I have deep veins –
pure white, crystal veins
held in a hardness
that was mud, that is stone.
I have been grains –
crushed in dark fire
melted in vastness
made layers, made folds.
I am refined –
yet broken again
ground from a roughness
by oceans, by cold.
I have returned –
a fragment, a stone
somehow a wholeness
a new thing, an old.
I am defined –
through all I have lost
shaped into roundness
for your hand, for your hold.
2012 © Andie Davidson
Of rain, relentless
memories drumming on my taut skin
running in gurgling rivulets, seeking
deep subterranean places
dark water, far beneath my groundsheet.
A turf-torn guy-rope
relic of a stormy past wound on itself,
spent, forgot, coiled without tension
white as a stripped nerve.
With intent I listen
there is no rhythm in the rain, no
reason or cónfine. I am choosing
storm-surviving, to hear my skin
streaming, streaming, streaming.
2012 © Andie Davidson
However delicate this filigree
this silver, iron or gold –
however fine and beautiful this glass,
its colours making sunlight speak –
however fleet and bright this flute
edging silver in sibilant song –
you shall not see or feel the fire,
the furnace finding them from stone.
Their faces and voices all felt fair,
warm in a way their cold touch cannot tell
set from white heat, bled to life,
beaten, drawn and mastered
into taut treasures that tell
stories, songs and longings
of long, long ago. Ore and wonder
as old as their ancestral home.
Trauma and high energy are
the price of simple things
the rocks that make our hills,
crumbled, melted into light.
2011 © Andie Davidson
You have become my most familiar stranger,
and stranger still my most familiar friend.
Except that we may not speak without memory,
nor remember without speaking exception.
You look my way—ask after me—as if it mattered,
matted strands of friendship, lying, unexamined.
Do not touch me—that’s near enough to be—
or to be not, lest touching reminds, feels strange.
Disassemble me again with un-love, lay me out,
in all my parts for choosing not to reassemble me.
I don’t know what you have become, except
you remind me of a time I knew a stranger.
It seems stranger to see just part, excluded now,
excepted from friendship, not quite stranger enough.
Friendship, as progressive, is slipping backwards,
into a time before even the way I thought, was new.
Before the way I loved was lovely, coming as it did
from everything I am, before you knew the way I am.
In becoming familiar to myself, unfamiliar to you
you have become my most familiar, absent, friend.
2012 © Andie Davidson
We gather, in twos and threes.
In twos.
Like birds with broken wings.
In ones.
Quiet in discomfort, lost
to sky.
Thoughts are clouds, reason not
to see.
Silent
or intermittent twitter-chat.
Bursts
of brighter hopes—one day …
One day
‘when my wing is mended’
when
released, as new shall fly.
We shall fly, alone, in twos.
Free
from hurts. On skyroads, unbound—
not too
hurt to conquer cloud hills. Imagine
the one
with wings gathering, lifting us
high.
But now
feathered in lost loves, flocked
in one
shared understanding. Like birds
in twos
shuffling for a sunrise, twittering
in trees
gathered. With broken wings.
2012 © Andie Davidson
Back-story to this: Birds of a feather