Arts Articles
On the quiet
No, not the stasis of the railway waiting room, people held between arrival and hopes for a departure, each coddling their isolation by nosing deeply in a paper or fingering restlessly the keypad on their phone, wondering why the train runs late ...
Home to the harbour lights
Across the ink dark oily sludge, It could not be called water, Surely not, Muck that flowed slow As treacle from the dented Tin in our kitchen cupboard,
The amulet
‘I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.’ The judge echoed the queen, conscious of irony and the risk of own goals. In her domain, rhetoric flows. ‘We’ll pray for him; tell us his name.’
Early Christian Anchorite
To escape this world’s contagion, I will go Forth to the wilderness and build me there A shelter; or a cave find in the hills. Thus will I loose myself from Satan’s ills.
Poem: ‘What the year has left undone’, from the Twelfth month issue, 1854
It is not what my hands have done, That weighs my spirit down, That casts a shadow on the sun, And over earth a frown: It is not any heinous guilt, Or vice by men abhorred; For fair the frame that I have built, A fair...
Amen fingers
Today I bless the fingers of the woman who uses yellow thread to mend a hole in my red sweater. She reads the need of a minute daisy for my light-deprived brain in the dead of December.
I shall betray tomorrow
I shall betray tomorrow, not today. Tear out my nails today, I shall not betray. You do not know where my courage ends. I do. Five of you, hard hands with rings. And on your feet you’ve boots With nails.
An atheist’s creed
Wisdom (and folly) through waiting, fearlessly passive1; naked flame’s humility; self-transformation in apostrophic mode, HaShem2; divine non-entity jealous of all humanity; powerless Nazarene’s failure breeding courage; (spontaneous-creative fullness of being3); positive incapability; abiding holiness of place; the inclusion of time in timelessness, (and at the point of death);...
Games at dawn
Children are the throats of blackbirds easing laughter out of half-light. Dawn raises curtains and the play begins. Trains emerge from skirting-boards, dinosaurs bark circles on the rug, while an army racks the carpet with its tiny dead.
When Autumn comes
I have come to the time When I watch seasons change, Mainly from my window, Nature is framed like some Constable or Turner, Startling, I notice garden choices Some not mine, a year’s growth Will fade, Autumn is here, The full eye blasting colour of the reds Of the...