Platinum, Wishing Well, Love's Instinct

Platinum

Alchemical flask contains our daily lives:

grace, beauty, drudgery,

unsatisfactory relationships, and also,

secreted within the familiar, a catalyst.

Under its extraordinary action,

the opposites may be reconciled.

 

When its presence activates,

flames of aspiration leap, and answering

fire-birds descend, and where they meet

a burning bush sweats perfume,

unconsumed

while transforming in love’s heat.

 

Having completed its task, catalyst

de-activates. From emptiness to fullness

it blew like wind, now slumbering again

in beds of ash and immortality.

 

 

 

Wishing well

Light in grotto’s pool,

under the bank,

under the wishing tree,

shimmers as we offer coins

to gilded Mary and a few

plastic angels

amongst the ferns.

 

Grotto inclines

attentive ears when

we say, “Thank you”,

twinkles

as travellers do

when meeting on

the homeward track.

 

 

Love’s Instinct

No longer buckling with chattels on back,

into death’s kingdom on straight track, where

lust engulfs in self forgetting, where

there is no room for regretting, no turning back,

we follow our natures to the core, losing

all we had identified ourselves by, whether

unruly heap, acceptable pile, or careful stack.

 

Within these depths which some may feel

as isolation in vastness, the sun of incarnation

is streaming. Within this mortal crack

in immortality, experiencing death is how

we heal. Dark oblivion and sexual joy are both

our Fool’s inheritance, we have them in our sack

at orgasm’s edge where fluxes of time congeal.

 

By Misha Norland