Arts Articles
In Meeting
We sat together in the white-walled room where no one spoke. God didn’t happen. I shuffled, stared at the carpet, wanted a crack in the silence, words, something to change. The shopping list in my mind said soap, potatoes, jam, then went askew adding things that weren’t for...
The minute was good enough
Yet what of that time can be explained? Are we engaged or are we looking away? Can we expunge her eyes as she looked back from the boat shipping her to Barbados without husband, friend or child? Sweet Parthenia did you have faith in us, the unborn, friends to go...
Remarks on colour
for Graham Shaw, author of ‘God in our Hands’ See! Our bio pod, the Earth, compendium of hot colour, all tricked out in oriflamme, in indigo, in ruby, its spinach-green grasses, jasper soils, its verdigris, their slow-burn insouciance, their flair.
‘I learned: Trespass’
I learned there was not always this crack guttering through the meadowlands of days, through our restless minds and bodies. I learned the welfare state once meant the right to forage hazelnuts in leaf litter, chanterelle and roots…
Changes and chances / this fleeting world
I Post-equinox, the light inside is different now. A frieze of hornbeam hedge in silhouette illuminates the dining room’s dim wall and casement astragals ascend the stairs. I read that if light could curve it would not cast shadows, gifting us this black and white, alongside uncertainty and haze....
Parliament of fowls
Inaudible as force, a blackbird descends – she’s charred sky-chaff, (I want to say) incombustible. Winter’s bonfire’s out for this blank bird,
Covid Life
The shed of shielding The igloo of isolation The desert of distance The street of space The sea of sorrow The lagoon of loneliness The world of worry The bubble of belonging The hill of hope The field of friendship
The Scholar at Cuddesdon
I take God out of the dictionary and listen to G-d’s breathlessness. There are claims that God’s vocation is to tell of flittings.
Wonder
What shall I send them today, I wonder, those faithful inheritors of George Fox standing silent and still on the top of Pendle Hill or up against the wall in Launceston Prison.
Circles
We gauge things differently now as we walk down the street: eyeing up personal space. A man whose dreads unfurl, mouths his thanks for the room I make as he legs it past me.