Arts Articles
The counsel of trees
Live adventurously. When choices arise, do you take the way that offers the fullest opportunity for the use of your gifts in the service of God and the community ? Let your life speak. When decisions have to be made, are you ready to join with others in seeking clearness, asking...
Poem: Rare Bird, a glosa for RS Thomas
Grey waters, vast as an area of prayer that one enters. Daily over a period of years I have let the eye rest on them. Was I waiting for something? ...
The heart and the hour
At the start, it’s no more than a fist, doing that opening, shutting, pumping business.
What lies ahead
Mashed into the last summer sunshine cold wind, a paper-cut barb Hints at winter ahead. Though told that warmth would banish this virus it hovers still, a vulture that threatens our fresh horizons Corralls us back into our cups Of joys, miseries and memories.
Ground zero
Rain is all mist without fall, and mottled with grey motions, the sky. There’s a sea-roar in that fruitless sycamore, and eucalyptus leads the cheer, throwing jackdaws in streaming perichoresis about a pale, unblooded sky.
The proud old lineage
We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why (James Elroy Flecker) When found, they are free to follow their imaginations, gladly, wherever they may lead:
Wild Olympians
And still they come – in impossible inflatables – The pregnant, the children, men, stubbled And hollow-eyed with desperation. Dwarfed by towering tankers, their tiny boats Pitched and tilted, precipitously, by ferries’ careless wakes.
Psalm 119
O Lord, thou hast dealt graciously with thy servant Butterflies are happy for our garden. Something coppery there, a Small Heath, and a Wood White skipping, luciform.
Poem: Friend
I never knew you were a Quaker. I might have guessed. A silence in the midst of argument; A pause for thought. A sense that something else was going on Quietly, all the time.
Unique selling point
Fall of dregs-from-the-wine-vat petals: unprogrammed, let’s say, or aleatory blossom. The thought (today’s) is this: unique selling point of religion is (still) holiness. Petals in blood-spill asymmetry make it more arduous for reason to prevail. Stamens sift rich sand in timbre, shock flakes are tumbled pumpkin.