MARTIN CHALLIS
Fire the candle
Crack the day
Light of life
Lift and sway
Up step up steep
Up there lit
Up to where
Archangels sit
Make ready song
Septets and airs
A vital throng
To catch our cares
Make ready step
Make ready light
Make peace within
Give love with might
Call an angel
One then two,
Call to bring
The world anew
Fire the candle
Crack the day
Bring love alive
Make love the way
Martinos © 2017
I am real
You feel this
Hold me
If only for a moment
To set me free
I will return
You will and do forget me
Until the moment
When I’m all you need
Like love
I am that viscera
Essential and unseen
Martinos @ 2017
on a southwind eagles fly,
majestic gliders forensic eyed, poised
on shifting drafts of autumnal clear-skied air,
on breezes yearning steadily from southern seas,
seas afar,
deep blue dark realms of wilderness and mystery
whose fathoms cold, swarm with micro and macrocosmic life;
all forms to balance and connect this natural world
by land and sea, in ocean and air, on wing and eye, all upon which
this life of ours so utterly depends, as it does
when on a southwind
eagles fly
Wake Up
To the simplicity, to
The essential stillness
The natural breath
The calmest force
Weaving
Weaving
Dancing
Skilfully
Delightfully
At the heart
Of the heart
of all
MChallis @ 2015
they call us in
the women
who bring us
through the eye
the elder-wise mother
who is sister
daughter, lover, all
holding space apart
for us to enter
feminine shape
at the beginning
brightness resting in
and upon the earth
the tender choice
bringing light
to being
bringing cause
Martinos @ 2015
Of chapel bells
and after day’s dry summer wind
chime’s angelic chorus
hang in lasting configuration
My father’s rye-grass covered hills
tremble with the breeze keeper’s song
as he gathers up his grief
Mother folds away her weeping
folds away her dreams
until they are still
Mourners soon move to chapel
to offer silent prayer
and glances from a distance
My brother
born yesterday, took no breath
from summer’s day
sang no breeze keeper’s song,
felt no dry summer’s wind,
yet heard
the farewell of bells
and dwelt there
harmonic
in tintinnabulation
To my dead son or daughter;
I left you, let you pass,
kept you out
frozen: The mark of
the palmist foretelling five children,
I climb this hill now, with four at my side.
Your memory: A shadow on the distant range,
where eucalypt is to its last;
the blue mountain.
Though I climb and four grow,
the wife that was then is now gone;
her grief and her echo.
Still I sense the soft pad of your call,
the tug of your passing,
and almost
the first breath of greeting.
MChallis 2006
after cutting timber
at the top of the hill
I waited for you
not long enough for the magpie’s
wing-feather to fall from the conifer
and then your silhouette
along with the sunset
struck me
and drawing closer
your smile
drawing closer
Blue to you may be a room with a view.
To me it’s an ocean turned sideways.
It’s the colour of air gone thick with the sea,
it’s the largest and highest of high-ways.
Blue to you may be one without two,
and all of the times you’ve landed,
feet thick with dew – stuck to each hue
where you thought for a time you were stranded.
Blue to you may be a day that is new, to
me it’s the place where I’m standing.
It’s the home of the eye and the reach of the tree.
It’s the wave of the wind and the wave that is we.
Blue is the deep and the shallow the same,
it’s just where I’ll be when you’re calling my name.
Searching and spreading. Dividing our wings.
Soaring the gentle, the sharing of things.
Come endless, come empty, full with your sound
call the vast harmony and arms that surround.
Come to the blue that touches all things
come with me gentle, come let us sing,
sing the high rising, sing the low mark
sing the blue heaven that covers the dark,
and chorus the carol, the carol of being,
and the blue that is given to those that are seeing.
A little empty that morning
she sat on the top step
of the verandah
sipping tea, sipping thought.
Three steps down to the pavement
squares of sandstone
lay in even handed rhythms;
flatly refusing to contour.
He’d moved away last week; big bloke, big smile
could clasp four pavers in one hand,
laid the lot inside ten days,
maybe a record, who could say.
Completed, the pavement was now empty of him,
no more scraping back, no more chipping out,
no more broad smiling hands
reaching for her cups of tea.
She missed this; as she missed the slightly flat renditions of
‘midnight oil’ and ‘fleetwood mac’, the cock of his straw hat
and the farewell call of… “see you sometime in the morning suze…”
(always at exactly 6.30 a.m.)
He was big on tea,
said he was glad
to meet someone who knew it
wasn’t merely the dis-colouration of milk.
She’d smile at that, he was right,
things like tea were best, given time to infuse.
she sipped her tea, sipped her thoughts
and the deeper taste that came with a little time.
music in the magic in the mystery
of softness in the footsteps
that your voice takes
to the place within my heart
brings a secret fascination
for intrigue’s imagination
where enchantment chords a yearning
willing obstacles to part
yet when music is discordant
I in truth cannot confide
fear comes overpowering
for the little one who hides
Yet with childish laughter promising
the joy of trusting smiles
I wonder for the soft heart
set free from all denials
I wonder for the joy of things
as they bubble as they soar
and I wonder for the song of love
on the path of evermore
music in the magic in the mystery
of softness in the footsteps
that your voice takes
to the place within my heart
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