The Spirit of Glory
Your glare stabs my eyes.
Your gaze burns my skin –
but pins me to a place to lounge in
with wrap-around screens:
the sky's blue, the meadows are golden.
And now we own it all.
So I must try to feel content
to move within these privileged walls.
It’s just that this shelter has no front door....
Hands grope for an illicit handle.
One behind me opens to a long corridor
where distant figures are beckoning –
mother, father, a playful dog;
weekends out of the city
camped beside the clean young river ...
Now that's all in my back room.
But the river is still flowing –
murky, but pushing
against all that’s been thrown behind the door;
beginning to creak it ajar.
Days out there are dry and dirty grey;
faces are twisting; cursing and harsh,
and making wild gestures ...
and I can't quite shut them out.
But our leader is strong.
His smile is bright;
bright as the coins we earn each day
with your imperial face stamped on one side,
a dead beast on the other.
****
Time for Compassion
During the trumpet-solos of the age of gold,
the audience must either dance,
or get ready to applaud.
No time to breathe the air.
Until there's night. Silence approaches,
and the cheeks that pump the tunes go slack.
Echoes hang under a long-dead moon,
resound the scores that have numbed my brain;
the strained crescendos. All that melts to a sludge,
pressing against the skin.
It takes that, and a staying there ...
but presence parts its lips;
and, with the mute pastels of dawn,
it chews through the well-thumbed hymn book –
until the only song worth singing
starts gathering in my throat.
Light trawls in a scoop of shadowy things:
flourish of bullfinch, a dash of berries;
pond-sheen, brick-glow,
the dull glimmer of the iron gate –
and from under my skin,
comes a responding flush.
Enough to enter the parade.
Summer is pulling onwards.
in a show of contrasts and sharp edges
whose vision presses narrowing aims
into my nerves and knowing,
So I break out in voices –
rasping, muttering, soothing;
working the heart,
and asking its pulse to carry us through.
****
The Green Lineage
In my summer day, the oak is king –
carrying house and ship and church;
the outreach of long boughs forming a canopy
that governs the overbearing light.
The dapple floats and offers shapes
shifting and defined by shadow:
nests on the swelling earth.
So I look up and on at a transmission that
raises the entanglement of sun, rain and soil;
enters the green communion that brings form
to breathe and grow and be consumed.
Where the priest is leaf-crowned,
and opens to bring the light down.
When the green force withdraws, it is autumn.
And I am done with growing and perishing,
knowing and unknowing – and with the wealth
that blows lives sky-high.
So there’s a casting off of the glow of things –
winter, but without a judgement.
On that day of the holly,
the nestling remains, as a settling into flesh.
Scarlet berries, in a cluster of prickles,
bear the seed of the sun.
Ripening within the darkness.
The grey day waits, the holly remembers.
In her summer it is evening,
the time of sacrifice.
****
Time without Hours
In the dusk-bleed that opens evening roses,
there’s a time with no clear beginning.
It’s when light and land sink into each other;
when the way things appear steps back –
when the dance of shafts through the trees
subsides from sharp distinction
into an ambiguous afterglow.
It is warm, and wintered voices are stirring –
though reason would say that’s past now.
But what we were and might yet be wavers,
then subsides, in a fullness that lands nowhere.
Just as between soft white wings and sudden talons
the owl hovers, quartering the field
in which all form is empty –
and numinous. How shape, colour, and meaning
shimmer as the wake of a traceless attention.
And – just as the house that stood secure
against the seasons of sky and hills
is only established when, through doors left open,
talk and listening, the walls unbind –
so, heart only rings like an unmuffled bell
when the ropes that haul it go slack.
My tugging, lingering time. And if I see
in white and black, like I’m a lamp left out here
to glare over banks and empty forecourts –
now I can close those eyes, feel each breath
infuse the time that enters, pauses,
and turns the mind penumbral.
It is warm. For those who are still young,
light offers the romance of stars and moon –
though not for one or all, or evermore.
But the time that grows throughout us,
like a rose unfolding through an unfolding rose,
diffuses summer, so the light returns
from display. Released, the dark heart shines.