You gave yourself to me
without restraint,
every part of you,
the perfect sacred lover.

As for me,
I was writhing on the bed
of my discontent at the time,
and didn’t even notice.

 

 

I wasn’t thinking
of anything in particular
when they came over,
I just looked up and there they were,
a host of silver angels on the wing,
bent on some purpose, I know not what.
The perfect majesty of heaven
moving with inexorable grace,
indifferent to what was below them
save through their radiance,
their luminous beauty,
which touched my soul
and caused my heart
to ache with longing.

 

 

 

He spoke Light,
the language
we had all forgotten,
and left His words
in the doorways
they opened,
so that those doors
could never close again.

What did you learn,
how did you use the gift of your life?

I learned how easily gold
slips through my fingers,
and how much despair
fallen gold creates.

But I learned something else too,
something about my heart and about love,
that love can make a new kind of gold
from my mistakes, a rare gold,
not found in heaven or on earth
but that dwells in man alone.

Light becomes darkness
and then it becomes light again,
but it’s not the same light as before,
it’s a new light, a light that has been tested
in the vale of life and has remained true,
true to man and true to God.

I’m impressionable,
everything affects me,
every look, every feeling,
every kindness,
every carelessness act,
my own and others.

By the end of the day
I’m dimpled like the page of
an old letterpress book,
then gradually in the night,
my flesh expands and
becomes smooth again,
the impressions lift off and
are stored in the basement
of my mind for later consideration
and I wake up to clean, a fresh page

I was watching
two hoverflies
early this morning,
they’d hang in the air
almost motionless,
then they’d engage
one another in a frenzy
for a few moments,
then separate
and hang again.

They were like my thoughts,
I would manage to still my mind
for a few moments then I’d be off,
worrying about why
I hadn’t written any poetry
or whether the courgette leaves
were going to starve the carrots of light.

Then it started to rain,
soft, summer rain
falling on the leaves
of the Ash tree above me.

That’s the thing about nature,
when it intervenes
it’s always beautiful, total,
inexplicable and right.

Is that you my beloved?

Is that your cool hand
I can feel on my cheek
as I wake from my slumbers?

Ah no, sadly no,
it’s the embrace of night herself,
night and her mischievous children
who come to play in the garden of my mind
until the light of day chases them away.

I sympathise with you,
married to a fool,
a loud obnoxious man,
filled with indignation
at what life has sent him
and still believing he has rights.

I thank you too,
even though I know you
have no choice in the matter
I thank you just the same,
for seeing through it all
and staying with me anyway.

Poems are important,
secret passages to another realm,
another world where life itself is a poem,
night and day, the sun and the rain,
the leaves on the trees and
the troubles of men all part of it,
a poem where life, death and rebirth
all have their place,
and everything rhymes.

I sat by
the embers
of last night’s fire
and watched
the morning sun
set the treetops ablaze.
You came as you always do,
like a whisper in the night,
and I felt my heart
thicken with peace.

I am afraid,
but with you beside me
I have nothing to fear.