Day: January 26, 2020

The kindness

Every time  I think that I will stop
That poetry is not my kind of game
The kindness of my readers picks me up

I start again and emptied is my cup
I wander through the library of names
 I feel the affect  and the unwilled stop

In the mind we know we suffer gaps
That every heart and soul has got its stains
The kindness of my readers picks me up

Each of  us can share our  homemade map
Can ask for comfort when we are in pain
All feel the affect  and the unwilled stops

Comfort me,  give charm to my black cat
He seems to have no affect, he is lame
The kindness of my readers picks us up

Would we wish the wild world to be tamed?
Were better if we could start  life again
Every time  I think that I will stop
The kindness of my readers draws me up

 

 

LOVE

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Photo by Mike Flemming.Copyright
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Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                              Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                             From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                             If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
                             Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                             I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                             Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
                             Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
                             My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                             So I did sit and eat.
Source: George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets  (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978)

Faltering voice

The moment that they told me he was gone
I knew I never more would be at one.
The guilt  is bad, the shame is harder still
That I no longer am  what I would will

That I did not perceive the   your state of mind
That to your heart I seemed to have been blind
That I was not enough to keep you here
That life and death most grievous are  so near

Then  shamed by my emotions I withdrew
Into the prison cell  that no-one knew
My soul was  pierced , I could not own my grief
 Limp, submissive , blown away, a leaf.

Shame is deadly, unexposed to speech
With reddened face and   faltering voice I weep

Their own heart

Living with division in the self
Two parts that can’t be joined by any wealth
Worthlessness,  remote the place it starts
Can we heal,rejoin the broken parts?

Must we go back to  places where we failed
Or be unfree, a prisoner with no jail?
Who might knit the stitches that would join
The valued  half, the other part they scorned?

Ways to go down deep might lead to death
Earn the  anger,bait the holy wrath
The earth cracks wide, the precipice appears
Astride the split, there is  no use for tears

So easy to break up , to split ,to part
Who   will hold their self  in their own heart?

 

The enemy of vision

The sacred heart fragmented does not awe
Broken,lost, and trampled, global   wars.
We worship our own selves, by camera formed
There are no depths, no Saviour to be born

The horizontal Flatland  where we crawl
Does not encourage us to stand up tall
There are no experts, no-one  understands
The dignity of art, the  learning scorned

The heart has cracked, the jigsaw can’t be done
We all lose a game that no-one’s won.
Here comes a vacuum cleaner which will suck
The heart of God  mixed with our human muck.

Can we  think there is no vertical
The lost imagination, the strained will