Poetry
© JP Bell
The Architect of Silence
​
I dwell in the rhythm of sorrow, an endless tide,
an infinite sea rising in my chest,
where drowned stars flicker like lost lanterns
and each wave carries the weight of unspoken farewells.
Grief is an ancient manuscript folded in my ribs,
pages filled with the ink of vanished hands,
sentences broken by silence,
punctuated by the weight of chained dreams.
I hear the whisper of a lighthouse
swallowed by the rising tide,
its sorrow echoing against walls of forgotten names.
Yet pain is but the architect of silence,
carving me into something both broken and whole.
For I am dust and I am stardust,
I am the wind, the whisper, the scripture of fire,
the copper bell that tolls in the absence of hands,
the memory of rain
in the land that has forgotten water.
I am the last grain of sand,
the orphaned shadow of a flame,
the voice of a song trapped inside a stone.
I am the fading light.
Published In: [S]CRIPTED – Art and Poetry Exhibition, 2025, p. 12.
bell-shaped narcissus
evading the hummingbird -
old-fashioned courtship.
Published In: The Poetry Machine, Palmerston North City Council, City Library, 2024.
The Traveler
​​
I found him beneath the ragged shade of afternoon,
a man with the earth’s dust braided into his beard.
His steps were not steps but the soft unraveling
of forgotten roads,
the ghost of places unnamed
pressed into the leather of his feet.
In his face, a language older than the spoken word,
lines that whispered of departures,
of a life carried in pockets of sky and stone.
I saw myself there —
a painter of disappearing things,
a collector of what refuses to stay.
Published In: [S]CRIPTED – Art and Poetry Exhibition, 2025, p. 13.
supple bamboo shoots
embracing the hibiscus -
kiss of the spring breeze.
Published In: The Poetry Machine, Palmerston North City Council, City Library, 2024.
Ode To Black And White
​
I am not of any color except of black and white.
I cannot be called blue, or red or yellow or green,
for I only reside the in the extremes
of darkness and of light.
I am neither opal, nor topaz, nor the early dawn nor the pale midnight.
I am only to become the night
in its blackness or the day at its brightest.
I am neither grey nor the rainbow.
I shall never be at the center nor in the prism of light.
I shall only be called the Yin or the Yang, for I am only the black and the white.
​
From the book, “Spellbound: The Distinctive Poetry Book Extraordinaire”. Published 2012.