The Spirit of Glory
I can’t look you in the eye.
Your gaze burns my skin –
but pins me to a place to lounge in
with movie screens for windows
and wrap-around murals:
the sky's blue, the meadows are golden.
And now we own it all.
So I must try to feel content
to move within such privileged walls -
although this shelter has no front door.
My hands grope for a handle.
One behind me opens to the long corridor
where the figures are beckoning -
mother, father, a playful dog ...
weekends out of the city
camped beside the clean young river
as the endless summer drifted by ...
Now they’ve passed into my back room.
But the figures are still beckoning,
pointing to where the river is going,
with all that’s thrown behind the door.
Days there are dry and dirty grey.
Speech is louder than ever,
though the people are small with bitter voices
hungry, thirsty, scratching our walls ...
But our leader’s 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
Among the trumpet-solos of the age of gold
shame is a fading voice.
Or lost altogether. But - yes!–
in the now, it's all flashing lights:
‘The Promised Land: A Travel Guide.’
Until at night, my border approaches,
and the strings that pull the hours go slack.
Heat hangs under a long-dead moon,
probing through what the brain has packed ...
and the bric-a-brac of name and place
melts down. But no farewell drain;
just a sloshing to and fro, to and fro,
that presses against my skin.
It takes a lingering there ...
until the lips of presence part. Open.
And in the slow pastel dawn
its long tongue licks away the shreds of memory,
the dress of things, the gestures and what they invite ...
until there’s no-one here to get drawn out;
nothing left to search for.
Only a native warmth, forming its body
in the wish to touch ground;
growing up in the wish to say something.
So lady light, come, lay down some shadows.
Dress them with creamy sprays and pink blush,
flourish bullfinch and hawthorn berries,
add the scent of lush and greasy streets,
and bare legs and arms - the parade
along which the wheels of circumstance roll,
pulling onwards ... into our summer.
Then I'll seek good work and a place that fits.
And I’ll break out as a flood of faces,
jubilant, arguing, weaving our story –
as you coolly pass on through.
****
The Green Lineage
In my summer day, the oak is king –
carrying house and ship and church for a thousand years;
the outreach of long boughs forming a canopy
that governs the overbearing light.
The dapple floats and offers shapes – shifting
and defined by shadow; like identities,
a nestling on the swelling earth.
So I look up and on at a transmission that
raises the entanglement of sun, rain, air and soil
into the green communion: to take form.
To breathe and grow and be consumed.
In that light, kings are priests,
enacting and enacted – a sacred succession.
When the green force withdraws, it is autumn.
And I am done with growing and perishing,
knowing and unknowing,
and with wealth sold off as numbers to make the flags flutter.
So, as the mind of gold dies down, winter is a release,
a casting off of the glow of things
rather than a final judgement.
On that day of the holly
the nestling remains, but is a settling into flesh.
Scarlet berries, in a cluster of tough prickles,
carry the seeds of the sun,
ripening through embodiment.
The grey day waits, the holly remembers.
In her summer it is evening,
the time of sacrifice.
Time without Hours
In the fragrance that calls up evening roses,
there is a time with no clear beginning
when the light and the land sink into each other.
It's the time when what things do sits down:
the solar dance of shafts through the trees
subsides from the intensity of distinction
into an ambiguous afterglow.
It is warm. I still have friends whose voices are moving through –
though many would say they're dead now;
but what we were and might yet be dies every moment
into an appearance that never lands –
just as between soft white wings and sudden talons
the owl hovers, quartering the field
in which all form is numinous.
And empty. Like a parked car that’s offered
meaning and purpose by an open, aimless road ....
And – just as the house that stood secure
against the seasons of sky and outlaw hills
gets filled when walls unbind into open doors and windows,
filled by space and voice and listening – true summer
arises only when I push the lid off my casket
and climb out of what I think I’ve become.
And when – as with the uniformed lights stood in dark streets
that mimic what was free and flowing
to stare over banks and empty forecourts –
a freezing stare pins me down,
I close those eyes; feel each breath enter the time
that enters – 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.
While the time that grows throughout us,
like a rose unfolding through an unfolding rose,
diffuses summer and brings the light home.
Its dark heart shines: you're not alone.