Friday 25 December 2015

Well- it's a bit rough round the edges but here's a poem for Christmas 2015

In between doing all the usual Christmas things, making a big meal and looking after Mother, I had time to scribble a few thoughts


CHRISTMAS 2015
Each one of us is born
Each one of us will die,
We come into this world
A divine spark of life,
We grow and become
And try to share our light,
Then we all pass 
Into the night.

I just want to know it all makes sense
I just want to feel there’s a reason we’re here,
When everything’s hard and I’m full of pain,
I want to know God is here.

When my sister is starving and cold,
And my brother is caught up in war,
And change is too sudden, and all seems lost,
And politicians only trumpet fear,
When little children who could have been me,
Tramp across deserts, desperate to flee,

I don’t need to know there’s life after death,
I don’t need to be washed in more blood,
There’s too many dying for others’ sins,
I just need to know God is near.

The wonder of life is
A great gift to us all.
Then it just empties away
After being so full.
Is it death that makes us
So fearful of life?
So we lay waste the Earth
Who gave us all birth?

I don’t need to make a crusade
To stand up and proclaim a Name.
Life is a fog, nothing is clear,
All I need to know is God is near.

So, a divine child was born of woman,
That miracle happens every day.
If we think it was only the once
We’ve missed what He was trying to say.
If I don’t see Christ in my enemy’s face,
And I don’t see God when I look within,
Then I’m just going to continue to
Make others die for my sins.

I don’t need your foolish Resurrection,
If you lay the Earth to waste here,
While you preach your hate and poison the world.
I need you to know God is near.


Wednesday 2 December 2015

THE SALMON OF WISDOM

THE SALMON OF WISDOM

In the pool of my heart
Is all that my wise waters have gathered
Drip by gathering drip
Slow trickles of wisdom
In cool brown depths.

Flies dart over my lilied surface
Fragments of glimpsed truths rise
And dissolve back into essence.
The tinc-tincing blackbird alights on
Lichened hazel-bough,
Yellow-beak, tapping the stone, marking time.
Red berries grow by my pool, and mirror
My eyes in their shining surfaces.

I rise and nibble what drops into my waters
Never fearing barbed hook because
All is one.
My silvered flanks are
A whisper of the in-between places.