Perhaps there is more pain than love,
for now; perhaps the nights are longer
than the limping, evil days;
perhaps we are more scarred than whole,
for now; perhaps the gale is stronger
as we walk the narrow way.

Perhaps we are not strange to strife,
for now; perhaps we are all exiles
on expectant, groaning earth.
Perhaps we know more death than life,
for now; but though all things around be hostile,
our demise is marked by birth.

Our feet are always coldest
right before the wading-in.

We swam that day, as the sun
sent up her watercolours, 
streaks of them in pink and blue
as if to drown 
			   the band of lead
that circled the horizon,
crest above its ashen belt.

Now I sit, and linger
as the burgundy leaves
are tossed and trembled,
and a cloud 
		       blurs over
the hill-perched houses.
Our lives, perhaps,
are vapour and leaves
in the inbound showers:
sad and smiling, tossed
and trembled, 
		          crowned
at last with dazzling life.

Our feet are always coldest
right before the wading-in.

On the beach, after reading George Herbert's Time

Walk across the ribs of sand
and sink your feet in, feel the warmth
and sift beneath you — are not we,
whose lives are hid away in Christ,
so light and soft across time's surface?

For it has warmed to us, and we to it.
And winds that once assaulted flesh —
blew waves of fire and dust across
the earth, cried loud around its tombs,
beat low and gutted towns and empires —
now caress us, brush our ankles
lightly with their sandy currents,
skim the sunlight-glittered beaches. 

***

At times, it's true, the winds and earth
whip up their armies once again,
unleashing smarting blasts of sand,
unpeeling rocks from mountain passes,
sealing us in slides and drifts of earth.
But avalanching thus upon us,
rock and sand and droning winds
have stripped us of our dragon-skins.

And the dust falls, and the sand sifts. 
And all the lies of yesteryear 
will start to drown beneath it.

***

At times, it's true, we must commit
ourselves to this the clenching earth.
And those we love, interred therein,
lie sleeping underneath the soil
as we must also. And yet time
will find us spinning round each-other
on its rippled beaches, bright and dancing
by the wash and churn of sea and sand,
delighted at the floods of evening light.
Time will find us, as do fire and rain,
rejoicing in its onslaughts and its easings.
Time will find us welcoming its currents.

Then the King comes, and the veil lifts,
and all the dead of centuries
shake off the earth to see it.

I think I have espaliered
myself. I bloom, but only backed
up flat against a wall

of my own making,
petals splayed as they
unfurl to face the air. 

Hydrangea globes
explode in place around
me, pastel pink and blue —

my God, let me now praise
You more like they do.
Coax me out to blossoming

in bounded bursts of colour,
hemmed around, but free
to laugh and bloom and breathe.

Congratulations to all the contest winners!

Cape Fold Belt Mountains

The mountains' quiet gold and gray,
their layers buckled, lifted, bent —
the open silence as I pray,
in the mountains' quiet gold and gray.
How slow and gentle is its way,
the love by which we have been rent,
as the mountains' quiet gold and gray,
with layers buckled, lifted, bent.

Desist, my soul, the dirt you scratch and pry
is cracked and beat to dryness with the dust. 
The ground is burst: your fields and soil will lie 
succumbed: to glut, and vanity, and lust.
Discard the bruised old garment, uniform
of sweat and soot. Another shirt is cleaned,
prepared for you, its pattern cruciform —
another calls; His lands are treed and green.
You labour and are heavy-laden: come,
excise these other contracts from your slate.
You are not pressed beneath the Master’s thumb;
He pays His workers, early and the late. 
The Lord of Harvests’ Son calls you released:
who let Him wash them, share His wedding feast.

There are such songs I long to sing,
and a house I long to visit —
there is a heart I ought to bring:
	it beats unseen
	still lodged between
my weak flesh, willing spirit.

		*** 

So longing then is threaded through
my mortal clothes, makes gold their lining.
We await more clothing — life anew:
	and in this state
	He consecrates
the poet’s songs, the lover’s pining.

It stole my sandal yesterday,
the sea. I'd waded out too deep
and lost it to a wave that swelled
abrupt and sucked away,
so full with sand and heaving
that the thing was gone from sight.
It soaked my shorts, as well.

And then the shells next evening, 
cupping at the strand like petals 
on a bridal train, all pearl and purple,
scattered under swirling skies. 
All things open outwards to us now,
unsheathing in the morning light
like flower-folds towards the sun,
delighted to be known and know.
Even oceans now cough up their secrets
(as they one day will their dead),
our earth's great flooded furrows
tamed by scientists and submarines,
the note of sadness heard by Sophocles
still echoed only in their deepest trenches.
 
They were feared, these waters, once —
this yawning snakemouth, strangling
girdle of the mainlands, flicked
and twisting tail of dark Leviathan
forever threatening to toss us
off its muscled back. And now?
Scamander's flood that lashed the sandals 
of Achilles up a Trojan plain, subdued
to laughing waves that steal a shoe
and chuckle up the beach:
the churning wine-dark death of Icarus
now pressed to sunset white and gold
beneath the Master's feet.

And did we flee, those Greeks and I,
before that third-day sunrise?
Ignorant armies surging 
under darkness to the beaches, 
plunging in their thousands
down those black embraces
which, though evil, were
at least familiar?

Did our feet beat the sand
like a taut-strung drum
by the foam-sandalled sea?

Let us then remember,
watching as the summer daylight
throws itself on beach and cliff,  
how much it must have cost,
this blessed lightness of our lives
here half-translucent in the veil —
and how heavy we become when,
crab-like crawled within our shells,
we cannot see the victory:
unthinkable ascension of a Man
once hung exposed upon a tree.

Perhaps the roar of the receding wave,
the notes of sadness, beating surfline,
are just echoes of an earlier age:
laments before we even thought 
the oceans masterable, let alone 
that they would one day be no more:
belonging totally to Him until
the light engulfs the final sea.
And think, just yesterday a gull swung down
and struck you with the great and yearning beauty
now investing everything —

where feet dance the sand
to the victory drum
by the glittering sea.

My Lord, I've waxed and scrubbed
the doorposts now for decades.
They can't deter the angel's blade.
Please paint them with your blood.
I've spent more long years hacking off
the many hydra-heads of pride —
please cauterize them, or I die.
There is no diamond in the rough
beneath my beaten heart of stone:
uncovered by my excavating,
given only then to You to save.
Please animate and clothe my bones:
my hard-self, dead-self needs enfleshing:
break me out this whitewashed grave.

— The Confessions

The moon is dim and pale above the sea.
I tasted once the Lord, and He knew me,
       and rendered indefensible
       the gold allure of sensibles
as yellowed leaves have fled the apple tree.

The moonlight on the sea begins to fade.
It must, for brilliance of the one who bade
       departure of the garden now,
       a desert sea beneath our prow,
to learn to rightly love what He has made.

And pause as the violin trembles,
and wait as the geese fan their flock, 
give time for the sunlight to deepen 
and tumblers to turn in the lock.  

Spring

Old time yields a gift, not depletion: 
white snow, frosted glass, stun the eye 
and then a cool rain splits the sky 
to herald an azurous season.

I'd much rather hold
to a brown-bordered rose
and feel as it swoons
through my fingers' cold sieve

than somehow behold,
with my brain, I suppose,
a form that, though fixed,
never gives.

Contra Aristotle

But shouldn't we say
(if we're given a choice)
such love for the herbage
turns men into beasts?

The shadow-barred rays
shouldn't make us rejoice —
not as much as the sunbeam
- light dancing - at least.

The jacarandas are in bloom, 
flinging their praise in petals — 
the clouds are stretched out like a loom: 
they spin a shirt of metal.  

We must approach Him boldly, 
not forgetting, by them circled, 
round His arms we always see 
a sash of royal purple.

Excited to share more soon!

David in Prayer, Rembrandt Van Rijn

Vigil

Ease our aching mental wires
in these unguarded hours, Lord;
as steel slacks liquid in a fire,
release our aching mental wires.
We grow all knotted as we tire,
and lie-entrapped across the floor:
release our aching mental wires
in these unguarded hours, Lord.

I will sing praises to my Light
before the morning comes again.
And even on the evening's flight
I will sing praises to my Light;
He is the keeper of the night:
indeed, it is as light to Him.
I will sing praises to my Light
before the morning comes again.

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