The Bard's Call

Will the Bard, my mentor, sends this invite:
Awake, arise! 'tis midsummer night!


From day long sleep's stupor, I stutter my answer:
Er, What? Yes, no dream this! Wits to gather.


Eyes dazed by diurnal drudge's noonday sun,
Now open lids to welcome the night's moon.


Limbs, once yeomen to practical pursuits,
Grow supple, lithe: sprouts wings of thoughts.

Craving

No fakir he but who submits

to lie naked

on piercing bits

 

Sweet pleasures of neural itch

he surrenders

so love can reach

 

What Francis sought

upon the snow,

banking fire river's flow,

 

Spurning the gift

of vital glow,

 

To burn anew:

the divine to know

 

 

A Poem Speaks

(before your tutored eyes
by habit taught decode
this script so swiftly would)

Read me with your lips
as child's tongue licks syllables
to melt away into
its core of sense.

As written I am silent, history.
As spoken I happen, an event.

Whose words I am beg entry
thru your whorled gate, to be
the wind's song in chambers
of who sent me,

as echoes in your mind
of the geste.

An Impression

"On some spiritual quest, we often deny surfaces, decide they are something to move beyond, across, behind, a mask for a motive force. Yet they are our interface. We search endlessly behind things, as if that desire were all, to be sublimated. These are the spaces moved through by Willy Chica’s poetry. Each poem is a gentle fold, a reverential offering to the pyre of ‘becoming’.

In this digital world of poetry sharing, what is unseen is the corporeal self. These are poems of yearning, ambiguous, yet with constant reference to the absent body, the other, woven, “in loomlike bed/ inserting, in pulling/ inlaying, a crafting” Here is a face, a hand, a You, all this reverence, for what is unseen, all this self –unsettling, these strange coils of matter, we see briefly, through tiny word-like portals.

Unified interiors, infinite exteriors, this “Private Sea” the title, quoted from Thoreau, expansive and incomplete, is glimpsed in flashes which punctuate these precisely worded (inter)expressions.

Will’s poems are sensual, a strong chiaroscuro encounter with light and shadow, which shows where the body lays, where the experience is revealed and obscured. They resonate with an affection we cannot help but imagine into, reanimated by our own imaginations, by our own love."

Amanda Joy

I Chance Upon

 

I chance upon your book today
(which I sent for you to write on).
I open it, eager to read thereon
all that you truly want to say.

So pleased to find your pearls, my dear.
(precious, pure, and rare in afterglow)
They bring back those mornings we knew,
when love was fresh and so fair

In thrall I read on...
what is this?
(a pictured canoe almost sunk!)
Inserted love notes, candid frank;
gleeful messages and a kiss?

My heart stops.
Gasps.
Too shocked to see.
(not my island but nearer shore).
These letters are,
I am stabbed in core,
for that new other.
No, not for me

My world stands still now.
This moment
(in this unsaid, this unknowing)
freezes time and space, ravelling
past promise to predicament.

You must read this,
my dear heart's friend:
(from way way back, you say Grade Two?)

I writhe in pain as lovers do
I write of pain so heart can mend

This Poem Wasn't

This poem wasn't of woman born

from seed of stranger dumb
planted in my mind's womb

multiplying in gestate
in cauldron inchoate

seeking life force to feed
a cry of love and need

'twas but a tiny thread
woven in loomlike bed

inserting, in pulling
inlaying, a crafting

of fabric into quilt
in patterns of my kilt

Aspire

Who thought it first I do not seek
(some say 'twas probably a Greek);

Neither how nor why it came to be
the measure of things mind can't see,

The fabric without stitch nor seam,
nexus of the one, the only realm,

This house, this home in time and space
we dwell in now then relinquish

To who knows what we were begat
before we were when we were not

This body, this soul, this form and shape
(some say came from that ancient ape);

This mold of wax and wick on fire
burning abode of an aspire

To become that emerging thing
which was always that very being

Always is and always will be
Self of this world and self of me.