but stop
because your own
entirely
lacked
all sin.
BREATH
Nothing was,
all was beginning on that dew-soft morning
far from now.
The sound of distance
gathered on the crystal air
still cool before the rise of noon,
and from the trees rose birdsong
iridescent as the sun-soaked lawn.
Far off, so far away
the coming tide of what would be;
for now, a quiet breath
drew ripples on a still dark pool.
I could not say what made me pause
that day of days – the day of leaving,
a moment snatched no more remarkable
than one brief heartbeat from the next,
but on that July day I understood
and listened to the one heart,
to the trusted trees,
the blaze of green far greener than before,
with the scent of lavender
reminding me of all the lavender I'd ever smelled,
and of all the summers.
BEAUTY GROWS
Beauty awakens beauty.
It begets itself as a living thing,
opens up its own eyes,
makes its own ears a receptacle
for remote oceans, for star sounds,
for places that were once black
but will never be so again.
Like an incoming tide beauty invades us.
It washes into our thirsty lives and never leaves.
The odour of pines can never be forgotten,
but will heap upon itself the wind,
loneliness, memories of silent faces,
many beginnings and ends,
even those commonplace words once overheard.
Through every aspect beauty speaks.
It comes to us in silent fields
and crowded halls,
and every time its language grows,
word upon word, image upon image,
building spires in derelict lands,
watering with song the stony unawoken air.
Beauty is a lantern in a dark domain
whose gleam illuminates far more
than its own light; it grows,
and bit by bit makes visible
an unseen world:
that part of life that we can touch
and feel no pain.
PERFECT WORLD
A rose could not grow in a perfect world;
bees would not visit it, and the shock of its perfume
would be as music
never played.
There can be no manifestation of light
where only light falls, for the shapes of all things
are revealed
in shadows.
The warmth of the summer sleeps in the snows,
just as reasons for joy are made plain in our sorrows.
Our needs make us
whole.
The roots of a tree are bound in darkness.
Death shows us life. Let the moon have its day,
and the rose have
the night.
MATTER OF THE HEART
What strange gift is this
that lets me see beyond the curtain
stained by light and dark?
Soft moving in the night
the hum of air,
and voices breathing in and out;
the constant bleat of monitors
mark out the steady pace
of heartbeat after heartbeat
on and on -
a sequence once deemed infinite,
a line extending outward
to tomorrows lost in haze.
I had not planned this -
to lie like this, awake,
and hear the dramas of those others
who, like me, have wandered near the edge.
We are as vulnerable as liquid
carried in an open cup,
frail lights which one sigh can extinguish
whilst the world moves on.
How easily the summers pass
whilst in our chests
the mechanisms thump and pound.
and memories of words that make a life,
and smiles as warm as open hands
on night-chilled flesh.
Oh happy man
who in the stillness and the dark
finds all the fortune he has earned
like soft rain falling;
it's what remains when all else
has been stripped away:
the image we have built in others' hearts
is who we are and what we've made.
PASSING THROUGH
Our story begins with a single sigh,
an eddy of dust, a tremor on water.
But it breaks the apple from its moorings,
sets free the pollen, and embarks
on a journey of no return.
And bit by bit our sigh becomes thunder.
How it unrolls in tumultuous seas!
We are the waves that surge through creation,
bobbing the flotsam of bells and laughter,
the butter of flesh, the swarm of words.
Nothing can stop us, however we alter.
We are waves passing through the miraculous atoms;
and the world heals behind us.
Onward and onward and onward we move,
shifting the silent mass of the universe.
TODAY
Nobody will ever know the name of this day
in spring;
it is just one more day,
except that in this life of mine,
now, as I live it,
it is the whole of creation
refined into this single point.
Sounds have been brought to me
from many sources.
The essences of countless lives
have worked their way
like music in and out of mine.
Without any warning today has emerged
as a blue bowl bright with the din
of insect wings.
It is a tapestry whose threads
are the many songs of birds.
And all this revealed
in the emerald breath of awakened leaves.
Today is the culmination
of everything that ever was.
It is a miracle which trundles on
through dusty hours,
a road down which
no man shall ever pass again.
Even now, as pigeons call
from lofty trees,
the warmth evaporates
from quiet stones,
and shutters close
to mark the end of one more day.
The living edge moves on.
Another day will come, and this one,
this day in which all things
were felt and done
will fade away,
a day in spring which has no name,
no way to fasten it inside the heart,
except through these few lines.
SADNESS
Sadness, I need you to go on calling to me
from those far off places.
It is not that I wish to be downcast,
but that a man sometimes needs to measure his own life.
I do not say that the past should haunt us,
rather that the path we have trodden has some importance.
To cast my eyes backwards and to see you, sadness,
like the hulks of dead ships sunk in dark waters,
is to know you have failed.
You are wreckage, detritus I have decided to abandon,
yet I do not wish to forget you existed.
Inside every sorrow lies the still beating heart
of something sunlit, something which nourished
that part which hungers, which quickened
the song that lives inside us.
There will always be night.
Breathing in, breathing out is how the world flows.
And shadows walk with us.
So speak to me, sadness,
remind me that life is an uphill path.
In turn I will say that a road leading upwards
will lend us a view of the whole world below.
ACCOUNTING
How has it happened that I have accumulated
so many days?
Twenty three thousand times I've awoken,
and on each awakening a new chance to live,
a fresh opportunity has shown me its face.
And what have I done with this?
I have eaten more than eight thousand loaves,
I have quenched my thirst on an ocean of tea.
More than a billion breaths have sustained me,
with more than a billion beats of my heart.
And how many words? How many dreams
have I given birth to? How many kisses
and curses have escaped me?
Measuring a man is no simple task.
His worst and his best may be written upon him,
but how does one account for the weight of his smiles,
for his fears which, like thistledown,
have seeded whole pastures beyond his horizons?
And what is the cost of the doubts he has held?
What value should we give to those words unspoken?
Each life that has entered this pool of creation
has fallen like drops of ink into water;
it blossoms, expands, is laughter
and perfume lost in a crowd.
But its hunger fills fields with barley and wheat.
Twenty three thousand times I've awoken,
and each day I follow the words of the song.
But the music moves on,
like a cloud drifting by
that will never return.
HOME
I once found home
inside a tree,
a cramped place
hollowed from an oak's deep chest,
a cave so hidden
by stout brambles
that I nearly passed it
as I ambled by.
But it called me
as trees will often do
to small boys
who have ears to hear
and eyes to see.
I went there
when the clouds inside me
turned to grey,
and sat inside its scented walls
and heard sap rise
and insects go about their ways,
and dreamt of other times,
and possibilities
of where a heart might wander
under different skies.
How strange to think
a tree gave succour
where a man could not,
its wooden arms
as warm and tender
as a boy could want.
It was my own.
Down every lane since then
my eyes have measured shadowed space.
The boy is grown,
no longer small enough
to squeeze inside the fortress
of green leaves, the safety
formed by seasons out of time.
But care grows roots inside the heart,
and now I have a place in me
the size and shape of comfort
granted me by home I once found
hollowed in an ancient oak.
BECOMING
You want to know
what life is for?
It is for more;
more breath,
more thought,
another step,
another day,
another pain or pleasure,
slap or kiss;
another chance
to make mistakes,
to fail, succeed,
to seek once more
in some small thing
the vastness
of the state of being;
to find
in every inhaled breath,
in every ray
that strikes the eye
that gift
the unborn
cannot have.
Inside each moment
every atom
stirs and sings.
This lit room
in the darkness
of eternity
is all we know.
We are the clay,
the empty page,
and with them
we must work
to find what,
in the end,
we gave to life.
ON ENCOUNTERING A PLUM
It could be, when your mind is out walking,
you discover a plum that has hidden itself
on the bough of a plum tree.
The sight surprises you, though you are not surprised,
and you wonder how this thing has happened:
a plum in a tree; knowledge and reality
meet amongst leaves.
Perhaps you will measure its weight in your palm.
It is naked, plump, a device
which contains every day of the summer.
Its flesh breaks open onto your tongue.
You are five and twelve and twenty again.
You spit out the stone. You have learned
once again what you always have known.
SONG OF THE EARTH
Beautiful words should descend
upon rain:
lifeblood, elixir,
each drop a kiss
that opens the grain,
a key which unlocks
the seed and the dream,
the maker of fish paths,
the mother of green.
An ocean of blessings should pour
upon rain:
fruit-giver, lake filler,
whose pattering voice
is a constant refrain.
The cells of our bodies
admit to its worth,
the bringer of life,
the song of the Earth.
SEED
Tiny pilgrim, you left upon the winds of autumn,
applauded by the leaves with copper hands,
and carried into unknown fields
the history of your ancient kind.
You did not know that in your wooden heart
the tender genesis of future forests lay,
but tumbling down the rocky cleft
you told your whispered message to the stony ground.
A pinch of dust, a drop of rain were start enough;
you fastened harder to an unsure world
and made your stand.
I too have made my journey,
grown from seed in distant lands,
but here for one brief moment in your shade we meet,
and share the cries of curlews in the arc of grey.
I saw you from far off, gesturing like one
whose arms describe the immensity of open sky.
The seed in you has built strange highways
into earth and air, and wormed its way
inside the caverns of our human dreams.
The code of chemistry in every cell
has filled the hollow winter with its silent song:
the promise of those shadowed flags
and generous days woven from a tale of green.
VAPOUR
Daylight fails.
Far off and silently
a star is creeping.
The roar of its great engines
has all dropped away,
but in it people sit
in tidy rows, tethered
by my gaze alone
t
o all they've left.
Down here a puddle
is a fragment of the fallen sky.
I hold the moment
whilst the plane soars on,
leaving behind it
a visible memory.
WITNESS
Down the windy lane that day
nobody came.
Though the sea sent its voice to rush through the woods,
how many heard it?
Who saw the treetops scrabble at clouds,
or the tall grass lean?
Somewhere dark a willow was creaking,
its sinews tight in the gathering rain.
The calls of the crows scraped through the trees,
and the wind was a sight in the churning leaves.
But nobody came.
EACH DAY I AM REMADE
The empty hall of my stomach summons me.
I am called upon to vouch for the wetness of rain.
The mown grass describes every summer there was,
and the voice of the pigeon contains all the evenings.
The heart hears the song. Small things assail me;
each day I am remade as a human.