Tag Archives: poetry

Our anniversary…

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Today is our 22nd wedding anniversary.

And I can honestly say that despite the ups and downs of the long walk together (and to be honest, with Michaela there have been very few downs) I love her more now than ever. I am a man blessed.

I know I am biased, but Michaela is a special person. She has the gift (and sometimes the burden) of being a networker, a host, a listener and a safe place for other people. Just recently we have been so very busy and she rarely stops – either working or meeting people or reaching out in some way. Sometimes people seem to want or expect too much of her and I wish I could protect her from some of this but it is simply who she is.

Today though we are going into Glasgow together. Just the two of us. Even though we have stuff to do, it is going to be OUR time.

Autumn is almost upon us;

Bare branches showing
Cold winds come blowing
Stealing this year away
Curlews are calling
The light now is falling
Dark nights are drawing in

There’s a crack in the church bell
There’s ice in the stairwell
Take care my love
Take care.
Close tight the windows
The day is only shadows
Come sit by the fire
With me

The far distant hillside
Is laced up in moonshine
No thoughts of the valley
Below
And maybe tomorrow
We can beg steal or borrow
Some time for just me
And just you

This house is now sleeping
Old floorboards creaking
The warmth’s all but gone
From the fire
So lets climb these stairs love
Dreams waiting a-bove
Let me lie in your arms
Again

Bare branches showing
Cold winds come blowing
Stealing this year away

September 2007

 

Cricket poetry…

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Forgive me dear readers when this blog veers towards the noble game of cricket. I know that my love of the game is somewhat marginal in its broader interest, but something of its idiosyncratic pleasure chimes with my soul.

I think this is partly the combination of physicality and deep thinking; the pace of the game which is so often mocked by the unaware means that a lot of the skill of playing the game is in the head. All the small confrontations involved in the event of every ball bowled, and the open ended hope for victory almost to the last.

Today we played a reduced over match against a Royal Botanical Gardens side- just a friendly, cut down to 20 overs because of an approaching weather front. They rattled up 110 (a wicket apiece for both Will and I) and then I opened the batting, perishing swiping across the line at a full one for 11. Grrrrr. 20 over cricket it not my bag really- I much prefer longer forms of the game in which you can build an innings. Will was last out attempting a slog off one of their quick bowlers in the last over, skying a catch to mid on.

The very words of cricket are poetry- all the terms evolved over hundreds of years- Googly, Silly Point, Yorker, Chin music and Square leg.

And cricket seems to have inspired lots of poetic writing over the years too- a happy combination of two of my passions. Here are a couple;

Firstly one of the more miserable, thanks to A E Houseman (from ‘Shropshire Lad‘ written in 1896.)

Twice a week the winter thorough
Here stood I to keep the goal:
Football then was fighting sorrow
For the young man’s soul.
Now in Maytime to the wicket
Out I march with bat and pad:
See the son of grief at cricket
Trying to be glad.
Try I will; no harm in trying:
Wonder ’tis how little mirth
Keeps the bones of man from lying
On the bed of earth.

Next an old Poem from Punch Magazine, written at the expense of a poor cricketer called William Scotton, renowed as a boring batsman. He probably would not have liked 20 over cricket either.Against the Australian team of 1886 Scotton played two remarkable innings in company with WG Grace, the two batsmen scoring 170 together for the first wicket for England at the Oval. Scotton’s score at the Oval was only 34 in 225.

Block, block, block
At the foot of thy wicket, O Scotton!
And I would that my tongue would utter
My boredom. You won’t put the pot on!
Oh, nice for the bowler, my boy,
That each ball like a barndoor you play!
Oh, nice for yourself, I suppose,
That you stick at the wicket all day!
And the clock’s slow hands go on,
And you still keep up your sticks;
But oh! for the lift of a smiting hand,
And the sound of a swipe for six!
Block, block, block,
At the foot of thy wicket, ah do!
But one hour of Grace or Walter Read
Were worth a week of you!

Poems of love…

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(I am writing this sitting in one of the great British wayside institutions- a Little Chef- somewhere near Skipton.)

We have been away on holiday for a week- more on this later- but today we attend our friends Stacey and Bob’s wedding at Beeston Manor, near Preston. Emily and I will be playing some fiddle/guitar music, and they kindly asked me to write a poem for the ceremony.

It is a humanist ceremony, and so I spent some time trying to come up with some way of saying something new about love. Not an easy thing to do without stumbling into a morass of sticky clichés. Also, my main poetic voice tends towards melancholic introspection, not quite the right tone for a wedding!

So, with every best wish to the happy couple- here is my poem of love;

The shared unknown

 

What more can be said of love that has not been said before?

I could sing to you of roses

I could scratch our names on trunks of trees

Or shower you with diamonds

We could walk through moonlight holding hands

Throw coins in Italian fountains

 

Or I could tell you of how, as a child

Someone sprinkled perfume on my pillow

And it smelled of you

Of how the sound of your voice is a flute

Blown by a desert wind

From some distant spice-filled oasis

 

But love is not captured in words

It also does the dishes

It takes the cold side of the bed

And knows all our guilty secrets

Love grows fat and grey and old

It gets sick and needs protection

 

So walk with me into this shared unknown

Love is a far horizon

Wherever you go is fine with me

These miles we’ll make together

For love is home when you are there

And will be so for ever

Singing of songs…

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I have been playing with a melody that popped into my head- a burst of folk music that I walked home with the other day and hummed into a recorder so I would not forget it.

It somehow connected with Song of Songs;

Listen! My beloved!
Look! Here he comes,
leaping across the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattice.
10 My beloved spoke and said to me,
“Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, come with me.
11 See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.”

This is one of those passages that when we read it (and ignore all those lurid sexual images that Song of Songs is full of) we have been accustomed to sanctify and imbue with foresight, as clearly the writer must have been alluding to the coming of Jesus. It is in the Bible after all.

And this may well be true, or perhaps we can read it in a much more earthy way- the man and his lover, fully alive, turned on like a spring morning. Humanity at the centre of a Creation re created through sexual electro chemistry.

I wrote a tamer Scottish version, to my own love-

The winter rains are almost done

The birds now sweetly singing

The woods alive in every limb

Each leaf new life is bringing

The ancient hills are green again

The valleys now are bleating

The forest floor slumbers no more

Bluebells will soon be ringing

Arise my love, and come away, come away

Arise my love and come away

 

The days are long those shadows gone

Light here around is falling

The humming hive is now alive

Lark into sky is soaring

So rise up hope and dance anew

On this your bright new morning

Come fly away my love with me

Our summer days are calling

Arise my love, and come away, come away

Arise my love and come away

The trees of the field shall clap their hands…

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Part of some poetry I am working on for Greenbelt festival

The air is harrowed by the song of birds

Each note a spore

Lighting upon the curl of some fertile ear

And the trees of the field clap their hands

 

The earth exhales

No longer held in the clamp of winter

Breath misting the day into rainbows of light

And the trees of the field clap their hands

 

Last year’s leaves fell not in vain

Digested as they are by a subterranean stomach

Burping out it’s appreciation

And the trees of the field clap their hands

Raw…

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I am sometimes so sick of the me

I wish I would just go away

I wish that the skin that I’m in would fall off

And the bones would go somewhere and stay

 

I should stay far from the you

It really is better that way

The sight of me stripped of my skin and my bones

Is a gruesome revolting display

 

 

A time to gather stones, and then to scatter them…

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I received a lovely thing today. One of our guests over the weekend left behind a gift for both Michaela and I.

Mine was a little bag full of tiny black stones, each one with a word in tiny writing.

When you put the sentence together, it read

…a time to gather stones and a time to scatter them…

The words of course, are from Ecclesiastes chapter 3. This is a special chapter for me, as I spent a very creative time writing a series of poems based around it, which became part of ‘Listing’.

At present, I am wondering whether I am gathering stones, or scattering them.

In some ways, I am building- all the plans we have for different ways of making a living. In other ways, it feels as if I am taking hold of a handful of stones and throwing them in the air, waiting to see where they all land.

It made me return to those old poems I had written. It is a strange thing to do, as they arise very much in the moment, and so to consider them anew is difficult. The one that impacted me was this one;

A time to gather

There is a time for all things under heaven…

There’s a murmur and mutter of holy unrest
They’re coming
So look to the north, the east and the west
They’re coming

Fools now wise in the way of the One
Captives unchained, once more on the run
Broken people splinted and cast
Winners now all prepared to be last

Sick folk nursed and discharged
Narrow people with lives now enlarged
Bitterness sweetened and ready to serve
Unworthy who get more than they deserve

Useless people ready to be used
The inexcusable being excused
The unstable stop up-and-downing
Depressives learn to start clowning

Sensitive souls softened to others
Orphans find fathers and mothers
The outsiders will sit by the fire
The lazybones now never tire

The tuneless will learn how to sing
The lame will dance Highland fling
The childless will learn how to mother
The selfish will favour the other

The talentless learn brand new skills
Megalomaniacs surrender their wills
Soldiers lay down the gun
The miserable start to have fun

~

Angry folk fit a long fuse
Drinkers will give up the booze
Sinners like me will no longer be
And the faithless will spiritually see

The becoming of God are flowing together
For now is the time
To gather

When I wrote this, it was a poem of yearning. A few years down the line, despite the battering taken from the ups and downs of community it is still there.

One of the challenges for sensitive damaged souls like me is the tendency towards isolation. I believe that community should be our goal and our aim, in spite of our experience of community.

I was grateful for the gift, and for the little slice of community- thanks Raine!

All manner of things shall be well…

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I have been working on a song today. I used to write songs a lot, but stopped (unsurprisingly) when I no longer sang as much.

It forced me to return to rhyme, which I am usually glad to put aside when I write poetry.

I was thinking about those words of Julian of Norwich– All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. The theology behind these simple words is highly complex. Despite living in a time of the the Black Death, which religious people saw as the just punishment of a wrathful God because of the sin of the people, she chose to believe in love and hope. Interestingly, in our times when the theological debate around Atonement is causing such conflict, Julian had some very non standard views about sin and the punishment of God. This from the Wikipedia entry;

Julian believed that sin was necessary in life because it brings one to self-knowledge, which leads to acceptance of the role of God in one’s life. Julian taught that humans sin because they are ignorant or naive, not because they are evil, which was the reason commonly given by the church for sin during the Middle Ages.Julian believed that in order to learn, we must fail. Also, in order to fail, we must sin. The pain caused by sin is an earthly reminder of the pain of the passion of Christ. Therefore, as people suffer as Christ did, they will become closer to Him by their experiences.

Similarly, Julian saw no wrath in God. She believed wrath existed only in humans but that God forgives us for this. She writes, “For I saw no wrath except on man’s side, and He forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love”. Julian believed that it was inaccurate to speak of God’s granting forgiveness for sins because forgiving would mean that committing the sin was wrong. Julian preached that sin should be seen as a part of the learning process of life, not malice that needed forgiveness. Julian writes that God sees us as perfect and waits for the day when humans’ souls mature so that evil and sin will no longer hinder one’s life.

Here are the words so far, still listening for their tune;

In the morning when I rise
In the evening when I die
You are there

In the cloister or the gutter
In the music and the song
In the heart that breaks wide open
In the right and in the wrong
In the tear that no one noticed
In the flow of every stream
In the leaf slowly unfurling
In things seen and yet unseen

In the mist of mellow fruitfulness
Or a stinking torture state
In the stab of empty promises
And twisting with our fate
In the road as yet untraveled
In the barrel of a gun
In the plan that comes unravelled
Or the journey just begun

In the cracks of what we concrete
In the atom and the bomb
In the hope of each spring morning
In a moment too soon gone
In the Bible and the bar room
In famine and the feast
In the spaces we make for him
And where we expect him least

I am learning trust in you
For all manner of things
Shall be well
All manner of things
Shall be well


If you stand on the edge too long…

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Sometimes, faced with a major change, we are full of the sense of opportunity. But if you are like me, these things ebb and flow- mostly as a result of fairly minor events that may have little real relevance to my future.

So an unexpected tax implication, or the failure of a small co operative venture, or even the harsh words of a friend- these things can feel like nails in a tyre.

Worry not however friends- I tend towards mercurial and what goes down will also rise. And as ever, I find melancholy makes me ruminate in word form;

Shrink wrapped

 

Squeezed in my own vices

Folded in like some second hand shroud

Shrink wrapped

All things

No longer

Possible