As I stood there
Under hawthorn and hazel;
A coppery canopy braided
With sunshine,
I could hear the noise
Of my heart in the wind;
A soft haggling sound
Of memory fretting
On memory.
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Category Archives: Poetry
A Life worth remembering
Sometimes from my doorstep on a morning
Of drifting pollen grains I can hear the silence
Hushing about the eaves,
Pouring its attention into mountain streamlets.
By mid morning the vast rolls of the sea
Break around the blue cliffs,
Splitting apart and merging into wholeness
Like the wrecking and healing of time.
Sometimes fragmented rhythms chance upon
These knotted flows of sound;
Warnings of incoming gales beneath shafts of sunlight
Demanding step-by-step negotiations.
But such mornings should always be undertaken
With great respect for its own moods.
Even tricky surfaces are holy ground,
Twigs, pebbles, stones and seaweed underfoot,
Touching, scraping, padding the skin
To give us memory, to give us a life
Worth remembering.
There is a sense of oldness in the air
There is a sense of oldness in the air,
As though it has been impregnated
With tenderness, delicacy and wisdom.
Ghostly peaks, partially hidden
By knitted webs of thinning wedding veils,
Worn out by generations of stone cold brides,
Remind us of old newness and peaceful departings.
Spring’s forest school alumni,
Ready to embark on their virgin flight,
Darken the air with insecure strong-born wings.
There is the sound of rain falling into lakes
And souls slipping into sunsets,
As though leaves were attached to their backs.
And mornings to come,
With night-trees feeding on shadows
To part ways with the sun.
I am
I am sky; absent clouds shifting,
Bright dusk arising or descending,
Roaring quietly, but deeply and eternally
Unstable.
Birthing stars from darkness and
Obscuring galaxies into oblivion.
Like a sea of torrential consciousness
My awareness is illuminated by death.
I am emptiness; inhabiting;
Without space for nothing,
Everything.
I am; availability; the taking
And making of matters,
A steeply elusive discus
Releasing at the precise millisecond
Of maximum thrust.
I am; a consistently integrated ambition,
clustering unlimited sub-selves
With a secret objective.
I am; impossible opportunity,
Bright darkness burning,
A moonlit sun and wind;
Unmoving wind tearing holes
In the moving of space.
I am; vision; reinvigorated
By the opposition, I spread through
Shallow eternity,
Spinning slowly, enfolding
In art, biology, science.
I am; the invisible you,
The nothing and everything
In all.
The Geography of you and me
We can look at each other
From both sides now;
Letting the distance between
The me in you and the me in me
Soften us.
Knowing so perfectly
Each other’s geography,
We can pause to stay comfortable
In each other’s silence,
Leaving the lights to burn
All through the night.
A Ripple in time
Your life is a ripple in time;
A chain reaction of events sparked
By your birth.
Wether you walk amongst wildflowers,
Or trail along a heathery marsh way,
Pushing a cloud-spun meadow
On the blue horizon, or
Dragging along the sun,
Your seasonal skin will keep falling;
Peeling off coats of arms, smoothed
By currents of interchanging keys,
Until nothing remains but a soft wind,
Tossing upon someone else’s waves.
Hovering above myself
I am hovering above myself
As though my existence is a circle
Painted on borrowed beach sand
Drawn by sticky fingertips
On someone else’s reality,
Its oily prints trailing a whole universe
Upon a silent sky.
