More older stuff

These poems all date from 2006 when I was doing a lot of thinking on the story of the prodigal son for an exhibition I put together in Southampton. It was also the year of my me and my wife's 10th anniversary. The poem 'Anniversary' probably makes a bit more sense if I tell you that we honeymooned in County Kerry, Ireland.


Lost Son


The robin sings the sun down.
The day shrinks and trembles inwards,
Down to a distant dog
And the crying brakes of a bus.
This is the world waiting.
This is the night’s first night.

To listen now is to be the ears
Of the father keening at the edge.
First he hears noise like short-wave
Crackling untuned pain which settles
With time to the radio-ham world
Of husky silence, one hand poised on the dial.

Then at the top of the house, a slate’s width
From the stars and their unlikely comets
A mobile jumps its signal like a mousetrap.
He is running. Falling up the bare stairs
Drumming into the mothballed attic room,
Deaf with the night’s return.

All lines now connect to this one.
Silence. Voice. The lost son.



Unprodigal


I returned home to find the prodigal
Sitting by the fire. He was drinking tea,
The kind I like, and reading a book,
Turning pages silently like a monk.
‘Lectio Devina’, I thought; pacing slowly
Word by word, perambulating over
And over those timeless phrases.

‘Give me my share of the estate’
He muttered uncommitedly
Sitting in my chair, never having left,
Reading his story, the unlived one,
Dreamt and always meant to,
But somehow never thought to ask,
‘Father – give me my share.’

He smiled, the prodigal, perhaps at this
Line or that. At the pig slop. Or the pain
Or the desperate rehearsal of the his plea,
Before pausing to refresh the fire,
A new log spat and sparked
Bursting light like fireworks at a party.

Pausing, he closed the book and put it down
Measuredly he left, presumably for bed.
Wild living in my eyes I snatched the book
And hurled it in the fire. And banging every door
In the muted house I ran
In search of a distant country.



Anniversary

‘And once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.’ Welden Berry

A wind swept loch always seemed a timid place to start
This burning fire of the inner heart
But I still choose and have the choice returned.

Irish fields, like the fire of the inner heart
Ringed the thumbnail cottage and the burn
Which seemed to me a timid place to start.

The meekly wounded need the gape of love confirmed
And in those little rooms we unfurled the chart
That invited us to choose and have the choice returned.

And when the mountains and the scree drew us apart
And extinguished in some degree the fire of the inner heart
I staggered down to choose and have the choice returned.

This seemed to me a timid place to start
To learn that love is as much unlearned
As learned in the depths of the inner heart.

These days the strong smoulder of persistent yearn
Is a hard peat fire of the inner heart,
Which seemed a timid place to start
But I still choose and have the choice returned.