Poems, written as footnotes on life as it unfolds.
September song
September, dearest of months, tell me if you know. How come you no longer stretch like you used to? Back along you spread out like jam, offering heady memories of endless bounties amongst the hedgerows. You gave us an eternity to gather them. Nowadays September...
Now
I only visit now places you live where there are no bodyguards I only go now to open spaces where there are no doors, to be shown and closed. I circumvent round the gatekeepers who patrol like circling birds of prey watching with piercing eyes for signs of dissent or...
Riverbank
Those are the trees of a hundred years. Here, the remarkable riverbank, which tells me all I need to know. If I look I can see that it is very true that some parts of what make up the world only ever change very slowly. Some things, like ancient oaks, are dependable,...
nobody
In water, the body and soul take on other properties. Morphing, moving differently, belonging to no one, having everything belong to you. If only for brief transitory periods of time. But if you can find enough of those times, of being nobody, just a tiny moving...
Sketchy
I watched recently how an artist creates a painting. All that was there at first was the faintest of sketches, on a blank canvas. Our biographies are a bit like this. The first lines drawn, the first markers of what makes up a life. But then the layers come. Great...
Magic
When facing forward we can trust two things: that the earth will be there to catch us whenever it is we dare to take our next step; and that the road will continue to wind out of sight, until some day we will each return our borrowed stardust to the universe. I took...
All gift
The tag on the shower puff read 'This product is made from natural materials, imperfections may show with use'. Well indeed. Exactly that. From time to time we could all do with that label on. Reminding others, reminding ourselves. Remembering this is true for those...
Ruins
'Ruins are not empty. They are sacred places full of presence'(John O'Donahue: Anam Cara). If we look we can see ruins everywhere. We see what is being brought to ruin right now. Impending ruin collects again. Adding to the ruins of our past. Rubble piling up in the...
Closure
the year we wished we could pack up banish into the loft or post off and discard to a distant land how to make sense of a time where the only gift was darkness the forest whispers 'do nothing' the next year will come will always, steadily, reliably wrap around this...
Towards healing part three/3: Friends who run through walls
The cavalry is not coming. I remember telling myself this. Distress can do that to you. Give you falsehoods. Make you forget. In the end though, I found a way to ‘find my own grit, in my own time’ (a beautiful phrase in Katherine May’s book ‘Wintering’)....
Towards healing part two/3: Yellow hats
We got matching yellow hats that day. From Wilko’s I think, plus a hand towel each. Oh, and we dropped by a charity shop, rummaged hastily... ‘There must be a couple here somewhere?’ - emerging exuberant with our finds! One over-sized, simply enormous, fluffy jumper...
Towards healing part one/3: Would you dance?
There came a day when I was driving and for no known reason, and rather embarrassingly, I thought of the 00’s song ‘Hero’ by Enrique Inglesias. (https://open.spotify.com/track/24Gxm7Eh7tO83E26LG0CsY ) Or at least a few lines from it. Almost against my better reasoning...