I am doing some work on a new collection of poetry.

I have been writing poetry for many years- with spikes and troughs of productivity. I wanted to do something with some of the things I had written. It is hard work though- I find looking at things that I wrote a few years ago quite hard. The emotional meaning that they bring to me is muted by the passage of time, and for me poetry is perhaps above all an emotional thing.

Others may focus on the technical and cerebral aspects of poetry, but I think I am a bit too lazy for all that stuff… although I tinker a bit on the edges.

So rather than doing what I should be doing and organising and editing, I am writing new things.

I did come across this the other day though-

Meaning

.

At the end of it all,

When history finally catches up with its vanishing point

What elements of you and me will still carry meaning?

Are we really no more than a knot along an evolutionary string?

Perhaps near the end

But then again, what a conceit that is-

Maybe we are nearer the beginning

.

Will all things pass,

Or are we elemental

Like the carbon molecules that mould us?

.

What might survive?

Truth
Beauty
Grace
Poetry singing in the soul
The flicker of a rising sun
In an old man’s eyes
The heart stings of hope
And the passing of glances
From father
To son
.
For what value have frescoes?
Icons?
But the truth they speak
Is in the filter
Of the eyes
They fall on
.

I am brought back to the Bible

Like a phantom itch in a missing limb.
.
To the cynical meanderings of the writer of Ecclesiastes.
And the beginning of it all in Genesis.
.
The end described in the wild narcotics of the Apocalypse of John.
.
And I stand still on the promise of a new kingdom
Here on the earth

But interconnected with a mysterious elsewhere

.
And the soft uncertain space

.
Within