Arts Articles
The garden
Who they were, what they did, and which one was to blame is what the merry-go-round of sages pondered, dancing on the proverbial pin. And pondered also down the ages if the sin was ersatz or original, or even half and half, and if it started with a forked tongue
Gloria
A poetic meditation inspired by Isaac Pennington Submit to the light, they said. Open your eyes to its glory. It will show, purge, strengthen you; direct your feet. My friend, give over your willing, give over your desiring, sink to the seed, which God sows in your heart. It will...
Rebellion
These dandelions – no show girls but they know how to pop up where they’re not wanted go on, do your worst on tarmac and paving stone Parliament Square, Waterloo Bridge padlocked into earth with combination roots go on, arrest me not ashamed to flaunt the green rosette around their...
In defence of parental signifiers
Contaminated words like ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘God’ take on the sins of others: not their fault, but their cross to carry. We generously offer cups of soured breast milk and brew of yew tree needles, assuming they’ll bear everything.
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.