A elder of the Psychosynthesis Trust community shares their latest poetry collection. The collection is inspired by the changing of seasons in 2024, from Autumn to Winter. All images were taken by the same soulful creator. By reading this, may you find inspiration, harmony and opportunities for reflection.
Autumn Leaves
I read the teachings,
but like golden autumn leaves
many had fallen far from the golden trees
and like us, had become mortal and resistant to change,
what I need now is the company of somebody who can walk quietly beside me,
someone who can tolerate my errors and understand why I make them.
Grace
As I walked beside the park
early this morning everything was sparkling,
the leaves on the pavement, the tops of the cars,
the empty beer cans, the park railings,
even the paving slabs glittered,
there was nothing the frost
had not graced,
indiscriminate, beautiful,
breath taking.
Fragments
At this time the world
seems to be full of fear and anger,
we know we have to change but it’s all so slow,
at times like this I just thank God for the moments
when peace and stillness interrupt my
anxious train of thoughts,
a leaf falling silently from a tree,
a fox curled up in the middle of an empty road,
the sound of a robin singing high in the trees above me,
each one a fragment, still falling from the moment of creation,
each one filled with light and hope.
Angels
When I came to the gate
there was a sign next to it which read:
‘If you pass this point you will have to run until
you reach to the very end of the path, you cannot stop, if you do
then you will have to return to the beginning and start all over again.’
I was young, strong and confident then, I wasn’t a sprinter but I was tenacious,
so I opened the gate and set off, full of joy and hope, up hill and down dale,
but what I hadn’t accounted for was the toll age would take on me,
I am still running now but it’s getting harder by the day
and increasingly I am passing tired old people
walking back to the beginning.
But now and again,
when I feel weak and I want to give up,
I glimpse the angels running along beside me
and I remember it’s not just my aching legs that are carrying me,
it’s my belief that this time I might just reach the very end.
The Harbour of Love
Love is a harbour,
a place of safety and hope,
a deep knowing that all will be well,
and the fleet that ties up in this harbour
is rusting, dirty, exhausted and barely afloat,
they come from far across the oceans
for succour and for healing,
they come to know peace.
They have learned to speak of love
yet they cannot love themselves,
they are not hypocrites,
just those who have created
a harbour of hope in their hearts
and have yet to create it in the world.
Healing
I am not here to learn how to get rich,
I’m not here to learn how to be Spiritual,
I came here to learn how to be human
and learning how to be human means accepting
that I am irredeemably and irreconcilably wounded,
not so that I can spend my life blaming others
but so that my wound can be the means
by which the love I seek can reach me,
because what will make me fully human
is the ability to receive and give love
and if such a thing can be called healing
then that is the only healing I need.
Marriage
I am walking in the rain
thinking of Antonio Machado
and how much his poetry means to me,
thinking of him walking alone in the hills of Spain
after he had lost his wife to consumption
with nothing but his broken heart for company,
thinking about them being jeered at and heckled
by onlookers outside the Church where they were married
because she was so much younger than him,
the hecklers couldn’t see that this was a marriage of souls,
not of bodies, they couldn’t see it because
they had forgotten what Machado
and his beloved had remembered.
Hell
I was just making my way back from hell
when I met a friend walking in the other direction,
I stopped him and asked him why on earth he was going there,
he replied, ‘I am going there for the same reason you did,
I want to know what it feels like to come back again.’
Flickering
It wasn’t until mid-life
that I started to take my feelings seriously,
to live my miseries as well as my joys
rather than finding ways to avoid them,
as a consequence I found something,
something I’d read about and longed for
but which somehow had always eluded me,
a quiet light arrived in my meditation,
a light which brought peace, it was constant,
steady and undaunted by my inconsistencies,
it gave me the strength to accept my failings
and my wounds and keep walking.
It’s not the fault of the light when I lose sight of it
and have to stumble through the darkness
it’s not the light that flickers, it’s me.
Together
These glories I walk though
and take for granted every day,
the colours and lights of the dawn,
the scents of the plants and the autumn leaves,
the life teeming all around me, the seasons turning,
old age and death approaching, I don’t regret a single moment,
I don’t believe there is any other place in this universe
where I could experience this joining of life, joy
and suffering, and with it the recognition
that what I do affects everything
and what everything else does affects me,
nowhere else could I learn so unequivocally
that no thing is separate from any other thing,
whether we like each other or not we are one family
and as the lawyers say, we are both jointly and severally
responsible for our destiny, one for all and all for one,
I can’t imagine another place where being could
become experiencing in such a profound way.
Satisfactions
Eating breakfast after meditation
and feeling graced by love.
Finally mending that tap in the basement
that’s been dripping for the last fifteen years.
Talking to people who have been subjected
to unimaginable horrors yet bear no grudges.
Emerging into the world again after another
lonely bout of feeling like a worthless outsider.
Sitting down to a great big plate
of my wife’s Aubergine Parmigiana.
One morning
We live, we love, we cry, we die,
over and over and over again
we live, we love, we cry, we die,
until one morning, without warning,
we wake up and laugh.
The torch of love
I don’t believe
we’re heading for extinction,
not before we’ve filled our purpose,
by then the earth may be battered,
there may not be much to eat
and there may be only a few of us left,
but those few will be standing
on the shoulders of all of us
who’ve gone before them,
and together we’ll be holding
the torch of love aloft.