Blue Chrysalis...

Playing today with a too-dark image from a few days ago when I needed a new profile photo---lightening it, seeing what's in the shadows, and discovered a way to irradiate a photo with blue spotlights: I found the blue lights intriguing even as I wrapped myself in them doing and undoing many possibilities. And I wonder if this process of enfolding and illumining in blue light is teaching me something mystical or perhaps silly? Some humour might be apropos these days, as a way to release the tension of radical shifts in the underlayers of my life. It seems that when a woman does something radical to her hair, she's about to do something radical to her life too. Major transformations are in process in the woman who resides over here, at Rubies In Crystal, I suspect... I wonder what will emerge from the chrysalis of blue lights? It is an interesting process that I've been through recently, extreme sensitivity, a withdrawal inwards, the depths where one retreats to, not knowing what is going on or which way to turn, desperations folding in on one, and the way the cocoon that you didn't know had grown around you begins to crack, it's fearful, those blinding splits of needles of light, and not knowing what will emerge, something saddened by experience, weighted, or beautiful, and that can fly in freedom...

Inner Altar - African Angel

(Click on photopoem for a larger size)

Inner Altar - Beads

In the process of writing these...

A Dream...

A Dream...recorded in the night
without a date stamp,
so when, & of Who?


...a face, half of which
is covered by a mask;
the other half,
where the cheek should be,
it's all been eaten away
and it's been reconstructed
with stories,
story after story...

he had no feet
and he is perched
on the window ledge
like a vampire or an angel,

I couldn't tell which...


©Brenda Clews 2005

Star Wars: Episode III

I saw it. A massive tragedy in the classical sense. Pure hubris. Absolutely preventable, but based on deep misunderstanding of the deep wisdom of the self. I am overwhelmed by Lucas's return to the most powerful myth of all, the Biblical myth that is the foundation of Western civilization. It was brilliant. I was so striken by the unrelenting tragedy that we have at the basis of our culture, by this brave portrayal of it, that I was in silent shock all the way home. And of course, the deity's wife dies at the beginning of the dark rule through his hubris. Wisdom, the wife of the fearsome deity, the Shekinah, is hidden in the Bible; she has to find her way through the mystical texts. O Padme! And then the monotheistic empire building, one dark Lord of fire and battle and death to rule them all...already his son, the saviour is born, is spirited away, hidden... And he has a sister, O, thank you Lucas, for his beautiful twin sister, the inclusion of the divine feminine, what is so desperately needed in the religious myths of our culture, visionary filmaker...

The electrical storm, unusual for this city, erupted so powerfully overhead minutes after our return we thought we were going to be struck by lightning tonight...

Sheets Of Light

MP3 of "Sheets Of Light" here

At my Aural Pleasure poetry reading site at Sound Click. I erased all the preamble on this one; even Omar's gone. Just the writing tonight... perhaps, uhmm, a postmodern foray... *hugs, hope you enjoy... (1min15sec).

"The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LXXI

The light is like delicate paper caressing the wall.
Lantern paper. Translucent paper on the sand
of the walls. Should I write the calligraphies
of my heart here? Even before
the wind blows it away.

On these iconic, cuneiform tablets of light,
pillars marching over ancient surfaces,
sails of light, perhaps fleeing the rich shadows
of time itself, love letters to you in luminescent alphabets,
a song of creation creating itself?

In all its tragedies and magnificences,
amid broken columns of meaning,
crumpled, torn bits of marble or parchment,
a festival of light...Cleopatra with her Anthony,
Eloise with her Abelard, Juliet with her Romeo...
Interlacings of the numinosity of love
written on sheets of light.

©Brenda Clews 2005

A Dozen Cherry Trees...

Any editorial suggestions would be much appreciated...