Not another poem about writing poems... When poems were engraved on stones You’d hope some palaeontologist might engage To trace the leachings of once living bones - Your furious monsters and their fossil rage. When poems were made from paper marked with ink You might fold them, hurl them, point first, dart At the heavens, hoping they might sink To find an answer in some human heart. Now poems are made of whispering bits Fizzing around the world - somewhere, you long, There must be a secret somebody who hits Your link and, for a moment, shares your song. But poems are made for an in between, for here The beat of Spirit’s brooding echoing sings In the space between words and worlds, and you are near To an endless mind that thought and thinks all things…
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I finally wrote another poem! This one has been gestating for ages but somehow just wouldn't come together to inhabit the vision I had for it. I'm so grateful that it has finally connected up at last. Hope you enjoy it and find it as meaningful to read as I found writing it... Always Always this fading, always this flowering The night failing, the dawn fleeing The winter keening for the coming spring Always this fleeting, always this falling The seed hungering for the harvest and The harvest felled that other lives may grow Always this ailing, always this healing The breathing in and the breath let go Stripped out and given to the wild airs Always this breaking, always this birthing Behind us birth is gasping, grave gaping Ahead to feed the all-corroding soil Till at this crux, where North, South, East and West Converge in nails upon the embodied All A death is died that is the death of death And at His tomb a breath is breathed that Spits out stone and Life Himself steps out ...
Did I mention that I seem to be writing lots of tree poems lately? Perhaps because we see in them a reflection of our own growth, maturing, aging and death? While enjoying a rootedness we may envy... Trees When I was a child there was a chestnut. Her candles blazed all May long, giving way To tawny rubies casked in spiky green, Her low-arced branches luring me to climb and conquer. Later it was a beech tree I loved best. My auntie had one growing by her gate. Though she had many shapely arms, Babs called her Venus de Milo for her voluptuous torso And sinewy skin. Next came a birch, slender silver Barred with elegant black, bronze too at her wrists, yet tough as tundra, And in season a shimmer of shivering, Winter-defying gold. There were many more saplings for my spinney, Hornbeams and hollies, lissom willows, Doomed tragedies of elm and ash, Even a few prickly conifers, and then There was rowan… But now I choose you, the oak. Warts and wrinkles, Scars and crags,...
On Headley Heath I seem to have been writing a bit about trees lately. I've always loved them, a life form that does not need to think in order to be. The following poem is about two literal trees close to the car park and trailer cafe on Headley Heath. In a poem they are of course metaphorical too, and as reader you can choose which meanings work for you - relationship, endurance, strength through togetherness, faithfulness as a fruitful, not a negative thing. How might a Bible metaphor from Isaiah 61 - "oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord" - resonate with you? Two trunks rise into a single canopy A whole summer of sun has Soaked their leaves in gold Which now flames down to earth Autumnally, fire for the dark Where, millionfold, their roots Kiss and commingle and empower Next Spring’s upsurging. How many storms have battered their embraces? How many droughts sucked at their life? How many seasons rippled into rings? How many generations of acorns did they...
Law and Liberty Symbol of rolling liberty This wave’s exact curl And dash upon the shore Is no stampede of freedom: Or deeper where the shark Slides silent in the water His fanged tyranny Has not the sea’s licence: Tide’s thrust and pulling gravity Arrayed each molecule Of the breaker’s curl In precise delineation Of its smash upon the sand While shark is most subject To sea’s voracious law Shaping his deadly torpedo Whose unhindered motion Is desperate necessity – He must swim or die. So our thinking freedom Lives by its limits: This skater accepts the ice With its bruising treachery, Subdues herself to it In months of wearing and Gradually prolongs a curve Or risks a flick – Then can exploit the ice Swooping in its pale sky With our dreams of flight With glide and dizzying spin She has the freedom of the ice. So the unstinting Giver Neither shackles freedom in necessity Nor unmakes order through licence For His full majesty Is His all-mastery And our full liberty.
Furies and Gorgons Blusterless Agamemnon The wind gone from your sails Buy a fair breeze With your daughter’s blood And get a hurricane With talons in it. Medusa rises from the abyss With serpents rising from her hair Each slithering shape gazing With the face of the oppressed: Despised daughters, belittled Sisters, grieving mothers, Abandoned widows and Rejected lovers. Quick, Perseus! Raise your mirror before their stares Strike home into your stony heart.
Mielahti The poem below is connected to the photo above. It was taken at Mielahti, a magical, mirror smooth bay in beautiful lake Jämijärvi in Finland, where I have spent many summers with my family. Somehow light and water are made for each other, aren't they. I'm reminded of the first chapter of Genesis, where the Spirit of God is moving over the primeval waters when God says, "Let there be light." Ever since then light and water have been sisters and friends - just ask Monet. You may have noticed that the interplay of light and water seems to come up in quite a few of the poems in this blog. I hope that together the poem and the photo will give some impression of what I get so excited about. The clouds reflected in the water and the lake reflected in the sky are mirrors of God's presence manifesting in us and of our consciousness embraced in His unfathomably deep awareness - for "in Him we live and move and have our being." I hope it works for you too...