Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Art of Weaving



Death steals a person away,

but leaves feelings intact.

Now, grief, like my rogue wisteria,

takes over my life.

I need to create a daily ritual,

write my grief with bird song,

with dappled light and shadow.

I need to weave it with honour

into the fabric of my days,


Sunday, October 23, 2011

I Need More Time

Time is so variable:

take this exact moment,

it's gone almost before I've noticed it;

in the blink of an eye,

tomorrow has become yesterday.

Time as a succession of pixels.

The wise tell us to concentrate

on the moment but that's like trying

to keep hold of one drop

in a rapidly moving stream.


Anyway we need time:

sentences are temporal.

Without time, we can neither think, talk,

understand, read nor write.

To communicate we need

words or images in a sequence.


So I have grave doubts

about eternity.

It lacks pixellation,

it lacks communication.

I don't think I am ready for it;

I need more time.


Saturday, October 15, 2011

Bric-à-Brac

i

I am an image junkie,

always on the prowl

for metaphors


ii

If I'm to write poetry,

I need the nourishment of time.

But my illness is bulimic,

devours time and spews it out

undigested. Where's sustenance

in gobbets of time

mixed with stomach acid?


iii

I always thought my final

resting place would be the quiet earth.

So great literature tells us;

never mind moths and harebells,

I wanted a small piece of ground

where I could slumber peacefully.


But that is not to be. My grave

is situated plumb above

an active fault line.

My skeleton, together

with my neighbour's bones,

will rattle and clonk

percussively until the end of time.


Sunday, October 2, 2011

Homage - for John.

This is threshold music.

After his wife's death,

Bach wove chorale melodies

into his solo violin works,

mostly Cantata number 4,

Christ Lag in Todesbanden,

Christ lay in death dark prison,

with its ringing Allelujah

at the end of every section.

But with voices and violin

matched together,

the Allelujahs take on

a more sombre form:

not the hubris of certainty,

but a human hesitation

and self doubt, good listening

when a loved one has died.

Bach's wife and my friend and brother

deserve the wistfulness of hope,

Allelujah.