Tony (A A) Marcoff
Frieze of Life
[after Edvard Munch]
like a walk through the garden of the stars when the moon is full and luminous, like a scream that greets the dream of dawn, like the kiss bestowed by the Madonna on the infant Christ, Child of All the Worlds, like a river flowing through the shadow of the willow, like a sea on which light flows endlessly in waves, like eternity here and now and everywhere, like a monk chanting after deep white silence…
like our grim destination—that urn of ashes, like fireworks sparkling in the sky at night, like a vision of the Body of God turned into the rising sun, the setting sun, the risen sun, like weather in the wings of a hawk, like cliff-hooks in the beetling cliff of experience, like the world beyond, like flamingoes on the pink freedom that is Lake Nakuru, like a flint-stone wall in an empty field, like a clock turning slowly to silence…
like the miracle at the end of time when death itself becomes a new world of being and light, like refugees hampered by deepening snow, like a Noh Drama of flame and slow motion and the ritual of putting yourself into the mask, like a burning candle as a moth circles its way to destruction, like a painting growing in the consciousness of dreams, subliminal and sublime and subterranean…
like an anarchist and his hope for universal knowledge, like the lover and the dove and the passion, like a potter’s clay transformed into a bowl of silence, like the cinema of a swan at the rising of the wing, like Adam and Eve embraced within the infinity of love, like missiles raining down on Ukraine and the tragedy of war, like the shadow of the sparrow on hallowed ground…
we have come at last to this, and this is our song, a soprano singing an aria by Bach of sadness and joy, as we sing by the sunflower of the star that is our sun, and become who we truly are, here by the river of the world and that kingfisher moment of light, brief, brilliant, blue:
this tulip world heralds the spring a kingfisher quickens the river with its swift blue dream
About the Author
Tony (AA) Marcoff is an Anglo-Russian poet who has lived in Africa, Iran, France and Japan. He writes haiku, tanka, tanka-prose and mainstream poetry, and lives near the beautiful River Mole in England .