soundofmanywaters

I've been a bit low on inspiration lately, sorry for the lack of new poems appearing on this blog in the last couple of months. So here's an old one, appropriately enough about the difficulties of writing... And yes, I did travel to work every day on the London Underground in those days. A New Orpheus The Muse is a flighty bird and proud Who stays half hidden in her high cloud, Will not flit down and talk to those Who would be poets in jagged prose And splintered lines of different sizes. They always lack her sweet surprises, For poetry, they say, can’t be When God is dead, man lost – i.e. In an age like ours. Those folks with brains Too big to see their own chilblains At freezing altitudes of thought She plain dislikes, and says they ought To learn truths they’re not looking for In paradox and metaphor That hint of greater relationships… And yet she leaves in dull eclipse Good Christian me, who would set right Her tricky principles of flight. ...

  In the centuries since your acorn First thumped into loam What rings have rippled through you. There’s one for 1966 – four-two! There’s another for the year I was born. There’s a ring for the Messerschmitt that buzzed you. Here’s one for the death of Queen Victoria And another for her birth – and surely there must be one for Royal Charles hiding from the Roundheads, As in most of the oaks in England. Perhaps six hundred times A green tide has flowed over you And a brown tide ebbed. Your long roots have battled droughts, Your branches wrestled storms. Several tons, maybe, of small grey birds Have pecked hopefully along your scars and fissures And flown away, and fallen to the ground. How rapidly I cast my eye Over your unanxious vastness And hastily enumerate and imagine And hurry off after my own rootless life.

  The taste of salt starts in the eye With bitter tears, the remembering Of all those friends you’re doomed Never to see again, That blinds you into looking back. Now you are a slowly dissolving column In the obliterating desert and We don’t even know your name. Just a command. “Remember.”

Is it more of a song if it freely Sings with the death of darkness As the unrestrained Spring pours Through the throats of these tiny birds?   Or are there deeper human notes That ring with our Autumn griefs And Winter silences, until They alchemise into worship?   At one end of my guitar There is a chest for hoarding Golden chords, until they swell With summer harmonies.   At the darkest heart of the world There is a man, all wounds, Who gives Himself to the uttermost In the ultimate act of praise.   If it will make me fit For some part in Your chorus Then let me, Lord, be an echo of The aching in Your Spring song.

  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 Echoes the beat of the Spirit’s brooding wings In the space between words and worlds, and you are near To an endless mind that thought and thinks all things…

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  ...