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Murmuration

entry picture

A hyper-sensitivity of feeling
your art connects across the senses
The roughness of ancient bark
beneath gentle fingertips
A kiss from rock-pool water
warm against bare ankles

A double exposure
a murmuration
it's poetry, the sensuality
the sheer never timid beauty
lensed so gracefully
with such assurance and dexterity

The texture, a waking daydream
a cloak of fog, shaft of sunlight
A cinematic freeze-frame
marked by absence
the distance or proximity
of pain and recovery

Point and click, your dark-room trick
it’s as if you have control
over the mountains
the birds, the tides
or consummate authorship
of the nuance you convey

A solo figure in vast expanse
an aloneness I recognise
searching but serene
Lost in the careful creation
of an endless mythology
loudly reverberates in me

The slow creep of new tissue
like quietly vanishing tattoos
it’s at your back and haunches
as your work builds and soars
so far from that place
expressive in its woozy warmth

I hear the touch, witness the aroma
I exist in awe and quiet wonder
A world scatters its knitted beauty
a murmuration
Little charcoal sketches
across watercolour paper

The spine is a map
a breadcrumb trail
we trace with our fingers
but we can't go back
ephemeral and observable only
in reflection or a photograph

Dusk tides, an evening deer
a crumbling barn, eiderdown snow
A swimsuit girl, the Northern Lights
a neon sign, a broken rainbow
midnight phone booth, stitches in skin
untethered and inspirationally free

Your photography is a place
I love to visit when I can
It's pure poetry you pen
with the light, with your lens
A lasting comfort, you translate
the message I can't help but take;

It's impossible
impossible not to love 
the beauty of this world...

[2021]

An ode to the work of one of my favourite photographers.

artistbeautyemotionfeelingphotographer

◄ The Lighthouse Keeper's Song

Old Poem ►

Comments

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Tom

Tue 26th Jan 2021 11:38

Thank you Paul, Holden and Keith for the likes and for reading ?

And thank you Keith, I'm honoured you'd share this with your friend. For me expressive and evocative photography is the art form most akin to poetry – and perhaps even more instantly transportive. It's a great source of inspiration too. As with the poets I like, when I find them, I often like everything they write; and the same with particular photographers.

I wish I managed to say it all slightly more pithily but my inner editor failed me on this one. ?

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keith jeffries

Mon 25th Jan 2021 15:16

a skillfully composed poem rich in its descriptive quality. Certainly an ode to a photographer. An Italian friend is a professional photographer and I shall show this to him.

Thank for a fine piece of poetic language

Keith

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Tom

Wed 20th Jan 2021 10:57

Thank you Jordyn, Stephen and Stephen for the likes! ?

And thank you Aviva for the comment and like. I'm so pleased you enjoyed my first poem of 2021. I did end up tweaking a few words here and there but it's finished now and it is what it is. Thanks for your encouragement - I really appreciate it. Tom.

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Aviva Rifka Bhandari

Tue 19th Jan 2021 16:47

Perhaps I just don't possess the skill to imagine anything better than the words you've chosen. So, I hope you don't trim or change a single word of this, but I am not sure if you should listen to me.
I thought it was perfect as it is.

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