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Exploding galaxies, shimmering, shattering crystalline fires of streaming light

pulsing and pulling

the lanes of night

the breath of the great infinite

lungs

of the universe

a brilliant star-dust,

weird, particular

& animate to a detail

small as a frog

or a flower,

the supernova

of a single atom.

These men sat down and thought,

what could they give us, what

contemplations had they distilled

from suffering

& privilege,

ecstasies and intensities,

ripened in calmer moments…

axioms, insights,

the trick of creating places where the

air brings forth radiances

civil

procedure

that structures health

& the wealth of spirits and hearts

with no self-deception,

but no obsession either

with the selfish side of life.

These men we have loved,

they have formed an honoured chain

the links of which

each, in their own turn, has picked-up

and added to,

till we have

gathered, in our techno-

baskets,

the fruits of mankind’s once-wide

sea.

Wherein our pride allows no admittance

that we have rendered

shoals of light

to heaps of flesh

and spiritual disease.

For

EVERY DAY IS AN UNCUT DIAMOND

What sort of eternity is it,

what blackness or void

that has,

irrevocably,

the tiny jewel of our

hearts’ dreams in it?

Modest is the star in the demon of night…

and wondrous is the flowering soul

in the lanes of light.

No voice at all

can catapult our ambition beyond

forest fires and

the wreck

that is the closing down

when closing down begins –

modesty becomes us all.

That God will not exist

unless kindness is done towards Him

propitiation

our gift

that we have peopled the universe with gods

because that which must be

is a call for its own

creation

even in the circle of choice.

I have hoped beyond hope,

whilst not wishing to do hurt

by a building of dreams that

cannot be freeze-dried.

I have wanted to know hardness,

which hurts us so cruelly,

because I have wanted our

ecstasies to be the fire off the flint.

I have loved, knowing the well of tears might

drown our hearts,

because the heat of love’s amazement

will dry the oceans of our grief:

one flower in an eternity –

where else would you look?

a meadow in eternity,

where could you wish to look?

The flower is less than the light,

in its uncertainty & modesty, it is no god;

only a gift

for sight

a gift that lifts a God.

Heroism,

that heroism belongs to reaching into

the fullest treasury of the human heart

in the face of that which is

beyond us.

There’s no heroism in war

in fighting ourselves

only courage,

and much Dutch courage at that,

to draw the veil

over our own stupidity:

Kindness

is to go beyond,

not to indulge a

cyclical barbarity;

to be heroic:

to find the width of,

some previously undiscovered part of,

the human heart, to find

the love that is not blind.

Soft

the frost has sunned its white-fresh fur

upon the rhythms of the veins of things

touching outlines to a bloom

rare before spring,

flooding Winter’s gloom with bands of

opal mist

which hover in the incandescent

light.

That that that was flat

is in the blueness of these shadows

once more alive;

what this crisp draught gives us

we can only marvel at.

What ice is this

that melts our heart?

What heart is this, where frost exceeds its fire?

What marriage is this?

What power!

Exquisite the potential, yes,

but sad the un-struck chord,

any un-struck,

which broke its promise

to weave the silent air

with the beauty of our hearts

the glory of Your word.

And the wonder of it is, I never saw before,

how the rocks rise up to heaven,

the least life-full, the hardest crystal

closest to the great soft

infinite space

whilst life,

so soft and varied, colourful

bright and wonderful,

hugs the valley floor,

and flows in lush veins towards the

water, the valley floor, the deep

& if this is so,

how is it that

rocks rise up

ejaculating light

spume flying from the tops of waves

all crests kindling

ecstatic fires –

so all below

flows

ever downward

all masses slumping

to the levelled plain?

Is this supremacy

of gravity

- the descent into silence

the glide to the grave

prone and dark –

not the void

from which arose that cataclysmic

spark when There Was Light?

And does not all the rhythm

and rocking, the seething turbulence from whose crests light shines out each day, belong to the ancestral, timeless moment when form was made, and God first stoned the pond?

For all rocks are rivers

or risen waves, now toppling

losing form

& slipping

to rest upon the plains.

All, ultimately, are fluid

the liquid motions of their

form so slow

but their proud agitation

our moment in time

when dance was alive

in the otherwise waste

of non-creation.

On such evenings

caught blue

between descant &

madrigal

dust river

everything’s circular

the heat and the head and the

life immortal

on such evenings

clocks singing

argument and

buttercups.

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