THE SOULS OF THE SHIP
by André Fernandes
Notes On Poetry, Book II
(Written in January 2013 / Published in January 2015)
2nd Edition ~ The Bard & The Hidromel
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ABOUT THIS WORK:
“The Souls Of The Ship” is a journey. You embark in a ship full of sailors unattached to the land, who seek only the mysterious fortunes beyond the shivering horizon.
I wrote this book in a strange season of my life. I was madly in love with a girl, and I strived to forget her. There is one good thing about poetry when you are in love: it’s the best poetry you’ll ever write. And so, back in those days, I really felt that, because I was able to write down all those emotions and painful feelings, I had some light to guide me in the darkness.
Between howls of pain and songs of hope, sea storms and summer isles, endless days and magical nights, “The Souls Of The Ship” is, much like The Door’s song, “The Crystal Ship”, a tale about a man who ran away from the land to seek for new thrills and new horizons, to refill his magic and survive the night, and write down a letter after all ends are met.
If this book wishes to say anything, it is that, sometimes, true love assumes the strangest forms and comes when you least expect. Ultimately, that’s what this is all about: the meaning and search for true love.
THE TREASURE MAP
The Dark Side Of Dawn //
O, Souls Of The Ship
I Am Myself Again
Underwater Forests
Under The Moonlight
The Wind Won’t Blow
A Season Of Fevers & Dreams
The Beatitude
The Arrow
Sweet Satyr
The Bright Side Of Dawn //
At First Sight
Fantasia
A Piece Of Heaven
It’s Merely Psychic
Impossibilities
The First Kiss Lasts Forever
The Hyacinth Of The Garden
Summer’s Almost Gone
Solitude And A Beer
Sadness On A Summer’s Day
Through The Withering Glass
To A Certain Grummet
Morning Star
True Love Is Eternal
Ode To The Moon
The Souls Of The Ship
REQUISITES TO SAIL THIS SHIP:
Know how to hoist a sail;
Draw the horizon;
Identify the X;
Write and sing poetry;
Celebrate black beer and mead;
Live the life you love;
Love the life you live;
And with a degree in freedom
you are good to go.
PART I //
THE DARK SIDE OF DAWN
O SOULS OF THE SHIP
O, souls of the ship -
to sail with you until
Reason deserts us to dive
below the mountains.
I have sung the tale
that brought me to you,
I have spilled in you
secrecies of my world
and my shattered heart.
And now I belong to you,
prisoner of your will.
I am a soul bound to strive
in a tournament of lusts and old age sins.
But hear me, heed my words well
for I wish to be cleansed.
We were pure at birth, and yet so fragile.
It is said that God can only touch us
when we breath the first breath;
After that, we are on our own.
And so, this is our song.
Fate is the tragic idea of what has not been achieved it.
Let us play with that for a while.
My voice is fragile but it can still touch your hearts,
or you wouldn’t be listening.
Tomorrow is and always will be our duty.
After this ship sets its wings to fly,
never again will we pay our sins
with the blood of our dreams.
Our quest will begin in a moment.
The gold mines shall be ours once we
replenish our wills with
glimpses of the future.
And in the end, after all kingdoms have been seized,
I shall borrow an island to live with my beloved one;
We two lost in the forest, with rain falling on our window,
where we celebrate life as men were meant to do.
But before the ship finds the river,
and the river finds its course,
we have to forget and forgive a medieval past
and face the last storm of our old lives.
Only then will we be worthy
of the future that lies
beyond the golden horizon.
I must deal with this last sea
and search for the missing pieces that once
belonged to my shattered soul.
I AM MYSELF AGAIN
To stare an eclipse
from the board,
lines begin to draw
the vast shore
that fades.
I can touch the ship
w/ my own eyes.
I can move it to another channel
& change the course
of the wind.
I am myself again,
killing the day, wishing away,
wishing I had a fire to light
my own way.
Still unwanted
to fill the glass.
But I’m on my own, now.
I left my hometown and put my past behind,
and now there’s no going back.
Tracing eatable dreams
in my sleep,
as the stars and the moon and the world
grow fond of me.
UNDERWATER FORESTS
There was a time
when gold shined as fiercely as the sun
and anything could be ours
for the sake of a laugh.
A time when we
would seek for shelter from the hot noon,
and we’d bath and hide beneath the
cool smooth underwater forests.
A time when we children
were angels, not serpents, and peace
would endlessly bloom
in the battlefields.
A time when we were Knights
of the Round Table and all our deeds were
told and enlarged by the drunken voices
of the moonlight tavern bards.
There was a time, dear friend,
when he had the El Dorado in our sight
and all we had to do was step inside.
That time has since gone by.
Now, we daydream about what we had
and we don’t look at what we have
right under our feet.
Are we bound to lose that as well?
My friend, my sweet village friend,
what about our future?
The endless sun will endlessly burn
but you and me are candles dripping wax,
wasting away the gold of our days
in the wind.
UNDER THE MOONLIGHT
She slept in a coffin,
under the sea,
in the edge of
the day
she would reason,
and the skies and the stars
would never set their eyes
on her.
Distant dreams of distant summers,
when I wrote your name under the stars
and slept on a roof.
Now I have lost the keys
to the kingdom.
It’s a sad tale, but well known.
I drink this beer with no desire or hope,
a rock in the middle of the sea
bathed with waves of nostalgia.
She traveled to the desert -
my love is there, sleeping with my scarf,
riding with her friends.
She’ll never come back to me.
All I have
belongs to the wind.
THE WIND WON’T BLOW
The wind won’t blow
and the ship won’t move thru these
eerie lands of dark water.
We’ve been stuck for days on end
and the wind won’t blow
our ship to land.
Hurry, wind, please hurry.
We feel the hunger again.
The grummet is trying
to heave the lead.
If I die tonight,
the whole world will never know
a single thing about me.
I was a crazy old sailor -
a man with a salty beard, bust of sins;
one who sought a cavern full of emeralds
and shined mentally from a
strange fever.
I was lost and I took my chances.
Gods and stars above,
I am at mast, for once, and I will drown
only when I’m thru.
So roll the dices
because only one of us can win,
and I don’t even have a soul to lose.
A SEASON OF FEVERS & DREAMS
I slept for a thousand dreams
in a febrile state of mind,
and though I slept with my head
turned to the nightside,
I would still hear the sides of the ship quiver
as we journeyed further into the unknown.
As we journeyed into the unknown,
songs were written, words were spoken
and friendships were made.
At night, one of our sailors would rise
above the sea of barrels, to sing us
the songs from the ships of old age.
Lips holding the pipe,
hands dancing between the frets
and how they danced a beautiful dance.
“Hey, good lad! Fetch us the brew,
won’t ya?”
The lad stood out of the crowd
and went to the kitchen.
He fetched us alright.
Poor lad. Poor me. Poor us,
if we die now without a glimpse of
tomorrow.
There’s only so much
a man can take before he’s given
the chance to rise.
THE BEATITUDE
Remember the cosmic dance of the stars.
They alone could shake the entire cosmos
with their dead light, dead fever.
Remember the young woman who lost
the eyes of her inner child;
now she lost sight of the wonders
at her window.
Remember how dull and uncertain
are the things your soul can’t carry,
for they don’t belong in the
world of dreams and beliefs.
Remember how wise can be
the words of an old pirate who
lived life at its fullest, and failed in all
there was to fail.
Remember the elder days when
the end was not so near.
And please remember
how good it must feel to be alive
and import and export life
between lungs,
and watch the trees change their colors
between seasons.
THE ARROW
We are not constant.
We are an arrow in flight,
in a wind of changes
that shapes us.
During the throw, we seek
the answers
for great two questions:
“Who shot the bow
and to where did it targeted -
from whence we came
and from where we go.”
We will never know.
SWEET SATYR
Bald and in agnostic feet,
in the suave thrill of life,
makes the river flow with its doubts,
the sweet satyr that drinks in hiding,
waiting for his season.
All soul is a soul’s avenue.
A silver light.
The city woman.
The woman of the city.
The reel of life. Passion has no price -
and so the sweet satyr drinks,
laid there, in hiding,
in the wintery palms of her hands.
“She doesn’t love you.”
“Yes, she does. And she’s a drug
I refuse to live without.”
In love with an idea, in his mental jail,
in the suave reel of life,
makes the wind blow with nostalgia,
the sweet satyr that drinks in hiding,
in the cistern of sorrows and
lost ambition.
All soul is a soul’s avenue.
And so the sweet satyr drinks,
to forget a life he never
aimed to live.
PART II //
THE BRIGHT SIDE OF DAWN
AT FIRST SIGHT
We left hunger behind
to die, and refilled our hopes and futures
with a bottle of mead.
Now to forward,
towards that big bright gigantic horizon -
we deserve its majestic colors.
A strange vibe
connects me to the tide
of this starry sea.
The ship dances,
as if in the middle of a dream,
carried & driven by the waves
of an ocean with a purpose.
At first sight
we watch a pale horizon
dressed with blue horses
that spit water from
their shins.
Ulysses.
Is this the land
of our dreams?
FANTASIA
Around the docks of the fortunate island
we watch in pride the sunrise,
as the golden dawn reverbs itself
in a feast of colors and febrile moods.
Here we land,
too tired to sing our songs
and continue our tale.
Here we settle,
we call home and live in peace
for a little while.
The ancient line divides the essential plans:
the heaven from the sea, the man from the infinite.
To each one of us
a moment is given, so that we can try our luck
and hit the world with our song.
Will I waste it too?
No.
Every day we walk towards the end.
It’s up to me all that I can be.
Life can seem simple
when you feel the sun shining in your skin,
from above.
A PIECE OF HEAVEN
Again the edenic flow of my heart
begins to race. What a thrill,
when she sets her hair to play in the air
and I watch it all and all is not enough.
I must drink
of her paradise.
“I see freedom in your fingers.
A blaze in your eyes.”
Her eyes.
“Your sweet tundra-eyes.”
/> The dawn is yet to rise.
The day has barely begun
and I feel that all else will mean nothing
if I don’t have you right now.
IT’S MERELY PSYCHIC
I find it all so wonderful. To chase
all these mental pictures of you and me.
It’s merely psychic, I know,
but still.
Perhaps if we were always together,
the desire would cease, and the passion
would gradually fade, leaving
our dreams to die
like plants without sunshine or water.
I picture you,
in that way. You know
what I mean.
Sweet woman of mine,
let the sun shine and the raindrops fall
on our window,
it’s all part of a beautiful life
that we create
when share it together.
IMPOSSIBILITIES
The eternity is so vast.
To her serve only the mad and
the unreasonable.
Never let me live forever:
The eyes could slip away
in the infinity of the impossible.
The mind could erase past memories
that I wish to keep forever preserved.
The spirit could dissolve itself
in the dawn of the temples.
Never did Love tasted so sweet.
Never did I dared to climb thru
all the possibilities.
And I am here. And you
are with me. All else, as they say,