Seeing Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks

'A bird is an instrument working according to a mathematical law.'

Illumination in the gloom, little more than
the moon's lustre. I mirror read tight tendrils
of spider writing to the future mind
of genius.

Spirals of harmonic flight, perpetual motion,
equal angles, the confluence of double helix,
percussion and the eddying of tides were stuffed
in his cerebellum.

One intellect to conjure earth's flesh, human bone,
the sun's skin, to transfuse the quill and spill it
onto parchment, black ink flowing in reverse
of synapse.

Unravelled skein of inspiration, mesmeric
lilliputian script, sketched prettier than Belgian lace.
A cosmos joust, to charge and lance conundrums,
grey matter bearing down, giving birth
to concepts.

I wander glass crypt to crypt, intermittent pulse
of light to glimpse the theories of his age
as artist, scientist, engineer. Breathe in museum hush
and gloom and feel our limitations nothing more
than alchemy.

Renaissance god, his bird mind soaring higher
than Icarus, preening mathematical law, submariner
in contraptions, reflex cogs and springs. This dynamo
siring movement, space, weight, force, as wheels turn
keeping time.

And in the shadows, hooks and pulleys crane
my mind's wilderness, desert to this fertile genius
too much for one skull. His magic, marching
in battalions, black pygmy letters in formation
shoulder pressed to shoulder, in the darkness
inventing light.

© Sheryl Persson

Irish Ulysses

(A response to "Ulysses" by James Joyce)

Woolgathering on city streets
thoughts are not a conscious stream
more a river, running swift and deep
beautiful as the Liffey.

All life crammed into a single day.
Odours of body-sweat and fish
the smell of cabbage and a taste of bile
jostle with noises on the quay;
cart-wheels, whistles, hooters, cranes
while the sea cradles the isle of Eire.

Beneath the pub’s unholy lights
as guilt and sorrow drown in beer
the talk’s of poetry, birth and death
the men they knew or never saw.
Humour, prejudice, certainty and doubt
meld with the lilt of fantasy and youth
as voices of the sirens swell
to fiddles, pipes and solitude.

The myth and more, the flowers that bloom.

© Paula McKay

A New Life

If I could bring back the dead
who would it be, and would they agree
maybe they were resting comfortably
unlike me, in my mummified world.

I wonder if *Osiris made a choice
said, hmmm not sure about this one
maybe it was he that cut me into
fourteen pieces, oh well I’m in a good mood
let him in.

The dead, there’re a funny lot
always got so much to say
talk so loud about what they’ve done
where they’ve been, their favourite music
their favourite wine, and they’re always on about
their complaints, Alzheimer’s, gastritis, ulcers
and of course schistosomiasis.

But what if I could bring back the dead
they could see the changes, to see what we’ve done
and feel the connections to what we’d become
but I think they might be a little bitter and twisted
when they find out that death still existed.

Robert Kennedy

- after the Egyptian, Book of the Dead.

*Osiris, the god of rebirth