Riddle 1

We sowed peace and got war
We sowed olive trees and got thorns.
So who is to blame,
The sower,
The seed
Or the field?

Moonlit Christ looks quizzically

Down on a thousand eager artists

Tying His arms and legs

To easels loaded

With the dirty teeth of

Fame and desire.

The goat thuds into

His chest and the vulture

Unscrews His bones.

Cold lonely on an empty hillside

He is a figure just out of sight

As a woman hurries home

With her shopping

Worrying about the change,

When the lights go out

And she curses, looking for her keys.

Shadows

Take a pencil to draw,
And you realise
We are mostly made of shadow.
We are revealed by what we are not;
By shadows and doubt,
By hiding and illusion.
Perhaps this is why
God’s light is both alarming
And healing,
Painful and a balm.
It destroys
How we see ourselves
How we are shown,
Then reaches through shadow
To the heart.

Esther

I have forgotten who I am,
Haunted by the ghost of my good uncle.
Who am I?
I am for such a time as this.
It is true, and yet it drives
Memory from my face.
When the spirits of terror are absent
In the dull cold hours
Only then when my heart is hidden,
Do I see the phantom dreams
Of golden sighing over sunsets
With my sisters,
And the crushing of ripe
Tomatoes on empty bowls.
I think of brothers who
Called again and again,
Eliciting brave arrows from
Oval eyes.
I remember sweat and heat,
Running for the freedom of laughter.
I remember dandelions and dew.
I remember blue horses tilting their minds onto me
So that our dreams ran together
As one.
I am for such a time as this,
But much more
Much more than the whispering
Of a good ghost and
Kneeling before the power of lust.
For this and more,
God only knows.

If God be for me who can be against me?
If God be for me, who should I be for?
The sun and wind and the sky and the land
And every woman and child and man
That the Light shines upon and is hidden within,
And all that breathes and all that moves
And all that Christ died for and all that he loves.
If God be for me, who should I be for?
All of creation and Christ in all!

Flags

It is strange that every nation has a flag,
Every square inch it’s nation.
Did each and every mind, home, city
Conceive with joy the wrapping, covering cloth
That we see now march slowly home
Bowed like wilted flowers at the drumming of the dead?
Or did vast swaths of us start,
Distracted from watching the stars
Flame and bloom in the whirling skies,
Dismayed by this Dream of Glory
That ricochets prattled off as we
Darted for cover and wondered who these flag men
Were, full of power and sight.

Pilgrim

Back in Deptford, where we used to live,
There is a statue of a Pilgrim,
Forever waiting for his journey, by the Thames.
I used to stare at him,
Imagining the hopes of freedom,
Dreams of possibility
That wreathed about his heart.
In truth, this New World voyager
Just looks stern and perhaps a little worried.
Being English, the pilgrim story
Is one of departure, not arrival,
An end with no beginning,
A tale of prisons, beatings, fear
But also roots pulled up
With soil still sadly clinging.
I think of the ships being
Fitted for the journey,
Amongst the grey streets,
Still tethered to the stone
And steel of London.
And there, sitting on the steps of taverns
Wrapped in silence, Friends,
Whose new worlds spun within them,
And who were being lead
By an invisible cord
Beyond the vanishing horizon.

And where is my new world?
Behind me commerce thunders and
The bloodless dreams of wealth
Build new towers over the graves
Of homes and open doors.
Where are we pulled to now?
As ever, God freshens the sea-breeze
And at the same moment
Calls us to stand and die.