CROW

Crow takes

leaves displeasure as an aftertaste,

Crow’s wings make the sound of weeping

as he flutters into rooms

cold with waiting.

Crow carries

away hope in his beak

black and bleak as winter,

nests in hearts lost to events

understanding cannot fathom.

Crow hovers,

He is the rolling ocean, white light

captured in the edges of his feathers

as he hides the leviathan that glides

through all our nightmares.

Crow caws

as he struts across branches

sends seismic shudders into the psyche

death is a wail, is the answer

to all our woe.

A Poem for Kevin:

Magpies did not warble that day

there was no sun in the sky

that day

no animals emerging, no songs sung

not that grey day.

Trees wept leaves that day

flowers re-furled, lowered their heads and bowed

that day,

insects refused to fly.

The mantis did not prey, spiders spun no webs

not that day.

Worms did not emerge, snails stayed in their shells

and I sat and stood and sat again

hearing my wife cry

as I stared at the outside and witnessed nothing at all

that day

my mind full of  him; his laugh,

his voice, his bright, bright eyes.

That day

I tried to fathom what cannot be;

how the ocean’s depth cannot compete with despair’s ravine,

and sorrow’s heat burns the heart

all the way into winter

and words become useless,

as they did

that day

the day my friend Kevin passed away.

I will not hear his voice

nor see him smile

nor share a meal and a drink

as we set off on another adventure, or have a coffee,

‘milk on side’ and discuss

all the things right and all the things wrong

not after that day, that horrible day

that stealing, ice pick of a day, that took a life

no one could afford to lose.

Perhaps the magpies did sing,

perhaps the animals emerged and the sun did shine

but that day, and these days since

I have not seen nor heard them.

The sound of coins through the centuries:

My brothers sold me,

giving me into the hands of the flesh dealers,

the merchants of bone and blood;

sold me for a handful of gold…

my brothers, who shared my voice, my hearth, my tent—

jealousy ruled that moment as the wind whispered

in sand that cracked the lips and filled the throat,

‘your father found favor when looking in your eyes.’

A father’s love, like a technicolor coat,

can be a vicious thing; highlighting an absence

as much as it grants light to what is…

my brothers did not see me,

did not feel the bond with me, they experienced

the dreadful lack that drinks choices the way the antelope

drinks from the waterhole

leaving behind the hole in the heart

where a father’s regard should dwell.

The moment when the coins

were exchanged from opening hand

to cupped palm,

and I was handed over,

set a sound through history

repeated in the thirty pieces finding Judas

or the crowing of a cock and Peter’s future denials,

a sound that reverberate still

in man’s dealings with each other and with the planet.

Jen, who creates me:

 

Is the beginning

found in our hands or in our feet -

a fall or a climb?

The finger writing fate

or the toe dipping into the night?

Did it take seven days for light

to find its place

or perhaps time cannot be measured

until there are eyes that can see

perhaps my life

like ancient Abraham

only began

after you.

Every morning I wake

turn

and there you are fighting the daylight still

determined to remain in sleep

cocooned.

I wander out to the shower

stand beneath the fall

decide again that the light is not the sun’s shine

but our response.

Coming down

We walked that morning, you, tired, wrapped

in hospital blankets, the newborn too, out

the whishing glass doors of the hospital - you could take

no more; into the fine drizzle, falling…covering trees

like tinsel. I carried Mary, you beside me, four-year old Jack

in front, laughing, always laughing, his being open

to the world, like grass pushing towards sunlight and rain

with not a thought to the roots left behind.

On down the empty road we walked, not far,

we lived in the same street as the hospital

and wondered as we walked if anyone else ever

walked home nowadays. Holding Mary, watching Jack,

feeling you beside me, I felt like Moses descending, cradling

the tablets that set the whole of his world up before him.

The Quiet John

Words hover, rainbow trout

hidden in the river - with soft underbellies,

speckled brown desires - unseen

in the muddy water, gills work

to convert ideas to sentences,

tails flick back and forth to fight

the current of plot, stay still

while the world moves.

Lips pout, wait for fish emerge,

barbel or common catfish, the thought

has hooked the thick lips of consonants

ripe to be cooked in conversation;

verbs found in the murky ground,

amongst the mounds of reeds and grasses –  

form in the sound space behind his teeth,

mingle, as if in a school, dart

to and fro – are lost in the deep nooks

and crannies underneath the bank; wait

for intelligence to find them. On the surface

still eyes - as distant as a fish’s thoughts - stare

back without a hint of confusion, the action

occurs beneath. His words skim across stones

and boulders, slide away as if each smoothed-out letter,

covered in slippery moss, cannot be held

by the shape of his grasping mouth or clamorous mind.

One day he will submerge people

as if to return them to the sea; even the great

fisherman will be pushed beneath

and face the truth of his humanity -

from the ocean we came,

from the ocean we will return.

One day his head will be served

upon a silver platter

like a fish head at the feast,

his words forever lost,

the ocean a distant echo

in the dying spectre of his ears.

That which cannot be spoken

Let there be light,

It is said it was said,

Although some say,

Asimov chief amongst them

It was a computer

that computed the idea

bringing us back – again –

into the universe of time

and space — regardless

there is Light

and it has been deemed good

while Darkness forever now

cops the bad rap

and so Light and Darkness are divided

except perhaps in the minds (and hearts?)

of humans where the split

is more of a flickering

betwixt as actions and thoughts

forever cross the divide because humans

see both as potentials

rather than a firm partition

to be seen from a separate standpoint

and is that why, perhaps,

the name of God cannot be spoken?