soundofmanywaters

  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 ancient 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. When poems were wrung out of your sad soul By sorrows grown from lonely sensitivity If no-one loved them, still you could console Your heart with contemplating your nobility. Now poems are made of whispering digi-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 there 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  ...

  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?                On Headley Heath 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 ri...

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.