I placed the bronze tip of Achilles spear
to my chest and asked the gods;

How do I heal this great wound of love?

This ash-wood is too heavy to carry.
This Melia Pelias.

Make me a body of bronze
so that in the dark places
by torchlight —

I would never be a stranger to you.

By day, my skin is like the sun.

The marmairō  —

your heart always rests in its warmth.

We have moved away from the earth 
my love. Away from the time of stone.

Now we gleam with the gods.
We are fire and lightning.

Pyr kai astrapto

A thousand years from now
when they find 
my tarnished stumps underwater,

leaning towards Olympus —

I will ask the gods to melt my frame
and to cast me
a new body as a bell.

The bell-founder and monks will
 hang my new shape in the church
 just outside the village.

The hand — to the rope,
that rings the sound
of this great wound of love.


All these tolls 

are my prayers for you;
my love.

My Angelus —

to always find each other again.

From the deep lungs of the ocean
a chorus of sea foam is singing.

Triton’s horn reaches the shore,

as chariots of rain 
chase the wind 
through a Kingston sky.

This is Poseidon’s opus for Norfolk.

A Homeric hymn:

For the god of the waters,
who shifts the earth and barren sea.

The marsh has its singers.
The ibis, heron, duck and hen —

the waters of winter

break against —
                 beak and bill, 
foot and feather, 

the adagio of the flow 
of frozen breath.

The flash and glimmer of a white
winter wing past

                             my window.

My eyes are cold, blinded by innocence.
They cannot follow this flight of freedom —
this opera of snow 

without snow.

This lento doloroso.

The sound of the song
of past winters
coming home.

Within my body I carry poems
for the 
Sacrament of Remembrance;

an abiding summer —

that could still save us.

I.

Dear Mother of Memory,

What would you have me write?

If this poem is an invocation —
then may it awaken the muses
and memory.

Each day we drink from

The Water of Lethe 
The Water of Forgetfulness 

Each night we search for 
our familiar ghosts.

Walking the hallways of
the past looking for a door.

We have created a language 
beneath the shadow of

The New Babel

I open my mouth to speak —

the first sounds we made
were not words.

II.

Dear Daughter of Sky and Earth,

What have I forgotten?

Lead me through the
ancient ache of trees.
Speak to me once again
in the language of bark and branch.
In the tongue of stone and water.

Let me drink from the

Mnemosyne
The River of Memory

For we are but for a moment,
a pool of shadow
behind Nature’s eternal lid.

III.

Dear Son of Memory, 

I did not dig the dust enclosed,
nor did I move your sacred stones and bones.

So do not curse me —
do not banish me to the 

Halls of Unremembrance 

Where black ink does not possess 
a face.

Where my words will disappear, 
like shadows on basalt.

Those dead crows, 
falling through time. 


IV.

In the moon tides music —
the antiphonal hymn of
remembrance and forgetfulness,

the ancestors are singing 
        the song of

          Mehara
The Song of Memory 

They sing of the flower,
the bird and the stone,

then turn their faces 
towards the wind.


On Norfolk —

The Ephemeral Isle
There are no rivers.

The wind cradles memory —
and carries her children 

to the sea.

Today I will plant this poem.

I will place its stem of words 
into the soil: the dark knowledge 
of its pre-existence.

Today I will observe its 
leaves of ink falling away.

Just as the eyes of men
view the world upside down,
I will hear the unheard voice
of the poem as it grows
in its own light
beneath the surface of 
the earth.

Today I will return it to 
the cradle of dawn.
Its first longing for itself.

Then I will wait.

The moon is out hunting.
Tonight, her prey is kindness.

She is hungry for the kind of kindness
that will create a dawn for the dark side
of her face.

The sun, too hot for her mouth.
The day’s rays will slay her tongue.

I tell her in a dream that one night
she will see my wife.

Spare her your hunger —
her kindness unshackled my life.

Your beauty is your own,
and so is hers,

the dark face I cannot see.

In the deep, quiet air
of migration,

the far north of the universe
is breathing inside
the eyes of the Bosunbirds.

Their flight — a hymn of silence above
wave, water and every tear —

The Forbidden Country

above us.

We, the wingless ones,
forever beneath them.

We created angels
to heal the ghost pains of memory.

Crafted wings in our own broken image,
from stained glass, stone
and brass.

In the deep, quiet air
of migration,

the far north of the universe

is breathing

inside.

As we —

the Sons and Daughters
of Icarus

have fallen away from ourselves.

On the last day
at the end of the world

the last man on earth
fashioned wings from scraps 
of numbered notes.

Salvaged from the lost mountains
of abandoned wallets and purses.

The sun too hot
for feathered wax
and papered faces unseen.

When you lose the sight in one eye as a child 
it changes forever how you view a river.

One eye to view the cosmos 
while the world sleeps.

He could suspend his Riverbody
above the surface

or search the bed for words,

swim underwater, 
upstream or downstream —

all — at once.

His river runs like a fever.
It protects the world from stale grace.

While I slept he whispered to me:

In the last four hundred years
Shakespeare has written 
thousands of sonnets and plays

that have been translated by the gods
as stars.

Sometimes he would appear to me in his
river-earth-tree-feather-branch-body.

The morphology of poetry. 

He said Keats told him he much 
preferred being a lake now 
than swimming in one, 
or writing about one.

Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.

I remember his only advice to me was:

Stay inside the poem.

I didn’t understand at the time
what he meant by that
until the day came

when I could no longer fly 
or breathe underwater.

I couldn’t understand 
the birds and I was imprisoned 
by time.

I stepped back into this poem
to find myself on the cliffs of Norfolk 
above a valley.

It was the colour of midnight and
I was caught in an electrical storm.

A flash of lightning
and for a heartbeat
the cliff was a bleached bone.

My ocean-feather-body trembled —

I saw a 
one-eyed ghostbird 
looking straight at me.

When the hours come for me
at the end of the world 
which is the first beginning —

will I notice the passing of
shadow into shadow 
light into light
the green into grey at dusk.

Will I remember the face
I once had
before wing and feather 
before tree and branch 
palm, seed and leaf.

Will I discover the soft water
of my body
sleeping in the soil
beneath the mountains.

Waiting there for me,
before the first beginning.

Let us return the world to you 

as you once knew it.


Let us plant a tree for every tree 
that we removed from the floor
of your house. 

Let us gather every red feather, 
cat’s fang

and rat’s tail
that we sung into being

with an orchestra of guns.

Let us forage the first fruit —
the first good thing

that you tasted in that first morning.

O Evanescent One 

we are 
fugitives from ourselves 

and yet, we have made you the fugitive.

Let us return the world to you 

as you once knew it.


Let us dismantle the engines 
of our own passing

and begin again,

in your congregation of feathers.

Let us understand that your cloaked 
flight —

above, below and through us,

is simply ceasing.

Let us return the world to you 

as you once knew it.


Let us bow our heads 

beneath your light


and walk into the green shimmer
of our own vanishing

and dare not ask for forgiveness.

When did things fall away from beneath your hand?
Was it when love fell deeply from your brow
towards the brass heaven?
 
When all things intimate were lost,
cast away in your gold.
 
Inside your little fortress of freedom,
curled around the edges of your life,
your archaeology of tenderness
sung the hymn of discovery.
 
Of finding your face
held in memory’s hands,
inside the delicate fire
of yourself.
 
Where a book imprisoned you
for such a time
in the sleeping betrayal
of your bed.
 
The glorious import of such
militant quietness
will not escape from the shores
of your sleeves.
 
Where, once again your name
must change
against the relentless tide of
the world.
 
Beneath the eyes
of your forgotten star
you rode into the light of
your last campaign —
 
into the light of Clouds Hill,
 
gently crafted
away from man’s unkind wing.
 
Where all your little gods died,
in the fall of your last leaf
 
away from the searching sands.



First published in Impspired magazine. February 2020.

She came to him at night,
on horseback.

The tower was half buried
so she would descend

away from the moonlight,
her neck moving into shadow

to the doorway via a stairwell
from the street.

Her body submerging into
their intimate underworld.

She was, to him, an angel
that appeared

the same time every night,
only at night.

Half buried,
in the permissible darkness.

He was her unforgiven saint
and this, their shared confessional.

He showed her by naked torchlight
the gold flicker of their life

revealed against
the ceiling of Egyptian blue.

He dusted the red earth from her feet,
gently placed his thumb on
the pulse of her wrist,

as they lay together
in their shared baptism.
 
Then came the winds.

Boreas —
Who could bend a tear
from the surface of her cheek.

Zephyrus —
Would gently lift her hair from
her shoulder and breathe to her the domain of flowers.

Notus —
Who always carried the rain for
the fire between them.

Eurus —
Would wipe away a bead of moisture
from her trembling lips.

Kaikias —
Provided a shield against the
knowing death of love.

Apeliotes —
Would drape her in the cloth of the
rising sun to conceal her nature.

Skiron —
For the onset of winter
when the mist would rise from her mouth instead of words.

Lips —
When she needed safe passage
away from her discontent.

On the night she
did not return

he spent his evenings
searching the red earth

for a glimpse of the cradle
of her hair rising from her shoulder.

Feel the ghost pain of her pulse
at the tip of his thumb.

Watch the gold flicker
of their life

gently retreat from his hand.

He spent his life traveling the world

searching for parts for his final project.

 
His inventory of grace.

 
A yellow star from the belongings

of a Jewish girl in Nazi Germany.

The barrel of Oppenheimer’s fountain pen.

An exhaust from a WW1 Indian motorcycle.

A jar of sand from Aleppo.

 

To a refugee camp in Bangladesh,

for a thread of saffron.

The robe of T.E Lawrence found

in an old chest in Dorset.

A white feather from Morocco.

Shell casings from the beaches

of Normandy.

The toe of a soldier’s boot washed up

at Dunkirk.

 

In Nagasaki,

a singed photograph of a Japanese girl.

A piece of rope and bark from Georgia.

Some charcoal from Dresden.

A doorframe from a Romanian orphanage.

The canvas of a Bosnian medic’s stretcher.

Some helicopter blades discovered in Vietnam in 1970.

A wedding ring on the leg of an army hospital bed.

Some rubble from a monastery in France.

An empty water bottle from Nauru.

Blood stained pipes from Manus.

Three locks of baby’s hair from a photo album

in Rwanda.

The side of a wheelchair found in Warsaw in 1939.

 

In Berlin,

some love letters locked away in a sideboard

for seventy five years.

The roof of a home in Afghanistan.

The sands of Darfur revealed a child’s toy.

A book of poetry was recovered from the side of a road in Baghdad.

 

In Myanmar,

a homemade splint trussed together

with string.

Remnants of a bombed wedding tent unearthed in Yemen.

 

A small handgun found in a church.

 

These were the parts for his final project.

His inventory of grace.

Discovered beyond time and place.

The parts of his heart.

His arterial design for a new beginning.

 

He disappeared before he could find
all the broken things to finish his life’s work.

 

To build a bridge,

at the end of the world.


First published in Tuck Magazine 2018.

 If I could write one true perfect line
 I would build a new Jerusalem of words 
 upon it.
  
 With no borders or margins along this parchment
 beneath the letters of 
 the many stained glass windows 
 and ancient doors,
 there would hide the burden 
 of the terrible weight of love.
  
 I would weave a tapestry from Budapest 
 around it.
  
 In between the shutters and thread
 along the wisps of smoke 
 in the darkened room of black bells
 where the dogs howl,
 outside the morning chant would begin.
  
 I would write it in pencil,
 the gráphō —
  
 It would be the horizontal branch
 in the interior of a star
 the bridge for Homers’ dreams
 the stardust in 
  
 The Winds of Herodotus 
  
 Lovers would lie down in that fine valley 
 between pencil and ink
 in the white sheets of abandon;
 on their secret page; without shame,
 their filament of desire.
  
 It would be the narrow trail 
 of the Bedouin before the sand 
 covers the sentence,
 the long thin mark on the surface of
 the shared stone of discontent 
 the wire that conducts the traveling 
 history of anger,
 the track in our skin of communal grief.
  
 If I could write one true perfect line
 it would be a scar upon the heavens 
  
 and I would not bleed.



  
First published in Impspired Magazine 2019.

We exhale in the theory of leaving
our bodies

when the theft of absence 
is so great 

the winds of our love 
move between the branches

of our longing
at the base of our lungs 

in the hope that this
will not be our final breath.

We inhale to save us
from that death between,

below and 
at the end of us.

There,
where the winds gently rest
in the cave of your breastbone. 

There,
where you bravely placed my heart. 

Here —
safely inside 
the world of yourself.



First published in The Blue Nib, September 2019.

When he stole from her
it was in a fever of gentleness
as if this act of movement towards her
was grand thievery from the past centuries.
 
He saw his theft as a gift
his new language created just for her
the beginning of a secret script between them
the characters of milk white hands
that clasps the ancient teapot
their own sacred ceremony.
 
When something missing was always present.
 
A flower from her hair when she awakened 
a letter from him 
a small rice bowl
several white petals plucked from
 
The Moon Garden.
 
These are the stems of shadow he leaves for her
 
Hanakotoba
 
The Language of Flowers
 
In the height of tall plants and the presence of thorns
these were the words between them
 
without words.
 
Amaririsu 
When there were only their faces.
 
Tsubaki
When the room was red 
and she was perishing with grace.
 
Saboten
When only their bodies remained. 
 
Shion
The time of remembrance.
 
Every night after he died
she left the screen door slightly open.
In the hope he would once again return
to steal something from her.
 
It is the hope of many a jasmine flower.



First published in Impspired Magazine. November 2019.

The longest journey is 
the iridescent flight

from feather to shell.

Your mother of pearl wing
was once spoken of 
in the language of water 

when freedom did not
have to be freedom
for there were no cages.

Your plumage — 
once the lamplight of heaven,

has now migrated to 
a new world of 

tortoise, cowrie and cone

shell — your resurrection body.

Scored with a knife
and carefully broken
into strips —

it is shaped with a coarse stone

to imitate 
your freedom.

The lamplight of heaven 
is now the colour of wild honey

and you can never land,
nor return home, 

ever again.

Beneath a ship-hulled sky
searching us

from the lap of god 

you sing one last hymn.

We, however, cannot hear your song,
nor do we remember what you looked like.

For the act of forgetting — 
shaped to imitate our freedom,

is the final migration of the human heart.

A dewdrop

once cradled a face
on the tip of a pine needle. 

A footprint

in the sand 
was removed by the tides of the moon.

When an adze is crafted,
the death of a basalt flake 
determines its form.

The scars that remain carve out the future.



From Rangitahua 

the dark glass cuts the shape of a new people.

Houses are framed using the branchwood of
the Norfolk pine.

The sacred tall tree with different leaves.

The roof is thatched from the stars.

At night,
turtle bone is dreaming inside a harpoon.

Fire speaks fire language with the earth 
and ovenstone understands that this
is the warmth of the gods.

She stands on a porch. 
Facing the sea.

Overhead, 
the White Terns have forgotten 
they were once us

before they had wings.



On the Marae

the skull of an elephant seal is placed
upon limestone slabs.

The Sacred Ahu.

In the god house
a prayer is offered.

The Ancestors notice her absence.

She wishes for the bones of remembrance,
for her body is the home her family once lived in.

Her descendants — a people not yet born,
without names,

will one day, belong —

here.


An adze is put to sleep to acquire

Mana  

so that new work can begin.


To shape the cortex and dorsal of a new universe.

The quiet, dark humming

that opens a tear duct —
a closed fist,
a barren womb,

a mouth 

to sing.


Seven hundred years ago —

after the fire,
at 

The Bay of Many Turtles 

she sings for her family to return.
The song of a lost family.

The voices of fishbone, 
pine and basalt.

The cry of the Hi-hi and
the Wunna.

The Pou —

Four burning posts 
facing the sea.

Her heart —
a bruised stone.

That grief unmoved 
singing inside
their lives unlived.


She is still singing.

Sole star —
Duang dieo

You are the eye of my heart.

Your beauty is unendurable.
That is why I must take my leave.

The wrist, hand and robe of a monk

understands this.

The leaves that dance at dawn
beneath the sweep of a broom 

understands this.

The wind chimes below the temple spires —
that remind us to be present with the past 

understands this.

That is why I must take my leave.


He is here with me now, your ancestor.
Gazing at me, down through the centuries.

He wants to tell me something.
Poet — to — poet.

The white crows wing follows the Ping River 
like a cartographer.
Mapping the sacred unseen.


And you are not here.


I remember the scent of the krajae tree.
The fragrant water of wood and bark.

A powder of krajae, sandalwood, musk and saffron 
is dissolved and placed upon the skin.


The white crows wing
is mapping the sacred unseen.


And you are not here.


I arrive at Wat Jedi Luang 
Kutaram 

Before the collapse of history 
its royal spire was the tallest in Lanna.

Maha Awat    In the great monastery I seek refuge
                       from the noonday sun. 

                       Sole star. The sky is a fever.

Amarakata     Made by immortals,
                       The Emerald Buddha is shading 
                       your eyes.

A black crow flies over a million rice fields.


And you are not here.


On to Wat Chettha/Settharam

The Most Excellent One 

Abandoned seventy years ago —
only one Jedi remains
inside Phutthisophon School.

Behind the fence,
all the ghosts are here.

A black beak and wing appears like a moonless 
night in the corner of a child’s eye.

The child is learning to speak.


Wat Chang Taem

Here, I sleep and dream of

The Garlic Fields 

Below my hammock, 
I can hear her 

hands

digging, shaking and banding.

Her whisper is

Chang — Chang

The elephants are bathing in the river next to me.

The lions are guarding your absence.


At Wat Jet Lin

former kings of Chiang Mai were bathed here
in water poured from conches 
through seven golden pipes.

Seven Lin for the seven years of

The Childs Learning

I bathe in the waters of the missing.
An old water wheel still stands.


Near Chiang Mai Gate at

Thiang Sao     In the memory of the dead this is a 
                        peaceful, holy place.
                        Horses, carts and tuskers are moving in               
                        the eye of your ancestor.

                        The metal castors have
                        laid down their bellows.

All that remains is —

Wat Chiang Khong      A bell-shaped Jedi on Suriwong      
                                        Road.                           
                                        It’s limbs bound 
   		                        by commerce and modernity.

		                        It’s face blindfolded by    
                                        telephone wires.

A black beak and wing appears.


And you are not here.


I rest and think of you at

Wat Yang Kuang / Wat Nang Rua 

King Mangrai planted a Bodhi tree here from a seed brought from Lanka.
He stayed three nights but received no omen
so travelled onward to found his new city at Chiang Mai.

The skeleton of a Bodhi leaf is the map of the heart.


Wat Chetawan

Not far from Tha Phae Gate,
in the cool of the evening you can hear —

The ancient spires sing in the wind.

The lost voice of a Burmese colonist millionaire.

How the Buddha accumulated merits through the practice of ten virtues.

The conquest of our devils.


I travel the Old Chiang Mai-Lamphun Road
to

Wat Prathat Hariphunchai  Lamphun


I search for you here in 
the palm-leaf manuscripts.

The talipot palm lives for many years
but flowers only once.

After its blossoming, death soon follows.

Its leaves are boiled and dried. 
Poetry is incised onto the leaf
with a stylus.

A mixture of lampblack and oil
is applied to the leaf then wiped off.

Only poetry remains.


In the folding books

poems were arranged like a secret code 
so that only a person who knew the key 
was able to understand the poem.

Who holds the key now, I wonder.

Underneath the Tripitaka building
the water well dreams
in the shape of crouching elephants.

I sit before the laughter of a dying world.



He is here with me now, your ancestor.
Gazing at me, down through the centuries.

He wants to tell me something.
Yet, I cannot hear his voice.

For I do not understand the language of crows.








Mark Tarren. 2025.