Sky Breathing

What if a hand came from the sky

and took yours, lifted you and

put you amongst the clouds

What then

Would you want to stay

Would that supreme love be enough

Today you go from one place to another

but do you stop at the door of your own heart

Who is living there?

Every day we are given the grace to live

yet instead we see pain on our brothers' and sisters' faces

Be not the blade that wounds

Be instead the earth that supports

Say the names of love in your heart

Say the names of love in your heart

Changes

Summer is over
and even the trees weep
leaves, under our feet

The Wave

The sea rearranged itself

like the cosmos changing its arena

reassembling the concrete nouns into other forms, still present but unrecognisable

When it came it was not like Hokusai's painting, nor from any film we had seen, it was slow, low and steady

a stealth of black water, cold and carrying our lives

It was a death within life

and we had not seen it upon our palms, nor in any dream

The worst was seeing the mothers, waiting through the night

for the children they said must be up in the mountains and would come down soon

when things were safe

We learnt that day that nothing is ever safe

Breath

Here in this place

putting my trust in wind and water

in serendipity

I turn away from making anything happen

This is my new life

my other lives have been recorded

for anyone to view anytime

I am not re-enacting

I am in a beautiful otherness

perhaps to rejoin elsewhere

or be joined here or somewhere

a planet in an outer circuit

Sometimes I am screaming Find Me

Sometimes I delight in all

Without compulsion nor detachment, there I am, unfinished and inbetween

Straddling Fate.

A Language of Absence

I will leave the pressed flower in the book I never read

the one you placed into my hand so many moons ago

your own moon long eclipsed

I cannot now believe I carried those books thousands of miles

and your shadow longer

Promise

I was woken by a fire

the telephone cable stretched against the night sky

a dancing blaze of orange

the sound of so many conversations chattering in the flames

whispers of love

laughter and tears

decisions for sofas and items for dinner

A demarcation line between then and now

your entrance ritualised, brighter than the morning sun to come

The Absurd

The weather report says there is sunshine

as I look at the grey sky and wind ravaged trees

whilst reading online posts of people trying to outguess the strategists

who have already known the lines of thought they would take

and prepared for it

All my friends, even the insular ones, the neurotics and depressives

are doing more than me

and I wonder if life's pulse is set on a timer for each of us

a sudden citrus burst with the inevitable analogies before and after

and here I am

sitting in my chair, awaiting a delivery of a chair

though of course the courier cannot give me a defined time

 

The Sea Ramble

Peter strolled along the sea front and thought about the indisputable facts; but as the tide swelled and turned he soon lost his metallic edge. Were the set of events laid out in his mind, and the established conclusion of that trajectory, truly facts? Or were permutations possible? Indeed was it not that fiction was the gold in the cracks, giving rich story where nothing lay? He thought about his half sister; whom he had never met and knew very little about; what was she doing, how was she living her life and where? Was she even still alive? Had she ever existed in reality or had the one statement of her existence been a conjuring by his mother – using the fact of her as an emotional weapon against the rosy tinted image of his absent father held in his boyhood mind? He recalled that one time he met his father; the short walk they'd taken across the field in Tuam. His father did not speak until they saw a small group of horses standing by a tree and then he had pointed into the mid distance and exclaimed that it was raining on the other side of the field – and how for a moment they were held in another space and time. Another reality. A charm. And how they had walked back to the family smallholding, silent but for their breathing and then once back his father had pressed a piece of gold into his hand before moving away down the hall. The only thing his father ever gave him. His mind moved on and he thought about the woman in the next street to his whom everyone talked ill of. Joan loved a man called John but John had killed a woman and was serving life in some prison somewhere. Was Joan negating the facts surrounding this man, to use the phrase 'in spite of' or did she not even perceive the facts as truth? What were Joan's set of facts? Peter walked on, muttering in his mind of how the Buddhists say there is no truth.