IN RESONANCE WITH THE EARTH
We are pleased to introduce new materials for this section of our journal. We see poiesis as providing the basis for human beings' creative responses to the world of nature. The arts in particular offer forms that crystallize these responses in ways that touch and move us. "In Resonance with the Earth" contains poetry, artworks, photography and essays relevant to this theme. In this issue of the journal, this section includes poetry, photographs, and artworks by Merve Kurt, Judith Greer Essex, and Beverley A’Court.
Beverley A’Court
BSc.Soc.Sci. (Joint hons. Phil. & Psych.), Dip. A.T., registered art therapist (UK), a long-term member of the Findhorn Foundation Community, currently in private practice
This issue embraces a selection of new poems by Beverley A’Court (Findhorn, Scotland), exploring her relationship with her mother, her experiences with water, the influence of Mandelstam's poetry on her own poetry, and her art therapy work. She has been practicing art therapy since 1981, pioneering holistic eco-art therapy. She is an advocate for the recognition of the place of poetic language, the body, ecology, and cultural wisdom traditions in art therapy.
Seal Mother[1]
When my mother leaves her land-body this life-time,
I will wrap her in seal-skin, pure holy grey of November sky
and sheen of evening sea,
and carry her with the tide-turning seal-song of the Gaels,
‘Yundo, yondah, yundo, rhoda da…’ [2]
I will roll her, laughing, spun jewelled
in the green curl of wave and silvery birl[3] of wind,
to the skirl of pipes,
as wisps of her white hair spin a spidery halo,
and her brown eyes shine, seal-wide.
Always a child of water, I watched as she softened
and made the red and grey clays
sing on the wheel in her hands,
cold water from the jug pouring and splashing,
clay streaking her face,
her freckled arms, her rolled-up sleeves,
my father’s shirt,
a skin she wore long after he had gone.
Floating practice[4]
Floating, robed and cradled in night sky
and cool, dark water, confirms -
some god is holding the whole of me;
this brick-head, bricked-up heart
with all its sad, ecstatic, animal shadows.
Floating, this weight I call ‘mine’
is just another feather
in the bird-shaman’s cloak,
in the white crane’s wing, in light
crossing continents.
Floating, for the first time,
at 6 years old, after weeks of trying to swim,
striving to stay afloat, keep my head-above-the waves
and then discovering;
giving up myself to falling through
the water,
which rose alive, a rocking water-elephant,
and carried me
in a perfect balance, water inside meeting water outside
two connecting seas,
and me, their swan, their shoals,
their fallen angel
floating.
‘Mandelshtam Collage’, or ‘Taking Liberties’[5]
It’s not migraine –
You took away all the oceans and all the room
and gave me my shoe-size in earth, with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.
It’s no longer me singing, it’s my breath.
And my hearing’s sheathed in a mountain.
I will return to the sound of where I was born
and when I get my breath back, you will hear
in my voice the earth,
thunder of hooves,
acres of black earth.
The people need poetry that will be their own secret
to keep them awake forever,
and bathe them in the bright-haired wave
of its breathing.
Unborn[6]
Something unborn hangs in black space,
A moon? An omen?
Something winged and unlit blooms inside my ribcage,
pregnant with meaning.
Offstage, a dancer, furled into herself,
prepares, unready but illumined from behind,
her neck and shoulders gently warming, her foot about to step.
Outside, entangled wild ones stare at me and,
disguised among the writhing roots and foliage,
a forest mermaid, swathed in sky-blue silks and
ocean sequins, petals, topaz… strides her way ahead
her limbs unsnaring,
while another shyer, self, swirls with questions; Is this madness?
Am I lost? Am I a puzzle, a mosaic of broken pieces?
Was there ever someone whole here?
A loyal guardian-dog-self watches, a charged,
electric being born of great sorrow,
one who senses music rising from the roots,
flailing harmonies and dissonances,
her origins in storm and blame and darkness.
She calms herself with tending, sowing wildflower seeds
in faith, as if this were a garden not a wildfire.
The guide is golden, in one hand a conch shell
for the calling she hears, in the other hand
the mudra, ‘Pacify. Be calm. No enemy,
for we are born from fire, we rise unharmed from fire
and every flame unfurls into green stems,
uncoiling leaves and blossoms. Let the garden emanate
around you by itself, unforced.
Be still, and fold your hands together, holding
tenderly between them, in that shaded, shallow,
heart-shaped hollow, your unborn,
new moon self.
Figure: Unborn. Response image.
Notes:
[1] Dedicated to my now almost 97year-old Mother, who worked for many years as a ceramic artist & who finally stopped sea-swimming at the age of 94.
[2] ’Seal song’ based on traditional chants, recorded by Mary Mclaughlin. The reference is to the North Atlantic seaboard Selkie tales of love and return, where a land-captured Selkie(seal)-woman is finally compelled to reclaim her seal-skin to return to her ocean home & her kin, leaving her land-husband grieving.
[3] Birl and Skirl, are North-Eastern Doric and Scots onomatopoeic words in current use.
[4] One of many poems I have composed about experiences in water - floating, night swimming under the stars and more. Last year I joined our local ‘Danced by Water’ sessions; combining relaxation and floating with witnessed Authentic Movement in warm water. This process often stimulates regression to foetal stages inside the amniotic fluid sac, releasing memories of profound safety and muscular freedom as well as some associated traumas, to be felt and gently integrated.
[5] Osip Mandelshtam is one of my favourite poets, especially the haunting and mysterious translations by W.S. Merwin and C. Brown ‘The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam; (New York Review Books, 2004). Here I took liberties and played, making a collage of with some favourite lines, expressing some of my own feelings about our current era.
[6] A poem written as an attempt to further understand after a collage I made in response to a session with a dissociated client who seemed to be holding a lot of intense feelings inside a shell of silence and apparent stillness, practiced over many decades living under an oppressive regime. The session was in Winter, a time of stillness and the as-yet-unformed, unborn, a season, as Rudolph Steiner suggested, of crystallisation: when plants send out electrical impulses in crystalline form below ground, tracing the pathways their roots will grow along.
Suggested citation note
A’Court, B. (2026). The new poems. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 7 (1). [open access internet journal]. – URL: http://ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)