poetry – poem prayer silence

Christmas tide

The cathedral glows with red and green and gold,
Waiting for the candles and the surpliced choir
And the people who will wash through its doors
These festive days and nights.
Their first Christmas for new canons and new Christians,
Tentative, joyful, amazed by splendour.
Their last Christmas for those who will move away
And for those whose death-day waits all unknown
Hidden in the new year that is to come.
And the tide of absences, the much-missed:
John whose wife faces the first Christmas of widowhood,
Jane who can’t find a carer to push her to church,
Jack who’s found a better shelter in jail
Than the wet waterfront.
In among the crowding strangers and the old friends they all come.
This human tide washes through the ancient building
For a day, a week, for forty years,
Finding a home here, a place to root down into God.

But the old stones know: everyone passes
Like the flower of the field.
Over the centuries the human tide
Has washed in and out, heavy with sorrows,
Bubbling with joy, awed into wonder.
This is the place where the fragile, the fleeting
Touches hands with eternity, and once a year
Remembers the truth: nothing is lost in God.
Not a butterfly, not an old man’s vanished memory,
Not a loving glance or act of kindness.
The candles in the winter dark remind us:
In endless light the lost tides shall return
And be made whole. All passing generations
Are held safe in God’s love, for ever.
The undefended baby in the manger shows:
There is no need for fear. This is the true nature
Of the Light beyond light, the Maker of the world:
A love that reaches out and never threatens.
Where all tides end he waits with endless joy.

tRuth 2019

All names are pseudonyms

image © portsmouthcathedral.org.uk

Advent

Like a whisper passing through a crowd of children,
All eyes suddenly straining up for the angel,
He is coming,
Really he is, and all shall be well, the kingdom is coming.
The forgotten truth flames up in winter dimness,
Lighting hope as the days darken,
He is coming.
This world of pain and cruelty will be remade,
All shall be well, no more tears,
He is coming.

To children bent over screens, livid in the blue light
Of a thousand earthbound stars, dizzy and deafened,
The moon speaks, rising over silent fields,
He is coming.

To the warriors of hatred and contempt
And to their broken victims
The earth speaks, as the harvest rots
Like those who planted it, unburied,
He is coming.

To the last trees, the trapped wild things,
To the no longer teeming waters,
The wind breathes over the chaos,
He is coming.

To the evil thoughts feasting like cancer
On human hearts, multiplying misery,
The One with the sharp sword speaks,
I am coming.

Like a whisper passing
From the gardener to the healer
To the prayer to the maker
To the broken child
Lighting a candle against the darkness,
He is coming.

Like a whisper passing
From angel to stupefied angel
In the marvelling silence of praise:
With empty hands, in weakness and poverty,
To a failed creation with failure
To a dying creation with death
He is coming.

Like a shout, like the new-created light,
Like life out of death,
He is coming.

tRuth 2015

image © Karl Grobl/Pixnio CC0

Advent Sunday

Winter sun lifting the heart:
Frail, crisp, clear like a glass bauble
Delicate and precious, retrieved
From long storage.
We begin again, the old story,
The high hopes: he will come.
Not with reassuring return of beautiful
Music and readings, no Wachet auf,
No choral perfection, no mince pies.
He will come, shattering the baubles
We hold dear, searing us with the touch
Of truth’s cold blade.
He will come shaking the tree
Of our bauble-hung life.
Hatching from the shards
Like blinking, naked chickens we will come
Disorientated to his clear light,
His forgiving judgement,
Who holds our tiny worlds like baubles
In long-suffering hands, until he comes
To work his new creation white-hot
From his furnace of change,
He, the Light undying.

tRuth 2019

image © Anne Roberts/flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Your friends were with you only for a season

Your friends were with you only for a season
To hear your word and share your holy life,
And then they scattered to the world’s far corners
To bring joy to indifference and strife.

Lord, so with us: we walk the path together
A year or two, we’re knit in friendship’s bands,
Until you bid us follow where you’re leading
In lonely coracle to unknown lands.

Teach us to part: for parting is not ending,
In glory we will meet if not before;
The bands of love in prayer grow ever stronger,
We bear each other to those separate shores.

And so we weave a net of grace and kindness
Across the world and down the passing years;
Christ is the net who binds us all together,
Who makes our souls through sharing hopes and fears.

And so farewell, in gratitude and laughter
For all that Christ has given in this place;
Lord, lead us on to find tomorrow’s blessings,
Tomorrow’s friends, tomorrow’s gift and grace.

tRuth 2019

I had the tune Londonderry Air in mind when writing this, but one would need to repeat the last verse.

image © Mike Prince /flickr (CC BY 2.0)

End of term

The head chorister’s tears fall
As he bids farewell to ruff and surplice,
To seven years of music-making,
Half his life,
As he bids farewell to his boyhood.
First loss, piercing yet sweet to look back upon,
The happiness of days chock-full of meaning.
He has learned now: all things pass.
May he learn also: that which is eternal
Can never be lost, but abides forever.
Broadened horizons for the young man he will be
Will bring new blessings, passing yet eternal.

tRuth 2019

image © Chris Beckett/ flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Resurrection

As the glad phoenix from his spicy bed
Bursts in vermilion splendour, as the bright
Sudden lightning-flash and orange-red
And leaping flames light up the night:

So is the thunder-clap of Jesus’ rising.
Consternation, joy, amazement all together
Confound us, shake us open for surprising
Truth to penetrate. HE IS RISEN – whether

Or not I believe it, he is truly living,
Unconstrained now, loving without limit,
Only my refusal may frustrate his giving.

But Gód’s blazing glory is beyónd what I can guess,
Negativity or evil cannot hinder, cannot dim it,
For his fire will enfold me and transmute me into Yes.

tRuth 2019

Chrism mass

A mass of chrism and the other oils
In little bottles, decanted at speed by vergers
While the diocese receives Christ at the bishop’s hand
And promises again to do his work.
And then they scatter, each with a year’s supply
Of confirmations, death-bed anointings,
Makings of new Christians,
Comfortings of chemotherapy endurers,
Healings of toxic memories.
Here is the risen Christ, in each encounter
With the holy oils, the kindly touch,
The hope unconquered.

tRuth 2019

Wednesday of Holy Week

Like sea-mist condensing from nowhere
The quiet deepens through the week
As the streets empty. When the blackbird speaks
He wakes an echo in the April evening
That falls as fountains from the air
Back into stillness. So we enter
The great silence, as an otter cleaving
Still water cleanly, and we wait. The centre
Of all things, the Christ mystery, we prepare
Our spacious silence for receiving.
Together we enter his eclipse; a bleak
And seeping sadness chills us into prayer
Like those who loiter in a graveyard early, grieving
Before sunrise. Here we wait, this week.

tRuth 2019

Palm Sunday

Today Jesus rides in triumph
through a rain of flowers
to his kingdom, on Brother Ass,
humble and holy, simple and true.
Every day he rides still into his own
on Brother Ass, Brother Body,
the patient, grumbling root
of every spiritual flowering.
Who can find Jesus without Brother Ass to help her?
Who can be real whose Brother Ass has strayed?
Brother, you deserve fine flowers of cherry,
snowdrifts of apple-blossom, to welcome
this Easter king in his holiness.
I like thistles, mumbles Brother Ass,
Yum-yum, thank you. Can you see
my rider now? Yum-yum, thank you.

tRuth 2019

St Francis used to refer to his body as Brother Ass. Towards the end of his life he asked pardon of Brother Ass for having behaved so harshly towards it by his overzealous asceticism.

Sabbath

His hands are bound about with linen bands,
Still now, no more with vivid gesture telling
Stories to thrill to; healing, kindly hands,
Their black wounds hidden by the sweetly smelling

Myrrh-soaked bindings. And the women weeping
Have turned away and left him dumbly lying
Like a thing in the darkness, and when the light comes leaping
In the spring dawn, he will still be sleeping.

The day long of lamenting and of crying,
Here he will be, still and cold and lonely,
In his last rest. Where has he gone, the flying

Soaring life of him? Deep down, defying
Death in his den, setting them free, the only
Lord of Life, raising the dead to joy undying.

tRuth 2019