to be.
Dreamy
This is a great piece. I felt as though I was floating with the scenes.
These poems of yours from the 1990s are really beautiful, Allison.
I really enjoyed this. It was especially nice to close my eyes and listen, your voice I assume.
OH MY GOD – I love this! Beautiful, breath-taking – true, true love – soul love, soul mates.
The beauty and the hardship of life paid tribute to in sharply emotive and compelling language art 🙂
Beautiful, breath-taking, powerful tribute to one gone – and how life is not in this dimension or another, but both, through the poetic painting of our true consciousness.
This poem really grabs me this evening. It has such agony in it and to have held it in your hands for its last breaths…the image of a “feeble resurrection” is one that has never occurred to me and I find it very striking. How can a resurrection be feeble except that somehow we bring our weakness into heaven…
Congratulations – a breathtaking poem alluding to a breathtaking experience!
The rhythm of this poem seems to capture the moment and then release it. Beautifully written. 🙂
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I love the word stylings of Ms. Allison Grayhurst….visit her blog and you will as well.
That’s fantastic! Well done! Your poems are always superb!
Loved the cadence in this one Allison – beautiful
After he had ‘re-painted’ Van Gogh’s bedroom picture, Lichtenstein said, “Yours is better….but mine is bigger”.
Very nice as always, you maintain quality as easy as gentle breathing – always a joy to read your work
“I will turn while in my days of darkness
and feast upon fireflies.”
I keep turning your opening words over and over in my mind, Allison. It sings like a mythical song. Closely identified with the theme of your piece.
Wish you the best with “Into My Mortal”. 🙂 Eric
BRILLIANT – and dead on! Glorious, poetically transportive!
“A new groove will capture my flight
and lift chairs from the floor.
I will be the one whose radio still sounds,
whose sandwich has been eaten
and whose telephone calls have meaning.
It is just a matter of believing in mercy
and not much more.
It is appreciating the smell of my baby’s neck
and the times when reading with my child.”
“The days will turn over
and the unexpected will enter
to bless then break
my fall.”
PS – Big smile on my face after reading it – that stays.
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Beautiful tribute from a great poet to her daughter. Thank you Allison.
I absolutely appreciate the parental bond the first line of this so beautifully describes. Very nice – look forward to reading more of you poems.
… your, of course. 🙂
It’s a beautiful poem, alluding to the marvels of a life’s journey.
Great poem, Allison! 🙂
Reblogged this on Eric M. Vogt: Life-Writings and commented:
What a great poem by Allison Grayhurst! If you haven’t read her, you should. 🙂 Eric
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Check out Ms. Allison Grayhurst latest published poem…In The Gloom Cupboard. Congratulations Ms. Allison. ❀ Ciao Bella ❀
Love it! Crisp, feeling, spacious, promising in its beauty.
“I am waiting for motivation, for a clarity of purpose
that I once owned like a beautiful stone
I sunk under the St. Lawrence rapids. When I was a child,
I watched those rapids without fear,
stood close to the edge and never wondered about the slippery underfoot,
never worried about the shadflies arriving like a plague of river insects
or about my loneliness that turned into a ghost companion
comforting me in those grey Quebec afternoons.”
“But here, in this riverless realm,
I cannot place my hands down. I cannot stretch wide enough
to feel whole.”
Brilliant! Peppered with keeper lines like bullets of insight in a gray world!
“Now you know the honeydew nectar
spread across the light – like a
limit – sweet but blurring.”
“agitated
like a mind unable to hold one clear sentence”
“You do not exist the way you once thought.”
“never finding the way out.
It has been this way.”
“Almost
your dream is gone.”
I LOVE IT! The power of myth, magic and mystery – like a fairy tale!
“By the last leaf changing
and the voice of rivers calling,
by the presence of an
unwilling hero
a great light is born.”
“The aspirations never hooked up,
but neither
did they die.”
Reads like a dream, like a song, like a touch – a tenderness filling my heart like a strong feather.
“I live inside the gentleness of your mind.”
“In dreams I find you
beside me for always,”
AND OH MY GOD…
“your eyes rich as the colours of earth
and your rhythm, profoundly ancient
like the dance of a seabird upon water.”
Myself feeling torn, weighed down, distracted, pulled apart by various pressures and desires of my own heart–I found this very comforting…thank you for a good read.
Really wonderful, Allison. 🙂
I LOVE this! Passionate, strong, solid, vital, instructive. BEAUTY. Wow.
“Over the highest evergreen I race
with my emblem. I lost
nearly everything I cared for to gain
a new soul. I lost a passion and gained
a rage against death and the wilderness outside.
I drink from the underground and am blessed.”
The kind of adamant resistance you show to not being caught by the dirge – I love you for it!
Brilliant, beautiful. Full of the power and majesty of the wholeness of life.
“Because of so many things
lost and remade, I have been left without a plan
but to lean without shame or resistance on
the bosom of God. That is the role, the flesh
and backbone combined.”
“Because I know it is all for you and all is given
by you – we sing, we paint our stories – this story
rich with surprises and laden with disappointments.
I sing and paint and wish for other things,
though I am satisfied with love and with the way
you see fit to carry me across.”
Just wonderful, Allison. I hope you are still in that place.
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Like a fine expensive bottle of Merlot, Allison just gets better with time. Thank you for this
This says so many things to me, and I feel like I can identify with so much of it. I read a few times and I’m saving it to read some more. There’s real beauty here.
wow, this piece is beautiful, and written expertly.
A CLASSIC – a true love poem not only to a personal breath-taking love, but to the love of humanity and to the articulation of our shared human landscape for glory.
Brilliant! Full of Meaning, feeling, reelingly stunning language capturing the poinancy and complexity of exquisite, if not always comfortable, human emotion!
” lovers assassinate love
for the sensation of pride.”
“It is my jealousy
that has woken, generous
with hate.”
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I Love this….thank you Allison. You brighten up a blog dedicated to politics and current news events, which are not always happy subjects, with your word magic. Thank you.
I really enjoyed this interview Alison, I always enjoy the concepts in your poetry even if it takes me 5 times to read. Sometimes it seems like your trying to release the elements of the spirit and sometimes its like you want to imprison it but life tears it away.
a beautiful poem of release and openness, i receive it
Allison, I really enjoyed seeing your face and listening to your soft voice while you read your poems and your answers to the questions. All — very engaging.
Oh my god, how beautiful.
“And from the beginning the miracle
sat on our shoulder like a butterfly”
“I give no more from the side of my mouth,
for the seductive shadow and the running crowd.
Plain as the path to heaven, I kiss the dread
and let it drift down sea. I open a room
where the light catches my breath.
I am breathing a morning glory.”
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Soon, you’ll be on Oprah….wait….there is no more Oprah. ( ° ͜ʖ ͡°)
♥ ❀ ✿ Namaste ❀ ✿ ♥
So nice to see this! Thanks for posting it up, Allison. I really enjoyed watching and listening to your thoughts here. 🙂
I really enjoyed how this builds and builds, and the final lines are like an epiphany : ‘I open a room …’
Wonderful poem, and so appropriate for springtime too. 🙂
I hope the sun shines for you today, Allison.
This is a nice piece. I love the second stanza and the last one. The last one hangs with you for quite a while after reading.
i thought it was very nice…… 🙂
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Without the magical words of artist such as Ms. Allison Grayhurst, this blog would be all doom & gloom. Thank you for slivers of hope Ms. Allison.
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Beautiful words from Ms. Allison Grayhurst. Thank you Ms. Allison.
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once again, I find myself semi-suddenly somewhere else, inside.
It’s always a pleasure & welcome strain
to take you in/ Thanx again
G.
Nothing is perfect in life with absolutism … However … “True love is blind and hard to find” … It is like the amazing course of a river that never ends … But … Goes on and On … And …… *That Is a Perfect Flow* … Thanks Allison for sharing …
A amazing story of love. I like the short chapters. Each with meaning and purpose.
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Wow….you write just a beautifully under Jocelyn Kain as you do as Allison Grayhurst.
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You are becoming so famous and widely read…when you are a big time wealthy author, remember us little folks!!
(ツ)
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From My favorite poet…..The Wonder From Down Under….Ms. Allison Grayhurst!!
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OH MY GOD… this is sheer poetry – about one of the most sacred of human experiences FINALLY being done justice to in one of those rare instances when it is DONE JUSTICE TO. Thank you for your depth, your breadth, your breath, your words and your fleshly soul.
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I like that Ms. Allison has started to post more frequently….Thank you Ms. Allison!!
Stunning! Allison Grayhurst shapes words like she shapes clay – with passion, compassion, wisdom and worth – making life sacred – time, human, shape and form.
This a beautiful journey. I love this one!
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Your work is so raw & emotional Allison.
I love it!
“I would give my capsized house,
my bed, my favourite corner
just to feel the rise of their quickening tides
clap over my bones & spirit. To know the fury
of feathers skilfully slicing
the skin of clouds. I would say this
is worth my enemy’s claw, worth a mouth
full of laughter. I could speak again
of love without weight, of a saffron flower
exposing all to the sun.” !!!
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Another honor from Ms. Allison…the world is starting to appreciate her wonderful talents!
LOVE THIS! BRILLIANT! WOW!
ESPECIALLY –
“It’s the end
of my kind,
the last of my line
unfolding. And then
all of it will be different –
both the edge and the enlightenment
both the things precise
and the things undefined.”
Amazing, any words I would say I are not worthy of the beauty of this poem.
Is this heaven? a wish for heaven on earth? It has such idealism in it. It expresses things that I often wait for.
Intense, gripping, aliveness – the raw, fierce, stunning grasp of a Great!
“Deep-set eyes like the eyes
of some brooding god,
hammering
the earth to pieces.
Breath of an invalid, gambler
& saint, weighed down by
sentiment.”
I love this – it reads like a song, like a warm and soft poetic blanket, like a hum, like a beauty ever so intimate and profound and real and true.
“He hurts with uncommon intensity –
liberation balanced between his two lips.
Like the slow hum of rain, I hear him
treading the snowed-in cities, hear his kiss
like a prayer of protection, flowering.
Freedom stitched to his smile,
he crosses the sea he’s never seen before,
as he carries his guitar
like a lover’s warm hand.”
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Your poetry bleeds and sings at the same time. Grieving paints in both colors and in black and white. Wonderful portrait! 🙂
This is very real, and has some breathtaking images.
The description of memory is particularly strong and affecting to me.
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Check out Kyp Harness…..
Loved the music – kind of hoped for a slightly mournful Dylanesque harmonica in the background (er but not the sharp harmonic type), But I guess you will both know what I mean
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What could it be? Loneliness, silence, fear, distance from God. Whatever it is, I have known it, too.
Brilliant. Another masterpiece of pungent, vivid language uniting passion and word to give expression to depth of feeling of life.
Imagination is all we need to reach the climax … Thanks Allison … I can’t fully describe … How thrilling this poem is feeding my special thirst and hunger … 🙂 …
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A feast for the senses.
Wonderful word choice. I could actually taste it all go down! Just ordered this book. Should be getting it soon. 🙂
Sweet you,
I’ve an award for you, for the person who you are and the things you share with the world
http://summer4soul.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/peace-is-a-free-choice-so-is-this-award/
Thank you for that..
Namasté, Summer
So beautiful! An explosion of the intensity within compellingly written, as usual!
A toast to the power of the interior sensual world that so needs it’s erotic world spoken of in these terms, as opposed to the shallow and hence toxically hiding cover up expressions of pornos or pornography – versus the true eros of erotica being shown, exposed and honoured in this way.
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Thanks Allison … It is beautiful …
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Beautiful! LOVE it. Warm powerful substantial connection and observance of what is most meaningful in relationship.
“In the afternoon when we
finally talk, the brightness of the day
absorbs into your face and what is left
is the movement of our connection
between coffee mugs and our children’s play.
At dinner, you tell me stories.
I see the years behind us, and for a moment the
curtains of heaven draw back before my eyes.’
5 out of 5 stars!
THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN is a Must-Read! June 14, 2013
We each read poetry in our own way. We read words from a different angle, a unique vantage point, and like the four different disciples looking from different sets of lenses we discern what stands out to us as of most importance and pen our gospel in our own very personal and spiritual way. I prelude this review with a disclaimer: if you read Allison’s book and see its Light differently, embrace it as affecting you in your unique way. In this review I will embrace what has stood out to my eye.
When I started to read Allison Grayhurst’s collection of poetry entitled THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN, I was expecting it to contain verses of the highest quality. I was expecting it to be a journey through spirituality. I was expecting this book to speak of God. I was not disappointed.
Yes, it is a journey: a journey of the heart through youth, anguish, struggle, spiritual awakening, grief, death, love, loss, guilt, struggle, despair, hope, surrender, God, sensuality, imperfection, motherhood, aging, the vanquishing of the devil, indeed, many devils, the inevitable fall from perfection and the casting off of old wineskins for a new one.
Perhaps speaking of this book as a chronicle of spiritual maturing would be more accurate, the realization that there is spirituality within imperfection and that handmade temples cannot hope to compete with the spiritual temples within each of us. By the end of the collection there is a spiritual ascension, a victory over demons of the past now slayed. There is height in Love and Forgiveness in guilt. There is an embracing of the chaos of life and a positive hope for the future. And, I believe, the realization that God is higher than chaos and the Creator is more permanent than perfection.
This journey touched me. It is a journey that every person makes at sometime in their life. And this trail we trod does not end. There is beauty in the trail and its many aspects just as there is beauty from every vantage point of the admirer of a diamond.
THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN is a diamond. It is a beautiful collection of insights and I appreciate the many nuances of meaning to Allison Grayhurst’s poetry. Her thoughts and writings are a deep well. Drink from it, for the water is clear and crisp. This collection is a MUST-READ.
—-Eric M. Vogt, author of LETTERS TO LARA and PATHS AND POOLS TO PONDER
Reblogged this on Eric M. Vogt: Life-Writings and commented:
5 out of 5 stars
THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN is a Must-Read!
We each read poetry in our own way. We read words from a different angle, a unique vantage point, and like the four different disciples looking from different sets of lenses we discern what stands out to us as of most importance and pen our gospel in our own very personal and spiritual way. I prelude this review with a disclaimer: if you read Allison’s book and see its Light differently, embrace it as affecting you in your unique way. In this review I will embrace what has stood out to my eye.
When I started to read Allison Grayhurst’s collection of poetry entitled THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN, I was expecting it to contain verses of the highest quality. I was expecting it to be a journey through spirituality. I was expecting this book to speak of God. I was not disappointed.
Yes, it is a journey: a journey of the heart through youth, anguish, struggle, spiritual awakening, grief, death, love, loss, guilt, struggle, despair, hope, surrender, God, sensuality, imperfection, motherhood, aging, the vanquishing of the devil, indeed, many devils, the inevitable fall from perfection and the casting off of old wineskins for a new one.
Perhaps speaking of this book as a chronicle of spiritual maturing would be more accurate, the realization that there is spirituality within imperfection and that handmade temples cannot hope to compete with the spiritual temples within each of us. By the end of the collection there is a spiritual ascension, a victory over demons of the past now slayed. There is height in Love and Forgiveness in guilt. There is an embracing of the chaos of life and a positive hope for the future. And, I believe, the realization that God is higher than chaos and the Creator is more permanent than perfection.
This journey touched me. It is a journey that every person makes at sometime in their life. And this trail we trod does not end. There is beauty in the trail and its many aspects just as there is beauty from every vantage point of the admirer of a diamond.
THE MANY LIGHTS OF EDEN is a diamond. It is a beautiful collection of insights and I appreciate the many nuances of meaning to Allison Grayhurst’s poetry. Her thoughts and writings are a deep well. Drink from it, for the water is clear and crisp. This collection is a MUST-READ.
—-Eric M. Vogt, author of LETTERS TO LARA and PATHS AND POOLS TO PONDER
Beautiful Love, Allison.
Reblogged this on The ObamaCrat.Com™ and commented:
Ms. Grayhurst is not only a great Canadian poet, but a great poet for the world. She belongs to all of US.
Just lovely, Allison, and a dark undertone runs through this, so effectively!
Breath-taking. Such depth of the experience of Life.
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Mute and amazing history!
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Brilliant poetry – the unspoken SPOKEN!
“I was a girl, knowing nothing of drugs, but helpless
just the same, a slave to all my girlish visions
of the coming days of promised rapture.
I was a young woman, wearing drab and loose clothes,
never looking in a mirror, talking in tongues,
clenching confusion as a crutch and giving glory
to any glory-seeking teacher.”
This is a wonderful piece with strong allusions and strong emotional pull.
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I cannot live on politics alone. Ms. Allison is one of my favorite poetess.
An honest and moving journey. I especially like the image of circling a solitary stone.
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I lived through a devastating flood in 2008 in Iowa, took everything of value and left things that were valueless. You do survive & move forward.
Beautiful, profound!
“We were made to split the light
with voices singular and clean.”
Wow…
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Very nice, Allison.
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The New Book Of Poetry From Ms. Allison Grayhurst
Congrats…AJM
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Powerful expression….
I can’t tell you how much I like this, Allison – it positively sings!
This is a wonderful piece. It’s not easy to write defiantly and to do it so gracefully.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant languaging of things – so exquisite one cares hardly the meaning of the words – they fall so perfectly on the surface of the subconscious mind. Meaning is clearly innate and yet the poetry of the sheer aesthetics of the word formations is enough. No one in my experience, captures and creates artistry of emotions like Allison Grayhurst.
“It fell by the curb
in a lucid slumber
of inarticulate words
like a dew drop
on ice.”
What works of Art! These Books! Gardens of sacred meaning unto themselves!
Love the Titles and Allison’s Sculptures!
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Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” move over. Wow… I love this. Poetic majesty draped around an Heroine in a haunting and yet intimate Maxwell Parrish painting.
“Again the stars were plucked
from her mind and the world below
leapt up and sponged her with its flame.
That summer she made a wish upon her chains
and walked the deserted farmyards.
The ravens followed her through the weeds
and heat, keeping up conversation. At night
she sang to the beating of the rain…”
Your poetry always leaves me longing breathless.
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I just love that book, dear! I read it over and over and glean a little more each time. 🙂
Reblogged this on annjohnsonmurphreeauthor and commented:
Follow with interest, post gives reason to think! Check out Allison Grayhurst at http://allisongrayhurst.com/
That was a great poem, Allison! Always like hearing a new one. 🙂
brush strokes…i liken you the artist painting emotion…with shadow and light…
Reblogged this on annjohnsonmurphreeauthor and commented:
Outstanding, check out Allison’s work at:
http://www.amazon.com/Wallpaper-Stars-poetry-Allison-Grayhurst/dp/1490499172/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372723352&sr=1-4&keywords=allison+grayhurst
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I love the complexity of dark and light imagery in your poem. very beguiling !
Explosive! Searingly wise!
“Under the canopy of my heart
the singing happens but does not happen
the way I can explain.”
“There is nothing to gain
by maintaining the same ongoing pattern.
It must be re-directed, surprised
by its flow to be of any critical use.”
Reply
I love it so much – I could Eat It. Thank you. A Classic in my library.
“For every day of sleep
let me shoulder the rain.”
Brilliant use of language – weaving the mystical with the mundane seamlessly over and over again.
“It is the spot that will not heal,
found on the floor by the fallen curtain.”
Beautiful, strong, powerful, simple. A declaration – a strong voice.
“I find myself just wanting
to be in the shadow, away from direct
light and the attitude of sentimentality and guilt.
I find my hands are strong and my legs
are capable of walking long distances.
I find that that is enough
to complete me.”
Strong, powerful language. Intimate – close – conviction – power of caring and taking a stand.
“But you know
what I am waiting for. Words.
Words that are bone-real like conviction,
words to swallow me “
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Brilliant poem on the nature of addiction and the collective cultural sleep driven by the mass hynosis of the mass media – is what it brings to mind for me – not to mention my struggle with junk food addiction and my addiction to junk or negative thinking – innocent, driven, inadvertent – yet consequential. This poem is a helpful stepping stone for me to hold fast to wakefulness while also holding onto my compassion.
“I allow myself to be extravagant
where I should be frugal, losing
my energy like blood into the tiger’s expanding jaws.
I allow myself to be reigned by addiction –
each hand moving the demon-stone, surging with
desperation, red and pulsing for relief.”
Your endings are great – here the image and the pause after ‘falling’ and the consonant pitter-patter of the last line…….”a poem should not mean but be”
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Another Allison Grayhurst book, please check it out…support fellow writers. AJM
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Congratulations on your success!
The craft here is amazing! There’s an essay itself in the way you have paced this. Awesome, in the literal sense of the word.
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Magnificent! Love the sculptures on Allison Grayhurst’s books as much as the poetry!
How long she has been writing and producing is a true testament to her vocation as a poet.
I love this one. The speaker has such beautiful images and seems so full of love.
I’ve had a few days away Allison and this is such a wonderful piece to come back to – the clay line was spectacular and the rythmns just perfect. Best wishes Jim
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“Love will lead the way” … Because … *Joy and happiness is what one should live for* …
Pingback: To Walk Without Shape Or Sound | eleganzabello
Passionate support of a colleague – vehement affirmation of the cry of justice and truth in a crazy world.
Uncanny ability to blend physical imagery and metaphysical concept seamlessly.
“You make us
drum hard
on the back of a beautiful fire.
You hold us near your mind, embracing
rooftops, stairwells, the upper half of
the sky.
There is nothing
as terrible
as your writer’s hands
that strike with light
our narrow hates
& wounds.”
Wow! Now THAT’S a love poem – fervent, deep to the interior.
“the one
celebrated by each breath.”
“Be for me a living arrow, a communion
of conviction and gentleness.”
“spiritual
decision.”
Okay, that’s it. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better. Thank you, Allison Grayhurst for cleansing us, edifying us – being a beacon in a pornographic world of meaningless shallows that would take down the human potential depth and breadth in this most critical and sacred area of life. Thank you for your living will to do us better.
“Because you are
my vowel, my “welcome home’ and
my sea in summer, I will sit
naked for you, never needing someone else.”
“Because you give wounds without evil,
a perspective of beauty in the weeds
and worries . . . because your faith
is unbroken by bitterness and others stand
against you trying to defeat
your incomparable strength”
Images rich and dripping with the majesty of their meaning!
“We jog through bitter uneatable harvests.”
“Jackets buttoned to the neck, we move in these sewer shafts”
“On our bed, we are broken, letting our arms rest”
“We tell each other these things are worth
the horror of abominations
accepted as societal norms, atrocities justified as a soldier’s directed bullet.”
“messaging
our blood vessels with deep oxygen, curing, learning
to make saliva and swallow.”
“We tell ourselves sometimes we wish
we could be like those who live
never knowing an intimate tender beauty”
“At times we wish this love didn’t exist, then we could give in
to what lies beyond the cliff, defend our exit, salt the Earth
with a dramatic departure.”
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The sense of moment and movement in this is palpable.
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Hello I wanted to let you know that I have nominated you for blogging excellence awards. Congratulations! Should you choose to, the criteria and acceptance info can be found here: http://booknvolume.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/thrilled-beyond-comprehension/
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Brilliant illustration – visceral and vivid – of the wasteland Eliot spoke of.
Breath-taking, shockingly awake – beauty through it all.
“The silence
rages through the airvents, and the lights
burn to a dull nothing. The white-nothing
of teeth & moon & ice & cloud.
We seek the breath
of freedom’s wake as
magic crumbles all around us in pools of
untouchable beauty.”
Ode to a cat – beautiful, stunning, embracing. Saw it like I never saw it – through this expression of affection and communion with the soul of one’s
cat.
Filled with the pungent odour of language wrapping itself around experience,
both inner and outer, clanging out to be heard, felt, understood.
“The forest floor I am captain of
is embroidered with fine strands of rooted hope,
carpets made to curl toes on”
A poem of triumph! Sparkling, sizzling with irrepressible life. A tribute to the power of the life force beyond that which would take it down.
“It is hers – strong ribbed, flushed,
eager to release whatever prevents
its satisfaction from being blessed
and openly achieved.”
a pretty good impressionist picture of Marrakesh
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love the imagery of this poem…D
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Yet again, honouring what needs to be honoured with a center focus on Love.
🙂
“I will not be afraid.
I will lift up my heart
and make room for what follows…”
It is, in the end, all that we who stand in life’s struggles can do. We just do not know what a few lines of hope does for another heart plagued or impassioned. Or impaled.
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With you on this one Alison
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I love this one! The flow of emotion and content seems perfect.
Hello Allison — just a quick note to say that it’s a nourishing place to be — here — reading your words on a Friday after my first full week of teaching again ; ) I’m exhausted and find my mind in a good open space to read poems. Thanks for being a WordPress poet ; ) and a great Canadian one.
There’s a painting by Peter Doig called ‘Pelican’ which he’d painted from seeing a man catching a Pelican at sea and the man giving him a stare as he passed holding the Pelican out of sight – and this narrative you know because he wrote it all down but there is no trace of the Pelican in his painting and it doesn’t need the narrative to explain its effect.
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A fine end to this poem, although God has become all part of yesterdays furnishings, as I believe God transcribed by various authorities, is not to be confused with what God is to the individuals own interpretation of existence.
A classic. Words that tingle and weave a depth story. Brilliant.
“and we are sold by the scars upon our throat,
by the longing discarded that never knew it
could end
and by the only relationship we are all
bound to have – our stronghold with or
not with
God.”
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Profound. Illustrative. Thank you.
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Thank you so much Allison for sharing your outstanding poetry with your followers (public) Kindle at no cost.
passionate and evocative…D
Absolutely LOVE this new photo. ✿ܓ (◕‿◕)
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Sheer beauty.
“to learn how to better love
and lessen the dread
to call the angels to my side
and help myself shed
to accept myself as fallen
and to help others who have fallen who sing
but have
no words”
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Love these lines – it is all like a picture reverberating with deep truth and large archetypal knowing.
“One day the drift drew near
and lightning touched the lips of angels.
The light was left only for the mighty.
So we sang. So we sang.
The murderers were shelved
beside the mighty because the only difference
was degree.”
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This love poem feels so specific and it’s beautiful to read.
BRILLIANT! A CLASSIC. EVERY WORD.
“Burn until
every muscle aches and the tension pulls
the labyrinth of your heart and mind into a straight line
with straight direction – nothing wasted.
Love, because it is hard, because it is
unusual to have the courage needed to love.
Love, because there is nothing else, because
it is the only heaven known, because it is
the only thing impossible made possible, and
when the dream is over, it will be
the one reality left embedded,
going further than, deeper than
the nucleus of your cells.”
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Pingback: Two poems published in Ann Arbor Review | Allison Grayhurst
Pingback: Two poems published in Ann Arbor Review | Allison Grayhurst
Congratulations on the publishing of your poetry. Ann
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Congratulations! In particular, I love the second one. Having gone to school in Ann Arbor, I have an affinity for that journal.
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Archetypal. Stunning. Satiating to the soul – does justice to loss and shock, as well as faith and beauty.
“all my poems are with me now,
the accumulation of my dance,
the rejoicing, and the coldness of loss.
Around – so close to the daylight.
If I had lived before, then now I am thrown
behind the door where eternity, not life abides.
Mortal year that has replaced my air
with this huffing and bewilderment –
how strong was the wave that has washed me over.
There are great things to come, though death
has forever changed the shape of my smile.”
Gives majesty to life – all sides. Beauty and substance re her grandfather – poetry creating magic of life.
“I love what is between us when truth does not torment,
when I imagine our paths like my grandfather’s
when he rode, relinquishing status, etching out his destiny
on a brokendown caboose, offering jewels of coal.”
No one can say it like Allison Grayhurst.
“Are you
here, or just a synchronized inspiration, energy
as icing for one day? It is not enough.
I need you here, not galactic but like a man
before his wedding hour, needing me too,
focused entirely on my fulfilment. Where are you?
In the sparrow-droppings? In the kitten’s fear?”
For me, this is like a love poem to Life.
“Why is it like this – this untimely shift
from requiem to rhapsody
as your voice and manner tilts my heart
like the wind would direct the ripples in a stream?
I hurt alone in bed, resigned
to the falseness of your mouth, then
with morning, the lushness of your love
recites an elegy to my fear and once again,
adoring, I call you one with my own.”
I enjoyed that…thanks for sharing. RIP Sam
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RIP Sam…. 🙁
The intensity has kept up all these years. I can see, smell and taste this.
“I will go now
into the constellations
like into a field of marigolds.
I will run now like a drunkard
at dawn. The waves
of morning’s early light
will be my medicine – the blue
& purple & orange thin arches,
all aglowing.”
This is great – this has the essence of that hard won simplicity which is the greatest prize in poetry.
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Here are my favourite lines in this poem:
I don’t believe
in waiting, being patient while aroused.
I like it because it rings so true with what the experience of waiting is, like reining in the horses.
And:
Damn my world
for changing, for making me ready, but falling behind,
insufficient to nourish this latest being that has arisen.
How the world doesn’t seem to move fast enough, but even if it did, would we catch it? or see? or believe? I feel like we are always so poor.
It’s good to read your poetry, Allison. I hope all is well.
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Oh Allison, heart-achy yet heartmoving ahead w/cool clean thoughts, soft clanging symbols & staring into a steamy mirror before stepping out into the hallway. love
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I should like to tell you how much I appreciate you through the inspiration of your blog and how Thankful I am that you touch my life.
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Fascinating and evocative (summons new images to my mind) Allison. I’ll read it a few more times to properly appreciate it.
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That is a beautiful piece!
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a clever closing simile
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This is tragedy. Can a soul change its mind? Beautiful poem, Allison.
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wow, for me this presents a new angle, supporting a new POV/
Hope as the bad guy, antagonist. Thanx again, friend.
“..never runs alongside something spectacular..” is my favorite/ I liked yr reading, G
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Brilliant. Beautiful! Reads like a delightful bath! And an excellent capturing of life in words, as usual.
Thank You for Touching My Life with your Inspiration and Individuality. Your Posts Always bring a Smile to my Day.
Blessings and Joy~
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Thanx again for yr valuable words, though in a different form, it’s a pleasure to hear you share. G
Pingback: CD with excerpt of poem “Days Without Water” | Allison Grayhurst
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Beautiful, powerful, arresting – love:
“You let me burn the incense.
I burned it, and I cannot breathe now without those
scents to wade in and sooth my despair.”
Wow, this is compelling! POWERFUL!
“I climb the scaffolding
fearless of my natural fears –
lifting mortar into a pale, bricklaying and laying out bricks
to seal a song, ready then
to pull out of the quicksand and feed you
in your darkness.”
PROFOUND in its height and depth and uncanny shape-shifting of language to create the fruit she speaks of at the end of the poem.
“Afterwards, I sit on the altar
of my withdrawal. I will not kneel, rendering
myself a thicker chair. My kind, like
fangs and hooves combined in one secret
creature. A city without history, emotions that
echo but do not deliver. My dress of skin: this place
cannot hold me any longer. Do you see the thumbprint
of the ocean – crater like – in the center of every Earth-rhythm?”
amazing. 🙂
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EXACTLY HOW I FEEL TODAY in my dialogue with Spirit!
“Tell me, deprive me of government, of natural things
that others have, but tell me what you want me ready
for. Hire me with this particular fruit. Let me be noble,
eliminate my doubt, my fear of being wrong or cruel. Take me
into your music, pound my spirit with your weight and
effort. Tell me what rabid ghost I must put down.
Help me
put it down.”
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Gentle, haunting, far away – and close as mouse.
“Last time, a being was born
from this authority, ecstasy became heavy,
exploding a thousand golden flowers.
Next time, I will stop counting and be like time,
there without an echo.”
Profound and pungent and defiant and wise as ever.
“Save me from cherished traditions and filing-cabinet dreams.
Save me from my bodily needs. Transform me into an angel or into
the one transformed from the angel – never to come here again,
except to hold my only true love
and to cradle close the heads of my sleeping children.”
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One of my favorites! Breath-takingly beautiful.
“In my eyes, the gulls are angels
arriving face-to-face at my second storey window,
speaking of God’s grace, personal, sharp and pure.
For the last time, chaos will have its say
and cowards will rule my playground.
This is the time of great beginning,
a time of the final letting go.
The birds are beside me, speaking in ways
I again understand, while the world is carving
new structures of dread.”
Archetypal – so many of us can relate – beautifuly written.
“In the beginning
I rode a burning steed,
crossed a violent river
and destroyed my home.
But now my footsteps are slower,
I never climb the rocks or chase
the landed hawk. I collect shells
for my garden and sing to the great
ocean’s waves.”
BRILLIANT! Just what I needed to hear today upon this re-read.
“Carried through the radar-stream
into an easeful position where
the goal is getting nearer at a slow pace
and old patterns are disintegrating,
remembered but not renewed.”
Beautiful, Allison. You traverse such long corridors, probing to ponder over possibilities, touching your way to the sunshine. Souls searched as such are sacred soil, sanctuaries of thought and Edens to the eye. E
Just the thing i needed to read today. Thanks
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A sweet poem of the truest currency. 🙂
Breath-taking, heart-felt, strong like wind, tears of joy, meaning, feeling – this poem waters an orchid deep inside me. At a time when pornographic advertising, music videos and the general pornographic imaging matrix we now live in is short circuiting how young people understand the individual self, love and human sexuality – this kind of witnessing and sharing about what is possible in human romantic relationship is critical, needed, hugely important for the sake of the continued existence of truth, hope and possibility related to human sensual and soulful love.
“The first time you sang, I felt
a fiery and surprising happiness.
The first hug we shared on the church steps
as the music played below was like a wave,
strong and soothing
rippling along my back and arms.”
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I really like this poem, Allison. You have such an inspired word choice and inner voice…
Those things we hold the most,
a love,
a child,
a ghost,
the gentle yield
to frost,
are all held
in the night.
E
A litany to the wholeness of life – sweeping feeling with breath-taking moments of nature’s cathedral of existence and our tinyness of fragmented moments of purpose, blessing, frailty – comfort
“That is why some fear is good, is intimate as love.
And the sky is breathing and the oceans, the seas,
the rivers are breathing. And the beetle and the rooftops too.
Trees sway with the clouds.
The butterfly and guppy are great as mountains.
All chimes of tenderness or tragedy,
seeking its necessary role.
We bear the weight.”
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Yes! It is so important to LISTEN, instead of HOPE sometimes. Precision of insight into the complexity as usual, Allison Grayhurst!
“But now I see that hope is murder to the seed
of this emerging beginning.”
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A true soul moment on an authentic soul journey – finding the light in the dark through humble acceptance of all that we are and are not – blind moments, blind corners – the determination to not abandon self no matter what. Those moments when I cannot “even see myself.”
“I have no intellectual
confidence – no real fans.
I have only myself, my darling nothingness.
I have the dark shadow on the darker land.”
Best description of faith embodied – what a picture – thank you!
“She dances as though she
could not fall. And though they gasp to pity
her poor body against rocks and ridges,
she continues to move like a beautiful sound,
sure of the hand that guides her.”
Sheer poetry and I LOVE the title and cover of the BOOK!
“We have been shown there is no grave,
only the mourning.”
“I no longer worry about what I am going to say
because there is you, with the scent of autumn
strong in your hair.”
This poem is like a haunting painting to walk through – like a rain in poetic Paris streets – its aesthetics making it all bloom far beyond its words. Thank you.
“I called to you in mornings,
weak with doubt and faced
by terrible extremes.
I ran to you when in the quiet of my room,
the walls oozed unloving shadows
and my heart could find no connection.
I talked to you in restaurants, in words
I dare never reuse.”
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Thank you for sharing the amazing verbal poetry. Your voice give life and energy to your words.
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I like this book. Just wonderful poetry.
Both sides of life and responses to life articulated in an amazing ability to appreciate and nail the essence of both the cerebral and the sensual – Go, Allison Grayhurst!
“We have these telescopes, our catacombs of understanding,
but we also have pilgrimage, crust, heartbeat, dying,
soccer fields and song.”
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To the marrow of the bone description – one wonders how she makes it through a day with such intensity of observance of the subtleties of life’s moments both inner and outer: the fireworks of the earth’s outer displays (tree roots, crows, conjoined legs, “windows stubbornly closed”) and the human being’s inner life (“a relieving smile”, “unintended solitude”). Thank you for your witnessing of all the layers, moods and moments – all embraced by your eye and unflinchingly given ‘voice’.
“Flowers are small. I can hear trains in the morning
when windows are stubbornly closed,
when I am walking and it is dark,
and the space around fills me with the ache
of unintended solitude.”
Part 1 – Intensely alive! Intense sharing! Honouring our own ‘quiet desperation’ journey (as Thoreau called it) – so incredibly articulated and laid out here; and as always, ending in jubilant revelation and resolution.
“Like a slap on the ocean’s ground, it came, rippling a great tide. The twisted face of misery lost its value. It was a miracle . . . to actually be plagued by nothing. There was no struggle, only sight. Only love. The seams of existence cracked, and along with them, the skeleton’s life I held and named from vast experience. I was alone, without potential, without hesitation. The panic of the heart, the scream of inner deficiency, all of that, past.”
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It is an incredible collection of Art, glad to see a post of them.
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Wonderful reviews. Always good to connect with another feminist sister. Hugs, Barbara
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Pingback: Congratulations! | Eric M. Vogt: North Country Calls
Congratulations, Allison, you are the latest recipient of The First Cup Award:
http://ericmvogt.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/congratulations-7/
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Beautiful lines:
“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?”
Allison always tackles the big ones … like “acceptance”.
“I had come full circle just by surviving,
back to the longing that existed before –
this time, void of grandiose significance,
existing now like an urge, strong as fire, natural
as deformity.”
This poem is so graphic – I can smell it. Profound and true line, can see myself in it:
“They are following the order of things,
full of hope but immune to all good faith.”
Stunning description of my Intention stated this morning (intenders.com): ‘I intend that I always have what I need to be and do what I need to be and do for my highest good and the highest good of all.’ By that I mean I am seeking “the electric dimension of togetherness”.
“Find me
like science is found enhancing the faint glow of
an almost-faith. I am reeling with need, chosen to bend
into this desperation as hips bend forward,
seeking the electric dimension of togetherness.”
The most accurate, brilliant description of impatience I have ever seen:
“I must be unable
to love – impatience burrowing into me, past
muscles, touching the skin beneath skin.”
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A poem to take my breath away – especially knowing it is written after years of marriage.
Such an accurate description and tribute to how true love through the ‘friction and harmony’ works:
“Always
miraculous, unexpected, awakening. Always
us, vanishing and then re-emerging with these things
of harmony and friction engulfing our scent and path.”
Profound – right through the heart – so well described – can feel it deeply:
“It is what was prayed for, what years and hardship has not
diluted, but has fused into an unbreakable bond – us –
the summoning of all our parts – ancient, immediate
so that even when death comes or fate and terrible sobbing,
neither of us will ever be again
without the other
alone.”
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Allison, you are carving out for yourself an indelible place in searing, profound social commentatorship, as well as being an eloquent poetic voice of the inner world:
“I know all animals are naked and people
think themselves clothed, but vanity and the undercurrent
of striving are photographs etched on their exposed arms,
necklines.”
Stunning description of the unconscious, abusive lover and the patriarchal model of lover relations enacted by either gender – as we make our way slowly to a partnership consciousness society (neither matriarchal or patriarchal) – thank Goodness she is speaking to the Universe, Spirit, God.
“Sometimes, I feel you like a prying lover, impatient with our
differences, anguished by the things that separate us. You have
no use for me, alone. You claim victory, destroy my shell
and make us join, make me not so small but swallowing
everything that is you, like smoke inhaled or
perfume on the tongue.”
Madness is our heritage… Some of us get there sooner than we’d prefer. 😉
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This is restful.
Home does have a smell all our own. 🙂
I love this line because it is to keep true autonomous, healthy love in our lives that we discipline ourselves to make no one in our own minds ‘an extension of us’:
“But I lost you and
it is good to lose extensions”
Brilliant way of describing the principle of gratitude or the art of appreciation UNDER FIRE, the truth of the ‘acceptance’ that is gift to ourselves ‘during times of lack’ – which one could argue always exists on one pregnant level or another of our multi-dimensional lives.
“I will accept my joy
regardless of lack”
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One of the most magical fantasy-reality, beautiful imaginings I’ve come across in a long time – pure, innocent, dynamic, deep:
“If I was a young starling neck deep in uncut grass,
pecking at exposed roots, I would be
sky, downspout, bush, tip of a cross on a steeple,
cured of isolation, taking flight and landing when I choose and
I would choose a fenced-in backyard
where a boy’s imagination owns the splintered bench, weeds
and a dug-up secret hole. I would watch that boy plot his course
and leap, knowing no separation,
I would spread, sing
and fold.”
Again, a master picture-maker … just goes to show Grayhurst’s ability to spendidly portray the easily seen and understood – even while she attempts to conjure recognition of the more subtle and complex layers of life she is usually tackling in her poems:
“f I had claimed myself a calling
as a chaplain – ritualized pacing in university halls, my arm
around youth, accompanying my affection
with a spiritual smile, then I would have
the certainty of some kind of career…”
.
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FELT every quiet with every line, bringing those small moments into searing “view”.
“The quiet that comes
at a fork-in-the-road, quiet
as we listen to the direction of the breeze
and hope for a voice to bellow forth at our queue,
is the quiet of waiting, the time between
pressing-play and music.”
BRILLIANT image for social commentary for our “CULTURE” (for me what stands out is the demise of culture through the proliferation of pornographic images all around us – denigrating the feminine in us all and in the rape of mother earth) – the image of mold is so perfect and arresting to describe the “throne” of the matrix:
“The maggots are worshipping the corpse again
like specks of spotted mould settling on society’s throne.
I relate to the stone, and also to the sea
that thrashes against the stone and breaks it down.”
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So well expressed and described – it’s reality said poetically of weather and storm – and then the underpinning of it all – time and movement of the seasons, the seasons of a year, the seasons of a life. I LOVE HOW IT ENDS in true stability:
“The road I base all my faith on is under my sleeve
sure of me, regardless if I turn or if I follow.”
I pick out this line, but really, every line shines like the sheer glory that is this poem. O, thank you for your heart.
“Through your eyes
of blue infant glory, fresh
as a yawning bird, I see
heavenly bodies turning
and the last of summer’s flowers
appear.”
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Incredible the ways in which we learn mercy and humility through the rawness of wounds. And we are invincible through it all – for what is preserved preserves us, as Grayhurst implies at her end in this poem.
“Life is raw
as a just-made wound. It is raw
so it is open to acts of mercy
and the beginning of true humility.”
What an image – what a statement – reminds me of the horse running toward the train headlight coming toward it on the track – Grayhurst’s poems are like paintings – I wish someone would paint this:
“until I can sleep and stop
kneeling – head neither turned up nor down.”
I LOVE THIS. I read it like singing a song or doing a dance – the next line not necessarily comuting for my rational mind – but my heart somehow anticipating the next note, the next step – what IMAGES:
“I have no grace as I sleep
in this flame and crowd my mind
with futile wondering.
I peel my footprints from
my sidewalk journey”
Wow… truly wow, what a ‘story’ – what a spectacle of feeling and caring and the heartbreak of feeling and caring, and how we are left to survive, to make sense of or simply to survive some experiences on earth.
“She told him of her duty and how love is
for another place. She looked straight ahead,
as if their hands clasping was a weakness
better to forget.
He gathers his breath and dives
into the rapids like one fierce, in flight, one
who has left his peace forever behind.”
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I LOVE THIS. Another one that sings like water. I am swerving and gliding down a ski hill – it’s meaning ahead of me – but feeling it’s pristine symmetry in my veins as I descend – knowing I am going to a good place.
“Under the guise
of do or die
the heart’s mystery is born.”
“Because faith came like it did
from the tape recorder and other
underrated things,”
“the dreams that drove me to love
nor appease the breath of death on
my clothes.”
“The nail is in the wood and still I wonder
why I am, on my own
on the world’s platform
– a gift”
Cool track, easy money equally so too. It is a cool balm away from the plastic pop of today, but I guess I am getting old now and stuck in my ways now.
Revisiting this poem now 2 years later:
This poem is BRILLIANT. Full of words and images and moments so accurately captured, it takes my breath away to think my own moments and experiences can be so known and shared by another.
“The bell is amputated from its string.
There will be no more ringing, no more
afternoons of speaking my confidences,
smoking them out from my private interior, onto
lips and into this stark atmosphere.”
“that leaves a bloodstain of legendary proportions,
that turns everything into a symphony, never stops
electrifying the loins as well as
the imagination.
I am on the street and things are moving –
ten gulls circling in the sky, two bluejays in a tree, and people
I say hi to, smile at so strong, that for a time I am distracted
from my solitude.”
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As usual, a mix of profound meaning and breath-taking artistry of language:
“Like a first laughter
awakened in a baby’s mouth or the child
who is finally old enough to be allowed freedom
to control and cope,
the way out is in,
to give nothing to fear”
I love snow and here’s exactly why:
“First snow of winter arriving,
its tide of working magic
caressing away the rage of the city
with its cold, immaculate embrace.”
This is an extremely powerful piece. It is terribly sad for me.
Tweeted, really enjoyed it and hope you are well.
This is how I feel about every animal caged in a zoo – I understand he is permanently wounded and hence needs to be in an animal hospital – whichever the reason – this poem speaks it brilliantly – the “human-made” perch – human’s inhumanity to animal when it is for our pleasure and not to aid the animal – Thank you. Grayhurst has done it again – captured in unavoidable embrace the piercing essence of the situation:
“Spring, he will never experience again, nor know
the scent of a pent-up life released like
sunflowers blooming, or the feel of the moon,
colder but more comforting than being touched.
He is without time or tribe,
and like fire, he haunts
by just being.”
Beautiful. I especially relate to the image at the end, age still desires, your phantom wings, still the same, touching the tips of a cumulus cloud. I have been thinking about aging lately, also about arms, strangely enough and agency. I’ve also never mentioned this but I very much enjoy the sexuality in your poems. It is a strong flavour in many of your poems. Courageous, too…perhaps.
Beautiful, soulful expressions of human and animal spirits – made by Grayhurst’s hand – the heartfelt poetry of her soul showing up in the physical “flesh” of sculpture – the feeling and power of these beings translated through her finger tips.
Profound – could be read at parenting courses. Wow.
“I kiss away the darkness that came without solace
and press your small body near…
little boy of mine…”
“Little child I adore
the smell of your skin
and the movement of your eyes.
I will do my best by you
and God willing, my best
I will not be denied.”
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What an image! What a point:
“what doldrums dictate
is in the pink sneakers of
winter blues and forcing hope into the mouth
even if it tastes like
stale candy.”
Again, what an image descibing such an incredible meaning!
“You pull the waves from a clear sky”
Meaning hidden so profound in such a simple statement within it’s context:
“A toddler’s game of hide-and-seek
is worth smiling for.”
And yet again – what amazing images making an amazing point:
“Your head is in a whisper – booby-traps
revealed in the ridges and dips of your thoughts.
You want to be put in a crockpot and left there,
stirred like soup, leeks and lentils, seeping out
an authentic aroma, arriving home.”
Profound images to describe the challenge of earth. The bowling ball and the chamber of the heart. The knowledge of the trees. The blessed slow moving worms who are up against the pressure of concrete. And it is all etched into the blueness of Grayhurst’s eyes.
“what everyone needs,
but the pavement is thick
and the ground beneath is rich,
saturated with worms,
moving,
thick
with worm motion
moving at worm speed.
I LOVE THIS. It took me right back and described perfectly what I had felt so often in my childhood with those beetles and that time.
“and the high-pitched beetle
fills the wind like a calming drug.”
An exquisite expression of the interiority of outdoor
moments at the change of seasons.
“In this place as summer fades
the quiet demands self-truth.
To pull from inside
a lacerated pride”
An intertwining of inner learning and transformation amidst the language of nature speaking to and healing us, all around us.
“Shadows mend the divided self
and love is an activity
to understand while counting birds
overhead.”
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Not to compare, but this is one of the most incredible of Grayhurst’s creations to me in the creation of its illogical imagery that FEELS like it makes perfect sense, and beyond! Incredible that we can get language to do this – take us so beyond the left brain into the multidimensional truth of our world, accessed only by our expansive right hemisphere.
“Waves and lions under the
sink”
This is so true! Thank god for the existence of the archetype of the Phoenix in our psyche!
“I rise like a rose
into bloom then lose all
my petals to the storm.”
Somehow these images mean the world to me:
“I live with my drink and the smell
of too many ghosts warming themselves
over my vent.”
Discernment! Perceiving clearly, making a choice, and taking a stand!
“I hear
them talking about the petty thing that keeps
days turning and leaves no one free enough
to walk the plank.
I stand outside for a moment
and plunge all I know like a stake
into dry ground.”
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I, too, have experienced this spell. What a poem. It inspires me to write about my own devils. I love how your poems go into every space.
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Can it get anymore visceral and ethereal than this? Bravo!
“Encyclopedias divulged in dead languages
& hoards of filthy critics teasing with
axe and indifference
their true-goal flower.
They crack their heads on insecurity.
They do not believe in this world.
From balconies, from strait-jackets,
from honeymoon apartments, they expose
the human guilt, delicate visions
that seduce the blind with wonder.”
I espcecially love this conclusive and comprehensive description:
“hoards of filthy critics teasing with
axe and indifference
their true-goal flower.”
OH MY GOD, this is another one of those poems that is like skiing down a hill with swing and swerve of sheer elegance – the moves, the connections, the unlikely pairing of words gliding us forward. This is one of those poems that makes me look forward to returning to these creations again eager for the next savouring of artistry and more.
“I listen for the perishing wind
and declare to it a vigil
of telltale strength.”
I love this image and message:
“a belief
in the many shapes of heaven.”
Poetry within poetry:
“The journey knows its evening
has come and all the beautiful clouds will drop
one by one from the sky.”
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Huge messages cloaked in poetry. With this first one I’ve been there many times and wish I went there more in my faith and focus of trust:
“In the serenity found with surrender,
and in the intense miracle, I pull
out my belonging and leave it there
in the thunder,
unharmed.”
This one is all about for me what Patricia Cota Robles is speaking of in her YouTube video “Downloading the Programs for the” … new earth:
“At the end of this season
the power of acceptance
will mount and the birds
will lift their wings up and over
the Earth. There will be no pattern, no regression.
Homes will grow like
happy flowers and each soul
will be in a stable balance.
Tenderness will govern activity
at the end
when the counting of days
is dropped.”
.
Ah! This is BEAUTIFUL!! Another masterpiece of a sensual poem – capturing the true potential of human sexuality. This is exactly what our mass media of pornographic innuendo everywhere, and porn as the default sex education of our time, hides from us. It does this by projecting out with alot of noise: surface sexual scratch-an-itch addictive distraction rendering us incapable of anything deeper. Junk food has become the order of the day when it comes to sex and food. Just as loving is a learned skill, so is depth sexuality. Wow! Thanks for revealing the possibility by rendering us a glimpse into true power and beauty in this arena. Reminds me somewhat of Nicole Daedone’s attempts to break out “surface mode” when it comes to this, http://omxperience.com/last-year/.
“It has been minutes maybe days since I felt
your warm tongue trace the blades of my back.
It has been too long in isolation,
away from your loins, the trembling
of your barely-believing hands and voice,
telling me we are larger than any love,
like druids or those so deep they have no religion.”
“when we are together, when our monastery re-appears
and your fingers flicker, strumming out a conversation,
honouring the strength of God – sensual as thunder lacing
the sky and all that lives under the sky”
hmm…I feel such gentleness in this poem, especially with that ending.
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I haven’t read this one/very strong symbol deliverance/mean shadows,thick vanity(& louder than prayer),distractions dissolving, & thread-bare desires/
continued love,g
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This piece is colossal. Glinting, sparkling jewels that are blinding in their treasure – sentences that shine and wink in their light of depth and meaning. What a treasure Allison Grayhurst is. Her gift? To unfold for us life at this intensity of feeling and revelation. Who knew truth and beauty could be so intertwined and so passionate?
“The bells speak of a hurt
that is mounting the circumference
of a life”
“Begging to the stars to tell
a colossal fable, a majestic myth to solve this boring condition
of being here, away from the infinite sky, swallowing
mounds of dirt where many others have had their footprints.”
“There is ringing in my ears and a sorrow
triumphant … It is what I have chosen – to not pretend and to kindle
a primal inspiration.”
“Desire like a ceremony –
days of meditation long past, but trances and
swaying and throwing words out, guttural,
epidemic with desire, those days are here.”
This line says it all:
“Believing we would be triumphant
made it so, and being dead we
learned a new way to rise and praise.”
Oh my goodness, I’m there, I see it, feel it – am stunned by it:
“The music lies down in the seas,
so I hear the dolphins hum
and see octopi sway.”
Line by line I image an entire book:
“Madness is part of our heritage
but also our navigating star.”
This sentence I could adopt as my anthem, paste it to my forehead as my best state of mind when I do achieve it:
“Whisper of the wonder we walk through each day.”
I just read last night that Patricia Cota Robles says the elemental realms (I prefer an inclusive term of balance versus saying: kingdom) have always been with us – though the majority of humanity think tales of fairies and other nature spirits are but fantasy and myth:
“Up and dancing, the ground and air
join together to say –
we were never alone.”
wow 🙂 … have a great weekend 🙂 Q
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Rich, fraught with depth, relief and instruction:
“Leaves and feathers we collect with our children,
graveyards we visit to look at lost names,
where our hands seed deeper into the Earth,
rise higher than the hawk-bird into the stratosphere of grace,
grace as wind we depend upon to navigate our footsteps,
to quilt together our four-way love,
cooling the cut of arduous days and pilgrimage.”
Yes, I have expereienced this and it is so challenging to do in our culture which preaches the opposite everywhere except places like here:
“Risk that comes out of despair
as a last ditch effort to not give up
has been told in chronicles, as surrendering stories
that rain away dust and heal the hunt of weighted hunger,
nourishing spiritual belonging.”
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This is a stunning line by Anne Burke regarding Allison Grayhurst’s work. It helps me gain a whole new perspecitve on what this poetry indeed offers us. I’d never articulated and appreciated it in this way to myself. Anne’s proclamation captures one of Grayhurst’s essential gifts to us: to wake up and feel the concrete world around us, as well as the non-concrete world around us.
“If you seek the truth, the physical blood and bones, then,
by all means, open the world into which we were all born”
[by reading Allison’s Grayhurst’s poetry]
“Leaves and feathers we collect with our children,
graveyards we visit to look at lost names,
where our hands seed deeper into the Earth,
rise higher than the hawk-bird into the stratosphere of grace,”
I agree with your thoughts in the amazing poetry. Our children are like flowers. We water them with knowledge, protect them against the cold and we love them. Thank you for the outstanding poetry.
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This is brilliant. I love the tone and message of this work by Grayhurst. I also love it when I can do the following:
“I will let my grief go first.
I will dispel it as energy
gathered between my palms, then blow it
like seeds of transformation out of my blood
and into a happy beginning.”
“I will make a collage of
my crashed expectations, peel away the crust
until I unveil a flower.”
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This poem helps me to name my darkness which helps me to move away from it:
“I see how poor
my devotion is.
I see my mind entranced
by frivolous difficulties
and mean shadows that drown
my lover’s heart.”
I love the combination of ‘frivilous difficulties’ and ‘mean shadows’ to describe EXACTLY the pitfalls my mind becomes ‘entranced’ with! So true!
And then there is the way out! The healing:
“I am comforted through
every break and self-betrayal.
Forgiveness drives out the ache
that keeps me immobilized,
where all is stultified by guilt.”
so much to begin to take in and savor this very early morning.
Thanx again for sharing, my hero
One of the most profound and simply put and sensually imaged longings I have ever read … the river, the stones, the desire.
“I sit beside the narrow rocks
and count each weathered stone.
I hope for love inside a stranger
and long to feel with fingers and soul
the connecting thread
that binds me to my enemy’s door.”
When I read your poem ‘I long to know’ a sense of nostalgia flooded me, for 23 years I have not been back to my homeland-when I sit by the lakeside or go on trail working anywhere in North America- I literally touch and count rocks, and wonder… why am I in a strange land? What is my connection here? I love the symbols of ‘fingers and soul’ I see fingers as my flesh-longing to touch, to feel, also trying to understand ‘ the connecting thread’ and my soul searching for the answers of whatever binds me to this place…thank you! jjf
“I sit beside the narrow rocks
and count each weathered stone.
I hope for love inside a stranger
and long to feel with fingers and soul
the connecting thread
that binds me to my enemy’s door.”
I really enjoy the simplicity of this poem. And I can relate so well to those dreamlines that disappear in our everyday tasks, and how we reshape to the moment we’re in…which is also the long road home…and to God, too.
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Perfectly depicts what I came to about my fear and worry over my financial survival and security. It just got this clear – Go Team!
I’d rather relax into the arms of fate with an innocent, hopeful and proactive heart – than spend my every moment eaten alive by worry – deformed and distorted by debilitating anxiety. Money is energy and as Abraham-Hicks says – emotional relaxation versus stressing over money is what helps abundance on every level – when I can discipline myself to go there. Tension just brings the opposite.
“I’d rather be lost
on the shark-infested tide than be beside you
in your boat of worries
with my limbs bound – mortal.”
“I will wrap a leaf around my face,
never again look and smell your makeshift hellish form.”
Revisiting this poem, I comment again:
This is one of those Grayhurst masterpieces. Strong with the scent of sound philsophy and insight.
I learned greatly from reflecting on this line and owned how they each show up in me:
“We are but gestures sown
by particles of love, desire and greed.”
This next line is so true and so important for me not to fall into. My expectations about what is possible and my emotional faith in my desires is paramount to my well being. Following my inner intuition and outer synchronicity toward that which I think I next want – is vital to keeping my life force alive.
“There was a plague in my eyes
that has thinned my expectations, but
I am better.”
Amazing way of capturing what it’s like to dance with the various parts of oneself and one’s partner over time:
“Being in love this long is like a voyage
underwater, swarming with glorious and
dangerous beings.”
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Wonderful and Beautifully Inspiring! Happy Friday 🙂
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What images! What images indeed to describe something so familiar to so many of us – especially during adolescence – a state of being, an emotional experience – that can be so vague and confusing when we are actually in it – put to such vivid detail and concrete illustration. Thank you, Allison Grayhurst.
“I don’t know how long I will ride
upstream with my arms around this waning moon”
“Hope is a hair strand I lost in the waters,
far from any net or shore.”
Wow! How many of us feel this way about our sense of vocation in the world! What will I be when I grow up? Who am I really? What actually warms my heart? Illustrated eloquently and viserally as this:
“I travel this way, cold to my own heart – a piece
of rock in space, a business card wet in the gutter.”
“By light I try to commune, but like a thin cloud
that forms then fades, I have no idea how long I will stay”
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gosh/ amazing/. another allison’s moving feast. I must confess two things; The 1st time I heard you read, i heard ,”my custard nerves”
(& tho’ I thot “Hmm, I missed that” I needed to go back, reread)
Also I couldn’t help but to wonder a bit about
the fool.
🙂 … “A very special poem that is mightier than a mountain” …
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I don’t know how she does it – but through disparate images she nails the feeling, the testimony, the inner music of the hero’s journey-challenge upward:
“Living here
in elementary wealth – nothing but
old-world, nothing but chaos.
Will the angels sing to me? I have been waiting
on their love.”
Our galactic history-herstory inimated so often – no wonder the intensity of the soul’s anquish, shock, hope, longing and triumph.
“So heavy is the window I look through. Brick by brick
I count my way up. My memories belong
to another world.”
Beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful, Allison. I just loved this poem.
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Brilliant. Surprising in it’s turn at the end – stunning, staggering in it’s implicaiton. Wow.
“When I was a baby child, it felt like there was a stone
stuck in my throat and a restlessness racing through my limbs.
I cried and cried when I was a baby, unfamiliar
with this daunting helpless form.”
.
I have nominated you for a liebster award 🙂
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How luxurious that Grayhurst captures also the peaceful moments of this earth journey with her vivid style:
“The filing of nails
on a nothing-to-do night –
with all desires nourished.”
“I feel my pulse calm,
feel almond shells around my feet
and the fires of anxiety appeased.”
I really like this expression. It reaches outward, like the spiderweb that if it was only outside we would leave to the delicate world of art in nature. But because it is in our home, we feel a need to tidy up. We need more outward in our lives. I know I do. 🙂
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Very beautiful piece, Allison! Your last line wraps the feeling up in a bright colored bow. 🙂
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BRILLIANT. One of the greatest and most relevant nuggets of poetic psychological insight ever. Thank you!
“I never opened my mouth to alleviate the
darkness, but instead I took offence
at the lack in others, not seeing that offence
as my own withdrawal.”
How profoundly and beautifully put:
“But I am changing. I am ending like childhood
ends, and I am
not so sure of myself
anymore.”
I like your stops and starts and pauses and changes of direction
A classic. What word and meaning use! Weaving metaphor and psychological insight together like a braided pastry that is potent and goes down well. The voice of the poet remaining present in it’s unique and consistent tone of passion and forthright addressing the situation throughout.
“I should have held it in –
a nut within its shell,
prolonged its freshness to ward-off
its rotting.”
“the strike has torn, though
it was meant to mend. And the night moves on
as sleep beckons me
further into isolation, lacking the promise
of rest or resolution.”
Thank You for Being a Blessing in my Life. I Appreciate YOU 🙂
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This is a very sensitively written description of an inner transformation, psychologically strong but written so gently and humbly. I relate to this poem and enjoyed it very much.
I love Morgan’s comment above. Yes. What sharing the heart and awareness of your soul and hence poetry does for others is keep us sane. Thank you, Allison. I love the following image – your observance and comprehension of the nature and significance of things is awakening and empowering.
“I released
the bribe, and with it, the demon. Because God is with me
like a black cat who follows me from station to station,
is gentle and existing with tenderness and solidarity.”
I also love this image, it is so true – how we can be taken over but not down.
“It will take me over,
toss me like a weather balloon
and put me on the brink of a high fever.”
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OH MY GOD!
What a jewel to come upon this! SO well spoken. Well wrought words that go to the depths of the core of the experience:
“It is not the same as being limited
by loneliness, these feelings of broken fidelity,
abandonment. It is not enough to germinate
in this grief, pleading for a picture
of better times, appealing to
memory, sentiment”
What a way to put it!:
Wilting … “but never when mingled with your stature”.
Explains so much about why I fell into the mudpies I did – whether it was into a person, a body of work, a school of thought, an organization of dogma, a myth such as the modern one of the rewards of workaholism. No wonder, when we – like the aboriginal peoples – have been stripped of our natural connections (galactic historian, Andrew Bartzis) – as the aboriginals were when their personally strengthening rituals were stripped from them by being outlawed, and then they were given the addictive substance of alcohol/drugs as their ‘liquid mysticism’.
After periods of drought, no wonder we are led into experiences of elation and then sobering lesson. Yet, the experience of it can still feel higher than we go afterward… for a time.
And the riches of it we gain forever; ‘it is difficult to distinguish the person from the beautiful gifts they bring’ – especially when they first warn us of the dragon and then they become the dragon:
“ecstasy
just to listen, to share our minds – walking
on streetcar tracks at 4 a.m. and never sleeping.
I carried you like a book, wilting always in life, but never
when mingled with your stature.”
“I was delivered by your high forehead and
by your crazed emotions. I was celebrating.”
A stunning and extraordinary description of the journey and substance of the free person:
“in that time, I was
devoured by my own individuality, stripped
of my conditioning, a person to reckon with, lean on –
whole.”
What a way to put it!:
“salvaging a heartbeat from habit…”
I lived years like this, and now when I have it, I am marveling how I ever got through … those years!:
“just me with these crippled hands, bare feet, no mentor
to merge with, nothing
to follow.”
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Wonderful, Allison, words that drip like oil
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What a great photograph!
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Such sadness in the air, mute but electrically charged, surrounding the reader as he paces with you. Love your images. Those beautiful full trees of our lives that are lost and cannot be replaced, grown by years and tending of the soul. There are no proper ceremonies or markers to quite equal such memories. Or loved ones lost. 🙂
Eric, what beauty, depth and breadth
in your response – poetry in response to poetry. Thank you.
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Whoa … check out this image … of experience so profoundly done justice to:
“Catapulted into the future with no way back,
into another lightyear spinning, picking up pebbles,
putting down shoes. Hoods and earmuffs, locking
eyes with the cold, locking tight with the bluegrey anguish
that breeds explosives inside the flesh of my tongue,
but is buried too deep beneath the tastebuds to ever emerge.”
This feels so familiar – this feeling … so well described:
“adding a slight shock of unpredictability
to an otherwise stagnant formation”
When I hear the interview with Patricia Cota Robles on the Laura Magdalene Eisenhower and Dr. Dream “Awake in the Dream” radio show – the part about many coming to assist earth at this time from parts of the universe far lighter and more expansive … this part and so much of Grayhurst’s poetry makes so much sense to me as a feeling I have:
“Growth
once so great, celestial forms descended, joined
to contemplate and just listen.”
“These pinecones
remind me that I too have dropped, naturally, from
my source – laying flat on an unforgiving surface, unable
to dig into softness and sprout.”
Sheer poetry, magic and brilliance in words. Another one of those Grayhurst masterpieces that goes below cerebral into heart, hope, light, body, being resonating with a signature of truth, comfort and joy – like a well-aimed, in-sync down hill ski triumph at top speed in perfect symmetry.
“virtues that have kept me solid”
“knowing passion like
a labour – confined to a pattern, somehow
boundless. Joy. I stand a virgin in your honeymoon.
I am made up of sunsets and dreamy afterglows.”
“I should close these shutters, marry a
soft genuine smile.”
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So well-described – yet another insight and clarity moment offered by Grayhurst:
“Miracles arrive, never in the way expected,
sometimes slowly, in small amounts
until you realize something merely accepted
was what was wanted all along.”
It is such a process to strengthen the connection between one’s body and soul without the regular use of addictions that only dull this connecting power of self:
“Darkness was my addiction, but I am done
with cantering through those hills.”
These lines sums up the entire poem for me – so rich and intricate a poem it is – here goes, here grows the theme:
“It is time for a shower –
to claim your nakedness.”
“while you slept,
knowing nothing of your own power”
“you are bare and brave and you do not believe it,
but you are ever so strong”
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Wow, if this means what I think it does… I am working with letting go of old seductive habits that no longer serve me, and in retrospect this is a perfect clarity and description to help me do it:
“This wilderness
of power, purposelessness and extremes I laid down inside of
to be beside you and the softness of your mouth
and the elixir of your touch
became mine, grew like a second body
merging with my own like death does
with cold eternity.”
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Love it:
“People
cave into fears as if that means
‘maturity’.”
“There is no time like there is
no permanence other than God.”
“Be my
instrument, expose the terror I cautiously keep.”
“In the mornings, I am lonely but want only
to be alone.”
Oh, do I ever remember this as a poet in Toronto in days gone by – the magnificence of such ecstasy and intensity; lost to everything but beauty and loneliness, a sweet price:
“Pen and beauty, an inevitable
loneliness that victory cannot solve”
“Peeled of my own death,
entering a corridor of dawn”
“this guest that never comes, eats bread
or slips into the cradle of a comfortable
home”
“A woodland to walk through that inherits
a shadow canopy darkness. Walk through
regardless of doubts full-blown,
regardless of scrapes across your tender surface”
Oh, my god – this is incredible – Grayhurst’s observation and insight into life’s intricacies is stunning. The subleties and motivations and consequences she comprehends in her poems is remarkable:
“You are trying to reach me with an old painter’s words
of resignation and reluctant wisdom – words
I cannot make use of.”
I am there, next to that delicate dance of the breeze through tree leaves in that shimmering moment:
“a shimmering sensation or
a delicate fluttering of
nature’s delicate best”
I will come back and continue to comment on the rest of this poem.
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I lived like this for years… I remember an acquaintance that I knew saw me from her car window as she drove by and later told me, “I saw you the other day, walking very … slowly. What were you doing?” she asked.
“Contemplating”, I answered. In this line Grayhurst helps me honour and understand more fully what I was doing… the “you” being spirit:
“I could walk faster than this, chat with the neighbours.
But I won’t. Because nothing is here but you, only,
and my feet can’t find the motivation to pick up pace.”
I will return again to continue commenting on this beautiful poem.
I had a talk yesterday where this is a brilliant description of exactly what I witnessed in the other person:
“You talk. My aura is a smog-filled season
where your sun’s rays barely seep through. Days
with stones in my stomach, rubbing against one another,
pressing their hard weight into places.”
Wow! Beauty on wheels is this poem about entering adolescence. Sheer beauty, along with her breath-taking way of capturing the interiority of things that is Grayhurst’s signature style.
“they came to snatch your heart
into a barren day, where conformity
would dry the void in your stomach
and the radio would be enough to hang your
curiosity upon.”
“But you, like a starfish,
swam slowly out of childhood – kindness intact,
individuality still pressing through your bones.”
“You kept the truth
you had when you were one, kept a depth and wonder
that refused to be buried.
After twelve affirming years,
the night still beats
softly for you.”
Lines that light fire:
“I feel the civilized crowd, absent of judgment,
crossing streets, side-stepping grates”
“But my hands were made heavy and
I continue dragging my head like a rock, lifting it
into the sky, over airplane tracks,
and vegetable patch gardens.”
“to let my thoughts be devoured
by survival and sensation”
“Maybe this is just wilderness and burning,
but never once did I know stagnation or
was I afraid.”
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…reminds me of the G.M. Hopkins poem – ‘The mind has mountains, cliffs of fall…’
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This is a brilliantly written poem. Wow, the imagery, the feeling…
I remember experiencing exactly this, and there was a comfort in the awareness and acceptance of it:
“but I steadied myself
on the cold shell of repetitive expectations –
dead valleys here, dead heights there”
I lived years like this, incredible to pull this off as if by grace, as if by trial, as if by test:
“by-passing predator
tentacles and jaws by instinct alone, no journey-map,
stars or horizon to act as goal or inspiration
This is the best feeling description and insight into the might and depth and intrigue of underwater sea creatures I have ever encountered:
“rolling
through cross-waves with creatures captured
by a dark density like
myself, shaded, loose at the extremities, compact
at the core, thriving on plateaus of deep pressure,
salty flavours all around – so far gone from walking
that legs leave, replaced by fins, and language is not
sound, but a full-body resonance”
You are a source of inspiration to me…keep creating those wonderful poems and sculpture’s.
First of all, I must comment on the powerful sculptures on the side of this writing by Grayhurst. I love the lighting and the camera angles that bring out so much in these expressions of Allison’s human appreciation sculptures.
I feel a delight of creativity, hope and optimism in my chest upon reading this, and a warm smile comes to my face:
“angels under the bed sheets
and smiles in the afternoons,
of dreams that form, fade, then form
again”
I remember when this took gargantuan effort on my part, and I remember once imaging in my head stoning a negative voice within – which is all that would hold it at bay, and did indeed extinquish it:
“Days I will try to treasure like a
jar full of fireflies,
when I will not give in, not
give space to the dark pit within.”
This says it all in a world where god is money and the mall is the temple:
“Days that mean more than money, and more
than the power that it yields.”
What an image, what a beauty of an image – for the power of grief after the death of one, one so desires to still be living:
“Each day I wear my grief
like metal mesh.”
And what an image for those, such as Walt Whitman, who did just this with the wounded on battlefields – beyond my capability or understanding, but not beyond my awe of admiration:
“You try to comfort this field
of wounds. You tend the amputees
and bound the screaming with soft song.”
Each line of beauty stands on its own, strong and powerful, rich and meaningful – drenched in nature’s promise:
“I will contain you as more than memory –
in my harvest will bloom many sunflowers
of your great generosity.”
“And your fiery blood
will sprout the roots and flesh of passion fruit.”
“The maple tree will grow large like you, protecting all
within its strong and tender shadow.”
I am there, in this painting of mind and feeling:
“And children
will be drawn to this yard, to play there amongst
the tall dramatic grass, and then sit still to watch
with wonder the many shades of sky, reflecting
the warmth of your paternal sun-setting colours.”
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I LOVE THIS. It says so much that to even comment on it doesn’t do it justice! This is brilliant. I love the wording, the love the imagery! So well said:
“to
hold your hand when the shelf cracks
and the books are all read, when the fridge
carries only last week’s fruit.”
“To lean my head on your heart and
let you speak your need, instead of curling
under the blankets like an angry, disturbed thing.”
“To be kinder than I’ve been,
to wrap a hand around the back of your cold,
delicate neck.”
“loving you better
when darkness inevitably descends.”
I sort of half know what this one is about and like it that way
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Great reviews!
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Brilliant. Healing elixir. So brilliantly put, felt and meant.
“We saw one another as the proof needed
to confirm the reality of our road”
“Like you, I am still denied
but now I know love.
My axle is female – and though
20 years later, my flesh is barely
(just starting to be)
my own.”
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Will check in on all of the newer books. Leaving poetry…purchase too low to continue with the creation even though it was one of my “loves”. Time to move on…keep creating I love your work. ajm
“I have put the “poetry blog” to bed! Please check out my new site where I will begin a new journey into “fiction” based on sometimes “fact” and continue to follow your visits are important to me”. ajm
“Libretto”
http://writerannjohnsonmurphree.wordpress.com/
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Great post, will be an enjoyable read. ajm
Libretto
http://writerannjohnsonmurphree.wordpress.com/
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Check out all of Allison Grayhurst work…outstanding.
Nearing the end of September, I feel like this poem expresses some of what is going on inside. I saw a painting the other day of a woman in a glade…and I cried because I feel so far away from her solitude and silence and simplicity…listening and openness.
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just downloaded mine – thanks kindly
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Your beautiful voice give life to your amazing poetry. I like your verbal poetry.
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I love this whole piece, the little I have been able to read so far. It reminds me of a very visceral childhood memory – and as a child we can be so much more PRESENT to all of creation, every nuance and that is what Grayhurst’s work does for me – sharpens my senses to “all this is” to be seen, heard, felt, noticed.
“Light that drips down the turnpike, onto roads
and ways far away from any window.
Blocks to build shelters and shields. Flags on flimsy poles.
A neutral breeze busting cardoors and
personalized licence plates.
Paved over, I see a carcass dripping, a little yellow flower,
smaller than a thumbprint.
Rust-coloured shawl, poncho that holds
great sentimental significance holds
me to a memory, old now as a ten-year-old untended garden
or pavement cracks grown into fissures.”
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This poetry is so rich – so transcendent – I can barely catch my breath to wrap concepts around it.
Rather, it is beyond words.
It uses words, to go beyond words.
I get transported, instead, to another realm.
I am catapulted to an understanding of earth experience that does justice to its layered potency.
Grayhurst gives us a place to refresh ourselves – in a cool, green valley – hidden from the dominant wasteland – where keeping head, heart, body and spirit together are seen, felt and experienced as being normal.
“Come upon me like a feather-stick –
sectioning my abdomen like a fruit. Suddenly
toddlers are conversing and the grey cat
takes in the morning. Bundle of weeds,
bundle of flowers. An opening
under the burning canopy. Lifetimes spent
collecting synergy, male rhythms and fixed lines.
God is coming down to hide in your loose-change-pocket.
I dreamt of owning your praise. Swinging from the rafters
in a game of hide-and-seek, I sought your breath,
hand of destined chores.
I played along inside the circle, inside a sack
I could hardly breathe out of. Languishing. A round bruise
forming on my left arm. Place me here. Crown me
or stake me on a tall spike. I am sand thrown mid-air.
No place to collect and land, not even a wave, a bucket,
the forelock of a horse. Not even
thinking in a straight continuation, but there, there, a pebble
between paw pads, then, a minor note locked
in perpetual repetition.”
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This is brilliant! Brilliant. Reminds me of when I first read Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. And I wanted to stand up on the city bus and exclaim aloud: “Listen to this!” A comprehensive capturing of human earthly experience in all it’s dimensions without missing a beat – beyond the conscious mind – dancing with the levels of our knowing and sensing – that we feel but do not always recognize, and rarely, oh so rarely articulate. Clearly, Grayhurst’s poetic journey has taken her to the mountain top.
“Paved paths, brisk
storm of senses, an old
opening, endless as a dug-in arrow –
head in the weeping jungle, the coolness
of autumn air brushing tombstones,
the thin necks of geese.
So much night in a single glass, body
and name together, replacing
existence with this inheritance and no other.
Rows of ships crowding the edge of the lake –
docked and bearing down for winter. The distance
grinds, gravel on my belly, cracked shells
in subterranean pages writing down dawns and victories
never experienced, only imagined.
Is it right to receive the bitter strawberry?
Drink its flesh like juice and
kneel before reality’s dictatorship?
Is it clarity? Or forgetting?”
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wow/ thank you again,A
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That was powerful. <3
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This smacks of the kind of hope of the human spirit above the drudgery of this world – that I had to regularly engage as a young woman kind of lost in a big city and not with a lot of spiritual tools – boy – do I love his spirit!
“But he does not fade like some do into
masculine despair which is anger,
which is not the saddle he mounts,
but perseveres with a steady pace,
his long fingers waving in perfect rhythm
inside a room, where hardships reach living
but mild.”
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Brilliant. Poignant. Sweet in more ways than one. Exactly how I am feeling today.
May we all sing as sweet. Thank you, love of Allison Grayhurst for expressing the life and love and fear of so many of us!
“Mostly I am a tree, solid in my roots,
proud of my leafy foliage.
Mostly I am grateful for the working
light bulbs, for the kindness of others that
pushes me along.
Mostly I am happy here,
pinned to this abundance of love, not looking
outside for a four-leaf clover.
Mostly my level is strong, but today
as I’m sinking – I relish the relief of tears it brings.”
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Stunning insights articulated with precision. Twists and turns of perspective. Creaking, and then with the crack of a whip, a crack of light thunders through.
“I have loved badly,
pessimistic”
“the steady rapture that only comes with patience”
“I sat on the bus and I was alone.
Did I know how fragile sanity was”
The power of intention and speaking it aloud.
This is a mainstay of my spiritual growth practice:
“There are names.
and allegiances that triumph
when spoken aloud.”
This is where I so beautifully am right now – learning sweet surrender. Listening with focused intent, and the intention to follow the inspired action:
“before my shelter broke
and I could be saved by surrender”
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Love. I have to buy this book!
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I really liked this one. Time is thick though we are free…and I am tired, too, often of the things you mention. Your poems ends like the end of a long, heavy sigh.
What poignancy. A feel, a tapestry of experience. Showing us how life works – all the impressions, all the input, all the images, all the sensory stimulation, all the feeling experiences, all the emotions connected to imagery – all the poetry around us all the time, that makes up a life, that makes up life, that makes up a memory, that makes up the stunning wonder of memory.
I adore this! It is deeply healing to me to read these words this morning. Thank you, Allison, for your healing balm in the world.
“It is lonely to be loved by God,
stretched beyond capacity by laws
of magnets, hunger and inevitable reality,
to hold open a hand and have even that
security taken…
It is hard to keep
trembling with service and acceptance, to be at ease
and know the gift will come just when it is needed – God will
choose the music, choose which danger is real and what must
depart. It is hard to not cry, sometimes…I am free but time is thick…”
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thanx once again, my friend. i serendipitiously ran into this image this morning and i guess, must include it here/
the best to you & yrs over the holydays, G
thank you, Allison, for sharing this, and all
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This poem articulates the way I often feel, too. I’ve just come out of a short New Year’s Retreat but feel that I’ve just scraped the surface of things, perhaps approached the “core” but am already back into the thick of things driven by something more like anxiety, survival, than other more simpler things. But hopefully this time of retreat (of core time) will find its way into these outer realms as I live my life! I enjoyed this poem. Still a poet…
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This is beautiful and moving. ❤️
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Thank You again, Allison/ it’s sure & pure
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Beautiful symmetry – so aware, so caring, so honest. Such a work of the observant eye. The one who SEES far beyond the exterior scenery and happenings around us. A thoughtful mind, a timeless time within this soul. Thank you.
“Still prayers are heard and sometimes answered
with an overflowing ‘yes!’
Sometimes angels are asked to reach down
and bring daylight to the 2 a.m. dark, to honour
the burial kick and ring the warning bell.
Sometimes soulmates are photographed.
There is no magic outside of God – there is
no love that remains love without faith.”
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Breath-taking! What a profound and beautiful witness to one of the heart-breaking expressions of the mystery of life. Thank you for your compassionate witness to Life and Death.
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Wonderful, as always!! Thanks for the follow on Twitter, as well. Sorry that I haven’t been commenting as of late, I’ve been working fastidiously on my next book and driving myself crazy in the process. I’ve been going through a bit of a funk w) my own poetry as of late which I’ve been trying to reconcile it, (oh what rejections I have received). My publisher wants to put the poetry book out before the novel and I was hoping to get it in some of the Lit. mags ahead of time. Alas, said Lit. mags aren’t cooperating so I’ve been questioning the validity of the whole project. Anyway, I look forward to receiving your next poem. They are all great and set a high bar for my own work. All the best, Lawrence
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A amazing blog and writer. Please read and enjoy.
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This is amazing!
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“scorched by the unharvested dream” is a beautiful line!
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This is truly a beautiful poem.
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Excellent!
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I, too, cold have written this poem…in that it expresses very well what I often feel and have felt.
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Beautiful…D
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Nice!
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“from the desolation of my eunuch intimacies” is VERY powerful!
Profound with a sense of vulnerability. I love the line ‘my house was a wound bandaged by prayers and a struggling purpose’…excellent. D
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Reblogged this on THIS, THAT AND OTHER SUCH POSTINGS by ANN JOHNSON-MURPHREE and commented:
Take an adventure through the writing of Allison Grayhurst, her work can be purchased at Amazon.com.
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How nice was that! 😀
Maybe it is not a mistake??? 😉
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Great…as usual Allison, your thoughts always give reason to “think” to your fans/readers
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What an enchanting piece.
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Love your voice. Dazzling stuff.
I mean your writing voice, although your physical one’s fine too!
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Carry on. You are a blessing to those who read your poems.
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Beautifully written. I really like this one.
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Bravo, Allison.Your achievement here, and yr efforts displayed previously, truly bring awe.sometimes, you make me question my just-clever tricks/I personally feel that you stand alone, here in these wordpress poetry posts, admiringly,G
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strong & sure/ & enviable
thank you
Odd to find your poem in the ‘Fishfood Magazine but I liked the lay-out and rhythms and the release of your last ‘verse’ – it reminded me of the effects you get from reading metaphysical poetry (especially Donne’s) – like your photograph as well as the poem!
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Congratulations on the new book. Ann
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Ah the loneliness! Wonderful words.
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This is wonderful! I loved your starting.
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Thank you dear Poet for your amazing poetry. Always a pleasure to find your site.
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Allison is amazing. Please read and listen to her outstanding poetry and thoughts.
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I loved the ending!
Constellations, I know nothing of.
But I know the countryside, and I know
a family of the deepest purity.
Beautiful!
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A fine piece (peace), Allison, thanx once again
You have a wonderful voice!
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Very marvelous lines of poetry presented here in this post. Thanks
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“In rooms of wood and desires breath, they move like beggars in oe another’s arms”…wonderful opening lines…D
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I have fallen into your poem and I love it!
Thank you for choosing to follow one of my blogs. I hope you will continue to enjoy the posts.
My other blog is poetry if you should care to check it out some time? http://poetryphotosandmusingsohmy.wordpress.com
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Powerful poem! Love the fire.
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Deeply profound in beautiful words and images.
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Hmmmm… Wow!
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congratulations
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I can’t reblog this post because it never loaded completely, just kept spinning.
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AHHHHHHHHHHH…it finally loaded.
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I notice that when readers comment on your poetry their prose becomes very poetic (though I did like … “Intelligence rips through her work like white water.”)
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Can’t reblog your post because my blog has been suspended. I don’t know why or for how long because Worstpress has not contacted me or replied to my inquires about this suspension.
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Great Post.
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lovely and moving/ thank you again
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yes
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Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold….
I like your rhythms and the meanings that bob about between your words
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Allison, you are gifted my sister! Your poems are deeply genuine and real…my heart is moved by the emotions of your spirit! Thanks for sharing your heart!
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The Last Beat – Delicious!
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You’re so blessed to have children this life/ thanx again, Allison
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Allison the like button just doesn’t do this justice! Love it.
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Félicitations!
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“….time held me green and dying/ though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
“I make one image—though ‘make’ is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be ‘made’ emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.”
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WOW <3
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Great Post.
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An excellent presentation.
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Deep and lovely
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Congratulations Allison, great job!😀
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a beautiful piece/ thank you again
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Pingback: The poetry of Allison Grayhurst | ELIZABETH ANN JOHNSON-MURPHREE
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just right this early still shadowed morning/ Always good reading you/ morning
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C’est magnifique!
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Thank you for this
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I especially like the last lines….lost like the original light that still exists in some to help the rest survive…I hope I still have some of that original light.
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right oN! <3
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Well done Allison and congratulations!
This piece is beautiful. E
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wow 🙂 keep on keepin on ………
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profound
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CONGRATULATIONS !!! WOW WOW WOW – What a stupendous Accomplishment! Thank you for SHARING your heart, life, love, work into infinity… <3
We at poetrydig.com dig your poetry AG.
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I have followed and read Allison Grayhurst for several years and all of her work is enjoyable, check her site out.
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allisongrayhurst.com
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So good to have you back.
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“Beauty Is” to be posted February 3.
Amazing work. So glad I discovered your page.
Love this
magnificent
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OK… deep breath! I hadn’t realized I read it without breathing so as not to break my concentration. Do I “get it” – me, the poetry challenged? I’m going to have to re-read several times, then I’ll likely come up with a personal image, or interpretation. So far, you’ve given me a jumble of feelings that are literally all over the map. Key words that make my heart jump. Fear, anger, doubt, and choking. Not bad for a single poem. At least I had been “prepared” as I’ve been reading some of your material on “Mr. Militant Negro!”
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Those times, we hear a desolate chorus rising
and we vanish completely into its volcanic siren wind. This is the outstanding work of Allison Grayhurst. Visit her site and enjoy many post of interest; beautiful words.
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Oh my god, a better romantic sensual love poem was never written.
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Pretty amazing. Wish the person in the poem could be comforted somehow.
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Such lovely words!
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C’est vrai!
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Thanks for posting this exquisite poem. It brought to mind “Barter” by Sara Teasdale, a lovely poem I committed to memory as a junior in high school and still know by heart almost 60 years later:
Barter
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.
Sara Teasdale
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Wow, your poem is amazing. So beautifully written and powerful. I can definitely relate to this. Well done!
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There is something about the poet who writes for herself yet speaks volumes to someone far away that she is likely never to meet. Yet reading your words, I was transformed to back to NYC and some very dark times. Time is a great healer as is distance. I thank you for sharing your words.
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AMAZING!! ✨🙏
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👌👌👌
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simply magnificent
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Lovely, hopeful, and this time achingly true for me & this canvas here/ thanx again, Allison
I still dream of “the greatest step”
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Thank you
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My Colours would be Grey reads like the sort of poem most poets conceive as they wake up but later can never remember…Very haunting.
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I enjoyed this poem, especially the line about the poem without a testimony, very insightful. Thank you.
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Allison, I’ve taken liberties to use part of this magnificent poem as a prologue to my work today. If they’re no problem with you, thank you so, if so, it’s gone. Of course I’ve posted arrows back to you. gary https://wordpress.com/post/namelessneed.wordpress.com/7756
https://namelessneed.wordpress.com/
rather.
fond thanx
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Heey its an ossm poem dude NAKED SIDE
A heart touching poem
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powerful
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Joyful enchantment
wishing you success with the new book
Very moving Allison.
this looks fascinating – just purchased for my kindle
Thank you Paul!
A great musical rendering of this fascinating poem. Very impressive.
Dead bugs and sponging winds! Your images are always exactly in focus and tell it like it is!
Compelling sculptures! I can’t tell if some of them are dead or sleeping but somehow it is as if it doesn’t matter. It’s only a matter of degree, after all.
Excellent
Enjoyed your poems, Allison. Very much.
Reblogged this on Allison Grayhurst.
time is talking while we are waiting for somebodyorotherelse to answer
Some great insight allied to fine poetry.
Excellent writings Allison. well penned.
Beautiful! <3
This is amazing.
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Stunning piece of work. Thank you.
Excellent!
Thank you Allison. I felt each and every word on extremely deep levels.
I love love love this to bits. Both the poem itself (the last stanza is absolutely delicious, I bow to you), and the spoken poem. Thank you for sharing Allison.
Very haunting piece. Excellent. 😊
So evocative and an excellent voice to compliment it.
This is a rich chronicle of what is is like to be woman. So much depth, color and feeling. It really covers a lot, encapsulates a lot. Everything from a tough childhood, being insvisible, finding love, creating life, letting go of the life and it’s identity building properties, finding yourself again and retiring.
Powerful stuff. Beautiful poem.
I adore this poem ❤
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This is a magnificent poem. I love it.
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This. Is. Gorgeous.
Hello, Allison! Great to see you’re still on here! Love your wordcraft…
So much pain. So much promise. Such is our world. —E
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Wonderful..
Absolutely BEAUTIFUL. 💞
All the best and well done!
i once held sunday
in my pocket,
or perhaps
it held me,
fondled book,
like sinful prophet,
dreamt of
eternity;
but whispered joys
–promised by better days–
jarred-quick
reality.
E
So vivid Allison. Tangible almost. And deep with meaning. I really enjoyed this verse.
Your voice compliments the poem so well.
What a lovely poem..
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Great job Allison
Beautiful.
Thank you for sharing Allison. Appreciate your work.
Thank ypu Allison for sharing.
I love that last line. Simple, concise and vivid.
A solid work, Allison, & I miss yr recitation
Love this! Great writing.
😊
love the traditional vibe, clear singing and playing …
“If I risk, I risk it all
with nothing to risk it for in sight.“
Isn’t that what it is, this life? A yearning to break free of the boundaries, to scale the wall, each brick laid meticulously by our own hand? Ah, those limitations we place upon what’s limitless. Sometimes the only way to scale is to burrow. My kingdom for a pick or a shovel! ⛏
Thank you Allison for sharing. Happy New Year 2019.
Awesome, thank you Allison for sharing.
Allison, Neruda gets me every time. What is there not to love? Thank you.
good work
Thank you Allison for sharing
Thank you for reading Butch
Love the mirror imagery
Beautiful and thought-provoking. A medley of language and thoughts, images that intersect the body of the poem. Truly beautiful.
Thank you for your kind words Elisa,
Time is two lips speaking different words,
two hands unable to hold each other,
Beautiful!
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
Best regards
“In heaven, the earth is a vegetable left too long in
the fridge”
Love this!
Beautifully constructed. Thank you for sharing.
So touching… a beautiful piece. Thank you for sharing!
Fine work as usual – best for me, “A pebble…oxygen is born”
Thank you 🙇 love ❤️
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I nominate you for The Awesome Blogger Award!
https://nowbeginslife.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/i-received-the-awesome-blogger-award/
That captivated me! Very uniquely penned.
Love “Water Wings”
Sent from my iPhone
>
Powerful poem.
Thank you!
So so well written!
Thanks!
Beautiful poetry
Thank you Kimi!
nice flow
Dear Allison. This is poetry. I am listening to your beautiful voice now. Thank you for sharing the amazing written and verbal poetry.
Thank you John!
You are welcome dear Allison.
Reblogged this on johncoyote and commented:
Please enjoy the words of the talented writer.
Love the imagery in your words here! So powerful.
Thank you!
Dear Allison. You are amazing. I love your verbal reading.
Dear Allison. Your verbal poetry is outstanding.
Reblogged this on johncoyote and commented:
Please go to her verbal poetry. Amazing verbal poetry shared.
You are amazing dear Allison. I will return to your work and listen again.
Thank you John! So good to hear.
You are welcome dear Allison.
John, thank you so much!
Outstanding verbal poetry dear Allison.. I did enjoy.
Thank you!
You are welcome dear Allison. More folks need to listen to your work.
Reblogged this on johncoyote and commented:
Please listen to the verbal poetry of a talented writer.
Outstanding work dear Allison. I will return tonight and listen to them all. I love your work and I hope you are doing well and having some fun.
Thank you John!
You are welcome dear Allison.
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Wonderful sadness that ends with the power of the mind that can free us from reality of now.
Thank you!
You are welcome. As a fellow poet I enjoy reading and being inspired by others.
Lovely poem Allison.
I am listening now. A amazing verbal poem dear Allison.
Hello dear Allison. I am listen to your poetry on YouTube. Thank you for what you do.
A beautiful piece. God is always here, we need to pay more attention. Open our awareness. Thanks for sharing.
Yes! And thank you for reading and commenting.
Absolutely, have read a number of your scribes.
Amazing verbal poetry dear Allison.
I am listening now dear Allison.
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Through the mending of brokenness, the embrace of vulnerability, and the recognition of divine presence, we find solace and meaning in the simplicity of life’s quiet moments.
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Well thought out poem. Well done. I love the first stanza.😊
<3
How beautiful
Wonderful ♥️