Some of my Poems

Worship
God's Debatable Lands
All in All
The Apostle
Haikus - For Martha
Wind in September
Stewartby Sunrise
Haiku
Family

Worship

In the high house, your love is very still:
You stoop to pass the lintel of my heart –
A heart always too weak to will your will,
Too narrow to contain the smallest part
Of your vast riches.
Yet, dear Lord, you bow
To enter here, where once was only scorn
And the door locked against you: sudden, now,
You bring the light, you are the light of dawn.

[1975]

God’s Debatable Lands

We all are people who fight shy of borders:
We want to live safe, deep in black or white,
Are creatures of light or darkness, fearing twilight.
Look how we build up fences against marauders,
Miles, miles of wire that shout mankind’s disorders
In empty land. There love cannot alight –
It is a frightened bird flung into flight,
A beaten madman cringing from his warders.

Loving our brittle refuge better than God,
We shun his country, the Debatable Lands.
– But then, by brambly ways we never trod
There comes to us, with broken, bleeding hands
Which hold out risk and healing, not a rod,
Our Jesus, Christ, the Man of the Borderlands.

[1979]

All in All

The Centre are You, and circumference,
And all between; of my emptiness the filling;
Joy of my pain; attack of my defence;
Doubt of my faith; reluctance of my willing.

You are the Answer and the Question too.
Who, who can grasp the beauty of Your mind,
The wisdom of Your being? It is You:
The treasure which we lose that we may find.

Yet closer to me than marrow to my bone,
Still standing with me as the Same and Other,
You are threefold my God and You are One:
My Life, my Father and my only Brother!

[1980]

The Apostle

I see you gazing at me from the glass:
The golden aura of holiness around your head,
The Sword and Book in your hand,
Feet that have trod white dust and burning deck
Halfway around the world, Tarsus to Damascus,
Antioch to Rome.

They say you were a little man, bald and bow-legged,
With beetling brows, and a face that sometimes shone
Like an angel’s, yet always just a man.
But oh, you move me like mountains
That tower in the sun – massive, unscalable,
Closer to heaven than earth.

And now they slander you as a hater of women, who twisted
The glad free Gospel, making a grim rod
To beat men’s backs and souls.
But oh, the thorn that stabbed your flesh –
It is none other than nailed your Master’s hands;
You live no other Word and Way than his.

You followed him, and bid us follow you,
And scale the breathless ways that lead to heaven.

[1981]

Haikus – For Martha

1

Child of my body
Laughing in the green garden –
What will your world be?

2

Curling brown hair
frames a small person’s face.
She smiles, with dark and deep eyes.

[1981]

Wind in September

After all these weeks the wind
is like an old friend returning.
Playfully flouncing the skirts of the trees,
making them dance
like wild girls tossing their heads for joy.
The willows are whirling gipsy girls,
showing their grey-green petticoats.
Those silver birches are above all that,
sniffy debutantes,
austerely they turn up their noses
(but their hair streams out behind
for all that!)
And there’s a hawthorn stolid, unmoved,
a nun of a tree –
or did I catch it clapping its hands
with a half-embarrassed wink?

Perhaps the wind will blow too hard
and in the night
will knock the cross off our church.
But I won't mind.
I know it bears no malice:
it simply doesn’t understand
stone things.
It loves the living wood,
the girls who flirt and dance.
Poor stony cross!
If you had only danced –
(You once were living wood,
once bore the Lord of life)
– you might be up there still.

[1983]

Stewartby Sunrise

Over these grey rooftops,
Under this grey lid of cloud,
A fiery jewel came up
– Red as the living flame –
And flashed into a startled eye,
Stabbing with spears of light
The unawakened sense.
And now a river of liquid rubies
Falls from the air in shining cataracts,
Burns and makes pure the dullness of our days.

Sometimes reality’s too big
And bursts the frame we try to view it in.
Here, men and women will live this little day
In little toils and pleasures ...
Little-guessed meanings, little joys and pains,
While the grey clouds will hide this great sun,
Risen, in such royal splendour, now.

The glory and the beauty are forever:
Long before these grey houses stood here,
Long before bricks were burned here
Or chimneys poured out smoke –
This bloody anger was as old as time
When the clay was laid down on some ocean floor.

And when we’re all dead ash again,
Under some rosebush that has long run wild;
Our works as long forgotten as our names,
And all our dreams stillborn –
This bleeding mercy will be young as love.

[1983]

Haiku

The River Thames in spate at Sutton Courtenay, Wednesday, 7th October 1992

Roaring of waters
Brown river hurrying by
An angler sits, still.

[1992]

Family

I thought my wife would be
a mirror of myself;
but God gave me
Someone Else.

We thought our children
would be Ours;
But God made them Theirs -
each one a genetic melting pot
of her best, my worst,
her worst, my best,
yet more surprising
more original
than anything we dreamed.

I thought my parents had been mistaken
about who they were;
that I was a changeling all along,
some prince or poet from another time and space.
But after all
I am bone of their bones
flesh of their flesh,
becoming them year by year
yet Strangely Changed.

This is - Family

[2002: For NOBS Festival Gathering]

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