Poetry of AJ Seymour

I'd like now to read some love poems. All my life I've been driven to write poems of love. I feel that this is because in every individual, including the poet, there is an inner necessity to describe the constant movement of the deep self outward, to the beloved person, one of the most important impulses of the human being. And in these poems, which I say constitute the love song of Arthur Seymour, many times the environment has suggested ideas and preferred images of resemblances and reconciliation. This has happened with the trade winds, with the tides, with a sea void, with a game. But always these elements in the environment possess voices that whisper or speak out loud and yield images to express the movement of the self, seeking to be joined with the other. Here now is the first one. As waters love the moons wild, wondering will across the sea. So huge, so incomplete, so passionate, my love for thee. As compass seeks the north, as winds yield fickle gusts and subject me to the old powering northeast urge that holds the trades. My love for thee. You can also find images of a love poem in the way in which the tides move up and down across the ocean. The sea plies ferry post from shore to shore, running behind the moon, and flooding beaches to great bays in the sun. And there she reaches her long, sought fingers till they run no more and spend before the trees. Then round the she turns, gathers her skirts, withdraws her glittering waters, obediently, like one of nature's daughters, and on a distant shore again she yearns with all her eager tides. And so I plie between your storms and laughter, hair and there, responsive to the call hidden in your voice or mingle with your words. I have no choice but heave my bulk after your messengers, and heather thither move beneath your sky. This is a poem which talks about the rice harvest. It's a poem of love. It's month since the young rice stirred to the morning breeze, now they are gathering the rice in the fields along the coast, and my heart turns to you. Time and the sun have stored their beauty in these grasses, in their communion with the soil, for a thousand mines and hearts to learn in love of the magical marriage of the crops. And my heart longs for a harvest as simple and true as theirs. I envy the easy beginning and the simple end lost in a larger life. But our ways call for a touching of our spirits only. I wish I were the rice and you the soil. The next love poem is based on the image of the Nile and what it means to Egypt. I lie like Egypt in the sun, you are my Nile. Through the dry earth, the living waters run, hear their oliga, brimming everyone, the ravaged wrinkles of the sun, until my patched land smile. Oh, for my heart, the death of drought would rain eternally, but blossom spring and grain because you came. You breathe and Egypt comes to life again. Nile is your name. In 1946, I was on a ship going to England and called the Marine Martin. And in the Bay of Biscay, it ran into the pulling of the tides. And there was the great ship staggering in the jump in sea. This too becomes the framework for a love poem. Night long, the wind was bitter and the sea plucked or beat angrily fists on either side at the great Marlin, soldering the tide of Lisbon. Pouseless in its urgency, the big ship staggered in the jump in sea. But though the waters closed and left no mark, her lights moved firmly on across the dark with her warm sleeping cargo, forced and free. And I, a pendulum at its city's heart, lay with your image bright upon my mind and lived each glowing memory I could find where joy and you keep indivisible part. Love angeled left the laboring ship behind. I hold communion with you in my heart. This poem is based upon reflections on the statue of Venus Demileau. It says, looking at the Venus statue. The woman we never meet and dreamed of love. These limbs beget the desire to possess. See how the waste holds breasts and thighs together in harmony. But spirit must rhythm these shapely curves in love, transform the wonder to a woman to make a marvelous bed fellow. To match her, we must be Apollo, as God would make us in his eye before the years reshape us to ourselves. If brought to life, these promises of happiness might all to worship and not move to love. Who would force union with a goddess? It must be she invite, consent, surrender. To sleep with her is every man's desire, clothing those perfect limbs on each beloved, so that the limbs move lovingly, she speak with our loves voice. This is about the kiss. They tell us there are two kinds of kiss, the brush of the moth and the kiss of the bee lost. The thousand tangled limbs of love, the kiss, the moth's brush and the lost bee passionate. The little moths, two bodies can create in their embrace, born on the wing of bliss. And yet for all this, yet for all the limbs the truth is this, the lovers hidden anguish is suddenly a river, desire flowing to the sea, all else is theme and vain hypothesis. And bodies but the soil, the living root, tethering the spirit to its plot of land until it flowers up to touch the sky. And Romeo or Anthony or I, the trembling touch of knee or lip or hand, how dream that spirit is the body's fruit? One incredulous morning in the passionate light of dawn, she came into my room. Excited by bear shoulders, she gave a cry of delight and we were locked in love, or let the years rolled back to my cold and passionate dawn. Nearly all women sleep when they are loved. Maybe the body has to coil again from its full stretch. Maybe the deep, drunged brain emerges from its spring tide into rest. maybe their bank, their ecstasy in dreams. against a future anguish and devaluation. But as the unhurried stars wheel overhead above a thousand million nests of love, one or two women lie and think and glow. Memories of you besiege my waking day and batter on my consciousness at night, the shape of you, the swing with which the slight tort figure of you turns to a deed the way or watch her, you unleash the shattering words upon your object till you see it real. There is a coiled strength in you like slim steel, like rapiers and those thin and glittering swords. But tenderness you have outstrips the roses, outruns the hearts of buds blushed and on bruised, and grace, born of lost half remembered poses, shaped in the dance from rhythms that you used to wield delighted limbs to the music's clothes. There's nothing memory-owns that I would lose. While yet the dawn through crimson gates comes streaming, still you lie dreaming fairer than the day. Once more sweet colour takes the dew-filled roses that through nights' flows is dark as soft-sleevely. Your lovely eyes like jewels in a star-skye which wandering ships have stared by scatter beauty-round. My day begins with your first smiling slowly, a smile that is a holy prayer without sound. Our share with yeats, the rage, the impotence of power, at this old age, this pain, this disability, the currents of blood begin to falter in their course. The clock in the heart is troubled by the quarreling angle of sun, but the blades of memory are stainless, shining bright to pack away at evening. Wisdom, born of the years, this body-bottled spirit, fit for eternity, yields to the time decay, the world's conspiracy. Or there are types enough. Two examples will suffice, layer huddled with this fool out in the tempest's blasts, cursing the elements and chiles in gratitude, instead of his error made, rebuffing a daughter's love shaped in his stubborn mold. And legendary Kai, drawn to the river's brink, bound by the angry daughters whose beauty he had robbed. Now that I know the sky plummets beyond the stars, now that my spirits span, haze mortgages to time, how can I play this role that time thrusts on us all? I have a room where several sages sleep in their serried shells and wait my conversation. Here I fashion images, carving and fitting words, polishing syllables, shaping new rhythms to grace new meanings, distilling experience, securing my identity, hammering metal in my spirit's workshop. I can remember now how the library started 30 years ago, a dictionary and Shakespeare, the sleeping dynamite of thought, the marvellous web of Topaz Rhythm, imagery and human conduct at Topsoil language, room set apart for living to sit and talk with friends. I have sought physical echoes in carvings, fragrant with the memory of Mahogmani forests, in capistries where new-bile girls caught with an endearing tilt of the head weighed on the banks of Amazonian rivers, bearing their little cargos of a rested virginity. In cruel heads of obsidian, where the dark blood has hardened into glass in the idiom of Aztec sacrifices, soft them from my Eulacean sea. I am heavy with sleep. The seeds of sleep weigh within my eyes, nest at the roots of my pubic hair, close the portals of my creative imagination. Sleep is hard in my liver, walks slowly between my vertebra. Its depressants pull the strength out of my limbs like glue. Dimly conscious, my life forces, gather drowsily in the aorta, calling in my centuries. The little death is amissed, shrouding my memory, even my lungs are old. What is me is reduced to a vanishing dot in the wind of oblivion. My naked, curious self, afraid as in the garden. I quail within my gates to this intake of the senses, history is wash and tide pouring in through my ports. But in my citadel I call on miraculous will, bank of creative courage. I shape my stuff of being, hammering, plating, molding, the wheel and taste of ideas, the physics of emotion, converting pain and loss, secrets of race and language, and virtue and stalwart power into a spirit plasma. And quail or quim, the self rigid in its courage till time invades the tower to quench the quickening core. I probe these geometered granules in my palm with my stubbed fingers and separate each labyrinth of history. How dark, how sweet, how moist and how destructive. Locked in each grain, its hidden laws and essences, the pattern of its being like a name, consuming time and strength and dignity, the fill the bowls of all the world. Magnetic filings that have pulled cross currents, subtle, amazed and various across the middle passage to sweeten islands with brutality. These genies of the tall cane blooms, slept in the soil, and climbed limbs of ratoons for birth and death within the waving plantations. Mirror the hills that plague my generation? Yes. Poetry should give back to the turbulence, confusion in the forces of the good, glee-shouting rampant in the ranks of ill. The insolence of youth, shouldering aside, the claims of middle aged incompetence, violence upon the roads and the assaults, inflicted daily on the human person. Colour's erosion of our private rights, faint kettysies bestowed upon the poor, the lawlessness that citizens commit daily in arrogant presumption, massive indifference of authority. Men also need poems to speak in secret words that embody their need for ecstasy. There must be words to feed the hungry spirit, to shine the mirror of a living faith, to bless the anguished mind awake at midnight, to soothe the old and set the children singing, make laughing lovers dream under the sky. For my heart, your breasts are vices, a casket where it may flee, and I in turn will create the wings for your total liberty. In my speaking wafes to heaven, the dream that sleeps in your soul, on my shapely words that will wing the skies to bear you home and whole. There exists in you each day's image, for the hooded flower you the dew, the horizon is troubled when you are away, and the restless wave is you. The winds that caress you sing lyrics like pine trees or shipmars to sea, and like them a lof-ly you tower, like a sudden and sad journey. Thoughts gather in you like an ancient path, voices echo from long ago, and I wake to find that the swallows that sleep in your soul that they come and they go.