The Flicker
Listen Here
Like a flash of lightning between the clouds, we live in the flicker.
May it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!
But darkness was here yesterday.Joseph Conrad
The Flicker
The hammer has laid down
into the gauntlet of a stammering light.
Morning flickers like a candle.
Sneezing in the day
like the hair of the dog that bit me.
I can see my breath in the mist
of the old stories - left over
from the night before. Language
licks the batter off the beater
caught between the wine of years
nosing into a tantric taste of resurrection
blended by time.
The worn clothes have been washed
to hang and dry.
Waking naked undisguised.
Which way will the wind blow
as the world decides what it wants to be?
What will be the last word I remember?
What will be the first word I forget?
© Jamie MillardNights remember and days forget.
What do words do?
In that space between the no longer and the not yet.
Yesterday.
Dark gives way to the flicker of the light. The other senses give way to sight.
Are we here to remember? Are we here to forget?
Both look back at the past.
Can they live in the present?
Today.
What do we see and what do we know?
Our eyes can deceive us.
The flicker.
Experience and expression.
Are they echoes of the things yet to come?
Tomorrow.
Do the clothes I slip into every day remember me?
Is my own skin the real costume that I wear as I touch the world and the world rubs back?
Memory is elusive. Words are inadequate to capture it.
Is language halfway between remembering and forgetting?
In the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, night and day
what will the world remember about me?
What will it forget?
Thank you for Being-Here!
May you live into the questions.
May the change of season bring with it the change you are creating.
May your own words greet you as the writer of the story you are Here to Be.
Stay well and have the best of days.
Happy Full Worm Moon!
Lots of Love,
Jamie
Crikey Jamie, and Conrad. Good. You, we, might have been here before: the light flickered then, that time. Your words contemplate; poetry meditates time; darkness has the heart of the matter.
Off the top of my head response as usual.
NB The first good books I read were opening glimpses into Conrad and Austen found 'by accident' quite late on in the school library. Later... where was the heart in Edinburgh, the gun at noon, or London when the fog shroud came up the river, shipped on the tides, in the dark manifests?
I adore the choice of words you've made. This morning, I saw your poetry book around the house and found myself thinking about poetry letters. I would love to send out my newsletter by email and a shorter version on paper. I would also love to see your handwriting on those poems, so they can stay closer to me—to pin them up on a wall like a painting, because they are landscapes of your mind.
I adore everything about this post, and this part truly stayed with me:
"Memory is elusive. Words are inadequate to capture it.
Is language halfway between remembering and forgetting?"
And also:
"Dark gives way to the flicker of light. The other senses give way to sight.
Are we here to remember? Are we here to forget?
Both look back at the past."
Beautiful—just beautiful.
I wrote this in my journal for the full moon ritual. Thank you for your light; it is surely one to remember and to keep warm along the way in this short life of ours. I will hold it close.