Lorca Estrella, you gypsy. Crush your red mouth onto mine. Below noon’s bright gold, i will bite that apple. In the greeness of the olive grove, high on the hill, there is an ancient Moorish tower. The colour of your peasant flesh your peasant flesh, which tastes of honey and the dawn. You offer me in your sunburnt body divine food which flowers the river bed, and gives stars to the wind. Brown light – why do you give me full of love, your lillied womanhood, and
Lorca Waters song can’t die. It’s the erotic sap which ripen the fields, It’s the blood of poets who’s souls got lost in the paths of nature. Harmonies spill from her welling crag, sweet rhythms she abandons to us. In bright morning the hearth smokes, and its plumes are arms Lifting up the mist. Listen to love affairs erupt in the water of the poplar grove, wingless birds abandoned in the grasses! The serenading trees with their snapping and cracking – the rough plains becoming mountains of
Valemon and the Wild Third Daughter is a jewel of a Scandinavian fairy tale. Epic, gutsy, funny, mysterious – it takes us through both the exhilaration and consequence of following your desire. One day a white bear arrives at the entrance to a castle and beckons you leap onto its back. There are no guarantees but your heart sings at the sight. What will you do? Safety or the deep forest? Read an extract from Martin’s commentary on Valemon and the Wild Third Daughter, from A Branch from
Read an extract from Martin’s commentary on the Russian story of Ivan the Bear's Son, from A Branch from the Lightning Tree. 'This is a point in our lives where we decide (or are forced) to throw the anchor down, to live in one place, have a teacher, dig in...' Throwing Down the Anchor This descent is characterized by the “black” stage of the initiation process. When one enters the black, a kind of sobering occurs, an awareness of things lost in the scramble for power and
Winter gods lope the forest Strike you with their wolfskin glove And the counterfeit life Takes its carrion demands Back to the blue deceits Of the one who first folded you I trust words like that more than therapy talk, or becoming-your-best-self, or some strangulated idea about enlightenment. That there is an owl that lands on your face as you gather sticks by the river and you fall into a trance for three days. Such an image thrills and alarms as it can’t be franchised, or easily
And as she sleeps he talks to himself, that old abiding friendship. In a brownstone in New York City, he once dreamt that a fairy tale was a kind of breast milk from the earth to us humans. A song-line that pours troublesome nutrition into our pretending-to-be-modern hearts. So all day long he thinks about this. That afternoon in Brooklyn it rains so hard you can barely walk upright, so he shelters in the doorway of a dive bar scrawling what he just thought on a napkin. The
