A dear friend of the Trust shares a new collection of poetry for the Autumn equinox. This collection draws inspiration from the memories and emotions that come from brotherhood.
Child Mind
This world is full of impossibilities,
things that have happened to me
yet make no sense at all to my child-mind,
things like losing my way so I could find myself,
things like being broken and then healed by love,
or bumping into strangers who turn out to be true friends,
the only conclusion I have been able to come up with
is that it is not, and never has been, my child-mind
that’s been running the show, it’s been
something else entirely, something that is me
and yet is far, far greater than I could ever comprehend.
Let Love
Life, it all seemed so important
when I was in the thick of it,
searching for my purpose
fixing up the house and raising a family
and it probably was important,
but not in any way I recognize now,
now I see that what was really important was
happening in the subtext; how to manage
my fears and anxieties, how to adapt to change,
stop judging things, keep an open mind
and most importantly, how to stay my hand
and let love do heavy lifting.
Autumn
It was autumn,
the bedclothes were too heavy,
and I was too hot,
as I drifted in and out of sleep
I drifted in and out of my dreams
and in one I met a man who said to me;
‘You’ve had your dance, now it’s time to pay the piper.’
When I asked him how much he wanted he looked away,
then back at me, eyes soft, beautiful and filled with love, and said;
‘Everything, all of it, every last bit of it.’
Gold
We wanted this, we chose this,
it’s won’t help us getting upset now,
without this we wouldn’t see beauty in chaos
or hope in disaster, we wouldn’t know what it is
to be broken by loss or made whole by love,
this life, with all its pains and obligations,
with all its trials and terrors is gold from end to end,
a gold that is host to every other colour,
no matter the tone or the hue.
The zone
Now I’m in my mid seventies
I’m in the zone and my friends are dropping like flies
so it can’t be too long before the exit sign
lights up over one of my ailments,
when I was a boy I had this mad,
stupid idea that I would live forever,
in a way I was right, my soul is eternal,
but being told that is no comfort to my body,
especially when it’s filled with aches and pains,
it’s my body I worry about, my home, my faithful friend,
with its capacity for love, lust and laughter, its greedy eyes,
it’s warmth and its ability to be moved to tears by all that is good.
Forever
Drunk again,
but it’s not booze this time,
it hasn’t been that for nearly twenty-five years,
this time it’s the colour of the late afternoon sun
drenching the trees at the end of our garden
and the way the breeze is gently
troubling their tired and turning leaves,
whispering to them that their time has nearly come
and the earth needs them, the earth needs them to let go
so their tiny souls can rise again into the great and endless forests
that surround the elysian fields, where they’ll turn and turn again forever.
Poverty
We are all poor,
we are all poor,
we were born poor
and we will never be anything else,
yet our poverty is filled with treasures;
the sunlight glittering through the leaves of a tree,
the first shy star shining in the evening twilight,
breathing frosty air in the dead of the night
and the quiet fellowship of our kind,
surely our greatest foolishness
was to think we could better it
with craft and coin alone.
Maturity
As we’ve gotten older
nothing has really changed,
just what’s important, it’s no longer
all about the kids or arguing bitterly about the details,
now it’s about eating our soup from bowls that don’t match,
or sitting quietly together without saying anything,
we don’t have to like the same things anymore
or do the same things either, there’s space
between us because we’ve worked out
that love doesn’t belong to us,
we belong to love,
and we understand that separation
can never separate us, not in a million years.
Intimacy
I thought I would come to know Christ
through his love, and to some extent I have,
but it turns out that’s only half the story,
in later life I have come to know him
far more intimately through his pain,
a pain I have avoided all my life
but which he has never turned away from.
Blessing
For the first time
in two months of heatwaves,
I woke this morning to the sound of rainfall,
I got out of bed, pulled on my hoodie and sweatpants
and went downstairs to start my morning walk,
but as I reached for the umbrella by the front door,
I paused and changed my mind, went back upstairs,
changed into shorts and a vest,
went back down, opened the door
and stepped out into the rain.
Love
People ask me how I’m feeling
and I say, ‘I’m feeling good thank you.’
which is really a well-practiced lie,
in truth I feel sad most of the time,
but when I say so they start trying to mend me,
then in my quiet moments, when I let myself really feel it,
I have found that sadness is ever the mother of compassion.
All my life I have wanted to know love more deeply,
to know it as a dear friend and companion,
and this is how I have come know it,
not as a cure for pain, but as the consequence of it.
Up and down
Everyone wants to go up,
maybe that’s because we were all born down,
born down with a distant memory of peace and love,
but trying to go up doesn’t seem to get us there,
it just makes down get angrier and stronger,
if we thought in terms of in and out
rather than up and down it might help,
further out and deeper in, a depth that can
help us make sense of what we must live though,
an undying light that is unaffected by the trials of life
but gives us the strength and wisdom to pass through them
and emerge with an understanding that we are vast beyond measure,
vast enough to contain all the polarities of life without tearing ourselves apart.
Memories
Half-forgotten memories
coiling and recoiling in the basement,
and down here amongst the debris and the bodies,
all the lessons I didn’t have the courage or humility to learn back then,
now they coming to me wearing clean shirts, looking to recreate themselves
by telling me that what happened then is going to happen again,
but it’s not, because now I can see them, I can see them
and I understand them, I couldn’t rid myself of them
but with a little help from love I can bear them
and that my friend, is a miracle
I never saw coming.