Peter Lilly: Poems

I find myself where the wind in the leaves is heard but traffic is not, where hills without houses roll to the horizon, where the creaky chair and  desk of tired varnish furnish the coming days with ideal, and I must write. The air is fresh and the sun blistering, et je vais parler français  avec les amis, en buvant le vin de la région,  et la sensation de la conversation dans une belle langue  ajoute une émotion pure, when I come to write verse in my native tongue. And the boisterous laughter of children, and the giggling of an infant energise this siesta atmosphere to fill the time with melody, and the fill the melody with words, and to fill the words with meaning, to fill the coming months avec le repos de maintenant. Written in July 2017 while Silje and I were on retreat with some friends in a tiny village in the south of 'Le Parc National des Cévennes.'  As I learn to speak more French I have ex...

Pictures of something achieved lose their reality when you touch the flat surface and realise it is only an imitation of three dimensions. I would try to chisel a sculpture but I've never had the time required to select the type of rock. So it's paper cuts instead of crushed bones, and crocodile tears instead of wailing. It's waking up instead of being born.   I couldn't grasp the intention of the new medium. I got lost analysing the brush strokes, and a world of feeling breathed and pulsated around my lifeless sums. Written in the summer of 2015.  This poem is about beauty's fragility to dissection, an observer's susceptibility to pride, and the imagination's vulnerability to desensitisation.  Sometimes we must  consciously humble ourselves before beauty, whether it be man-made art, that of nature, or the beauty within the divine, so that we do not remain unaffected. Emotional responses ...