September | 2014 | Damien B. Donnelly

I wandered through the wood
And wondered
What would happen
As I walked past the Willows
And Walnuts,
Worried for the world
Beyond the woods.

I watched
This wilderness
Of winding ways
And weathered wills
Where I worshiped the wisdom
Of these weighted monsters-
Magnificent in the marshes,
A million miles
From the mediocrity of man
And his madness,
Mindfully meandering amid
Mulberries, Maples and more
A million trunks
Like magical masts
Making their way
Through mighty mists
As irrepressible roots
Raided through
Rushes and ruins
Of rudimental riches
Rotting around the ground.
From Nature and nurture
To nourishment and nutrients
In nanoseconds
Neath this night
Nowhere near
The noise and nonsense
Of knob-heads
And nincompooptic know-it-alls
Whose knuckles
Gnaw at you needlessly
As they clamber
And claw their way,
Cunning and cankerous,
Across cadavers
Scarcely cold
To claim the crown.

I filed through the forest
And felt the freedom
In its fortune,
Forged far from
Frivolous, foolish fellows
And feared for the future.

I prayed
To pave a path
As pure as
This paradise
That paraded itself
In front of me.

As I parted
I borrowed some branches
To beat back
The bosses and bastards
Bombarding boardrooms
With bombastic beatitudes
Bordering on baseless
Overbearing, big headedness
But thought it better
To bore a path
Beyond these bellowing battles
And brooding barflies.

I wandered through the wood
And wondered what would happen
If we lost the beauty of nature
To the madness of man
And his gluttonous greed?

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

How still it is,
Silent
‘Neath the somber shade of night,
Beyond the light
Already long departed
And sleeping in the shadows,
Alone in thoughts
That twist and turn
And dig deep
Amid the this and that,
The important and redundant,
And all the while
The stillness builds-
Oblivious to the restlessness
Beneath my skin,
Between my toes,
A sense of something
In the as yet unseen-
Somewhere out there
My future already on the move,
Shaken into substance,
Substantially self-sufficient,
While I sit in silence,
In stillness,
In waiting,
Wrapped up cocoon-like
Beneath the hibernating blanket
Of this interim-
This condition of considered change.

I will soon slip
Into a sleep
Born of the metamorphosis
Of the moment,
Aware of who I was,
In the knowledge of who I am
And accepting of who I will,
In time,
Grow into.
Tomorrow will be the memory
Of who I was
While today exists only the dream
Of what tomorrow will bring.
This stillness
Is as teasing as the unknown
Route ahead-
The trail my feet have yet to thread,
To carve out a crater
That smacks of existence
Long after
I have journeyed on
And found fresher,
Unexplored lands
I shall,
One day,
For a time
Call home.

Somewhere,
Just out of sight,
On the edge of this stillness
A night Owl
Toots a tale of transition
Above the silent slumber
Of a world
With eyes closed-
Unconscious to the weighty wisdom
Of tomorrow’s light.
The erudite Owl,
Perched once
In another land,
In another time,
On virginal shoulders of Athena,
Who witnesses the world
Through eyes that see
Beyond the darkness
Of all that has been
And has yet to unfold
And carries
In his very presence
On this very night,
In this very stillness,
While all else surrenders to the silence,
A confirmation of the transition
Felt within me,
Sensed around me
And promising to take hold of me
As sure as he will spread
His well-worn wings,
Find his flight
And take to the shadows
Before morning finds it’s light