Ocean of Ice

Ice floes, sharp, jagged icicles. Hidden, floating icebergs. Tearing, sinking, drowning. We struggle amid snow squalls and tears of fire burn our cheeks. It's a dance of avoidance in the avalanche of the Arctic waters. Do not freeze, or turn to ice.

Ice moves quickly, unpredictably, in response to ocean currents and wind. Ice, like tectonic plates. Frozen earthquakes and ice mountains, ridges and blocky ice rubble. O be wary, what impales the heart, tides of ice.

Ice floes surge and spin, ice moves in packs, networks of cracks and patches of open water, pushing broken ice, loose chunks of ice, and ice jams. Icebreaking.

But the currents are intermixed in this strange painting of love, surging warmth and rigid cold. Where deceptions occur: what looks solid, isn't. And then the ice so thin it's a mirror down into the depths.

Venus comes aloft on her scallop seashell amidst the ice floes; the Zephyr winds are cold and northerly. The Horae await with a cloak embossed with delicately beautiful ice flowers, as fragile as morning frost. Where is the warmth? The sea is awash with cold and hot waters, whitecaps of ice or steam. Which currents are to be trusted?

Sun-washed Blossoms

Ishtar's high priestess, Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, of the rising and setting star in the East, Venus, sexual mystery of the darkness, not the sun-stroked beauty of Botticelli's.

Unclothed, unashamed but virginal, an untouched goddess of love blown in by waves whose whitecaps are like flocks of flying white birds. Botticell's Venus not the sensual 'come-hither' of Inanna and her Shepherd-King, Dumuzi. Or she of the Song of Songs.

Botticelli's Venus is the Virgin in a pagan landscape of delight in the beauty of the world. Fragile becoming on the wind-washed shores of our being. Her beauty not lustful but ethereal; the innocence of unblemmished spirituality.

Only, Botticelli, man who remained like a monk, single, dedicated to art, and art alone, your gorgeous muse causes all of Nature to bloom in your paintings where it bursts out of your canvases, the Birth of Venus and the Primavera.

Where is the sultry goddess of the dark gleaming gold temple of love?

Valentines Day

Those of you who have been reading my latest series of poems will understand the humour in this image, I say laughing. You never know where she will appear! Happy Valentines!

Temple of Love

Venus, star in the night. Love in the darkness. Your breath. Ecstasies of the body, erotic touch. This temple, its sacred creativities.

O, the goddess of love awaits, inviting. Sighing, and moans. The gleam of the god of war, his helmet golden red in the night.

When Anteros - god of requited love, "love returned," and the avenger of scorned love - came, wings beating like heartbeats, you knew me. For the first time. Anteros, brother of Eros, god of lust, love, erotic union.

Fire gleams in your eyes, volcanic. You didn't see me before though you had known me a long time. I was hidden in your life.

I'm tired of restrictions. Let's change what we have meant to each other. Like angels lying in a bouffant of chocolate and roses. The convergences on the public holy day of love, Valentine's.

Great art presents itself as presence in the world, alive, shimmering.

What the heart holds, for it prefers secrecy.

birth of beauty

times of decrease, recession, turmoil, depression, upheaval, war, loss and degradation, fear and grief, the unpardonable, what can't be retracted, the birth of love borne by beauty on the waves of the sea

Savonarola's body burnt in the Piazza della Signoria, it is 1498, he who convinced you to renounce the sensual pleasure of beauty - The Mystical Nativity painted in 1500 so different to when

you and Leonardo da Vinci, a friend who you studied with in Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s

those angelic visions

art historians speak of spiritual tautness in your work, of the grace of line and that your figures are holy heiroglyphics

she appeared under your delicate sable brushes in 1492 and disappeared for centuries until the Pre-Raphaelites resurrected her and now she is a definer of feminine beauty in the modern world

with my curls, when I was a young woman, people used to compare me to 'Botticell's Venus'; I, too, have borne her...

rising from the sea

the rush of waves in my ears

listening to you


beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, fragrant perfume and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Sandro, and

yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae

washes of colour, seaspray of roses,

translucent robes

poetry we weave ourselves with

Divine Message of Beauty in the World

I write on vellum with sea-scalloped edges.

Birth blueness is everywhere, that particular nascent colour.

You bring the simplicity of writing with you.

While I wear a cloak of flowers, a shower of roses, lyrical, fragile birth, beauty, this flowing cape of words

That the goddesses of the seasons have woven for us.

___________
Botticelli's Birth of Venus hangs in the Uffizi, in Florence. It was painted in 1485.