A poem from The Breathless Pause by Moyra Caldecott

The anniversary of a death

Trying to reconstruct a person
on the anniversary of his death
you must enter
the labyrinth of memory
with its twisting
and its turning,
its sudden shocks,
its false starts
and its blind alleys,
and its sudden revelations
of what you did not know you knew.

Someone emerges
from the shadows,
familiar,
yet unfamiliar…
substantial
yet unsubstantial.
Fading fast
leaving an ache behind…
and a question:
Did you ever really know him?

Moyra at St James Wine Vaults, Bath

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause:

While I was wasting the day

While I was wasting the day
the grass was growing,
daisies opening,
sunflowers
pushing up tall stems.

While I was wasting the day
the bee pushed its way
into a hundred foxgloves
and went home tired.

Now the light fades.
The rain wets my hair.
I smell honey suckle and musk rose
and take a deep breath
for tomorrow.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause:

The net of pearls

Reality is not a straight line
from past to future
through the present…
but a network
of inter connections
going every which way.
When we recognise
the nodes
sitting in a garden at dawn,
watching little finches,
or flowers opening,
a pearl is formed
and shines
even in the night
when we are lonely
and far from home.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause.

Leaving the pond
and the gentle water weeds
a swan rode the ocean.
At first,
because it was evening
and mirror still,
not knowing
the fathoms
of deep and restless currents
stirring beneath
its poised white weight,
it rested easily,
on smooth silver.

But then -
slowly -
it began to feel
the pull and tug of the tide,
the unfamiliar hidden strength
and secret power of the sea.
No longer resting,
it rode the water
like a challenge,
rejoiced to feel
the primal rhythm coursing
in its own small veins.

No longer satisfied
with pools
of still water,
the swan rode on,
and never left the sea.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause:

Dare Darkness Grab Us

Shivering on a very small earth,
the night sky
formidable
with stars,
we pull the comforting blanket
of our love
over us,
and,
curled together,
dare Darkness grab us
and Time scatter us.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The William Blake Birthday Book (ISBN 978-0956199904).

Revelation

The dangerous seeing eye
poised to strike at darkness.
No mild recognition,
but terror,
as meaning leaps to meaning,
like lightning on iron mountains.
Words split
in revelation.
The crust of long accustomed
shatters
and an unfamiliar landscape
is revealed.

Moyra Caldecott will be one of the featured poets on 30th October 2009 at St James Wine Vaults, 10 St James Street, Bath BA1 2TW.

“What a Performance” is an evening of poetry, story-telling, and music and songs. Please go along — the more the merrier.

Although Moyra will be attending, friends will be reading her poems as, due to a stroke, Moyra is unable to speak coherently.

On listening to a poet reading his own poem

Words spin and circle
like diamonds in a whirlpool.
I catch only some
and fill in the blanks
from my own source pool,
inventing my own poem
as the poet’s words
pass by.
A kingfisher’s wing
flashes in the sun
and dazzles me.
I pass out of understanding
into a region
of pure beauty
and coast in
on a different meaning.

A poem by Moyra Caldecott, from The Breathless Pause.

Sleeping
with the silver disk
of the full moon
on my forehead…
light shining
through the thick bone.
Watch how it glints
on mind mirrors,
Scatters shadows,
and seeks at last,
the tiny seed thought
that waits for birth.

Before I leave this section another thought has come to mind in connection with those fairy tales. I don’t understand Einstein’s theories but I have been told that he suggested that if you faster than the speed of light, time slows down, so you don’t age as fast as those you left behind on earth.

Now there is an important point I want to make, and perhaps I should have made it at the beginning of this talk instead of at the end.

When I was researching my Egyptian novels I came across the concepts of ‘Everlasting’ and ‘eternity’ set over against each other. When I was young I had always associated them together, believing that they were the same thing. For instance in a Grimm brothers story I read about a diamond mountain in Pomerania which was two miles high. Every 1000 years a little bird came and sharpened its beak on it. When the diamond mountain is worn away, the story said, this would indicate that the first second of eternity had been passed.

In Irish myth I read that the Otherworld was remarkably like our own – but better.

At the doorway to the east,
Three trees of brilliant crystal,
Whence a gentle flock of birds calls
To the children of the royal fort.

A tree at the doorway to the court,
Fair its harmony;
A tree of silver before the setting sun,
Its brightness like that of gold.

Three score trees there
Whose crowns are meetings that do not meet.
Each tree bears ripe fruit,
For three hundred men.
There is in the sid a well
With three fifties of brightly coloured mantles,
A pin of radiant gold
In the corner of each mantle.

[Early Irish Myths and Sagas. Gantz. Penguin Books]

Even in the Bible I read a description of the otherworld using images from this and implying in both cases that That is just an extension of This.

Book of Revelations, Chapter 4:

After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, “Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter.”

And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.

And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine-stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, I sight like unto an emerald.

And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting clothed in white raiment: and they had on their heads crowns of gold.

And out the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.

And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.

And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

In this century T.S.Eliot’s poem Little Gidding comes to mind.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered fate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

When my husband died I avoided asking him for help because I feared it would impede his progress in the Otherworld – might take him away from doing something else more important. And then I got a message ‘loud and clear’ reminding me that in the Otherworld there is neither time nor space. He does not have to come from somewhere else to attend to me – because he is ‘here’.

Because we call it the Otherworld we think it is like this one – only insubstantial. It is totally, unimaginably different. For the first time I understood how God could be aware of every sparrow that fell. ‘He’ wasn’t somewhere else looking on as we would from a height surveying a landscape. The sparrow is ‘in’ Eternity with Him.

And we, if we were not seduced by others into confusing ‘Everlasting’ and ‘Eternity’, would know that we, as eternal spiritual beings, are ‘in’ Eternity even now, while we are simultaneously but only temporarily ‘in’ time because we have material bodies as well as our spiritual being.

If we had champagne this evening I would ask you to raise you glasses in a toast to the magnificence of the present moment, through which all the strands of multi-dimensional time are threaded!

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 7
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 8
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 9

Fairy stories are sometimes the ‘dumbing down’ of mighty ancient myths. The shining, highly evolved beings of other realms are reduced to improbable little flittering creatures that hide among the bluebells. But nevertheless their stories can still give us the insights we need, and the sentence that starts them all off ‘Once upon a time’ is relevant to this talk. It implies that there is more than one Time, and what we are about to hear is happening in a different Time to the one we know.

A herd boy falls in love with a beautiful maiden he sees standing at the doorway into a hollow hill. He follows her and enters ‘faeryland’ – a realm of great beauty, where nothing is as it is in the world he has known. He has a blissful visit with her of a few days and returns to the ordinary world only to find he has been away for 50 years and everything has changed. His parents are dead, his old companions changed.

This has to be an allegory of the moment we enter the Quest, the path of seriously exploring the Unknown Spiritual realms. It is out of Linear Time. It could take fifty years or a moment. While we are exploring we are on a ‘high’ of spiritual endeavour. When we look around us again – our old companions have changed. This happens all around us. How many marriages do you know that have gone sour because one partner has explored further than the other?

Read these old fairy stories with new eyes. ‘Redeem the unread vision in the Higher Dream’, says T.S. Eliot in his poem Ash Wednesday.

Irish Folk Tales ed. By Henry Glassie Penguin Books 1987 p.256
Usheen’s Return to Ireland (Galway) by Lady Gregory 1926:

Usheen was the last of the Fianna and the greatest of them. It’s he was brought away to Tir-Nan-Oge, that place where you’d stop for a thousand years and be as young as the first day you went.

Out hunting they were, and there was a deer came before them very often, and they would follow it with the hounds, and it would always make for the sea, and there was a rock a little way out in the water, and it would leap on to that, and they wouldn’t follow it.

So one day they were going to hunt, they put Usheen out on the rock first, the way he could catch a hold of the deer and be there before it. So they found it and followed it, and when it jumped on to the rock Usheen got a hold of it. But it went down in to the sea and brought him with it to some enchanted place underground that was called Tir-Nan-Oge, and there he stopped a very long time, but he thought it was only a few days he was in it.

It is in that direction, to the west he was brought, and it was to the Clare coast he came back. And in that place you wouldn’t feel the time passing and he saw the beauty of heaven and kept his youth there a thousand years.

It is a fine place, and everything that is good is in it. And if anyone is sent there with a message he will want to stop in it, and twenty years of it will seem to him like one half-hour. But as to where Tir-Nan-Oge is, it is in every place, all about us.

Well, when he thought he had been a twelvemonth there, he began to wish to see the strong men again, his brothers; and he asked whoever was in authority in that place to give him a horse and to let him go.

And they told him his brothers were all dead, but he wouldn’t believe it.

So they gave him a horse, but they bade him not to get off it or to touch the ground while he was away; and they put him back in his own country.

And when he went back to his old place, there was nothing left of the houses but broken walls, and they covered with moss; and all his friends and brothers were dead, with the length of time that had passed.

And where his own home used to be he saw the stone trough standing that used to be full of water, and where they used to be putting their hands in and washing themselves.

And when he saw it he had such a wish and such a feeling for it that he forgot what he was told and got off the horse.

And in a minute it was as if all the years came on him, and he was lying there on the ground, a very old man and all his strength gone.

I sometimes wonder if the tales we hear about the abductions by aliens in spacecraft are not of the same order as these ancient tales of fairy abduction. They could both be symbolic tales thrown up by a powerful subconscious yearning for spiritual enlightenment – or they could be quite literally tales of abduction by extra-terrestrials – both in fairytale times, and in the present day. Who knows how long we have been visited by beings from other worlds?

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 7
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 8