Blued Light Stephen Symons
Blued Light Stephen Symons
always for Jules ““Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying, everything is absorbed through weather and the sea, and the moon swam back, its rays all silvered, and time and again the darkness would be broken by the crash of a wave, and every day on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning.” Pablo Neruda
This chapbook includes a selection of poetry written between December 2011 and June 2013. The poems contained in this chap book may not by way of trade or otherwise, be sold, resold, hired out, copied, reproduced, posted on the Internet or otherwise without the author’s prior consent in any form. Copyright © Stephen Symons 2013 Please email Stephen Symons at stephensymons@gmail.com for further information
Blued Light Stephen Symons
CONTENTS Birth of a Daughter page 2 Rain song 3 Camps Bay 4 Machines for Living 5 Unicorn 6 Tinnitus 7 Elands Bay 8 Black ice 9 Glass 10 Breathing 11 Spring 12 Kromrivier, Cederberg 13 Death of a Surfer 14 South Easter 15
Birth of a Daughter You made your arrival with a beautiful noise much blood and a surgeon’s smile a sudden ceremonious cut frozen in pixels and the fragility of wailing crystal that demanded unassailable walls vicious ramparts and a moat of crocodiles from your ambushed father, My daughter, you were far more than beautiful with your dimples threads of hair and fingernails of silk, Now swaddled a wrinkled grub looking for milk you latched and found the heartbeat of your mother’s smile effortlessly closed your eyes and swam back to heaven with a new taste in your mouth, As all parents do, or perhaps not do I thought of you as an old woman bent with age and then I wept of how life is but an inevitable necklace of tears, happiness and love. [2] Stephen Symons © 2013
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Rain song You step over the notes as they settle on the beach they find your hips and the flowers of your dress Your hand is all I have And all I want are the details of your fingers within mine the folds of flesh the scars tanlines grazes the inaudible whispers of pain on your skin, This intimacy of joints is perhaps all we’ll ever have as the tide gathers up our footprints and the rain sweeps that song towards us.
[3] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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Camps Bay Within the city a fist of heat is already beating the beginnings of day out of metal and mind, Yet on summiting the Nek there’s that horse-shoe of coast below cooled by distance and the blued absence of sun, Driving past roofs and curtained windows weeping the breath of sleep and kettles, Switchbacking down into the sea’s voice so close you can hear the drawing up of its secret lists watching each liquid syllable threading the misted light to morning, Then the school bell rings and the children rush the gate.
[4] Stephen Symons © 2013
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Machines for living An engine partly of the mind but mainly of glass brick and sound That carries the echoes of heels the double whipcrack of thin doors and mumbling keys, Constantly fed by lifts juddering in steel grey coats jammed with visits defeat and journeys up or down each to their daily birth or death.
“Une maison est une machine-à-habiter.” (A house is a machine for living in.) - Le Corbusier (Modernist architect)
[5] Stephen Symons © 2013
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Unicorn By midday she is bloated and stiff limbed weightless, pregnant with gas like a grey balloon moored to the veld, At the base are hack and saw-lines and the smell of burnt blooded bone evidence of a bleeding out into the stars, As with the felling of an ancient forest silence grows from the stump soon there will just be imaginings and the sad libraries of remembering, For this hornless one the thief has left a softness in the eyes two gentle opals for the vultures and nothing else just the black grass broken at the root.
The number of rhino poached within South Africa since the beginning of the year reached 367 by the end of May 2013. There are less than 15 000 rhinos left in Africa. [6] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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Tinnitus Before sleep with most parts of the day folded away the present steps inside him, What he hears is the singing of a needle that rises and then fades to the sound of clouds brushing against darkness, He closes his eyes and leaves the night shapes of stools and mirrors for the black felt beneath his eyelids, And stands there in the thick ink of the blind at the edges of an ocean robbed of his feet feeling the first breaths of a dream lifting off the sea.
Tinnitus - a buzzing, ringing, or whistling sound in one or both ears occurring without an external stimulus.
[7] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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Elands Bay An introvert by nature the beach demands distance preferring the aloneness of sky and the lifeless beginnings of land, Here, the elements suck colour from each sunrise and sunset, and spread it over the wind-raked shoreline strewn with its tidal slicks of feathers foam and strandings mostly dead and picked at, Footprints from the high water mark life is twisted to a kelp horn shattered to shell middens and then atomised so it can fill follicles and mat hair into arguments of salted talcum, Along the point where stone turns to surf kelp burnishs the swells to oil that push against the land eroding our presence,
[8] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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An introvert by nature the beach demands closeness this is why the ocean trawls sound from the land giving it to the surf, gulls and wind pouring the left-overs into shells and our ears.
Elands Bay is a West Coast town located about 200km north of Cape Town. It is a world-renowned left point surf spot.
Black ice Above the dermis overhead now more ash than cobalt something exists though purged of oxygen it’s clearly there and beyond calculation or the concept of God, The stars sing of this across a sky of black ice smooth as Coltrane from a window in long gone shivering notes of light.
[9] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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Glass Sometimes he lets himself wear the fragrance of her on some obscurity of his body like the back of his hand or the fold of his elbow, He lifts those parts of himself to his nose, Smiles, And lets her slip across a memory at the back of his mind like a blue window allows clouds to skate over glass reflecting the far off altitudes of a country he once knew.
[10] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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Breathing There are high winds within tonight lifting gravity by the clavicle twisting tendons from cartilage, Tripping alarms, Forget any corpuscular silence the heart is a ticking muscle inside this cage of bones where love’s calligraphy is practiced, Each breath that is drawn from the mouth is a magician’s cloth woven from the present and the past unravelling into the future soaring the thermals of sleep upwards over this land and its ache to dawn.
[11] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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Spring Crystal shards of backlight turn leaves to lemon embers that pulse in a breeze colouring morning in fresh warmth, Light is deconstructed to the molecular and colour is drawn towards birdsong, This is Spring still damp at the corners with Winter the air-cold fabric hung out to dry Against hues that build to cloud and gale and eventually Summer.
[12] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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Kromrivier, Cederberg Here in the squinting light hammered into heat the leaves applaud in a rising breeze scrubbing the silence stirring the dam from oiled stillness, Sunset oxides fixed to green and ochre brush the mountains mixed from an ancient palette of valley and scree, Pigments fused to sandstone vaults shift with the sun, colouring the dust washing the corrugations of jeep tracks with crushed shadows of pink and orange, Then more dust, a floured film running over rock, water, fynbos and flesh. Slowly colour becomes time - stone red tinting each surface with the dynasties of far-off light.
Kromrivier, Cederberg - A river that flows from the Cederberg mountain range located approximately 300 km north of Cape Town.
[13] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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Death of a Surfer Death came in a whorl of azure and white decades from that threadbare armchair odd socks and fireless eyes at the close of day, It slid through the blue a scarred slab of cartilage a slash of barbed wire and muscled sandpaper against sea-soft skin neoprened and tan lined It took him for no reason other than he was home happiest in the cool blue heaving, Now shut tight the beach is scoured there’s just the sad glide of gulls and feathers against a slurried scape, Every atom mourns dark and fathomless as the waves.
Camps Bay bodyboarder David Lilienfeld was attacked by a Great White Shark while surfing Kogel Bay on the 19th of April 2012. He died on the scene.
[14] Stephen Symons Š 2013
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South Easter In this wind the city is lost at sea mad as a hatter it loosens the bolts of the bay and quilts the mountain in a charge of cumulus, In this wind all comes from the sea curtains of salt seek out the cleanest windows and ribbons of flotsam form beachheads in watercoloured coves, In this wind the sea is welded to days on end in a dazed palette of white noise roads swim beneath drifts of sand like whales and leaves are summoned to pile up in suburban corners, In this wind nature unbuckles rage mugging the dreams of babies with rattling gutters and rapping fruit as sleep corrodes like a nail, In this wind the city burns, flames ambush vynbos in a haze of apricot and Armageddon, parents stir, lovers pause and the city coughs beneath the slap of helicopter blades. The “Cape Doctor” or south-easter can reach speeds of over 100 kph during the summer months in Cape Town. [15] Stephen Symons © 2013
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Blued Light Stephen Symons
This chapbook includes a selection of poetry written between December 2011 and June 2013. The poems contained in this chap book may not by way of trade or otherwise, be sold, resold, hired out, copied, reproduced, posted on the Internet or otherwise without the author’s prior consent in any form. Copyright Š Stephen Symons 2013 Please email Stephen Symons at stephensymons@gmail.com for further information