Staring Out of Windows at Trees (A Cycle of Seven Sonnets)

Staring Out of Windows at Trees

(A Cycle of Seven Sonnets)

In loving memory of my father

1. Rebirth

The dying sun’s last blood ebbs into night,
pulsing through tree-veined skies to my heart’s beat.
I am this living world, it’s my birthright;
I can feel the Earth breathe beneath my feet.

When I lost it all, and my dignity
deserted me; when my old life was dead,
eradicated by insanity;
this was my second womb. Here I was fed
on visions by the universal mind;
nourished with knowledge that could only be
gained when I had cut the last tie to bind
me to my conditioned reality.

I thought I’d died, but I had been reborn
like the night that dies into a new dawn.

2. No Time is Wasted Time

I went home to my parents, with no clue
how to escape out of my mental maze.
My father did what loving fathers do;
sheltered me while I struggled through that phase.

I thought I was wasting time by staring
at trees outside their newly rented flat,
through its black-edged windows. He kept caring
as I relived those childhood patterns that
had built the room where I had always lived,
in my mind. Yet those trees taught me how to
unlock that old door. My freedom was sieved
through their beauty. It was a whole new view.

No time is wasted time, I know these days
we learn to heal ourselves in many ways.

3. Elemental Souls

These black-edged window panes have sometimes framed
the other universe; they map and grid
the world in which my dreams are formed and named,
the one that shapes and is shaped by my id.

I’ve seen a young queen etched against the sky,
she took wind-hewn majesty as her due.
I’ve seen a long thin sprite, eager and shy,
a red-nosed rabbit and a chicken too.

I’ve seen so many beings breezing through
the storied trees with each fresh gust of air;
were they, like me, once transformed by this view
into another state, a new life where
their restless souls sought shelter in the trees
and came that way to be rooted in peace?

4. Out of My Mind

This room is mirrored in the window pane
while at the same time I can see out there,
where my child self is glorying in rain,
with elemental eyes and leaf strewn hair.

She won’t come out of that imagined realm;
I know from her perspective it’s far too
limiting to stay inside, at the helm.
I say it depends on your point of view;
this lamp glows in the glass bright as the moon
that is now full outside. Here, we can fuse
our hearts and minds to form a mental tune
to which we can set any life we choose.

We’re free to conceive new worlds there, it seems,
and here, we’re free to give birth to those dreams.

5. Absorbed in Nature

As I sit here my old man of the tree
absorbs me. His face is drawn in strong brown
arcs of weathered branches; and I can see
that he wants to smile, though his mouth curves down.

My father sat where I am sitting now,
to lose his sadness in this beauty, viewed
through this window. These trees he loved knew how
to warm the wintry seasons of his mood.

Did the trees draw in what they had drawn out?
Did his emotions change their soulscapes too,
enrich their mental earth so they could sprout
new future lives grown from an altered view?

Though he moved on, was his melancholy
mood absorbed into the soul of a tree?

6. Living Lessons in Art

Each new hour washes its own colour through
the tree-filled sky outside my window. Flame
red to gold my heart heals. Pain blurs into
awe; dissolves into budding leaves which frame
evanescent moons blossoming in Spring;
into birds dreaming their nests, canopied
by lucent shades of green jade as they sing
the scents of Summer. Grief resolves its need
in Autumn clear and vibrant as one pure
note struck at sunset, rich and strong and proud;
dies snared by living wood carved to a lure
of Winter lace cobwebbed on pearl grey cloud.

Trees making art from life, beauty from pain,
teach me what I have lived through loss to gain.

7. Spiritual Beauty

The sky glows crimson, pink and gold like stained
glass through perfect filigrees of trees, but
some were restrained in order to be trained
into beauty, others were pruned and cut.

Gold must be mixed with dross before it holds
the ideal form which one who crafts it sees,
minds must be poured hot into their new moulds
before they can cool into shapes that please.

Those who have never been ugly or wrong
become parodies of themselves with age,
for early beauty does not live too long
unless a blight gives insight at some stage.

Pain is the dross which when mixed with the heart
tempers it to a living work of art.