7th January 2021
Subversion
When the Ancient of Days showed up as a baby
who would have thought it, apart from prophets,
parents, shepherds and seers?
And when Light of Light, before any stars,
Burst out in the darkness
who’d have foreseen it,
apart from the unblinded, the prophets,
parents, shepherds and seers?
So, hope, in America, on Epiphany Day.
Light trumps the darkness, whatever they say.
26th January 2021
Forward Planning
What shall we bother with this year? Hmm Apathy?
When shall we procrastinate about it? Later.
Where shall we holiday this year? In the Doldrums.
Why should we think otherwise? Christ
How? Be a Christian. Practicing.
2nd February 2021
Sir Tom at Candlemas
He was the unforeseen hero who
everyone knew, loved and took heart from,
and he’s died.
He broke through the opaque walls
of our Covid confinement,
of the impotence we felt,
and we could see him do his duty,
because he had to do it again.
That was Sir Tom even when so old.
It was completed with so much money raised,
him knighted and the whole of it,
the countless rebellions
against the virus, topped the charts
as an anthem of faith and hope and love..
He died on what is a Jesus Day
and that resonates because the baby,
a foreseen hero but only recognised
by very old eyes, also did his duty,
also spent his life and brought us eternal safety
and left hope and faith and love with us, in us.
The virus took Tom, and we mourn his death.
But it didn’t defeat him.
Love always wins.
Ash Wednesday 2021
Hard, Hard, Hard.
We thought, many of us, that it would be over quickly,
done and dusted like 1914.
Even lockdown felt a bit like Detention.
We quite liked being kept in;
the whole class was in it together
and we banged our desks in tribute,
not just being awkward.
And the holidays were coming.
That was so long ago. Summer was too early
and Winter followed Spring.
It’s as if it’s been one long Lent that has
cost us too much, too many.
We’ve been delirious in an evil wilderness.
Hard, hard, hard. There’s ice in the soul.
I expect we’ll all go wild whenever it ends;
make up for stolen time, feast and go to town,
go over the top with no shells crashing down on us,
raid the beer cellars and crash the parties,
cheer the cherished departed and cry in our cups.
It’ll be a relief when the floodgates can open.
There’ll be the stories and fresh songs,
and we’ll need to put up new statues.
They say that Spring is making a comeback, and it looks likely.
It’s Lent now and days lengthen, flowers are restocking.
We’ve been wrong before of course, all of us, but here’s hoping.
I wonder what it will feel like on the far side.
12th March 2021
Whimsically
I’m made up to be writing poetry
and I’ve got the gift of the jab.
Winter wants to be out of here
and soon I’ll be fighting flab.
I’m reading of old King Oswald
and his rescue of the North,
with Oswiu and the Raven and
new Christians at their birth,
stirring and inspiring stories
as I try to flex my spirit,
and follow Jesus to the Cross,
his death, my life and glory in it.
17th March 2021 also St Patrick’s Day
Hey Jeremiah
Hey Jeremiah,
thanks for all your prophecies,
especially the cuddly bits,
but are you saying that God
is a cat and his people are prey
as the land’s “a thing to be hissed at forever”?
Is Old God sharpening his claws
on a desiccated fig tree and sitting
on a tumbledown wall waiting to pounce?
Ok, I know you’re disappointed with
The Chosen
and they haven’t come up to scratch.
But cut them some slack, will you?
You’re taking it too personally
just because the city nobs are going
to stick you in the clink and make your
prophecies ‘disappear’.
Maybe God will get you out pronto.
But then again, maybe he won’t.
Jeremiah 18.
15 But my people have forgotten me,
they burn offerings to a delusion;
they have stumbled* in their ways,
in the ancient roads,
and have gone into bypaths,
not the highway,
16 making their land a horror,
a thing to be hissed at for ever.
All who pass by it are horrified
and shake their heads.
17 Like the wind from the east,
I will scatter them before the enemy.
I will show them my back, not my face,
on the day of their calamity.
18 Then they said, ‘Come, let us make plots against Jeremiah—for instruction shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, let us bring charges against him,* and let us not heed any of his words.’
24th March 2021
Change
Three white ducks have flown and gone.
I had wondered where they were.
The village is poorer without their bustling and busy presence.
It isn’t the same loss as the exiled Kingdom of Judah,
told by the Bible,
but it affects me.
It doesn’t matter nearly as much as the ruins of Covid,
but it is a loss.
It isn’t in of the same order as nature’s reactions
to human blundering,
but the ducks are missing and missed.
Well, they are delighting somewhere else now.
The people returned to Judah eventually.
The ducks will still be ducks.
Covid will in time be a footnote.
I shall be gone.
Nature will continue as it does.
It’s all part of one story of countless chapters,
and it is read.
Holy Saturday
Down, Out and Back
Now,
tidied away quickly,
sealed up so that his stench
and the sight of him in death,
will not offend religious sensibilities,
for it is better for one man not to have
a funeral than a whole festival be contaminated,
they know where he is.
But he climbs down off his shelf
and heads for Hell.
Bulldozing its gates
and trashing the chains
he grabs Adam and Eve by their wrists
and says Come with me.
It is not a request.
The place empties
and there’s a victory lap over Jerusalem
on their way to Ever.
Jesus hangs around. He’s only just begun.
24th September 2021
Life and Service
He broke an ankle when the biplane crash landed,
shot down by friendly fire in North Africa,
but he lived.
I read in his logbook the record of his Swordfish flights
from HMS Eagle, the carrier later sunk.
He’d been redeployed by then.
If he’d died in action I couldn’t have been born.
I wouldn’t be trying to get my mind round
the paradoxes of choices and of their consequences,
as he tried to do.
Dear Dad.
In those days he was killing others,
dropping bombs at Taranto as his chosen duty
and taking flak for it.
Killing for peace and serving the brutal struggle
to liberate others so they could choose love, perhaps.
And now, in our war, in our present conflicted world,
how perplexing it is to struggle for peace,
to generate energy to cool us all down
and to turn the light on
when we’re frozen in deep dark confusion.
Doing nothing is not an option, but how to do,
and what then?
It’s never simple, is it?
But that’s life, I guess,
at least for now.
9th October 2021
Scandal
I captured Christ.
Hung him on the wall.
Shoved him in an oil lamp.
Kept him in Church.
Preyed to him.
Made sure he was well groomed
so that the kids would love him to the end.
To what end? Gratification or grace?
I looked at him but he’d got out somehow.
He left a note but I didn’t read it.
12th October 2021
Getting into Shape
I was groomed, moulded and shaped,
at my most malleable
and Jesus “had come in”.
There was pressure but no whip,
not physically.
Just the three-line whip.
No cruelty, but heroes to imitate
and examples to follow.
I’m grateful beyond measure,
I think. I think they got so much wrong,
but Jesus heard their prayers
as I launched towards his orbit,
pockmarked with the scarring of sin,
until I was ready to cut loose from
their gravity, and not that only.
Jesus, the astral wonder,
the rock-solid star,
the source of all the light,
the unrestrained piercer of this world’s air
who was put out as if a candle
only to flare and flash into burning
blinding, cosmic brightness,
in your mercy keep me now on course
and with you.
And keep me star struck.
18th October 2021
The Colour of a Dead Saint
Aged rock stars on YouTube sing
‘In the Presence of the Lord’.
Ash drops off my cigar in The Shrine of St Bruno
as I listen on a dreich morning amid memories of old Joan,
dead Joan, ever-alive in Christ Joan;
lovely in nature, devoted in her faith, tiresome in her doggedness.
Everyone has a smile-story of her,
or an uplifting memory, or a feeling blessed
coupled with anxiety lest she fell down the pulpit stairs.
She’ll be sent on her way with sad joy.
The leaf fall of autumn gives a final blaze
before it is trampled and rained away into mud,
Maker’s mud.
Just so are Saints,
though stories that are told add
to the pigment of the Faith.
Like prayers absorbed in the walls of a church,
they join the provisional and the for the time being
anticipation of the presence of the Lord.
23rd October 2021
There Will Be Lava
Easy enough to pen a nice rhyme,
or to construct a platitude in verse.
Harder to wait till you are compelled by
‘the mystery of having been moved by words’
and you realise that poetry is driven and
compulsive for both writer and readers.
It is a potentially scorching experience.
It is like respecting a volcano as it erupts.
Don’t try to tame lava flow for it is like Holy Spirit
and will overwhelm you.
If it does not change you
nor reorder the map work within you,
is it poetry at all?
For from within the fault lines
and weaknesses of one who dares
to add poetry to his own mind,
and even to seek the Yes of another,
the emerging flow of words brought together
as ideas may result in change from the ground up.
There will be freshly made soil.
Do not be afraid of it.
All Hallows Eve 2021
The Dead Centre
Living, as we were,
next door to the dead centre of town,
if you called on the Vicar you were passing by
some of his neighbours who were dead.
Ah, such quiet neighbours!
Never a bother, entombed under
clipped and immaculate greens.
Confined and kept in their place,
they never broke their silence,
never screamed at night
nor came to visit,
nor caused a scene.
They were too busy being dead
to break out and bother or disturb
the now alive.
Whether they liked it or not,
whether or not they were visited by their bereaved,
they were remembered each Sunday,
in prayer and with care,
even by those who never knew them
and named in candlelight at All Souls,
for all are hallowed.
And the dead are not silent, merely inaudible,
for under that soil and every other,
all are present to God, and share in
the eternal work which worship is,
which for the living is search
and for the dead is knowledge.
Yes they are too busy being dead
and too at peace being in life.
For if they seem lost to us they are never to God.
Ah, if only all Dead Centres might be as bright and cheerful
as that Merry Cemetery in far off Maramures, where the dead
are affirmed and their presence celebrated.
If only all people might learn not to fear their end, nor being dead.
For in whatever state we are with the Lord, and he is Life.
All Souls Tide Hymn. Tune: Londonderry Air
We Celebrate our Loved Ones
We celebrate our loved ones now kept safe by God,
With tears we bring to mind their love for us.
We give God thanks for all the goodness in their lives,
and all the blessings that we knew through them.
In Christ we trust who came to us from Glory,
Who in his life revealed the Father’s face,
Who conquered sin and rose from death victorious
That all who die are covered by his grace.
We live by faith, the Faith revealed in Scripture,
We worship Christ whom we have never seen
We pray with living and with all departed,
The cloud of witnesses who see his face.
We pray in grief for love is so demanding,
And in contrition for the blight of sin.
We pray in hope for Christ has won the victory
And from his throne he bids us enter in.
Love calls us on until we reach our ending,
To play our part as they did in their day.
Love is the prayer we make to serve a Kingdom
Where all God’s children live abundantly.
Love draws us on to share the Gospel message,
To live the life which Jesus lived on earth.
To do God’s will here as it is in heaven,
And celebrate the endless love of God.
4th November 2021
That Friend
When the oldest that we’ve known,
the oldest we’ve chosen,
who chose us too,
is removed from life
and from all who love them,
Sorrow and pain cannot begin by being described.
It must first of all be burnt into our souls as that
searing, heartless, relentless break in and theft.
All burglaries are violations.
This one is the removal of the irreplaceable.
So howl, if you will, if it helps.
There is no forbidding it.
The lungful of all the outrage must be expelled
before any other air can take its place.
Grief should be observed,
as should any duty to those we love.
Anything less is not human.
We are not machines and we should break down
when love leaves us bereft of being loved
by one who, till now, has lived and breathed as we do,
and has been the friend that only he could be.
Something, someone, a life,
has ended.
We may believe the separation to be
temporary as well as permanent,
being, as we are, in paradox
and always trying to solidify
the billowing spray of hope.
But we must grieve.
It is what love requires
6th November 2021
I Wonder as I Wander
Could I set out in a coracle,
steered and trying to steer
in the current direction of my God
and far from hurt or fear,
I’d be on the lookout for monsters,
and mountains of fire and their rain,
But I guess I hope for the best from God
as I sing his high praise again.
The high seas are owned by the High King,
who rules over Chieftains and Clans.
May he carry me safe across waters
and then, in the end, to dry land.