Gifts For Elizabeth

New town, new job, strapped for cash. It was her birthday and this was all I could afford. Gifts for Elizabeth Look into the sky tonight and travel back in time where diamonds light forever- up beyond the Milky Way, and if you know the stars by name you'll never be alone. See Lunar, queen of all the nights, a-glide with silver smiles; lingers while the morning mist shimmers-all with dew then hides among the vapour-screens to watch her lover rise. How mighty rides the Sun King, Midas of the morn, transforming leaden-sea and sky to sheets of dazzling gold; red-carpets lie on cloud-scapes of plains and mountain-passes. Purple-anvils forging hailstorms, thunder clapping lightning flashing. Buddhas billow then dissolve in peaceful islands floating high... now yellow skies of driven rain-squalls. Flooding fields send swollen rivers rushing to the sea, where they boil and steam in the tropic-tides then leap on the wind and flee – to return in tears to their native hills. Such glory is the earthly-engine, where sylph-rainbows float on fields-of-flowers that mirror back their subtle hues while starry- fish flash in inky-seas of ever-night. Deep forests whisper secrets to the fields and jungle-hedgerows where busy insects drone. Fisher-folk of spiders spin beauty into webs that find jewels in the frost. Savours of the planet are bound into a whole by the pulsing of the hours in the rhythm of the days that circle in the seasons of the spiral of the years. There's a presence and a theme in the beat of the never-ending dancing of the ocean on the shore – where a gypsy-wind croons love-songs to the birds that pipe and soar. To melt into this music is to blend into the motion and form again the beauty of our truth, where minds are laughing ripples on a stream that runs for ever. Find succour in the knowledge that all of us are one, and the substance of all things is the universal essence of the stars... and see strife as but a passing phase.