Arts Articles
Confession
I come to a place of light in an ocean of darkness. They said: Stand still in the light, submit to its power. When temptation came and troubles appeared I was to sink to the bright seed. Troubles would be hushed and darkness fly away.
Vantage point
If I need a better life, I build one, dig its foundations below the soles of my feet, plough the potholes with the heels of my shoes and, into the arms of a good neighbour, entrust my...
Worship
We lost a Friend this week. He died just round the bay where the estuary meets the sea. A sweet day for us today surfing, sunshine and Meeting – it’s all worship, isn’t it?
Spell God
I write it in the dirt today in the bottom of the grave where New Year’s worms ease in the writhe or relent of human hate.
Darling, save the last dance for me
Not a neat map with a route-proofreading of sorrows. We find ourselves inherently happy. Your twitch to my itch, my blistered kissed lips and your sculptured jaw-line moving prime numbers into play. We approach a kinda Dhammapada climbed neither high nor higher. To that far place where no sun shines, ...
What the skeleton said
When alive I was male. My hips have Told you this. A warrior, a soldier. You need only see my shin, dented, Axe-marked, the whole leg mis-shapen While still in my teens. Fighting was harsh, and weapons primitive. My hands, when they held blood, damaged by war, My skin burned,...
Friends’ Meeting House Pakefield
Too small to be called a hall a house in an overgrown garden, where old horizontal slabs hold faint names of the long dead.
Extract from The Convict’s Appeal
Still, surely it deserves a thought, An awful, solemn pause, Whether the Creed, by Christians taught, Can justify their laws? Which doom not death alone, but – far As human power is given, Thus place before the Almighty’s bar, Man – unprepar’d for Heaven!
Dinosaurs
It was not from the tongues of angels that came the whine of exocets intent on harm to tribesmen, comrades, friends. The deaths are classified ‘collateral’: puffs of dust across a landscape of ‘we have no option but to…’
A bypass ticket online
Failing sight, loss of hearing, Sleepless night, muddled thinking Pad for leaks, dressings for ulcers And painful feet which can’t be mended. You don’t think about getting old. It won’t happen to you, not yet. Not yet, and when it does you think That you will go...