Train Journey

The oaks are shepherds of grass: 

earth-reined clouds of vein and sap 

rooted to days of sliding tones. 

Sculpted, struck, and air-plucked 

our lines and poles that race the grain 

might tease the ageing sounds of muck.

Alone transcends Autumnal colour, 

fading every corner of the soul, dormant 

like a child breeding her own dark womb - 

a dull and pining presence, stairs 

spilling onto a platform of air. Or a door 

high in a wall, opening onto nothing. 

Time dried hard in faces: eyes ploughed with 

hours, bodied with swells and subsidences, 

flooding and sucking the channels of days 

like the bittersoft smears of old men’s tears - 

breathing a sob-seeping of lifeworn ways 

beneath hoarded thoughts and patient years.

So look for me in reflections of clouds 

swelling fathoms below you, watching 

or in that creche of bracken, snow-hatching.

A Similar Hue

I walk with the author 

      of scent and sound - 

a sculptor of shape 

      and shade beside 

my destiny-tread. This 

       truth will not blend.

Her eyes called what 

       seemed a similar hue, 

not true but coloured 

       with a life and line - 

shades and flickering 

       raises, glimpses glinting 

at me: too hungry 

      for anything more than 

a pulped, puckered depth 

      filmed with the day-surface.

Dawn

Called by the sheen of tears on your face 

To hold you firm and carry you far 

From night-shadows behind and the shallow smile 

Of yesterday’s hope betrayed. One 

To bring us, broken, into the arms of a King 

To bury that face of loss, and sobbing cry 

On the heart of the name we no longer deny. 

Crimson-cloaked and crowned to follow - 

                                         Eyes shining, rising 

With the True Light now of our every tomorrow.

Portugal

Do you believe the wine or the water?
     Springs in the hills and cloud-coral skies -
All light-spattered, passing
     Like the dawning of night in your eyes.

Until Eternity

I

To the heart of it. Call the theme and I
    will answer with only the core of the
creation-breath in me. Sweeping through it,
    soaring over all, singing every soul-song alone
and together again at last. All in one, sunk
    and strung through with the tides of a wind
unwritten and precast in the forges of those
    sunlight-eyes. A past cast and caught to be
swung, woven anew with honey-dripped
    dewstreams of unbroken truths untold
and as yet unsung by angel-poets in the
    treetops. Listening to You. Calling to You.
In earnest weeping on feet that glow with
    the dust of heaven’s dawning, feet that grow
rooted to a life of glory never defined but
    destined to be shouted and hurled from
the crest of every wave, thundered from
    every cloud and sung from every throat
that has known that voice. That beat of war,
    that crash of a new tide on shores of gold,
and the throb and roar as the mountains
    kneel before the Master: Creator-Illuminator,
Love-shining Maker. The Heart of it.


II

We bow.
             Time will barely allow us to catch
a glimpse, to watch the ever-present glory
             flow in processions of light and harmony from

the broken gates of that darkest, plundered place.
             Thundering calls embrace minds awoken now
to the death of all that binds, all that was broken
             and taken from the hands of death. Removed

from all who will allow The Life to awaken
             the joy til now half-hidden: the sunlit lands
all-held in hearts but yet unbidden, now called
             unveiled, beheld by parts til now unlighted.


III


Your hand will hold, Your heart will call
Your voice will mould my soul, my all
with words that burn, refining true
my heart held fast beholding You.

The songs that flow from heaven’s throne
breathe growth to tearful seeds once sown
and life to minds once darkness-bound
now caught embraced by Love profound.

The Man of Truth, my Light Immortal -
all creation’s Lord through Love eternal:
Your smile my prize and gift by grace,
eyes streaming joy we are face to face

Sketch

Furrows of bronze swathe the sky in
this twilit awe-golden bluewash
of an evening looking down on fields of
birds and a forest in smoke and skeleton-brush:
clustered, ringed and grass-lapped.
Drinking the sound of dusk-trapped day,
dozing cloudfall vistas glower clod-trodden -
crusting fleck and feel, peelable. Strokable.
Crescendo-attainable through panes
of green and grainy mirrors of world:
That still moment between day and dusk
when the grass glows harder than the sky.

Contours

Birds hoarse and arrayed in distance echo
the misted recess of this valley’s morning -
resonant, like the pulp-thud and wobble
of my book: packed, clamped and patterned
with print. Pregnant like the hollow pock
and clatter of a box of chocolates
meltworthy-bitter in their scented card.
We, gloating, pour over legends
mouthing names like the thing itself -
scaled or contoured rich in lines
and all other codes of heaving surface.

Lightfall

Sleeping cocooned
in the night-white
northern softfall
follower of branch
and sill, your time
one small sunrise
ahead of mine.
Away from me
and our rains and
gust hustled weeks,
in your forest-dark
myths: sky-nurtured
eyes still laughing
and crying as
lakes of shadow
drain the clouds dry.
In silence - deaf
to my call perhaps -
tracks, scars, deep set
by heartfall words
and lightfall tears
lie filling with
snow. And walk on
now, as dawn thaws
my imprint of you.

Concert at the Barbican

Rivulet rounds of triumphal, orchestral sounds

swirling, leaving air thickened, weightless -

these players and callers of time and timbre, balancing

and nuancing the very grain of my ear-drone. Distance

becomes a kind of texture; movement softer, and

silent like the echo-surge of the hide and seek

children of my brain. A silken chafe of those

quiet things we swallowed too swiftly with talk.

In the bodied, fibrous hum of cellos arrayed against

the flatter crackle of the horns, I am calling to me

your messages and listening for my ways of reading -

stringing limp lines from a memory disembodied now:

All too delicate, they weave my themes in leaves

shaken and released by shadowed thoughts in unlit

rooms alone; rhymes to drape in lines half-hurled

to catch the light cast by this chorus-throne.