Arts Articles
Illegal deposit
What’s the law on loitering? (with or without intent?) Does he commit offence, who summer, autumn, winter, spring, swings his soiled sleeping bag into a shop doorway and curls inside it in a drug-drenched sleep?
Youth hostelling in Normandy
The Paris gendarme whimsically dropped round David’s neck a garland he’d found, and waved us on. We pedalled stoically over Normandy as wind plucked cuffs and panniers, barns hosted us. Till one night, sleeping in a ruined chateau guarded by a ghostly widow, who led us down dark...
Madonna and child
In just a heartbeat Space dissolves And time stands still And oh! the ecstasy, the thrill In that dissolving unity That tender gaze… A blink before the birth of fear When cruelty was a distant cloud A devil’s joke And there was love, and peace, and hope And all...
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.