Arts Articles
To Paulette
And have you taught the Quakers how to sing? Us Quakers, who for more than twelve-score years Have stilled our voices and made deaf our ears To music, lest it hinder focussing Upon the Light within, life’s seed and spring. We were mistaken: you have stilled our fears, By...
The Quaker Arts Network greeted 2022 with a celebratory concert of songs. John Sheldon was there
We started with ‘We do not own the world’ by Jenny Vickers. This is from a collection of Jenny’s settings of the Advices & queries and was presented as an audio-visual display. There was an uplifting approach to the music with the emphasis on ‘Rejoice in the splendour of...
Of small and cumulative acts
Come gentle Shaper, caress my acts into a quieter fire. I am tired. I have forgotten the music of silent deeds. Sweep me into the threshing floor where corn and chaff are one until the gold begins to light the discerning into the willing stream.
Another journey
A hellish trip, that drag through rocks as blank as faces in a coma, for two such undertravelled, simplish souls. Their pathways glinted over carcases of hills like ribs picked smooth by vultures where dogs as daft as donkeys brayed the slightest scrape.
On falling in the river with Margaret Fell
‘So I sat me down in my pew again, and cried bitterly’ Margaret Fell. 1694 When I sat down, the silence was already rising, a river of quick fire. Like a body, flowing, it called to me. Quaking, I fell whole, no jot, no tittle withheld but all of me – falling. ...
Innocent ground
How then to be anything but hard smooth and stone faced (practised, all set?) when the sower comes; anything but too deeply trodden, churned – by the endless roil of thoughts past, future, or never – to make her welcome, to offer him a fit place?
Black Jesus
After the man was lynched, the hickory licked lightning from a white sky. The fiddler came that night and cut its trunk. The devil burned his hand, the scald of wood was still alive.
A golden light
The following was submitted to Airton Meeting’s ‘Year in poems’ for 2020. All Friends, visitors and Malhamdale residents were invited to send original work to be shown on the Meeting website, one per month for the year. Sometimes a golden light falls across the door to a place made...
Poem: A Gathered Meeting
Written in response to the Dovetailing art installation at Farfield Quaker Meeting House, July 2021. Each time, from a new page, stillness uncoils from within me, to hang, suspended, in the Meeting’s light.
Noah
It is a time for bitumen. A chill wind scours the flanks of Ararat, the rain is needles on our skins, injecting pins of bitter steel. Bitumen comes sluglike, black, oozy; seals the keel with bonds of tightness holding hope below the storm.