Swan Song
The wait is over: 93 years in the making!
Ars Poetica and Other Poems
is now available in from:
Lulu, Amazon, Barns & Noble,
If possible please support your local bookseller
and ask for it loudly in store by name.
Ars Poetica and Other Poems
“ISBN 978-0-9689463-2-9”
Ars Poetica and Other Poems Ebook (Now Available)
(If your device supports streaming: Hear the author’s voice!
as you follow the text. Great for Poetry-Study and ESL Learning)
Lulu, Amazon, Barns & Nobel,
“ISBN 978-1-3877915-2-1”
But wait there’s More!
Short Tall Stories
is also available in from:
Lulu, Amazon, Barns & Noble,
Also Available from your local bookseller (Please support them if you can)
Short Tall Stories
“ISBN 978-0-9689463-3-6”
eBook Short Tall Stories (Available Soon Jan 1, 2023)
(If your device supports streaming: Hear the author’s voice!
as you follow the text. You will Laugh, cry and tilt your head in wonder.)
MY SECOND SWAN SONG This website exists for no other reason but to confirm that Stan White, poet, photographer, and likely the finest nonagenarian theremin player in the world, has lived on this planet for the past 93 years.
Some Thoughts on Poetry It is difficult to imagine the process of thought in a world without words but it suggests a world as a single and indivisible entity. Conversely, a world with language is inevitably shattered into a million shards not all of which are obviously associated with others. Poetry is the most suitable discipline for putting them together again.
Knowing that the reality of our everyday living is not what it seems, and that everything, including ourselves, is a cluster of unbelievably small particles all in continuous reaction with each other, inevitably affects the manner in which we must think of gods, souls, aspects of spirituality, and even consciousness itself.
The process of writing poetry is that of taking the abstraction of thought and the ‘intangibility’ of feelings and converting them into the actuality of words. Sadly, words and language are far less accommodating, and the crude technology of writing, even more so, such that sometimes the form of a poem is more important than its content.
The Photographs Most of the photographs on this site were originally in stereo, that is to say 3D images. Many were shot on digital cameras modified to shoot in infra red. Images were sometimes hand coloured and sometimes computer coloured. The table-top images were photographed on Ektachrome or Kodakcrome and long before the advent of Photoshop.
Self Portrait
Cherry Tomato Production
Language
That articulated sound
we set down in quiescence
nemesis of reticence
advocate of opinion
necessity of fact
requisite of fiction.
This manna of mind
is who we are.
©SJW. 8 July 2020 1:30 a.m.
Impatient Chicken
Yellow bird
It struck the windshield,
fluttered, then was gone;
I watched it dwindle
in the rearview glass.
to fall a yellow asterisk
upon the road.
Had it been a sparrow
I doubted it would rate
a passing thought;
I don’t know why
for both are birds,
but it was yellow
and I grieved its loss.
Perhaps it had been born
a little slower
than befits a bird
or had a more important
matter on its mind
for it was spring.
It struck the windshield
fluttered, then was gone
and I grieved its loss
for it was yellow.
©SJW. 22 March 2008 4:56 p.m.
Off to School
Figment
I took sleep
through the woods last night
stopping to watch fireflies
but there was more
than the mere space
that darkness makes…
a dream,
that took its mystery
from the delight of times
where love once tarried,
extant
in all its wonderment
on its way to morning.
©SJW. 22 June 2020 5:30 a.m.
Cemetery
Ars Poetica
I write of stars
and of the infinity behind mirrors
and of the inconsequence of trifles
I write in the sound of the sea in shells
and of the crescendo of silence
in the light of an eye in the deep of sleep
I write between a memory and a forget
in the fading half-light at the end of days
and upon the eve of every eve
I write in the epilogues of myths
of where the seaward runes once told
of when a never is born and a forever ends
I write of where an echo fades
and in the touch of a lover’s hand
and of where a rainbow strays
I write in the idiom of day dreamed days
and in the sounds of tip toes in the night
and wake to a choristry of birds singing
I write in the loneliness of distant mountains
and in the thirsts of desert sands
crave the tranquility of still waters
I write in the confusion of happening
that the startled pheasant takes into the air
I write of a shoe that has never stepped
and of the hem of the emperor’s clothes
and the weight of a sadness and a regret
I write in the feeling of falling fast
and in the sea-saw of the tides
I write in the crevices of dawns
and in the drone of the mumble bees
and of where a fall of wood smoke goes
I write in the synonym of time
and of the night side of the moon
and in the breath of fairy kneeling flowers
I write of stars
©SJW. 27 September 2017 2:17 a.m.
Battle of Britain
Music
What form you have
your miscellany of patterns
fill my mind with
the gossamer of your sadness
the ebullience of your joy.
What curiosity of sound
engendered such serendipity
…language of birds,
dances of silence?
©SJW. 1 Jan 2008 12:01 p.m.
Waiting for Godot
God Musing
Should I, in an idle moment, take a day
bathe it in the warmth of gentle sun
then, over an undulating weald,
lay a patchwork quilt of fields
and, to put the rustle in a breeze
a handful, here and there, of trees
and where within the quilt, a seam
as from a dell, or better yet, a spring
a rivulet that babbles in a stream
down a dingle-wooded fell
then for resting and relief
over tree-lined lanes a cloak of velveteen
beneath infinities of stars, a solitary moon
and in between, a dawn to warn of morning
and in the wane of afternoon, a dusky light
before the inevitable totality of night
but for fear of mankind’s willful harm
I leave it all for lovers arm in arm.
©SJW. 21 May 2011 6:00 a.m.
