Sacred Moment
Evening falls, leads into night.
I search darkening skies
for the moon’s bright circle,
so meaningful, that light.
The moon, a thin wedding ring,
encircling a gilded cradle,
wherein five planets float.
Aligned, their circular lights
create such longing
in the observer’s heart.
The magic moment has come,
a moment forever sacred.
Whatever happens now
will be correct and right.
Pain and Pane
I am living in a Duke of York world
fraught with mood swings and random changes.
When I am up, I am up, and when I am down,
well, then I am down, and every so often,
I meet in the middle and am neither up nor down.
At night I swim among the constellations
and the stars net silver sequins in my hair.
By day, I walk along a piano’s keyboard
and replay life’s ups and downs like scales,
practicing them, again and again.
I no longer know who or what I am.
I only know I exist right here, at my desk,
my table, in my bed, looking out through
a window that has opened in my head,
a window that serves as a mirror.
I step through it, and go back to my childhood
in Wales. I recall the sunny days of sea and sand,
but also those days when sunlight fails, clouds
gather, and the west wind conjures rain and gales.
Such pain as I press my nose against the window
pane, and watch the raindrops falling again.
A World of Silence
My dreams are black-and-white movies,
no voices, with the cinema pianist tapping
silent notes on the hammer dulcimer.
Shadowy images, cast by a candle, flicker
along the walls, and I am back in school,
walking, half-asleep to midnight mass.
I stumble forward, from that distant past
towards a series of unknown futures
none of which may ever come to pass.
In the Big Top of my head, the gymnasts
hold hands and in silence float their clouds
above the heads of the wondering crowds.
To fall or not to fall, to fall to rise no more.
Soundless sighs erupt from silent, open
mouths as the tight-rope walker sets out.
The umbrella in his hand is a Roman candle
that throws shadows on the circus sand
as clowns with bulbous noses cavort below.
The ring-master flexes an inaudible whip.
The carnival ponies trot up and down.
The motor-bike rider accelerates. In the hush
the bike ascends the Wall of Death and falls,
diving down, down, down, into silence.
“All words come out of silence. The language of poetry rises from, and returns to, silence.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 110.
The Secret Fountain
Go deep into yourself.
Search for the secret fountain,
the well with the sacred waters that renew,
replenish, and flow like sunlight.
Rest by its verdant banks. Here you can
find the self you thought you had lost.
Here, angels take wing and songbirds sing.
Telephone calls, e-mails, social media,
all such worldly things, lack meaning.
Rest awhile. The universe knows you.
Permit it to once again make friends
with who and what you are, what you were,
what you will always be, your eternal spirit
known, cossetted, comforted, and loved.
Your curriculum vitae no longer matters.
What matters is the heart of you,
that gold mine hidden deep within.
Here lies the mold of shining gold that will
enrich your soul, renew your life,
and gift you ever-lasting treasures.
Old Man Sin Drome
Damn! He’s done it again.
He must pretend it hasn’t happened.
He struggles out of his jeans,
runs the hot tap in the powder room,
removes his underoos,
and places them in the basin.
He adds soap and watches the water
bubble and change color.
He rolls up his sleeves,
places his hands in the hot suds,
grabs the nail brush,
and starts to scrub.
Cancer. He is washing it away,
removing its stain, the smell,
the pain of its presence.
He drains the water and wrings
his underoos, twisting them this way
and that in an effort to purge.
More water now, no soap.
He waits for the water to discolor.
When it doesn’t, he knows that all
is well and the evidence destroyed.
He wrings out his underoos again,
then hangs them over the air vent to dry.
He keeps a spare pair in the cabinet drawer.
He puts them on, struggles back into his jeans,
and hopes that nobody will ever find out.
Wash-Day Blues
“Out, out, foul spot.” Yet,
however much I scrub them,
those blood spots on my clothes
will not disappear. No seas
incarnadine for me. Picking
at scabs, my fingernails draw blood.
with so many ragged edges.
The old, stale liquid flows
fresh again from once-healed wounds.
Why made me open them up?
Was it just boredom? Or that itch
ever nibbling at the mind’s edge?
Tell me, how do we walk away?
How do we heal ourselves?
How do we forgive and forget?
Does the fresh blood wash away
the dirt I feel crusted round me?
Will I ever be clean again?
Wednesday is wash-day.
I scrub again and again
at all my dirty linen. Then I watch
as my wrinkled skin grows damp, scabs
soften, and I open them once more.
Lost
Where can it be? I put it
somewhere safe, but I
can’t remember where.
So many things grow legs,
go absent without leave,
walk out of my world.
I am slowly losing control.
My life will soon be left
in somebody else’s hands.
They will control my wants
needs, and necessities.
Then I too will be lost.
Placed somewhere safe,
perhaps, there to lie forgotten,
abandoned, secure, perhaps,
but who knows at what cost.
Time and Tide
Sitting, waiting, patiently,
it’s all I have left, except
for impatience and anger.
They sometimes take control
in an explosion of bitterness.
I can only sit here for so long and
then anguish gets the better of me.
A dropped plate, a spilt glass,
a cup of coffee slithering over
the tablecloth, and I explode.
Such events are becoming
more frequent and much fiercer.
I try to withstand them, to hold them
back, but they rise like the tide
that lifts the Fundy fishing boats
from their beds in the mud,
moon tides, planetary upheavals,
that swell again in spring and fall.
Like the boats in the bay,
I am powerless to stop them.
Two Spiders
A spider dangles from its web by a fine, thin thread
that glistens in the sunlight. She hangs there, refusing
to think about the father she never knew, the aunties,
uncles, grand-parents, sisters and step-sisters, and all
those unknown relatives that abandoned her and fled.
What can she do? What can we do? Nothing.
We think ‘ancestry’ but we know, more or less,
who we are and what we are. We are just a son
and a daughter of troubled marriages where one set
got divorced and the other stayed together through
hell and high water, and all that those things mean.
But we are a son and a daughter, brought together
by chance, circumstance, happenstance, or some
thing beyond our control, and happy together,
the outside world shut out, and us in our little web,
as we have been for more than sixty years.
We have learned that, when the strong winds blow,
we must weave our web beneath fine grasses, that
do not stand strong like the oak tree, then stubbornly
break and fall, but bend like reeds or willows, before
the life’s storms, then straightening up, to raise
their heads, and surviving, after the winds pass.
A Darker Mist
Sometimes a dark mist marches over
the sea-salt marsh flats and, a sea-bird
come to land, nests in my heart. This lone
bird brings others and soon a colony sings
its chorus in time with the incoming tide
that threatens to overwhelm me.
My body’s weak clay responds to this
darkness and slips into the chaotic
cacophony of multiple voices
raised to shut me off from the light.
My soul, a seagull seeking the sun,
rises upwards, ever upwards,
in search of the sunshine, that silver
lining that redeems every cloud, belying
the darkness of this gathering gloom.
“You will find sorrow moving through you, like a dark mist over landscape.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 94.
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