Terry Bat-Sonja is an artist who has, over the last year also begun to write poetry constantly. Though she always wrote on boxes in closets and on trains, it's just become more obsessive. She was born in southern Africa, has lived in various interesting countries, and spent a bunch to time on the east coast. She has lived for the last eight years in Southern California, but she is a gypsy at heart.
Walking, animals, the cosmos, the ocean, kabbalah, mountains, people, and the weather, her garden, and people she loves deeply...(and there are many), influence her and amuse and muse her.... and inspire her.
Turning over between buttercup sheets,
curves, mine,
the light turns amber ominous
tide is out,
small desolation's
rich sheaves of hair on pillow,
not mine, just imagined...........
It's darker now, the last jasmine,
such sweetness!
pulling into sleep's dark green door,
there, all is interior crystal.
Fluorine's purple-green & watery,
half-consummated lovemaking blends,
and the wolf roams,
Miro blends into Chagall,
and then waking,
into Turner's luminous yellow morning
drugged with bunched dream-visions
shocking,
calm
and even.
They have no internal venom,
to subdue with, save what they create,
their teeth are not hollow, but blunt,
they do not have our snake dances,
though dances they do have, and ecstasy
too.
Mostly they have forgotten us,
our places with the Mother lie in ruins,
the milk offerings, long forgotten.
Fewer still know
how the Greatest one
circled the earth.
Oh fanged ones,
we still dance for them
the kundalini dance,
but we are not sacred.
Many of us are killed
for our beautiful skins
or for killing lust.
Unless you live in the land of the cobra
the mamba, or the anaconda
they respect us not.
Keep the ancient wisdom within,
one day they will return,
unless they kill us all first,
and we are no more,
to help them
unveil the ways.
The freeway roar,
hurtles into, deep into,
the silent prissy preplanned neighborhood,
filling it,
but the sound of light covers that,
even that.
In the dawning,
on the hill eucalyptus trees,
fog hung
& passing through their fingers,
limbs, branches & weeping leaves.
Darkly, fragrantly, waiting,
for nothing, really for nothing.
I want this delicacy to stay
but it won't.
The coyotes are so close
their little teeth are snapping
their breath hot on my cheeks
their fur, running along the sound walls
& through my fingers.........
Soon
their yips and cries fade.
The morning glories are half-open,
the light,
in their small mouths
like a communion wafer
But never filling.
Three times around
a mile, an aggressive dog,
stray moths, fingers clasped
we go.
The arms of California pines
curving just so,
forever upward, then
draped down, Greek hands,
tree dancers, stuck in tree poses.
Moving in tree time
I'm wondering, who I am tonight,
with each turn around
knowing
less and less,
until I feel I am sleepwalking,
suspended in tree/grass
purple night time
less and less I know
of me,
more and more
I walk.
I won't come up,
my lungs have adapted.
Again in the distance,
your voice,
then my hand reassuring.
then off again
I'm spinning, turning,
torso, breasts,
floating,
luminously scanning,
tiny cowries, seeds, twigs,
petals winds
rising
rising
in a thousand delicious fragrancies
falling deep into myself again.
(Copyright by Terry Bat-Sonja, 1998 - No reproduction without express permission from the author)