Arts Articles
Winter sestina (6 December 2014)
on summer nights she cupped love in her heart tasted the honey of a gentle kiss and the heat of an exotic garden, she roamed in a rabble of wild colours, with rows of chillies red hot in the sun, back when she was young, heart hammering, fluttering like a...
Thought for the Week: Hunting the Higgs
No wonder they love a laugh, the physicists. What ever they find or don’t, it’s OK. Symmetries of the world just remnants of those which, if perfect, would only have led to no world at all – anti-matter, matter would have cancelled each other out. Maybe. Or maybe not,...
On using this laptop for the first time
I am doing this for practice, nothing more. We practice all the time, preparing for The Real Thing.
Thought for the Week: Holding in the Light
What can it mean to hold you in the Light? It cannot change God’s Will, or Fate, or Chance, The chain, the world-without-end linear dance Of causes and effects, turn wrong to right.
Art gallery
The Night Before Christmas
(or ‘A Visit from St Paul’) (Not to be confused with ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ attributed to Clement Clarke Moore) ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through Friends House Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; Thanks to new insulation I heard not a thing Till...
Hide and seek
We sit round the silence listening to space, concentrating; our thoughts circle the quiet centre of the room. A faint movement far within the darkness, a cry: there, in the pile of books? or in the vase of flowers? the sun’s flash on a gull, high over the sea....
Courtly gallantry
She was the love of my life. Made for each other everyone said. We made plans. Our world was full of promise. But to test me, like knights of centuries past,
Thought for the Week: Silent worship?
The room breathes in. And out. Hands find a variety of poses. There is a pair of sandals with socks, a pair without. Two fine beards. Malcolm stands, tries to find words about calm. Sits. A stomach growls. Lunch beckons, until we remember to think of God.
Dylan Thomas: A compassion for mankind
The most unworldly Quaker in Wales could scarcely have failed to register that 2014 is the centenary of the birth of a much-mocked, much-misrepresented and much-adored Welsh poet – Dylan Thomas.