It's been a while since I've written any poetry but I thought I would go through two of my old projects Poetry Mosaic and Moments of Chaos and Nostalgia (a poetry/photography project with photographer Dan Wesker) and in addition to this some of my unpublished work and share the poems here in an online collection called Re Issue. I'm still very proud of Poetry Mosaic. This is how I described it on the blog initially.
Poetry Mosaic is the online poetry invention of London based poet, Naomi Woddis. I find that my writing process is changing rapidly and I am using found text in my work. Sometimes I will do an extended interview and this will form the basis or springboard for a poem. I mix some extracts of the conversation with my own writing.
Poetry Mosaic goes a step further. The responses to specific questions will be the starting point for the poetry on this site. Short phrases from these replies will be cut and pasted with longer pieces of my own work and the finished poems will be posted on the Poetry Mosaic blog. Each respondent will be fully acknowledged at the end of each poem on the Poetry Mosaic blog. I will retain sole copyright for the poem that I create out of the responses.
Sometimes I created the poem using only the replies and at other times I would include my own contributions to the final piece.
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On Time
The oldest knew the mountain. As children they had all the time in the world,
watched the hourglass empty, caught in the glint of the rising sun’s eye.
*
My greying hair, the shrinking human brain, skin products gathering on the bathroom shelf.
An antelope runs across a lonely desert, its shadow speeding.
*
Tornado time whirls. Monks meditate on stillness at the fulcrum.
Everything that has happened will happen. It is always Now.
© Copyright Naomi Woddis 2008
Inspired and taken from answers to the the following questions:
What image illustrates the true nature of time ? Describe the first time you saw another person’s blood ? What does the word home mean to you ?
Chrystine Bennett A tornado, a hurricane. no not the winds whirling round and round picking up cars and cows and houses, the strange stillness in the middle. Time is not forward or back, it is never past, it is always now.
Dorianne Laux Trees are time. Leaves fall like minutes. Eons of rings hidden at the core. They tick like clocks in the breeze and the birds who live inside them are small beating hearts. They watch the grass grow over their feet. Their limbs ache when it rains. The oldest knew the mountains when they were young, when they had all the time in the world.
Niall O’Sullivan The human brain.
Sally Evans A sand-glass. Or the sun rising in the north east at the solstice. The neolithic tomb where the sun strikes in through an aperture only once a year, at its highest point. A reversible sand-glass.
Catherine Brennan The increasing accumulation of skin products in the bathroom cabinet!
Lucy Lepchani Most cultures have a linear model of time: past, present, future. Tantric traditions are founded on the concept of time as non-linear: everything that has ever happened or will happen, is taking place simultaneously, constantly. Tantric practices, which range from meditation to feasting, sexual rites or intoxication or working with death, and many other taboos, shift consciousness to dispel the illusion of linear time (known as ‘The Monster of Time’). Tantrics hold that to experience Time as it truly is, as it reflects the nature of the universe, is to experience divine ecstasy.
Andy Thibault Simultaneously, I see the curve of the earth from space and antelope running in the desert from a cliff in the southwest U.S. Stella Duffy The greying of hair.