You are ever
under siege, Your
mighty right hand
now wearied, and
Your left grasping
after a little rest –
but Sabbath seems
to escape You.
How will You renew
creation, Lord, when
You sit across from me
slumped in the chair
like a soldier about to
surrender?
And yet, Your eyes,
Your eyes still galvanize
in grace, and later when
I read Your latest missive
I am reminded that You
mind Yourself, and so us,
and I breathe a
sigh of
belief.
my mind drifts, following
my eyes, now on a
pothole, now on a
building bending from sky
to ground, now on
beauty whisking across
the street with poise and purpose,
now on a row of toilets and sinks
and pipes for plumbing lives.
But then I see a little finger
swaddled in a mother’s
hand. And I think on
You and my soul
floats up to a
place where
I know
Love.
Is it possible that the tick
of the clock is all there is?
That tock is a figment of my
Imagination, projected by
an ear anxious to hear what
really isn’t there?
I’m amazed and
arrested by
the thought that the
tock of the clock is a ruse.
As this thought winds
its way through my body, I
recall those odd times when
my eye twitched without my
willing it to do so – twitch, twitch,
twitch – like the tick of a hand
racing across a face
looking to tock.
My walk home from church was unexceptional; aside
from the fact that I can walk and the street-
side tress cannot; and aside
from the fact that the sky
opened for a time and showed
me the divine eye: and aside
from the fact that the wind
whispered my name and the
horizon smiled at me; and aside
from the fact that the blessed
dead watched my every step,
counting each one and writing
them in ‘The Book of Strides’; and aside
from the fact that I remember angels
rambled round King Street, dressed
incognito – although their wings
left tufts of down under
this tree and round that bush.
My walk home from church was
deceptively pedestrian.
What a gift it is to
feel blood stream from
heart to hand to pen, now
staining this page with
my very being
I can hardly help myself
and yet I must since
no-one else can and
so after bleeding ink
on paper I practice
the augury of
ancient days.
I wind my way into
the labyrinth I am and
so finally settle into myself;
where I write a travel guide
for one.
Not far from the land of
gratitude lies the region of
hope – folk only visit
the one via the other, and
no-one begins in either.
It is a geographic miracle – a delight.
Of course, some opt to
tarry in neither, but on
the other side of both
is peace: a land of
holy reckoning.
They fall asleep so swiftly,
these animals closer to Genesis
than me and my kind. They
dream of the Lord God
walking their wood,
until then again they
flinch from the pain of
the primal couple stepping
out of the garden and into
their nightmare.
Is there any hope for Your
creatures? To surface from
sleep to discover a sliver
of sanity seeping into this
Homo Sapiens?
These pets sleep –
domesticated by our
regimes, our
treats, our
house training but
every now and then
the wild comes calling
and I sense some
hope for
us all.
