Asleep-Awake

by Mandy Beattie -

My eyelashes flutter and flatline crescent-moons on crests of cheeks

behind iris-lids is sky inside a pearl-mussel a swirling ocean

swell pitching me deeper, deeper, deeper until I am skinless-skein

and silver umbilicus-ectoplasm from The Cup Bearer I track Ptolemy

to waltz past stones of sleep to swoop and soar I am a Sky-Traveller

in a Starship The Plough’s my jib and I fly elbow to elbow with fluttering wings

I trail mountain folds, isobars, snow caps and seeds, air-swim

over oceans and niblets of sand I am a wind-horse

weaving among clusters of gypsophila with star-petals in my hair

I shadow the Big Dipper to the North Star as I cartwheel around

The Northern Cross a giant harp strums my skinless-skein

and silver umbilicus-ectoplasm and I forward roll to Andromeda to foxtrot

with El Morya and Merlin on a magic carpet through the maw

of the Milky Way until fingers of light edge around bare bones and Saturn’s

curtain rings and Orion's Belt is the launch-pad through the veil

of thin-air when the long and short hand siphons me back into bones

my heart the drum beat of a Shaman and alchemy

as my bones uncurl and unfurl from its question mark — When

will it be, ‘As Above, So Below?’

Published in The Haar, 2021

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Mandy Beattie’s poetry is a tapestry of stories & imagery rooted in people and place, often with an element of other-worldliness. Her poems have been published in: Wordpeace, Poets Republic, Dreich, Wee Dreich, The Haar, Purple Hermit, Wordgathering, The Clearance Collection, Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis, Marble Poetry Broadsheet, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Book Week Scotland and The People’s Poem of Scotland.