Still small voice

Beer beach. Almost July.
Even with the sun skulking
Behind lumpy grey clouds
And an onshore breeze
To cool the pebbles
It is warm enough

Warm enough to sit,
Read, remove a layer
And later, sandals on
Wander over to the beach café
For a flat white and a brie
And cranberry panini

 Lunch, and to listen
Until time itself disappears
And the world of thoughts
Recedes
And some aural centre
Draws you in

Not gravity, not to-do lists
Not worries, nor plans
Neither angels nor demons
Only the sound of the beach
Filling all, upholding all, as if
One can swim at any depth

Suspended inside sound:
Breaking waves crashing
Like thousands of crisps
Trodden underfoot
Forlorn seagulls crying
Searching for scraps

An irritating Pekinese angry
In its over-stretched skin
Hull grunts of a fishing smack
Hauled over the pebbles
And much silence, the silence
Of an uncrowded beach

Into which I hear
All I need to hear

Summer?

It’s a temporary fixture
Like one-summer ants
Accelerators down
Scampering around on
Sun-scorched paving slabs
All to collect a leaf,
And march triumphant

Before death,
Hoisting their green flags

It’s burning beach sand
Underfeet furnaces
Making flamenco dancers
Of even the most reserved
A staccato dancing
Desperate hunt for cool
Blades of green grass

Before the sand chills
So fast at the sunset hour

It’s inane music
Filling the void
No one permitted to dip,
Or speak of life in the raw,
Or grief-stricken hearts, but
We weep with those whose
Suntans are for next year

Before the sounds of
Our final goodbyes dissipate

It’s for removing shirts
Flouting flesh-covering rules
It’s beach cricket. Intense.
Annual family contests
Fiercely fought, bat and ball,
Battling like warring hippos,
Unto death…well, loss anyway

Before stumps are drawn
Chilled beers are sunk

And we carry one another
Across lengthening shadows

Juggling with water

In a dream as a child,
Creeping downstairs
In the dark, I sat
Composed, adjusting the
Ragged piano stool
And played Rachmaninov’s
2nd piano concerto in C minor
Faultlessly
Each finger and note
Plunging into an infinite pool
Of untrammelled light

It was so vivid
A copy of a reality
Evading this conscious realm
Early in the morning I followed
My dream to the same stool
But my fingers turned to butter
And the notes and chords
Evaporated never to return
Like a juggler whose sticks
Had turned to water
I sighed

And now? Years piled upon years?
Here I am. And there you are.
Do we prefer the dream world
Of realised hopes, like miracles
Grace-gifts from elsewhere?
Or,
Do we reconcile ourselves
To the world of cuts and bruises
Of hoped-for solidity
Slipping through our fingers
Like water into sand?

Jazz-jamming bum notes flow on,
Unashamed stepping stones

On the subject of water,
I stumbled across
An unlooked-for treasure
Tucked away in an ancient psalm
You keep my tears in a bottle
You have recorded each one
In Your book
Now? Now, with eyes closed
Jazz-jamming bum notes flow on,
Unashamed stepping stones
Sounding like spring rain

Jumping from the sea wall

I think I was four
When my tongue wrapped itself
Round a new word:
Subtract
It may, of course, have been
Take away, or minus
But I added it to my arsenal
Of ideas of having less

At four, I knew
I had less height, less strength
Less girth, less stamina
Than the grown-ups
The urge to close the gap
A burning fire: how oddly
We strive for the things
That will overtake us

But even at four, or five, or six
Our secret comparisons
Invisible and inward,
Bristle with life:
Elizabeth is beautiful
Somehow Carol is not
Love, added and subtracted
Rushes in like the tide, and away

My friend, arms raised, yelling
Jumped off the sea wall
Into the waves…I held back
Washington never lied…but I?
Whoever dealt the cards
Gave some to all, not all to one
What we lack others have
That’s the arithmetic

Freely you have received
Freely give
Oh! this somersaulting universe
Under a tutelage of grace!
Having less is a baptism,
A plunging into a vast ocean
I lack courage…but only in me
It comes as a gift…to share

Not Just Mud - a trilogy

Not just mud i

It all started with pulling my

Fingers free from the mud

Abandoned at low-tide

Dark, tacky, sweet-smelling

Mud to sink toes and feet in

But at my age then,

I wanted to be a crab

So, immersing toes and fingers

Side-slipping, I chased the

Outgoing tide until…

…it was the sight of a

Real, live, salty red crab

That stopped me:

Curiosity pulled at my fingers

Until, with a thwook,

Out of the mud they came

I took hold of the hard edges

Of the crab’s crusty shell

And let its flailing legs

Make patterns in the mud-ripples

Before baptising it

In a pool and letting it

Get clean away, then it was back

To plunging my fingers in then out

I wondered even then:

What could I make with mud?

Mud: the impotent left-overs

The detritus of decay

Washed here and there

By forces too strong to resist

Wind, tidal surges, estuary madness

Mud: weak, wet, and worthless

But my fingers went to work

First a handful, squeezed

Until the sea stopped draining free

I looked at the grey-brown sphere

Formed between my palms until

It was a scoop of ice cream…

Next? Something like a cone

Squeezed and rolled, emerged

It all ended with Mother

Picking me up

Mud still in my hands

And between my toes until

I was bath-baptised and got

Clean away…to bed, dreaming

Of mud-men and mud-women

Majestic and mighty

Not just mud ii

The years passed by

And mud had turned to clay

And clay had turned to stone

And the stone had turned

Into sculptures

Of tall men and tall women

Striding across long grass

Leaving behind an evolution

If not an evolution

Then a metamorphosis

My gnarly fingers

And swollen joints testifying

Of a lifetime sculpting

Making a fading dream

Become impervious

A vision taking on solid forms

Of a people, a stone race

Of magnificence rising up

From all that’s unseen

Beneath the soles

Of our shoes. Sixty years it took

Before halted again,

Not by a crab but

At my god-likeness

Not just mud iii

My brother was a doctor

My sister a warrior

In low moments I thought

I had wasted my life-clock

Felt like grey-brown mud

Squeezed dry by the world

Just a scoop of nothing much

A sculptor barely scraping by

It was not a voice I heard

But something

Not an angelic visitation

But each cell of my body

Began to exult - I saw

The loving hand of God

Reaching down into the poor

And broken mud-people we are

And yielding, if we will, to the

Divine finger-moulding-pressing

We rise, like wet clay on a wheel

Into the mud-men, and

The mud-women

Of a four-year-old’s dream

The weak, wet, and worthless

Now tall, mighty, and magnificent

Nazareth, Israel

2022 census
Pop: 78,000
The inhabitants are predominantly Arab citizens of Israel,
of whom 69% are Muslim Arabs and 31% Christian Arabs

Shall I explore Nazareth?
Travel there will bleed £300
From my bank account
But barely nine hours later
And I’d be eating falafels
At Bayat’s, outside, soaking
In the late afternoon sun

But like the two disciples
On the road to Emmaus,
Nine hours elapsing
After the resurrection,
Imagine, if you will,
Sitting across from me, Jesus,
Asking for more hummus

Our meal washed down with
Cups of Baladi, orangey tea
Or a glass of Shafaya
Blood red wine from Galilee
And he asks me:
Can you make wine
Without crushing the grapes?

My eyes meet his
There’s a cool breeze
To alleviate the afternoon heat
But I look at this man
If that is what he is
He stands up, smiles
A tear in his eye, and is gone

I look around with his eyes
My ears growing accustomed
To the poetic cadence
Of Arabic and Hebrew tongues
I wonder if he, so unwelcome
Once, at the synagogue,
Was sitting easily or uneasily?

Are they ready for you in Nazareth?
It seemed his one question
Spawned more questions in me
Rather than answering his with a No.
Are they ready for the wine
Or would they crush you once more?

Is that why you left?
But his smile more than
The tear has not left me
He sat down at my table
And, later when I went to pay
The restaurant owner said
‘Bill paid. By your friend’.
Slowly, I closed my wallet

And left, knowing he is ready
Ready to welcome those
Who are unwelcome
Displaced Palestinians
Ejected from house and home
Post-holocaust Jews
Diasporans in their own land

Can my heart be so hard
To leave him outside myself
Standing in the Bristol rain?
No. Now I understand
It took a crushing, not just
A bill paid by a stranger
To savour the new wine.

______________________________________________________

Luke 4

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown”.

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They drove him out, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

Words on hold

It’s revealing what gets stuck
Year on year
In the sluice gate

All that mudded water
Redirected, ruining houses
Built on flood plains

Whilst broken chairs
Like erupted bones
Splinter the angry stream

Or logs and small trees,
Held up, banging themselves
Hard against the grill

No space left
For the flow of words
A heart clogged

With jagged splinters
The grist, you’d think
But not today

Today, whatever
Grain is being milled
Out of sight and sound

Is a quiet day
For picking out the debris
One piece at a time

9pm: My triste:

The back garden slatted bench
Two ice cubes and a
Cut glass swill of American whiskey
In my cold right-hand
And in my other
A warming medium-sized
Henri Winterman’s

Welcome

It’s quiet and best taken in
With eyes closed
A crow with a single squark
Has made his journey from the moon
Hiding behind the wood
And the river of cars
Add to the whisper of the trees

I wonder if hidden Russian or Ukrainian
Or Israeli or Hamas fighters
Are listening also to chattering leaves
It’s too early for cats to squeal
Radiators and fires
In my neighbours’ houses
Prove irresistible

It’s too early also for constellations
Just three pin-point stars
Watching over the Earth
All the skylarks, blackbirds, sparrows
Are down; it’s the time
For bats to break the speed limit
Of the encroaching night

Welcome

I exhale a cloud of sweet-smelling
Incense my conversational
Prayers ascending
Carried into the trees
By the Spirit
To heaven all around us
So close

Pause

Warmed internally as I am
By the golden whiskey
My tongue on fire
I feel the God of the bible is close
God who makes all wars to cease
And I wonder how?
Maybe I should only wonder when?

These sensory minutes
Slowed by thoughts and longings
Lead me to feel
Yes, the hard bench, but far more:
Peace, tangible goodness
Pressing down into us all
If we would stop and look up

Not a typical Friday

An alarm set for 6…ignored
Late now, stumbling, unshaven
Quick scrape with blade
Hot water on the face
Heart rate up, face the day

Walk through woods
Holding trousers up
Away from the mud
Bit sweaty reaching W-o-T
Early now, waiting for lift

Knocking mud from boots
Saying my prayers
Lift late, lift arrives
We speak, she with peppermint tea
I fumbling with mobile and rucksack

I’m unloaded
And find a Costa
Sup a flat white
Try not to get sticky fingers
Breakfast is a blueberry muffin

Was late, then early
Now waiting
Strange how unaccustomed to time
We clock people are
Perhaps more suited to eternity?

Have an hour to kill
Not listening to others’ talk
A man says have a nice day
Maybe too often and to strangers
Maybe waiting a lifetime for a nice day

We all shed clues
Our inner man
Incapable of hiding
A slight frown, or
Eyes full of music

That’s it…
I contend we are all
Musical instruments
Being played by a
Divine hand, different moods

Not a typical Friday
My time register and
Soul duly tuned, will it be
An atonal Shostakovich day
Discordant or…

An exultant symphony
Lifting us up, opening the heart
Believing one can…
At last…
Love one’s neighbour as oneself?

Extra

My friend Jon used to pass me
John, his torn open
Tube of extra strong mints
And I, worrying about halitosis
Would smile meekly
And prise from the flayed opening
The white disc of crumbling
Sinus-clearing mint

Unlike Polos
That can be sucked to
A nanometer before
Cracking on a warm tongue
Extrastrongs seem to demand
Less suck and more bite
It’s funny isn’t it
That everything is…itself?

Jon had no idea
But his simple act
Was duplicated in me
I, too, offer mints
To others, halitosis or not.
It’s really not much to do with mints
I can take them or leave themIt’s masculine and unspoken

Like grooming primates
It’s that fleeting eye contact
The physical extension of an arm
The lack of words
That communicates all that is needed
So…Jon and I would sit there
In church often, quietly crunching
Our bad-breath stoppers

Love one another
As I have loved you
Makes me wonder if Jesus
Had he been alive now
Would have bought Extrastrongs?
I think he did
I think he was disguised
As a Jon

The last teabag

All these reminders of the
Ends of things…
The last tea bag lying flat
On the bottom of its glass jar
Lonely and waiting
Finally chosen
Evoking more than a brew
A meditation no less:

Seized with enough grip
Not to tear, transferred
From one world to another,
And deluged with scalding water
Suffering it seems
Before the glory,
That inner golden glow,
Infuses, floods, and fills

Polyphenol pleasure…
Liberated molecules diffusing,
Their leaf-bound cages breached,
Swimming free with a purpose?
Maybe not understood,
But, flexing with the passions
Of sudden heat and colour

Find their way to rest
On a human tongue or,
Ascending an olfactory maze,
Millions of years in the making,
For a few minutes
Bearing their unique calling
Their mission fruit:
Stillness, sighing, smiling

Like the final teabag
Unchosen, unknowing of
Any purpose; this life
Boiling us one moment
Neglecting us another
Not here to be ghettoed
But as a diaspora, to be tasted,
To still the One who made us

Contrasts

Within the space of ten days
My body and I have
Trodden on a volcanic island
All pumice, leeched copper and
Bands of iron ore, glimmering
Under a furnace of summer sun

Only to write these words
To the drumming rhythm
Of random English rain
Anticipating a morning journey
To the Welsh valleys
And steep sheep-bleating hillsides

Neither divorced from the sea
Where time gazing at spindrift
Flung far from wave crests
Is time well spent
Or waiting until the evening
Moonglades are illuminated

With a light within which
No crime seems possible
Its almost hypnotic stillness
Falling gently, soaking the
Good earth with
Reminders of reflected glory

And yet…flying bombs tonight
Will find their targets
Drones caressed by moonbeams
Carrying their deathnotes,
Waspy, mosquito whining drones
Heard too late, or never seen

Yes, we deep-sigh for contrasts
For headlines re-written
From volcanic fire
To bucolic peace
From hostages held too long
To cries of freedom

Ten days?
Surely that’s enough time?

Allotment Wisdom - February

It was John, two plots down,
I first saw unfurling great sheets
Of black roll
Breathable black plastic
Pinned down to the ground
With bricks and old lead pipes

Late October one year
November the next, after which
John, like the ground beneath,
Hibernating only to emerge
In February to inspect the bricks
Lift the roll, and sniff the soil

It was a binary life
Covers on, winter withdrawal
Covers off, sow in Spring
But there was an unease
Suppression is not deliverance
Like fire beneath the foam

The weed-seed encased in
Overwintered soil
Undisturbed lies ready
To thrust - at night it seems -
To spoil the perfection of
What looked barren

Bert, one plot removed,
Leaning on his hoe
Smiling at John, that’s all,
Left his earth to breathe
The winter air and
The foxes to run

Visited once a week
After harvest, and
Fork in hand,
Upended any weeds
Roots and all
Left them to rot

Not here

Words folded inside
The grieving
It’s a form of muteness
Where anything said
Is said through blank eyes
Devoid of the person not here

The one whose absence
Is fuller, more immediate
Than before, woven tightly
Into the fabric of
An interior world, the
Location of one not here

Externals continue
Of shirts buttoned,
Laces tied, and shaving,
Kettle-steam, and duvets
But there is no memory
Only of the one not here

Silences punctured
Only by convulsions
Then exhausted sleep
On the floor, maybe
Waking only to comfort
Those comforting you

And then, only then
Does it lift, quietly…
You touch the dust on a mirror
See teabags left to mould
The neglect of days
Unnoticed

Letters, cards on the mat
Beyond the front door
Now opened…
An inrush of cool air
The sound of the city
Life invading

You tell the one not here
‘Stay or leave as you wish
And make me weep or smile
Or rant and blow like a bull’
Our communion is safe now,
Forever secure

The Watering Can

It’s January-blue-sky-cold,
There’s no equal
The high clouds, still,
The air, like the frozen water
Unmoving

A week ago it was different
A vicious storm downed
Dried out branches
Did its work, shaking
The loose things of this world

Oddly, though, it uprighted
A watering can, can in name only
Green plastic, heavy now
With the storm rains, standing
As if deliberately placed

On an aging pink, moss-encrusted
Paving slab, perfectly central,
Open to the sky
Unable to fill or empty itself
Subject to storms

Like us, storm-tossed
And yet only to set us
Open to the deluges
Pouring down from heaven
And the gardener

Deep calls unto deep

Occasionally rules are
Exposed as faulty vessels
To carry such living words
Whose light, incapable
Of conforming, created
To do the conforming:
Words unfolding life to us

Take a word out of context
To make a pretext
Can hold the laws of children
A highway code, as daily bread,
Poor bread though,
A railway-track-wisdom
But deep calls unto deep

Words from the underneath
Interior bass notes
That reverberate beyond
And meet the unvoiced
Calling of another
Distant in miles, or persuasion,
But closer than a brother
Yes, deep calls to deep

Carrying far beyond
The need for words
Into the mine shaft
Reaching not for dark coals
But all that is contained
In multi-tonal hearts

Full of love colours,
Under strain maybe, yet love:
Of grief, of unlikely dreams
Of prayers, of waiting, longings
Of rhyming and discord
Weeping with those who weep
Over our Jerusalems

Deep calling unto deep
Not without purpose
But a joint pulling together
To gather in the ropes that bind
Any two, not made with twine
Or flax, or jute, but cordless
Ropes from the deep

Sinking into Silence

It’s a rare thing, that
Deep silence
Filled to the brim
Beyond a lack of noise

Talking has ceased
Distractions powerless
To unsettle, to undo the spell
One thing remains

Thirty heads stilled,
Just the scratch of a pen
A nose blown, gently,
A sigh, but within a cocoon,

A coalescence, an
Unspoken agreement
‘Do not disturb’ signs
Invisibly worn

A corporate meditation
Subtracting nothing
From the gearbox to
The wheels

From the inner man
To the hands wrapped
Round a pen, a chisel
Or softened clay

After, like waking,
Thirty heads see
Their neighbours as if
They were never there

It wasn’t a dream
But escaping the trance
There’s only one word
Satisfaction.

After

Busy people chase the afternoon
The loquacious gabble, burdened
With afterthoughts
And jet designers place afterburners
Well…aft

But nothing much compares
With living for the after-life

Having a destination after ‘this’
In mind

Is it a world that’s been washed,
Tumbled dried, smelling fresh,
Ironed by a celestial being
All creases flattened,
All wrinkles stretched,
All tears wiped away?

Or is it like a snake shedding its skin
Or a metamorphosis
That longest of primary school words
The glistening caterpillar cocoon
Fastened on a stick in a jam jar
Is that what we are? Waiting?
A dim version of what is to come?

A primary school world
Waiting to be elevated
Away with shorts and on with trousers
No more chapped thighs
Lowered into hot baths
Red skin now replaced with the mud
Of rugby fields, of men and boys?

Let me tell you
It’s the fourth day
After Christmas
Since the angel on top of the tree
Winked
And reminded us of the
Heavenly hosts in good voice
Welsh maybe, or Italian?
Or from the four corners
Belting out

‘Glory to God in the Highest
And peace, goodwill towards men’

The afterglow of Christmas
When the afterlife
Discarded it’s afterness
And glory in the highest
Fastened itself
To the lowest,
The least,
The lost.

We Three Kings

Gold

Looking for a love
That’s looking solely for me
I am Melchior

Frankincense

Pursuing a star
Light, like scent, falling on me
Caspar is my name

Myrrh

Sorrow piercing me
Nails driven into place
Balthazar I am

The Other Story

Trailing behind the donkey
The ever-present
Memory of a botched divorce
Joseph’s fear and love
Dictating his untold strife

And Mary’s inability to hide
A young girl embarrassed by an angel
Nine months of overshadowing
Leaving no trace of bitterness
Peace dictating her every thought

Together now, they travel
Away from the knowing looks
Unaware of the star, or the
Angels from the realms of glory
Of heaven touching Earth

How unaware we are also
Carrying our own travails
As we must into the Messiah-feast
And yet this is why we put lights on the tree
Why we bust the budget

Why, broken like Joseph, perhaps
We gather. Like the angels
We cannot be contained
Love has broken out; a reminder
Of the other story:

Of myriads of tough angel warriors
On tiptoe, like children
Waiting, singing, singing, waiting for
The first cry of one baby the
Starting gun for a feast that will never end