Peter Lilly: Poems

Your hair is blonde it reflects In green flecks, the grass As the water does the sky. At the end of the damp sand And the water of dusty clouds You talk to the ripples and the bubbles Dropping shells in the lapping. You talk the same language of expression For this is the calm constancy of l'étang Not the constant change of crashing waves. Beneath a sunset that marks us With a strong desire to remain I see it reflected in the turquoise of you eyes, a minute flame. In the water, the sun's bridal dress  Drapes an enormous fiery train And proudly L'étang de l'Or  Bares its burnished name. L'étang de l'Or, probably best translated as 'The Golden Marsh', is a large marshy lake between Mauguio and the Mediterranean Sea. This week I walked there with my son and we played at the waters edge before watching the sunset.

As the morning sun starts to bake the red earth of these hills, we set out. Clasping rock and rope, we embed our digits into this land as the mud embeds beneath our finger-nails. I am shoeless and bare chested, to let the clay paint my skin with the story of this journey. This climb is not about a summit, but an isolated depth,  an interior sea-level  inside  this peninsula's ribcage . So we re-descend the steep trachea walls, and listen to the breathing path whistle and giggle in playful respiration. If you are fascinated with the echo of this palaeolithic chamber, that vocal selfie-stick, the waters of the  lagoon  will freeze in interrupted stillness, shy of the volume of trespassing tourists. But, if you listen in silence, long enough for your feet to sink beneath the surface the heart beneath the water begins to beat, and the  lagoon  will rouse unto its pious dance,...

Photograph of a vineyard in Les Cévennes, by Silje Lilly. Taken in July 2017. John 15:1-8 Gleaning grapes before October storms, the vines are ancient fingers, deathly-dry and knotted digits. bark-scarred with the wisdom of growing. They are crowned with a branchy vibrancy, of greenery, naivety and fertility. The miracle of the vine and the branches is the fruit. The credulous branches, are trusted to bear the weight of the yield, their green luminescence is continually fed by the vine that looks like deadwood.  A Lamb looking as though it had been slain. I wrote this poem in the Autumn of 2016 while I was in a vineyard on the outskirts of Montpellier, where Silje and I live, in the south of France. We were picking grapes after the harvest and enjoying time reading and writing in the autumn sun.  Silje took the photo in July 2017 while in another vineyard in Les Cévennes, a short drive north. Time and a...

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...

It’s not only in the colours and outlines of  the soft rounded hills and calabrese trees, and every possible variant of the colour green, under a grey sky. It’s also in the patterns of rust drawing maps on corrugated roofs of trackside farm buildings. It’s in the wells of deep hoof prints in black sodden earth surrounding a trough of water. It’s in the living fence-posts of moss-damp wood, and beacons of fresh-yellow timber where it has been recently mended. It’s in the crown-of-thorns birds-nest visible through naked limbs of a winter oak. It’s in the irregular circles of tiny yellow lichen on the unique fragments of our planet which make up ancient stone walls. It’s in the fragile chandeliers, of frosted spiders-webs that decorate an evergreen hedge. When I return,  I find my home in the details of Britain.  This poem was written in the autumn/winter of 2016, whilst I was visiting the UK.  Since moving to France, it feels like I...

Gentle chill mingles with February sun to warm my bones, and prick my skin with cold.  Lake calm sleep breath waves expose the broken shells that make up the earth,  and keep the land believing in winter.  When I lived in the U.K. the first sunny day of spring would burn itself onto my memory with relief from the cold, joy in the warmth, and anticipation for the summer to come. Most years I would write a poem on that day about my excitement (such as ' I have missed the sun ' written in April 2011).  Now I live in Montpellier in the south of France, that feeling comes a little earlier in the year. This year it was towards the end of February, when we were at the beach near Sète for the day. It was warm but the (relative) cold of winter was still clinging to the air. The feeling given by the weather matched  the relief and thankfulness we feel at finally moving into our flat here in Montpellier. 

Today's snow is the literal icing on 255,500 yesterdays of this building. The walls give way to weathered cliff-face; the beacon of the capital of the crown of Britain. Snow capped monuments to literature point upwards to the castle, that has bled out the streets of this city in slow running tributaries, not of death, but new life, new redness and new heat. A city that keeps on breathing and looking up to it's frosted castle. Written while looking up at the castle from Princes Street Gardens, in the snow of January 2013.

Muted, we watched as the cheshire cat's teeth morphed from pearly white, through plaque yellow, to blood red. As the sickle moon descended into its silent grave in the horizon. Written September 2015. My wife and I were traveling  from Lyon to Montpellier, with some rather awkward covoiturage companions. The sickle blood-moon was ominous and haunting in the silent journey, and I penned this as well as I could in the pitch black of the car. 

Even on this boat, on this fjord, there is someone looking at a screen. Oblivious to the passing beauty that will outlive our LCD: our acid and our own synapses. Overfamiliarity is no excuse. I got burnt today, in the wind below where the dregs of slowly melting snow are the glacial prints, where ice age fingers were dragged towards the permanent peace in narrow streams. I got burned by beauty that leapt from the sun and was magnified by every contour, every millilitre of pure water, every centimetre of distance travelled, every knot of speed, and every quark of every atom of every cell of my love's generous and radiant being. Beauty leapt from the sun, was magnified in those obscenely majestic ricochets, and left me burnt and tender. The Spirit hovers over the deepest fjord in silent sparks and seemingly random flashes of purpose. If you let the collisions burn you tender, those sparks w...

I wanted to look out from the edge of the world and feel the weight of a thousand miles of ocean breaking against my toes. I wanted to look out, to fearlessly stand on overhanging cliff face, adding to the nothing before me with my breath. I wanted to look out from the flat of my back at the immeasurable depth of the blackness between the stars, all thinly veiled in our life-parcel atmosphere. Give me distance: so I can taste the untampered air of the sea; so I can see a thousand peaked horizon reverberating the globe before my feebly observing eyes; so I can be pinned to the earth by starlight, who's heat and fury is refracted by lightyears to become peace and beauty. Give me sea, give me mountains, give me stars, and keep your phoney medicine. - Written on Monday 04/03/12

A magnitude of grey refracts the sun into a wide spectrum. If time is taken to watch it, see it slowly changes: ever ageing in smooth perfections. The firmament of the sky's skin is beautiful, regardless of weather. This rotating work of art is permeated with the stylistic splendour of its painter's mind. Fragments of storms, which were split by sunlight, are beautiful as they rain themselves dry, exposing coursing veins glowing neon in the ambience of echoes of completeness to come. This rotating work of art is permeated with the stylistic splendour of its painter's mind. And I am loosened from fabric shackles having grown my own linen and exhaled reasons to move with the painter's gift of air.  Written 28-30/12/12.  We can learn so much from the changing beauty of the sky.

Oh two leaf tree. Did somebody leave you behind? Ever expectant of the fruit You’re desperate to produce, But The ground around you is only Littered with the brown leaves of former glory, Last year’s windfall; now fertilizer And a fractured birdhouse, housing damp. Oh two leaf tree. Did somebody take your branches? Shaping your shadow to fit the outline of a tired summer, Saving your limbs to thaw a bitter frost, So The sundial has lost its strength, Derelict greenhouse fills with rain, Forgotten firewood now dampens sparks, But you can drink of this cold and feed your new limbs.. and grow. Written in the winter of 2007.