Blackcap

It is bubbling from the shrub again.
April. A fair week of it.
With the grace of sunshine and mercy
Of stillness. I wake early and hear it.

It is like a fond voice all but forgotten.
It is like dusting off an old recording.
It is like remembering that even in absence
There is presence in another place
Or that the song you sang for a season
(before winter, or dark, or the cloying damp)
Has reason to return.

Threshold

Was recently on a retreat kind of thing for people who do the same sort of job as me, pioneering new forms of church. For a lot of us doing what we are called to do was like venturing over some sort of threshold, venturing in unconventional ways, learning to do things that seem impossible or unimaginable.

Threshold

Finally, there is the rite of passage
after all the others, the normal ones,
only there are no brides or gowns,
no clink of crystal glasses,
no scroll and no invited guests.

There is just a threshold beneath the sky,
the border fence has been ripped out,
its twisted metal rusting in the saline air,
and mentors, minders and my father
have tiptoed back into history and the earth.

Yet somehow a line is crossed,
a fence in borrowed time, vaulted,
the door of possibilities clicks behind you
and there is only you, the pull of the tide against the sea bed,
the choice of whether or not to fly.

Anniversary

It is one year today since my father died. I am shocked at how life has adjusted to his absence. Memory seems like such an intangible thing. I want to conjure up his presence through memory but even after a single year that proves difficult. A person is so much more than what we can remember as the memory fades, there is something mysterious and amazing about presence, that extraordinary synthesis of personality and physique that makes a person what they are.

Something of that mystery I have tried to communicate in this poem.

ANNIVERSARY

I wonder what I still have after a year
as memories fade and those I don't want stick;
like the shape of your mouth on the bed,
the colour of your skin, the silence.

I have a trowel that was yours
and I keep it, not that I will use it,
but its shape will not blunt
and the handle fits my grip dependably.

When all this is over

When all this is over
I shall take up woodwork.
I will let my forceful life
Rest within the grain
Of wood seasoned
In the steady rain.

I will gather what is left
Of the forest and fashion
Fallen stuff into something,
Maybe nothing, but hope
That this is not the point.

I will shape a diminishment
Around small shards and shapes,
A calm diminuendo within
The hush of fallen leaves
And bare trees transfigured
In the dying sun.

And I shall live
Within the lines of my shallow palms
That can only hold as much
As they will then;
A saw, a blade, perhaps a lathe,
Indeed as much as they do now.

This the second in a trio of poems for Advent, the first being 'Mary' - shall aim to write 'Zechariah' in due course!

Bit of news, 'Nightjar' and 'High Tide' were accepted for publication by Borderlines the journal of the Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society for their winter edition.

Elizabeth

This is now. This long sight.
From hill country, eyeing a puff
Of dust illuminated in the dying

Light. This moving storm growing
From silence to a throng, a rage
Of glory climbing in the midday sun.

This is time. Though mine
Is further forward, further on
Reaching for the desert and the brokenhearted.

This is now, this now
When the burdened figure climbs the final
Steps and speaks the words

Carried like burning coals from the hearth
Of heaven. This long sight of mine
Eyes the stuff confined within this shy
Slight girl, holding a new world inside her.

Family Devotion

All I have to say goes unheard.
I want to show you Revelation,
Prophecy on the line of the receding tide,
A crab harbouring thugs in Adullams cave,
The gull, rare in its white wings
Burning but not consumed,
A Voice calling from the rain, the wind.

Much sooner than I’d have liked
We make it to your destination;
There is Providence in the offering of warm drinks,
Forgiveness in biscuits shared
Silently across the picnic table,
Crumbs falling to the starlings
Speaking another language underneath.
I do not speak another word.

Lip Reading

Browsing comments from the past,
The sort of thing you write
To those who mourn;
‘Always had a joke to tell’,
‘Will miss his happy smile’,
‘Much loved by all he knew’.

We accept these platitudes
With grace, these honest lines
From club and pub
And charitable trust,
The hospital where he passed
Away, the lip-reading class.

This last lament from the hard of hearing
Reads of ‘how he persevered’.
I see him leaning in
Keening for all the many words
That might have been. The unannunciated
Vowels and consonants of misused time
The silent, shaped, – ‘too late, ‘too late’.