can you describe this beautiful photo taken by (c)Ankh Spice better than Ankh?
“a thousand miles of grey wind-calved mountains on a veil-world, material for a sorcerer’s armour, fallen bits of storm-sky, shoals of glass sharks” -Ankh Spice
” a seascape – choppy, restless pewter sea in endless unbroken waterpeaks. Long dark hills brood sleeping-dragonry alon gthe horizon, a split of orange dawn/dusk firing down the spine. The rest of the sky is exhaled smoke, beginning to tint around the ember” – Ankh Spice
At journey’s end by staci-lee sherwood
What lies beneath the sea
Hidden from our eyes
Secrets the ocean keeps
Only sharing
With a few
Do the mermaids sing softly
As whales swim by
Wrapped in a watery blanket
Made of ocean tears
Waves crash against rocks
Holding back the tide
When it becomes too fierce
As cool mist
Calms the night
As the sun begins to set
Getting ready for its slumber
All the world’s creatures
Begin to settle in
A mystery awaits
In a far away place
For each to unravel
As we chart our own course
Of self determined destiny
Shall we rush to the land
Or linger in the sea
Time is a precious gift
We unwrap
With every sunrise
The dawning of a new day
Beckons us to explore
A new era
And new wisdom
As we set our own course
Immersive from Lisa Falshaw
Stand. Still.
Look out over silken-grey, sea-tumbled bed, hiding
love-depths smoothed and honed
like hand on skin, gentle lapping water,
salt-taste bites granular on lips edged with kisses.
Mountains rise, sky-tipped,
rugged contours flow back to water,
settling to razor-sharp edge,
slices soft-dipped embrace.
Sinking sun hangs low, suspended
over dark-hushed land,
dips gold to treasure of love,
flashes hot sky under foaming clouds,
sets fire to what lies beyond ink shadows,
promises and disappointments
in glowing embers of a dying fire.
Stay here, immerse yourself, my love.
(twitter: @LisaFal)
Water by Bailey Gee
I sit in silence
Looking at the water
The waves ripple
As they greet me at my feet
Calming
Soothing
For one moment
My mind is blank
I feel relaxed
Waves
Are a magical thing
Natures cure
So much depends by Helena McCanney
on gravity.
This thing we cannot see
feel or lick that lurks
every place among
and between each object,
but never shirks its duties,
tugging us towards
each other and bonding us
steadfast to the ground.
So much depends on gravity
setting the planets
on track around the sun,
our homestar.
This celestial roulette wheel
that never loses momentum
keeping the moon in unbroken
perambulation around the Earth.
So much more depends on gravity,
And with the pull of the moon,
the tide lumbers in
and out.
skald by Debbie Strange
this is the way
it comes for you
in the end
a valkyrie sun astride
the mountain's obsidian back
mercury swans and planets
laying claim to the words
of your bioluminescent suffering
(twitter: @debbiestrange)
Upon these waves by Alex Irwin (the ulsterpoet)
Upon these waves
I rest my day,
o'er gilded light
and dwindleday.
And as I dwell
I hear them say,
I wash, I wash,
I wash away
Ampersand by Larissa Reid(In memoriam from the gannet colony of the Bass Rock, Scotland, 2022)
Gannet banks, copper light infusing wing tips,
Crisp white arc against a split wide sky
Stitching elegance from elements.
Gannet arrows through metal shell of sea
Folded origami meets slim sleek shoal;
An ampersand scatter of mackerel.
Gannet pulls up and out of water’s density,
To soak in laced air,
The sea oscillates in her wake.
(Twitter: @Ammonites_Stars)
Untitled piece by Sidney Mansueto
A thousand roaring waves roll into
A void of deep passion with no voice
To be heard and seen, hiding with fear.
Fear drowns the voice, lessening its truth
Making waves in the name of fictional stories
That make the real story lifeless.
Something as beautiful as an ocean
Is shaking with thunder, a storm to erupt
Yet nothing can stand still,
only can be if it chooses to stand against fear.
Links:
Poetry based on photography Challenge from Ankh Spice pt. 1Poetry from Ankh Spice : Reclaiming the birdboyHoliday Interlude by Ankh Spice from Avalanches in Poetry Writings & Art Inspired by Leonard Cohen5 Poems by Ankh Spice : That which can be made visible, Hold the river, Feeding the koi, Act like you were never for sale, & Hathor’s giftA Quicksilver Trilling by David L O’Nan : Poetry & Writing style lyrics inspired by DylanPoem by David L O’Nan Writing Suicide Notes in the BluebirdPoems by Peach Delphine: Every Cloud Has Life of Its Own & Speaking of Home, Beyond the Wind, Flat
can you describe this beautiful photo taken by (c)Ankh Spice better than Ankh?
“a thousand miles of grey wind-calved mountains on a veil-world, material for a sorcerer’s armour, fallen bits of storm-sky, shoals of glass sharks” -Ankh Spice
” a seascape – choppy, restless pewter sea in endless unbroken waterpeaks. Long dark hills brood sleeping-dragonry alon gthe horizon, a split of orange dawn/dusk firing down the spine. The rest of the sky is exhaled smoke, beginning to tint around the ember” – Ankh Spice
Waveforms by Lesley Curwen
wavelets / chins tipped / hold sun’s embrace
squirrel grey in livid rays/ their ranks of open lips
mouth sweetness/ at the eye of dusk
no swimmers here/ to rip their harlequin silk
to shreds/ of light
ashore/ sole-prints are shadowed/ by day’s ebbing
gold/ to be immersed in crosshatched expanse
of tide/ whose basketwork
convexities/ suck land’s mauve loom
below/ a quilt of cumulus
a haiga description from Mo Schoenfeld
light slips, struggling,
night laps at the mountain top,
darker depths settle.
I framed a portrait for an absentee by Sam Hickford
Here is a cranny for you to seize, my love,
among the volcanic strait of smoke-stung cloud..
will you take it, as the wagtail claps
this wreath of Autumn, makes this land its vow?
As each trilled wavelet furnishes a mountain
for a chalk-board dreadnought to a droughtless word,
come. I watch the ocean’s opiate
break mirrors in the champion of its lens
and picture you cradled in these hues
of fire and lazuli and scarlet shards.
Shores of Safe Distance by Robin McNamara
When we divide our words between
a stanza with image-filled meanings
and one with an abstraction of reality
not easily deciphered/
do we need anything more than the
acceptance of our verses read by the judgmental or do we find our oars and paddle out a bit further; into deep waters
of thoughts, without a compass.
With only the stars to navigate a way
to your account of my words.
What if I drowned, what if the storms of uncertainty was too much,
what would
wash up upon the shores?
A body of work beautifully polished by the waves or a piece of driftwood?
Would you tread water to find our existence, or would the stones under your feet compel you to go back and stare at the ocean from
a distance and say; maybe another time.That's All Folks by Elizabeth Cusack
The sky is burning—
It’s not exactly news—
It’s been this way since I was born.
There was an egg before akasha,
If you care about language,
And there was the ein sof,
If you care to read that tongue,
And there was an egg before the chicken—
This is very hard to grasp,
It has ruined paradise,
This inability to understand,
The great unknown was once one,
And all multiplicities someday will blow apart.
A prophet comes along once in a while
And says, this is what it’s all about— all is one,
Call it love or whatever makes you smile,
But the fact is we are killing every one,
And as we come and go,
And as we kill our mother,
And read our revelations,
The steel-grey cable under the sea
Is recording every absurdity,
And as we remember the essential dead poets—
Remember what, exactly?
That everybody who ever lived is now here!
James Joyce got it in the Wake,
And they mocked him
As they do every damned prophet—
All the condemned are on this ride
As we read up on Aleister Crowley,
As we are on this burning earth,
As we read revelations from the dead
And martyred who died for clarity—
And don’t forget Stalin, Mao, and old Paul—
And as we drink the soma and submit when we are called,
We remember the ones who saved our lives—
Thank you to the poets, that we have a mind at all!
That is the final thing they will try to take from us all.
STRUGGLING by Spriha Kant
Kaleidoscopic dreams
float like amorphous clouds
and the hopes shine like the sun
in her psyche.
Stuck amidst
the turbulent eddies
trying to drown her
in the stygian abyss
she keeps the
waves of her
mind, heart, and actions
synchronously tranquil
for she is as vulnerable as a fire in the water
who can’t dare to rebel against her inner voice
ordering her to achieve something that will
raise the eyebrows and open the mouth wide
of the pessimistic commentators.
Links to some work of a few of the poets:
*From the Fevers of the Mind Press Presents the Poets of 2020*
All of the poems that follow first appeared in their original, unedited forms on the WombwellRainbow blog. Thank you to Paul Brookes for curating with such care, and the artists (MaryFrances Ness, James Knight, and Sue Harpham) who provided images for the month-long ekphrastic challenge which inspired them
Sun’s first sleep-breath sweets the dropped shoulder
of Te Puia o Whakaari, her bones in early mistlight all grace
and delicate pickings, gulled clavicles of a hard dancer, stilled
Coiled tension is resting. It is hard to recognise a haunting
in the rose-gilt of a sunrise. Do you know her name, when you recognised it
did you forget to exhale? Release your living now to cloud
the pane we do not see – deep scratches creep across this vision.
The guardians are always here to remind you – this light, it may change any moment.
*(In memory of those lost in the eruption of Whakaari on 9 December 2019. One translation of the te reo Māori name of this volcano forms the title of this poem)
Hold the river
You told me you haven’t been outside in 57 days and tonight the river is a dropped ribbon, limp and lost and the sharp stones of the trail as I begin to run become the sound of something chewing. The faster we go, the faster we’re eaten. You are moving, in the lines of your confinement, so slowly now you’ve become a painting in my head – static – existing never to be touched. And in the guilty, lucky air down here we’re starting up the engines and on my knees in the soft mud I can hear the first plane for months, idling beyond the water. I’d wish you were here, but the wind is whipping up cold, and the coming dark is frantic with sudden birds, woken startled from their neat new nests along the runway.
Feeding the koi
You save the crusts from the good brown loaf, not truly stale, but tired. On your early walk
through the city gardens, there is a patient round mirror to crumble them into, and in it an unfamiliar creature,
folded and loose in his aspect. He watches you from the water. You have never met his eyes, although you sense they are kind.
This morning, autumn has nodded last orders at the trees and the ember of the squalling sun catches
a plume at his throat, and his blur blushes bright — young with reborn flame. In the dry world the wind arrives
to spread the blaze outwards in ripples from the man standing, the man lying, with his hands full
of burning bread, and when the fish surface their mouths make round holes in his body.
In one tiny circle after another the fire goes out. Cool water — O O O —
welling dark and smooth from the gut. It was always the truth.
What feeds on us that steals our fire. What we feed to remember what we are.
Act like you were never for sale
On those days we were flutter and varnish. Time blown on the tradewinds — toys for the updraft, downdraft, too hard
and brittle-bright for any landing but the spurt and gasp of applause. And on those days we painted the unspeakable
feelings, the ones that never made it into the script, on hot ripe faces with palmed-
palm-sugar and unguent-of-anthers, and on those days those same faces slipslid their gaudied eyes and touched their cheeks
together intimately, brief and baked electric with proper unsaids, and on and on arced those spat-out days when the electric that moved us
moved us wet with big colour in that little pond of footlights all thrashing pick me from the swirl of young eels, him so slender, her good
bright needle-teeth, and on those days company meant only that we played together well, that even the most badly bitten didn’t drop
a word or miss a step, or when they did the faces they’d loved-by-painting bled laughter tainted kindly, and not yet like they smelled a life dripping away
into the water or as if they’d finally bumped against the glass, seen the strings of our dangling tags, and some of that last part
is a lie. But who doesn’t want to lie just as pretty as something made to end up in a prettier box, for now
sticky with the ghosts of fertile anthers, and so we bite into recall again and again, this cake now invisible on the pink plastic
saucer so sweet, so sweet and fallen to bits in the grass. And these days we know the magic
poured out of that flimsy doll’s teapot’s more real than you’ve been in your life. Don’t ever act
like it didn’t — like it doesn’t — make you sick.
Hathor’s gift
Last night you called me from the bottom of a well and I pictured the signal between us as a rope ladder woven from a bunch of old strings attached. A bit frayed, this connection, and this wry analogy, but both holding together just enough for you to see the ladder a little bit more clearly than you were seeing the rope. And I don’t care if we’ve not spoken since before the world cracked its lid, I’m just grateful I still look like some kind of stick when the alligators find the ass. Often it’s hard to respect the tree in someone who’s fallen in an indifferent swamp, over and over, they think that makes you soft wood. But it was you who told me Hathor kicked out the crocodile god even though she was at least partly a cow. I bet they underestimated just how fierce a prey animal waxes when her herd is in the dark and feeling the closing teeth. I bet they underestimated her even after she teamed up with the sun itself and gored the darkness threatening her loved ones on the tips of her kind, soft horns. Stabbed it until it was striped with secondhand light, then drowned it in her milk of most inhuman kindness.
Ankh Spice is a queer-identified, sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (New Zealand). Almost 100 of his poems have been published internationally, online and in printed anthologies, over the last 18 months. He’s been incredibly grateful and a bit astounded to have four poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and two for Best of the Net. His poem ‘New Cloth’ was selected as a winner of the World View 2020 competition run by the Poetry Archive, and he’s really delighted that the video recording of him reading this work now appears in the archive in perpetuity, along with readings from other winners from all over the globe. He’s also very proud that audio recordings of his work are held in the first wave of Iambapoet, an audio archive of poets reading their own work, created and curated by Mark Antony Owen. It’s been a very busy year — Ankh accepted roles as a Poetry Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine, and as co-editor at Ice Floe Press. He was also a guest reader/editor on EIC Matthew M.C. Smith’s team for Black Bough Poetry’s Amazon best-seller, ‘Deep Time’ — two volumes of poetry from hundreds of poets inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Underland’, and was part of the early editing team for ‘Black Dogs, Black Tales’, a horror anthology produced in Aotearoa by EIC T Wood, to raise money for a local mental health charity. He’s also found time to edit innumerable stories for popular dark-fantasy author C.M. Scandreth (aka his incredibly talented author spouse, Caitlin Spice) for the NoSleep Podcast, and is grateful to have appeared (in virtual guise) as headline poet at two sold-out sessions of Cheltenham Poetry Festival. At the time of writing this, Ankh is also working on several collections of his own poems. One of these is a collection of his shorter ekphrastic and vividly imagistic work and photography — Ankh calls these ‘gift poems’ as most of them are uploaded to social media rather than being held for traditional publication — that’s been picked up by a small indie press as a two-volume deal for print. Further details will be released in early 2021. He’s also working on a very short volume of poems for Hedgehog Press’s ‘Stickleback’ series. His larger collection, which was picked up by an independent press earlier in 2020, but which he withdrew when behaviour damaging to the poetry community by person/s working for that press was uncovered, is being reworked for re-submission elsewhere. He very much hopes that 2021 will be the year for this book to make its way into the world. Ankh’s poetry explores a wide range of themes close to his heart – environmental/climate change, mental health, identity, queerness, body politics, mythology, natural science, spirituality, ‘the persistent briefness of being human’, the landscape and environs of Aotearoa and of course, the ocean. His poetic lens, which often employs strong derealisation and very flexible language that purposely opens up multiple interpretations, has been described as oracular, reverent, and visionary, and his poetry has been most often compared to G.M Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. Ankh’s favourite recent compliment about his work is that it feels like walking a tightrope over the abyss between two worlds — being forced to look down into the dark but with an awareness that balance is possible, and that there’s a new place on the other side, beckoning us on. Ankh’s favourite recent compliment about himself is that he’s a walking Mary Ruefle poem. (With great thanks to Sarah-Jane Crowson and Julia Beach). If he’s not out running the coast of Te Whanganui-a-Tara sporting alarming neon and sparkly cat ears, you’ll find him and his work at: Twitter: @SeaGoatScreamsPoetry Facebook: @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry Linktree: https://linktr.ee/SeaGoatScreamsPoetry Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-448322296 Iambapoet: https://www.iambapoet.com/ankh-spice Poetry Archive: https://poetryarchive.org/poem/wordview-2020-new-cloth/
Fevers of the Mind 