Three Poems by Kathryn MacDonald

 

Moontreader

 

You sing on the fringes

of my sanity

dancing your lyric

limbs toward the

iced trees glistening

west of the sun.

 

The world is smaller

here where the frosted

oak rests along the

cold stream bed and

your voice softly calls,

beckoning.

 

As sisters we walk

over razor edged pebbles

that tear our soles

while petulant wonder-

land children tug

at billowing skirts.

 

We warm brittle twigs

with dream breath

spinning nests of supple

poems in the forks

of barren branches, naked

roots turned skyward.

 

Shimmering and vulnerable

the tumbling moon

            buoyed by spidery

            filament of cloud

spirals toward us

floats in the melting stream.

 

We whisper farewell

to the Cailleach of winter and

welcome Beira, who is spring,

who is summer.

FOLLOW BIRDS AND DREAMERS

 

Thunder shakes the night ominous as music in a B-movie.

I toss the sheet and sit at the edge of the bed –

 

above, the fan twirls like a majorette’s baton

outside, waves crash against the rock-strewn shore

 

tug at my ankles. Do you hear their blue sound

repeating and repeating, rushing in, the slow pull away?

 

I breathe deep the salty sea, swallow teeming incandescency

become foam-cresting wave luminous beneath the milky way.

 

Leap aboard a sloop with me, make Icarus-wings of sails,

chart our course for paradise as did Saint Brendan of Clonfert.

 

We’ll follow frigate birds into the blue, chase the impossible

horizon’s mysterious allure, make passage beyond the deep.

 

When we no longer seek the womb we call the sea

the fairy tern will guide us to sand and stone and earth’s green edge

 

where we will shed our pilgrim threads, walk upon the moss

beneath the branches of a leafy tree whose song so differs

 

from the silence of the sea and ponder changes made
in the vast quietude upon a ship. So different now you and me.

OF SAGES & SEAS & BUTTERFLY WINGS

 

She paints – oil on canvas – abstractions

that carry the weight of revolution

 

seeks the rare hue of transformation

created in ancient philosophers’ cauldrons

 

by sages who steeped copper in wine

creating neither blue nor green

 

a phantastic hue –

the wings of a butterfly     rings

 

of blue-green seas embracing tropical islands

the magic shade that beckons sailors

 

to shallow shores

                             hidden reefs     mermen

 

perilous magnificence

potent possibility

 

aeruca / patina /verdigris.

Kathryn MacDonald has published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies such as Stones Beneath the Surface. She has published internationally in The High Window, Dust and Lothlorien in the U.K., and in Juniper and Jerry Jazz Musician in the U.S., as well as other journals and countries. She is the author A Breeze You Whisper: Poems and Calla & Édourd (fiction). For publication details, please see https://kathrynmacdonald.com.