3UDC: 008; 502/504 DOI 10.24412/2713-184x-2024-1-76-82
POEMS BY BEVERLEY A'COURT
This issue embraces a selection of poems by Beverley A'Court (Findhorn, Scotland). She has been practicing art therapy since 1981, pioneering holistic eco-art therapy. She is an advocate for the recognition of the place of poetic language, the body, ecology, and cultural wisdom traditions in art therapy. She made a selection of her poems and commented on them in the following way:
BEVERLEY A'Court
BSc.Soc.Sci. (Joint Hons. Phil. & Psych), Dip. A.T., registered art therapist (UK), a long-term member of the Findhorn Foundation Community, currently in private practice
These 'praisepoems' literally 'spring,' bubble up as I walk, often wholly as written here and sometimes with repetitions which I may, as here, edit out some time later.
The 'Homage to our Lady' poem was inspired by the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, and is a gathering of familiar N E Scottish agricultural images and associations, woven together with gratitude and devotional feelings I associate with our local 12th century Benedictine Monastery, where 26 monks live in silence and keep a warm, welcoming and healing place of spiritual sanctuary many locals go to for contemplation. I enjoy playing with traditional structures in poetry, while expressing personal themes.
I believe that as we relax, we can feel ourselves as nature and when we quieten or remove our attention from the 'white noise' of strain and effort, as Feldenkrais so well described, and can listen to ourselves, our own body as part of nature, with natural forces pouring through us.
Imagination, as well as the somatic sense, is the symbolic medium through which this unity of flow is experienced in consciousness
Often my walking songs and poems feel as if they come from 'outside' me, I am being sung rather than singing. This is an ancient experience written about by many artists.
SongWalk. A day walking in Northern Portugal
A wandering walk; following invisible songlines,
a river of conversation
between body and land,
feet and lungs, paths unfolding
from the dreaming machair*,
pines and cedars speaking back
in whispers, breezes conjuring
seas of sound
and from my body, a spring of song.
Beings hear my being sung, my prayer-full anthem
limbs swinging in lilting rhythms and
mica-feathered moths and
skittish lizards, brown as dung,
butterflies like palm-sized angels,
black-wings trimmed in
gold and acid yellow,
twin wrens
dipping through the pines, and swaying eucalyptus,
their bark unfurling papery ribbons
lemon-green and amber ochres,
last year's strands black crackling underfoot,
along the track
and my praise-song,
footfall after footfall, limbs and river
one fluid wandering world,
one choir.
*A machair is a fertile low-lying grassy plain found on part of the northwest coastlines of Ireland and Scotland, is the distinctive ecology of pebbly sand dunes, heathers, tiny alpine-like wildflowers and some rare lichens found around the Scottish coastline. It is very pretty as the pale white (in some places shell) sand is luminous against the smoky grey skies we often have. (B. A.)
Lady of the North East. (after George MacKay Brown)
Homage to Our Lady of Honey,
In the light between the silks of the honey-bee's back.
Homage to Our Lady of Secret Knowledge, Between the plum's flesh and its skin.
Homage to Our Lady of Understanding, In the thistle's kiss, the whale's eye.
Homage to Our Lady of Involvement, In the punctured rain-drop, In the baptism of rain-on-skin, In the drenching.
Homage to Our Lady of Irrevocable Poetry, In the planes shot down by 'friendly fire', In how we always love our enemies. In reflections.
Homage to Our Lady of the Loyal Heart,
In the upstream salmon,
In the father who hits the bottle not the child.
Angels who fall and never cease from bearing all our weight.
Homage to Our Lady of Music and Constellations, In the song of the deep-sea jellyfish, In the rays of the harbour sun-star, In Cassiopeia dispersed among the waves.
Homage to Our Lady of Caring for the Land, In the earthworm,
In the furrow's sun-cracked, rain-glazed sides. Homage,
In the waist-high barley, her festival of feathers.
Purple Lake / 21 lines (after Malaysian Panton style)
The Dalai Lama sits blessing the land,
tulips are opening, snow melting,
while sadness lives in me like a purple lake.
When my son hugs me, he plants an anchor in my heart. We feed the birds
and the window fills with trembling and feathers.
The longing for sunlit mountains sticks in my side like an arrow,
this yearning I wear like plumage, like victory.
Tulips are opening, snow melting. We feed the birds.
When my son hugs me, he plants an anchor in my heart, and the window fills with trembling and feathers.
Feeding the birds,
this longing for sunlit mountains
sticks in my side like an arrow,
the window fills with trembling and feathers,
the yearning I wear like plumage, like victory.
The longing for sunlit mountains sticks in my side like an arrow, the Dalai Lama blessing the land. This yearning I wear like plumage, like victory, while sadness lives in me like a purple lake.
The Company of Birds & Hares
I.
Returning from the day's long walk, away from the human world of talk and war-torn thought,
turning over in my palm like a warm found stone, my day among the lives and voices of my other kin; sea-birds, bees, hares, moths and butterflies. Slow-walking hours, side-by-side, low-gliding arm's length away, fulmars, touchable, lover-like, dark eye-gazing. "They'll dive-bomb, go for you, drive you out and off their cliff" "Aggressive birds."
Under the scooped arcs of skuas, great and arctic, peat-dark wing-tips snow-flecked, loosened chunks of moor, slow to get airborne but once
high, dark angels spiralling in currents, playing eagle.
Each day one pair, sky-dancing, accompany me pausing when I pause, perching, wings folded on a nearby rock while I sit in meditation and when I sing, raise feathered arms and stare straight at me, seem to breathe with me same salt, same light, same ocean.
Dusk, turning the cliff's last curve, there
they were, falling into place outside my door, seeing me safely home. "They watch us, closely, enemies, they want to see us off and gone..." I make tea and mutely long for feathered arms, moss and flower pillows, and the stream that was a path, all warm and brown and flowing wordless song.
II.
All day, for days, in flowered, furred and feathered prayer,
with hares, who, when I chant, turn and run back along the path towards me,
so unexpectedly, so suddenly
I'm the one who freezes in surprise.
All day in reverence for lichens, yellow trefoils, wings and sea,
for alpine gardens, dust of flies,
and bees clung-on to wind-sprung heather bells.
All day with every living thing so close in touch and taste and sharing
space and breath and moisture,
glorious in our woven freedoms.
III.
Each cell is petal to a distant star, each breath a tropic wind, blown home, Each tiny move sends tremors far to distant hearts and bone. We blink and spring a shiver in the leaves, our hunger engine hums the buzz of bees, and every step we walk dislodges, frees the captive birds of love, to dance the breeze.
I saw the Geese
And when we die & they ask,
'What did you see?' I'll say;
I saw the geese;
carried in wind
like winged seed-cases,
a black-flecked & breaking strand across
the sky, above our heads, our house,
the line of an invisible wave,
their gently modulating 'V'
forming and reforming,
ribbonning,
in ever-changing places
in rippling rivulets,
& then their streaming down
like wind-blown, falling seeds,
all spin and flicker,
filling the open sky,
showering the fields,
and sunset sand-flats
with wing-beating,
heart-beating
life.
Lain
Sleeping in my clothes; So simple, to lie down wherever you find yourself, on sand, stone, pavement, floor...
What disturbance it creates,
this simple act of unstanding, lying down
without apparent cause,
permission,
purpose.
A sudden stricken one, or saint, perhaps, or revolutionary? A taker-of-freedoms, a feral body in charge of itself?
Listen to the Leaves
See how we free ourselves,
say the leaves,
how far we fly.
How vast our reach is,
now
we have left the branches. What tree is big enough for us
who fill a whole sky?
