soundofmanywaters

  Bearing the image   Still without memory, still unaware Of any possibility of future, there Sprawls Adam in his golden thoughtlessness Upon the green of Eden, where he is   Contemplated. While he continues whole Completeness only incompletes his role. The cut is deep. A trail of scarlet blood Leads to where Eve too slumbers upon sward.   Adam’s wound will close, hers will remain. New life is only birthed in blood and pain. She dreams of a thorned and weaponed future where A cross awaits the offspring she will bear   And now the image opens in her eyes Of Love most fully given when it dies.

 SoundofManyWaters News June 2025 Remarkably, SoundofManyWaters has now received over 3,000 views! Thank you so much everyone for taking the time to look at my poems. I hope you have enjoyed them and found them stimulating and inspiring. Although most of you are from the UK, over a thousand come from the USA, Canada and Singapore, with a large number of other countries also represented. I feel deeply humbled. There are now 40 posts on SoMW, which may make it hard to navigate the blog, find your favourites, or sort out the best poems from the ones that work less well for you. I personally feel disappointed that the posts appear just in date order, leaving some of what I like to think are really good poems way down the list where many potential readers may not look. I hope you will persevere in the belief that there may be gems to be mined deeper down. Two other less than perfect features of the blog are first that the poems appear at first sight as prose. At least one friend of mine...

Held I am a stone chipped from a cold white tomb. In your firm grip I'm comforted and scared, my jagged edges fit wrong in your palm. Both strong and tender, soft and hard, you hold and hold and hold and hold; transformed deep till the pain of being slowly eases, quiet your life seeps in until I'm calmed. But from your hand around my sharpness oozes Redness. You could not grip me without wounds, My name engraved in pain in your pierced hands.

This is a reworking of a poem that appeared earlier on Sound of Many Waters. I've long felt that its last stanza, in which my journey comes to rest under the roots of the oak, belonged in it but was not the place to end it, because I want to share a better hope in these poems. I hope the new final stanza offers a completion rather than a mere petering out...  Spinney 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 to conquer.   Later it was a beech tree I loved best. My auntie had one growing by her gate. Though it had many shapely arms, she called it Venus de Milo for its voluptuous torso And sheeny 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, defiant gold.   There were many more saplings for my spinney,...

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.”