I told her a story, a fairy story, My little daughter with eyes of blue. And with clear, wide gaze as the splendors brightened, She always asked me— "Oh, is it true?"
Always that word when the wonder reached her, The pictured beauty so grand and new— When the good were paid and the evil punished, Still, with soft insistance — "Oh, is it true?"
Ah, late, drear knowledge from sin and sorrow, How will you answer and answer true, Her wistful doubt of the happy ending?— Wise child! I wondered how much she knew.
The sun burns the morning, a bush in the brain Moon walks the river and raises the dead; Here in my wilderness wanders the blood; And the sweat on the brow makes a sign, And the wailing heart’s nailed to the side.
Here is a universe bred in the bone, Here is a saviour who sings like a bird, Here the night shelters and here the stars shine, Here a mild baby speaks his first word In the stable under the skin.
Under the ribs sail the moon and the sun; A cross is tatooed on the breast of the child, And sewn on his skull a scarlet thorn; A mother in labour pays twice her pain, Once for the Virgin’s child, once for her own.
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Track 1
How this picture is made
What a fractal is
A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. The large form and the small form are the same kind of thing. A poem can be drawn that way. The shape of the whole comes from the shape of the lines.
Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.
How the boundary is drawn
The number under the picture is the poem constant. It is read from the build of the lines: their length, how uneven they are, the size of the stanzas, the share of vowels, and the way the lines end. A new word moves the number when it changes that build. The same poem always gives the same number.
Drawn on its own, that number sits in a quiet part of the plane, and most poems would look like the same soft disk. So the number is carried outward along its own direction until it meets the edge of the Mandelbrot set, where the shape turns sharp. The picture is the Julia set of that meeting place.
Each point on the canvas is folded again and again by one small rule. Points that stay near the rule form the dark interior. Points that rush away become the coloured bands. The hue comes from the poem constant, and the brightest bands turn toward gold. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.
What the branching signifies
Branching draws the poem as a tree. Each turn follows a line, and every smaller branch repeats that pattern. A longer line reaches farther. The letters at the start of a line bend the next turn. A higher share of vowels opens the branches wider.
The trunk takes its colour from the poem constant and warms toward gold at the tips. When the poem has more than one stanza, gold forks leave the trunk. Each fork is a stanza beyond the first, up to three. The tree divides where the poem divides. One stanza remains a single trunk.