SOLSTICE GUEST CONTRIBUTOR : PHILLIP LEAMON
MON 21 MAR 04.32 - MOON LIT serves up a little sun soaked poetic magic for all midsummer night dreamers....
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Happy Summer Solstice overnight one and All ( ...an equally wondrous Winter Solstice to our Mooning friends and family in the Southern Hemisphere)
A matter of days since publication of MOON LIT 6 featuring poetry from folk lore enthusiast and Green Man incarnate Phillip Leamon (still available to read here) we make a solar inspired offering to marry our more regular lunar intentions. Phil has saved a smattering of poetic treats for our solstice dinner dessert, served moist in a crushed elegiac berry jus for optimal tasting under a setting midsummer sun. Savour the flavours friends. Tuck into the feast of succulent circuitous spheres, in both verse and presentation, finished with a delicately drawn, well rounded digestif, distilled by yours truly to mark this auspicious solar occasion. Enjoy!
This is high summer dear ones, a time for celebration and sharing of gifts that reflect the abundance so freely given by the natural world. Lest we forget, that ceaseless benevolence supports and nurtures our species' historically brief and tenuous presence on this incomparably beautiful planet. During our influential tenure, the argument for taking greater care of Mother Earth's bounty has never been more pressing.
The essence of caring responsibility arises naturally from an attitude of gratitude easily accessed in these long, luxuriously warm summer evenings. Clement weather, camaraderie, conversation, laughter, song and dance; feasts of freshly picked produce; the cooling crystal shimmer of water in river and sea; the perfume and taste of sun kissed skin. Let's give uninhibited thanks.
Birdsong; the verdant, generous green canopy of trees in full leaf; flowers in bloom whether in city, suburb or vale; afternoon naps on grassy knolls and a place to rest one's head when the sun finally dips its shining pate so briefly below the horizon...only to rise again in another sacred dawn; Life itself, the energetic loving thread that enfolds and connects us all in its unifying, unending embrace. Let's give thanks and resolve to celebrate and share that with which we have been blessed.
May the full height of this year's Summer Solstice find your world bathed in the eternal sunshine of heartfelt gratitude.
With love and thanks 'til next time
Mark
MIDSUMMER IN LOCKDOWN
No stones but a garden. No gathering, though peace.
Hush for a moment, hold, and we are middled in
the year; dusk drops - still - stop. The chord that holds us all
as one is threaded through the belly of the month
like time spanned spiral sand in hourglass’ birth canal
that fat June must pass through to be born anew. You
take hands from far like old friends at a dance, weave
through the air and join your hands and hers and theirs and
soon we form the endless chain that wraps itself round
fire and womb and moon and through the galaxy’s eye
into this single, separate second where we all hang motionless
in love and then again the dance wheels on and on
EARLY TO BED
The lawn lays unmown again
rampant and glorious
full of the daisies all courting the sun.
Blackbirds seduce the dusk
joyful and rapturous
lie like a held breath ‘til silence has come.
Warm wind teases the blinds
whispered and heavy breathed
window wide midsummer skies kiss goodnight.
Restless you lay beside
Untended and glorious
Full of the yearning near touch of the dark.
NOT IN A GLASS
SUMMER SOLSTICE MOON
charcoal on paper
18 x 18cm
2021
Phil Leamon is an English teacher and Head of Sustainability at Cranleigh School, tirelessly striving to transform institutionalised consumer habits into an easily accessed, practical and progressive eco-awareness. His poetry has been published by Dempsey and Windle and he has co-curated the Illustoetry schools exhibitions of illustrated poetry for the Cambridge Art Festival.
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