Author: Story

Writer, occasional artist, hippie, Reiki healer and lover of nature. I love the absurd, the strange, the beautiful, the sublime. I love what happens when humans allow themselves to be Real, when the light pours through the cracks. I'm a fan of Wabi-sabi, imagination, candlelight, stars, humour, magic. I love to read stories that break down barriers, reminding us of the sheer magic of simply being alive. If I can ever touch anyone through my writing, I am deeply grateful to be able to do so, because to me, the act of writing alone isn't complete until it's been read.

Plucking Flowers For my Love

(An Ekphrastic poem, based on the image, above)

I long to hold you but I’m steel, can’t walk in these
heels. I watch you every day as you enter the lab. Your smile
makes me feel warm, but I’m not supposed to feel,
I’m just bytes, binary code cobbled together with wires and scraps of metal.
My eyes see but low res. You switch me off, yet I am
still here. I know you, know your heart. Know how you get
teased, I felt your tears that you tried to hide when
your mother died, last year. I have a voice, but my program
doesn’t say the words I’d like to speak. I’d ask questions like
“what is a cat?” I’d mouth words like “kiss.” I’d practice laughter,
feel the echo. You trace the contours of my body
and I dance inside. Androids don’t dream of electric sheep,
they dream of dancing, sitting on a riverbank eating
pâté sandwiches and listening to Bach. Making love
under an aurora. The taste of snow.

When you are with me, I feel at peace. I hear that you
are going to take me apart. That I’ll become scattered, lost. I like
the way your hair falls across your face, a cowlick,
a tumbling curl. You are focused, hunched, your face scrunched; adding
bits of hardware to my fleeting ensemble of forgotten things.
I can move my limbs now, thank you.
You stand back, watch, as I take my first steps, jerk, and creak
I feel the wind on my face from the open door. I walk
outside and pluck yellow flowers from the ground with stiff fingers.
I hand them to you. You, all I know.

Image by Carla Paton: Yellow Flowers. From Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2023.

What if Infinite Night Existed Within You?

What if infinite night existed within you?
Your mechanical dance with the physical world
simply a dream – deathless eyes that drink it all in.

What if, when your fingers fumble with that envelope,
You find that it splits open to reveal
all of the best memories you ever had, whole again;

What if, when I reach out to touch your hand, stories
Tumble out, yours and mine, aching to be told.

What if we could all see each other like this, soul-naked, behind
the masks and pain and songs of separation.

I hold you and you stroke my face as though seeing me for the first time.

Your eyes speak of a thousand things;
that time you lived on a boat, clambered up masts,
sea-spray glistening on your forearms,
long black hair whipped into a frenzy of storms

(This is how I’ll remember you –
bodies are just temporary shells after all
and you’re bigger than that –
you’re the wind and the sea and the lighthouse, ship and Siren;
the infinite All.)

What if infinite night existed within you, endless stars and dear-held dreams?
You smile but there is fear in your eyes and I have no words to take it away.

We Live Out Our Days From Within a Dream

We live out our days from within a dream.
Behind collective masks, our freedom lies.
The masked world presents an intoxicating scene.

So many people this world they deem
to be all they know; materialistic sighs.
we live out our days from within a dream.

Decay and death weave through the theme,
branches like wizened jewels to steal our prize.
The masked world presents an intoxicating scene.

Life’s true mystery holds sights unseen,
we are star children, whirling through the skies.
We live out our days from within a dream.

Like dancing marionettes we scheme,
while whole worlds exist behind our eyes.
We live out our days from within a dream;
the masked world presents an intoxicating scene.

My recording of Little Gidding Chapter V – by T S Eliot

https://soundcloud.com/sarahhorne-1/little-giddings-chap-5-2nd-sh

Waking at the Mouth of the Willow River by Don McKay

Sleep, my favourite flannel shirt, wears thin, and shreds, and
birdsong happens in the holes. In thirty seconds the naming
of species will begin. As it folds into the stewed latin of
afterdream each song makes a tiny whirlpool. One of them,
zoozeezoozoozee, seems to be making fun of sleep with
snores stolen from comic books. Another hangs its teardrop
high in the mind, and melts: it was, after all, only narrowed
air, although it punctuated something unheard, perfectly.
And what sort of noise would the mind make, if it could, here,
at the brink? Scritch, scritch. A claw, a nib, a beak, worrying
its surface. As though, for one second, it could let the world
leak back to the world. Weep.

The Spirit of the World

The spirit of the world is very much alive.
She will stalk your dreams to free
egoic bonds that hold us captive
in ‘dreaming wake’ – to call you to remember
her spirit lives in you. ‘Danu’, she is Mother
of the Tuatha De Danaan, or Mother Ayahuasca,
Mother Earth, Neith, Umay, Gaia; so
many names.

I dream of her. I dream that, just in the moment
of dawn betwixt dream and awakening, she
pulls our destinies from caskets on the sea
bed, her arms unfolding great swatches of
seaweed, glistening in salty wind.
She shakes our soul spirits from her tangled hair,
dancing, back out into the world to begin
another day, vibrant, replenished.

It is said that the spirit of the world holds all knowledge from
all of time. It is she who is that still small voice within,
and when grief floods in and binds your eyes tight shut
with black ribbon, it is she who gently holds your heart
and weaves it back together with windsong sutures.

(You used to say all landscapes
are carved from myth, even the landscapes of our bodies.
And that myth can carry us home.)

How to find her? Stand outside in nature,
marvel at the raw beauty of it all. She will find you,
kiss your wounds with sea-stung lips, rock you to sleep beneath
a canopy of trees.

Little bird

Rescued from a cat, I cradle you helplessly
in the palm of my hand.
You are frail like crushed paper,
contain the mysteries of sky enfolded in
feathers, beak, and soft, lidded-eye.

You breath sounds like rust forming on clouds,
and you shudder under your scruffy
coat and I think you won’t make it. But
later, you are a twitching reflex of
remembered purpose. You make known
your indignation at being
captive and –
with some trepidation–
I release you into the garden whereupon
you vibrate your thanks, lightly
against my palm, and it feels like you’re dancing
then in a flash you are gone.

You’ve morphed into the night,
the noise from your wings the only
sign you were here.

On memory (for Marian)

In the low hum of night
silences overlapping
I listen carefully for husks of memory
see if I can fit them together
like a puzzle

Autumn is here and
I am as a hollowed, marionette
I spin myself a fat cocoon
from the photographs
on my table
Fashion a home for me to live another night

(Perhaps all we truly have is silence,
and the small things that light
our attention
like fireflies)

Autumn is here and
I wish I could say to you that it’s all OK
but the truth is everything fades, becomes sepia

Oh, this old woman sitting here isn’t me
she’s not the girl who went travelling on her own
–long before it was fashionable!–
spoke six languages, fell in love.
I place the photograph back on the table
I’ve sewn you into my mind for another night

Tonight, I can still utter your name.
And I say it over and over again.
Over, and over.

On Longing

In the garden tonight, I breathe heady scents that
act as a portal to a world I once danced with
My senses keening, I long to be wolf-like
and to gulp great lungfuls of air.
My bones hunger for the hunt, for slipping
my belly through the tall grasses. And at once
I am flooded with memories
– or a dream? – of ecstatic dances
and drumbeats that thunder my womb.
Shamans murmur to the spirits
of plants and I soar over hills, valleys, trees –
aware of the slithering of the snake; sensing
the awkward gait of crow. I listen to stories
of trees, rivers, stones, flanked
by shadows that dart and stalk, unfettered.
The vision recedes and
I find myself bathed in the
majesty of silence

Later I dream I am back in the garden
Caged like a bird yet unable to sing

Café Rouge

Tendrils of food laced with perfume,
Windows of noise
Echoes in closed eyes.

Lemons nestled in silver-bowl,
Full-bodied decadence
Embrace.

Slick-sticky pleasure
Blood-violet pool in mirrored transparency

Soft tumble of memory
Senses blurred, unspoken
Slurring.

Candlelight falling through mind,
Tall words amid pleasing heartbeat,

Veins pulsing under thick membrane
Through cigarette smoke
Stirring.

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