Where the Earth Meets the Sky – Rachel Anne Grigor

Words at the Black Swan – Session 5

Date: Sunday 15th September 2013, 15:30 – 17:00
Workshop Leader: Crysse Morrison
Exhibition: Rachel Anne Grigor: Where the Earth Meets the Sky

Wordworks

Where does the earth meet the sky?

Memories, once played on an ever spinning reel
Are now merely snapshots, pictures on a wall.
Her thoughts taking flight like captive birds set free,
Her life in their song, with a mixed up melody.

Long summer days on the beach at Porthmeor
Flying a kite in a sky, blue and clear.
Shouting to Daddy ‘How high is the sky?’
And ‘When I am older I want to fly’.

A marriage proposal in a courtyard in Venice,
Walking on air, passionate kisses.
A wedding ensues, she’s a radiant bride
But who is the man standing at her side?

They’re making a camp at the edge of the garden
Two little girls, whose names she’s forgotten.
Pointing out stars in the velvety sky,
‘Mummy, when we are older we want to fly’.

Alone on the edge, nothing left to recall
Just one last thought as she’s starting to fall,
Shouting to Daddy ‘How high is the sky?’
And ‘Now I am old I want to fly’.

Stephanie Johns

Flat Steel

Flat steel is what I look out across
when I’m following the flat wind to the horizon –
smoothing with your hands you say
there now, never mind
it’ll be alright

and where the earth meets the sky
I feel them grinding as they close together, nausea
at the cross of my chest, my bones
on chairs, along the bottom of the bath –
Equinox undoes my resistance
and I need to say something to you.

David Davies, Sept 2013

Fleeting Glimpses

~ vivid impressions, like those brightly-coloured tableaux
that spin on the postcard carousel, gay pictures to please.
Art should not soothe, Picasso said. He would like these.
A child’s eye view of the sky ruffles each rim,
a dark strip demanding attention. Everything below
is ours: buildings land and trees all ownable.
Air is the point of interruption, the place of movement.
Branches wave, fabric blows, childrens’ balls are thrown,
and somewhere in the space between, Icarus is still falling.

Crysse Morrison

Where does the earth meet the sky?

~ in a child’s gaze,
~ through the wings of a moonfly,
~ far away across the water,
~ glimpsed through the trees,
~ frostily, murkily, free-falling,
~ as songbirds call,
~ when wind whirrs autumn leaves,
~ “at the corner of the sea” and
~ “where the willow falls.”

On shores and in gardens,
behind buildings, beyond rocks,
and along the ebb-tide shore,
always there must be an end to what we can touch
and a beginning to what is insubstantial,
ethereal, elusive, not component but vapour,
that stuff we call sky.