Paul StJohn Mackintosh

Writing * Poetry * Dark Fiction * Weird * Fantastic * Horror * Fantasy * Science Fiction * Literature

Month: October 2011

New poem

Inspired by a Mackintosh banner bagpipe pibroche – I’ll post that up here soon.

Mackintosh Pibroche

Great pipe notes float like mists over Moy,
calling up wooded and empty glens
ringed by gnarled bare granite crags;
harled castles of my ancestors
still mirror glory in dark lochs
and shut yetts bar the ancient gates.

New poem

San Shek Wan

My bedroom has no curtains
to cordon where I lie,
but morning drapes the windows
with green, and clouds, and sky.

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On top of the Pilis Hills

Late afternoon, looking towards Esztergom

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An eccentric erection in Pilisszentlelek

And I’m all for eccentric erections. But I have no idea what this one was for.

There it was, just standing in the forest on the hillside.

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Autumn colours in Pilisszentlelek

Autumn comes earlier here in the hills. And unfortunately, my crap camera can’t do justice to the amazingly vivid saturated colours in the clear sunshine.

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Esztergom at sunset

This was just before 7pm, when all the church bells started ringing. Bats were flying against the sunset sky, and the evening glow reflected in the Danube bend.

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New poem

Hungarian Dawn

The sun paints golden stripes across the green,
from the next valley sounds an early train,
Esther, ecstatic, reaches for the chimes,
my tablet plays the Cosi overture,
and Mozart cuts straight through the walls
between the solitary cells
where we are doomed to pass our days
and gently lays his fingers on my heart.

Poets should be fathers, Coleridge knew:
nothing captures that dawning freshness like
having to wake up, getting out of bed
and sharing those first morning moments with
someone who cannot yet speak,
who does not need to hear a word,
and just wants to be touched and held,
for you can hold a child and a pen.

The whole world moves to music, intervals
between men’s voices, shadows of the trees,
ideas and impressions, following
the natural progression of the scales;
a black cat wanders down the lane,
bay horses neigh and flick their tails,
a pheasant coughs, according to
the resonance, the music of the spheres.

Humanity’s dark inner caverns ring
from mighty grounds, and what we think or write
is just an echo of those normal modes,
the notes and stops of consonants and vowels
the pentatonic scale of breath,
and we communicate in time
in unison of each and all
the rhythm that makes two hearts beat as one.

And so I spend those precious first few hours
in writing poetry instead of work
– time out from get and spend – with much to do
and with a family needing to be fed;
the blue water in the pool
lays its perfect mosaic of tiles
of light, and with the closing notes,
where our path ends, a rose exalts the sun.

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