What’s going on in a chameleon’s mind as it changes colour to blend in with its environment on a saturday night? This poem spectacularly speculates!
I like these colours
but they don’t match
mix my pigments
colour clashes suit me
I love my privacy
Marc Latham’s poetry collection, which has a majority of Folding Mirror poems in it, is now available for kindle on the Amazon bookshop.
It’s another mirrored space poem today, along with a bit of mind travel, and the event horizon providing the fold. Cheers.
Event Horizon
Flying free, spinning wild,
All of space, forever time,
Planets to visit, birth clouds to see
Nothing to restrict, restrain me
What’s that pull, sucking force
Taking me miles, way off course
Big circular jaws, open mouth
a basking shark in the universal ocean
Event Horizon, no escape now
An insect caught in Venus fly trap
Space ship and Black Hole
Into the dark, losing my light
What’s that glimmer, honey kite
The greatest journey, beyond none
Hidden from mind’s eye, realms of imagination
Forever space, all of time
Ending search, relaxing head.
The European Space Agency (ESA) this week released an image they’d built up out of scans of the universe by the Planck telescope, which is situated a million miles from Earth on its ‘night side’.
Our Milky Way galaxy appears as a line in the middle of the image, and so that inspired the Folding Mirror poem below.
It mirrors with a words per line structure of:
4-3-6-5-6-9-9-12 (13) 12-9-9-6-5-6-3-4
orchid north pole of
cosmic microwave background
radiation. The oldest light of the
Universe; remnants of big bang:
a quite spectacular space travel sharabang.
Cool blue ocean web of new forming stars, contains
dust and gas creating pillars of nebulas, stretch thousands
of light years high through infinity time: birth without fears or tears.
Earth and Sun nestle within Milky Way main disc shining along the fold
we gaze unto deep sky space without seeing spirals within sky gold
protostars grown T Tauri, red giants flickering goodbye die
in cold streams of light, worlds born beyond sight.
Travelling thirteen billion years south time
just ride streams descending down
the beginnings of the life chime
resembling marigold pastures
on creation’s south pole
Marc Latham has proudly provided the foreword for the third in Wendy Webb’s epic Mermaid’s Tales series of narrative poetry books. The book also contains several poems from other poets featured on this site, including Caroline Gill, Claire Knight and a palindrome by Norman Bissett.
Parts of the series are also being serialised in the Tips for Writers and etips magazines, which have been very supportive of this site and provided a home for many Folding Mirror poems. Etips is sent once a month to those who sign up for it.
Details of all the above are available from the Norfolk Poets website.
Here is Marc Latham’s foreword:
The Mermaid’s Mother and Sycorax is the third instalment in Wendy Webb’s epic mermaid series. It was inspired by Shakespeare‘s Tempest, but those who know Wendy‘s style will not be surprised to find themselves quickly transported into myth and the modern world from line to line.
Examples of this include Miss Muffet finding herself brought out from nursery rhyme and into the stark reality of the modern world within a broken home family on social care. And the Lost Boys of Hollywood fiction fame is later connected to Shakespeare‘s Sycorax through memory.
Apart from the clever connections and switches between time and space, and myth and reality there are also many lines that please just through their deliciousness. An early example of this appears in the third quatrain:
‘…Walk through
a valley‘s tears to reap a sickle moon
of cannibals and moon-calves fate has spooned.‘
For the reader, Mermaid’s Mother and Sycorax therefore combines the pleasures of a wondrous narrative with a tough mental workout, inspiring the reader to re-read the text and research all the ingredients scattered throughout the fifty-nine quatrains. I soon found myself looking up the story of The Tempest, and the Mermaid played a part in the birth of two poems. With uncanny timing, the new Pendulum album, Immersion, has a cover with a scene that could have been on the front of one of the Mermaid poems.
This poem is another example of quality thought provoking work by a poet who has shown her phenomenal productivity coupled with a wealth of knowledge to bring together so many poems and publications over the years. Several poems by other skilful poets after Wendy‘s work are the icing on the cake.
mistYmuse 