New* for Summer 2026: Highland Fling, Cross Purposes, Epistemological Breakdown, Patterns, The Clown, Hidden.

* "New" means new to this blog. Some of these were written years ago but were never published. Some needed a lot of updating!

Highland Fling

You are not dancing but

    Floating

Over crossed Scottish swords

    Flashing

Defiance at gravity

    Flouting

The drag of mortality

    Freeing

Your heart from its heaviness

    Flaunting

The reward of your training

    Flying

In the gale of the spirit

    Flaming

Heart, face and hands skyward

    Flinging.

Your dance is ending, the pipes are

    Falling

Silent, you rejoin the world of the

    Floundering

And become again my dad.

    Fleeting

My glimpse of your sky-flung soul.

Cross Purposes

 One

The best I have to bring you is my worst.

To heal me you hold all my fear and pain.

To bless me you have made yourself accursed.

You bear my death that I may breathe again.

So here I am, no stranger in this crowd

Pressing against you with their cries of hate.

Their jeers and insults only voice aloud

The sullen silence of my inner state.

How can I do this to you? How heap more

And yet more horror on your helplessness?

How watch you facing down this furious roar,

These people scandalised by holiness?

So I must give you all, or not be free.

You gladly wear my worst, to welcome me.

Two

The worst that I can bring you is my best.

“How splendidly I keep your rules all day.

I know you cannot fail to be impressed

By my fine speeches every time I pray.”

“ ‘Take up my cross?’ Now that’s a lot to lose.

You’d rank me with this tax collector here,

Whose sins offend us both?” Thus I refuse

To clutch at costly mercy moving near.

Again I hear my voice among the crowd

Whose scorn and anger drown your ardent pleas

For mercy on ignorance. Stiff necked and proud,

I find I’m standing with the Pharisees.

My worst is blessed, best cursed: such is my fall

Nothing can mend me till you have my all.

Cross Purposes is a double sonnet. Though each half is complete as an individual poem, the two can be read together for complementary or contrasting insights, reflecting one another. Some of Shakespeare's sonnet use this form, for example the "Mutability" sonnets numbered 64 and 65.

A Haiku of Haikus

Five

Elements of earth,

Wind and rain and toil and tears

Gather here to wait.

Rain swells grape and grain

Sun and soil combined create

A little cosmos.

Ploughman and planter,

Reaper, brewer, baker, all

Bring their sweat and skill,

Bring us bread and wine.

A portion small as seed is set

Here on this table.

Grain and grape stand forth

As body and blood: none here

Without being crushed.

Seven

Crushed as small as seed

God-sown, rooted in Mary,

The Lord of Harvest

Grows in flesh and blood

In sweat and skill and wisdom

Waiting for ripeness.

The sower scatters

good seed on a stony field.

Thorn and thistle thrive.

Strangest of harvests

Here where love combined with hate

Shreds flesh and sheds blood.

Stone shadows enclose

A long sabbath day, nothing

Left to do but wait.

For unless a seed

Falls into the ground and dies

It abides alone

But dying rises:

From harrowed and furrowed dirt

Springs this hallowed bread.

Five

Now Christ calls His guests

From every tongue and nation

In vast multitude.

The Host in heaven

The hosts around His table

The host in our hands.

Christ’s breaking heals us

Christ’s death is living in us

His blood flows through us.

His rising raised us,

His table, though not of earth,

Now holds our harvest.

Now at His supper

At the fulness of all things

Heaven kisses earth.

Epistemological Breakdown

Somewhere in the great nowhere

Which is mostly where we live now

Hear silent thunder, watch the dark flashes

Of our war upon our minds.

From the freezing North

Blizzards of research papers bear

Proofs that there can never be anyone

At home to read them.

From fecund southern jungles

Simian hoots and squeals blare

Out the triumph of unreason

In the strangling dark.

Between gibberish and prose

Poets have nothing to say

So we let off a few fireworks

To defy the void.

There was once a healer

Who presided at the wedding

Of soul and substance, word and world

But we sacked him.

Broken homes bring banishment.

We tramp the streets of ransacked cities

Littered with scribbled papers,

Hooted and haunted.

Patterns

Holy and undivided Trinity

Three persons are a perfect unity

Giving yourself in love eternally

One to another giving, majesty

Forever moving, though immutably,

Pouring yourselves away all sinlessly

Giving yourself in love eternally

None reaches up to press for primacy

No shade when light is shed so liquidly

Can find a masking place: all holily

Three persons are a perfect unity

A stillness pulsing with all energy

A giving that reverses entropy

Action unblemished, thought a radiancy

Holy and undivided Trinity

Love is the name of God, and lovelily

Three are composed of One, and One of Three

Love, joy and peace embrace infinity

Giving yourself in love eternally

Three persons are a perfect unity

Holy and undivided Trinity…

A couple of insights came to me while I was pursuing the reflections that gave rise to this poem. One is that the universe everywhere exhibits entropy, all too briefly suspended in the case of life, but the continual self-giving of the Three Persons to One Another reverses it: instead of being diminished through giving out, they are stronger. So the Trinity "reverses entropy." 

The other is a key difference between this model and the simple monad of Judaic and Islamic monotheism, where one is one and all alone and ever more shall be so. That unity of only a single element is static: there is no space for movement, dynamism, interaction or process. Since the created universe constantly displays processes brought about by interacting powers, the dynamism of the Trinitarian model is a better fit. 

The Clown

If I must inhabit

Venus’ happy court

I would be her jester,

Make her joys my sport.

I’d threaten all the lovebirds

To turn them into pie,

Arraign the silly butterflies

For thinking they could fly.

“Nymph? She’s just a peasant,

Her swain is just a churl.”

I’d mock the moonstruck gallant

And his maudlin girl.

With sweet acerbic jibing

I’d follow them all day.

Though they’d just say I’m teasing

I’d ease my tears away.

They’d be too busy loving

To give much mind to me

And I’d forget in laughter

The pain they never see.

Hidden

Set your mind on things above… For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Colossians 3

My life is hidden in God with Christ my Lord

My death an echo of his sundered grave

My song is tuning to a distant chord

My soul, dawn stirring in a twilit wood

In longing for his light is all my love

My life is hidden in God with Christ my Lord

Hear now the chirrup of a waking bird

While light is yet to creep through clouds above

My song is tuning to a distant chord

Waste shall fall from me and become the food

That cycles through the earth and makes it move

My life is hidden in God with Christ my Lord

World swirls around me with unwearying word

Selling the trash that glitters in its trove

My song is tuning to a distant chord

Here in the heavens with you is all my hoard

Here is the soul you spent yourself to save

My life is hidden in God with Christ my Lord

My song is tuning to a distant chord.

For poetic structure nerds, the form of "Hidden" is a villanelle. I don't usually mess with these complicated formats, in fact this is my very first one. However I felt the delicate chiming of the repeated lines would bring out the feeling of that far off and faint, yet ever present, life and longing, like distant bells. I also decided to leave out punctuation to let the sounds run into each other more, with the same intention. I leave it with you to decide whether it worked. 

The twentieth century produced many fine examples of villanelles, including "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas and "If I could tell you" by W H Auden.