Storm over Tysoe

The storm was preceded by Wedgewood blue skies and the goats' hair of cirrus clouds. Then the barometer fell and it arrived. It came, at first, puppy-playful and boisterous, desert-warmed and seeded with rain, tumbling and whipping over Windmill Hill from down Winderton way. The windmill's sails flexed and clanked; straining to once more and fly with the wind, to break free and spin until the sparks flew and smoke billowed feeding the wind with a devil's fire.

The larches cresting Sunrising hill roar like breakers on Chesil beach. Their trunks creaking like clippers off Cape Horn. Penny and I stand on this frozen wave of rain-rattled escarpment and listen to the wild thunder of treesong. Penny hunches. She is not fond of this weather.

Below, the church stands on its little island. The rivers and tidal creaks of houses flowing around it. Even today, its profile exudes a sense of warmth and timeless solidity. Older storms have raged and fiercer Gods have been worshipped here in the past. When the world was younger did not the God of Golgotha ride upon the Canaanite storms and make the wilderness of the Israelites twist and writhe?

Now fences are torn and sheds upturned. The elm, across the road, scatters its gnarled finger-bones on the pavement. Even the rooks are grounded. On the lower road, they hang piratical to the thrashing Jolly Roger branches. Crow's nest calamities lie strewn jetsam upon the ground. Earlier I had watched a pair of jackdaws carelessly flung like heraldic emblems upon the perilous sky. Tomorrow they will be back for beak-fulls of the elm's discarded debris to rebuild lost nests.

A blackbird surfs a branch with a quizzical eye; its beak yellowing with the season's turn and the pulse of life.

The little oak that stands beside Winnie's gate still holds on to its crisp brown leaves. The wind worries them; hanging there like thrown toffee wrappers.

Penny blinks the rain from her lashes and we contemplate the sheep. They continue to graze unconcerned by the ripping squalls. So we splash home with the wind at our backs to a packet of ginger biscuits and a discussion on the wetness of wet.

.

Still GROWS the ELDER

The summer heat has come, dustily settling across the fields and with it, the weighty, drowsiness that hums and buzzes in the head. The noontime hedges are as still as the night-time ones and the trees click and stretch beneath the sun. But the lethargy is short lived; the summer is still young, it hasn't yet shaken off the new-yeast of spring. The elder that the park-keeper laboured to cut back last month, explodes with green, lacy life, rearing in delight; defiantly laughing at the clean straight edges loved by sheers and humankind.

Two days ago, in the rain, I came across a dead rook - a juvenile, black beaked, full size. It lay upon the grass; perfectly formed, its eyes closed, as if sleeping. The crack willows by the pond were its dripping pall. The jackdaws and rooks were silent. Its blackness seeped into the sodden ground in the way that night creeps across the field, grass blade by grass blade. Penny sniffed around its iridescent body. I felt an irrational sorrow swim round my veins. Will its presence here on earth be missed and its death be mourned? Will its family watch out for its return and feel the stab of its absence? Crows, we are told, can recognise humans who have caused them harm for a year or more after the initial offence. Fields where danger has been perceived are avoided and news of it spread around the entire colony which is then handed down generation by generation. For how long will this young rook be grieved?

But today there is no body. There is no evidence of it at all on that grassy patch. The ground is bone dry as if even the trace of water falling from the lifeless feathers must be eradicated. Still grows the sweet smelling elder. For some, the world is not large enough to contain all this joy and sadness.  

And THE Cuckoo..

One of those mornings when the air is pearled with silver beads that lift and float with every movement; too full of light to fall to earth.   A sky of hammered pewter brushes the fresh-cut grass and swaddles the trees.   A myriad snails pebble the field; Fibonacci whirls like fossilised Catherine Wheels.   Jackdaws sing scat to the thrush's song; the avant-garde augmenting the lyric.    When the rain comes it is serpent soft, hissing through leaves of spearmint-green.   The dog-rose is in flower and the cuckoo has yet to change its tune.

WOLF wind

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Under a sky, bruised and bloodied by the sun and cloud,
     there is a wolf wind that lurks and prowls through the wood;
     cruel... sly... and wicked.

The sheep don't seem to notice it, full of new-life - not yet born.
     Nor the bishop hare, as still as star light, eyeing me
     with the eyes of a prophet, from the long grassed verge
     that rolls its way to Oxhill.

Fractured puddles, spread like splintered flint shards
     the dust-hard track-ways that ring to the heel of a boot
     while down at the corner of Peacock Lane the wolf wind
     crouches, ready to pounce...

There's a grey light that blows from Nineveh, ocean cold
     and heavy; and trees, black stencilled, hag-haired and
     made arthritic by the seasons' turn, clutch and claw at the
     wild and restless sky.

Down by Banbury Road the rooks cling piratical
     to the bucking schooner of their branches,
     their sea legs steady, tending the new-life of their own
     and winging the fangs of the sly wolf wind.

THERE are NIGHTS like THIS...

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There are nights like this,
owl soft and hung
with sheep song, when
the larches on Sunrising
slant limb-wise on
westerly winds, that lying
here upon this mossy
backbone, scented with cow
and gorse and the cold wet
earth, I know with all certainty
that, unless I dig my fingers
deep into the knotted roots
of grass at my side, I would fall

Upwards into the blackness
of the sky, trailing cold
star-fire through my outstretched
fingers.

FLEDGLINGS

The second or maybe even third hatchings are taking place. The hedges and dark corners are alive with scruffy squawks. The older rooks play dodge and twist on the field followed by their insistent clamouring young. Our runner beans are regularly plundered and the garden now blooms with spinning, scratched CDs and ragged carrier bags that play upon the wind like corporate prayer flags. Everywhere is enthused with the untidy energy of youth...

And now here they come in a small gaggle down main street. A little knot of girls singing and shrieking; daring the world to look at them with that eggshell-thin, fragile, belligerence of adolescence. Dressed in little more than their fathers' high blood pressure they trip the kerb to Oxhill Road and the sky is filled again with shrill laughter and bad language. Every shriek, every movement, calls fearfully out to an uncomprehending world in which they have found themselves flung. There are no easy Edens for us sons and daughters of Adam.

          "I AM HERE. AND THIS IS ME..." They say.

They fall silent as they walk past and then collapse in snorts and giggles, their arms around each other's shoulders and necks. And I love them for it; I love them for their heroic "barbaric yawp" that signals their presence in this world... in this village... on this little inconsequential street on one summer's afternoon at the razored edge of their childhoods... I'm drawn into their terrifying, wonderful, invigorating, intimidatingly indifferent worlds.

Do the little, feathered scruff-balls that dart beneath the garden hedges also feel this? Lifting their voice to the blank, unyielding sky for the first time. Is their piping call clear and sound? Or do they fear that no one will notice; that their voice is too cracked, that their song won't work? Do they fear that they too might be ultimately... unlovable?

They turn the corner, by the maple that flames wine-red in autumn and pass out of sight.
But their voices still ring among the flights of lazy bees.

          "THIS IS ME. I AM HERE AND I AM BEAUTIFUL..."

...and if there is a slight shake and hesitation over the last word that turns it more into a question than a statement, let us pretend not to notice it.
         ...For yes you are so very, very very beautiful...
                      but for none of the reasons you think...

Summer FLIES

The summer heat of these long days seems to slide low; hugging the ground, trapping the drifting mesh of insects in a lazy, languorous dance. Not even the flies can find enough energy to fly. They walk up and down my arm and round my nose and ears, tasting the dust and sweat and human-ness of me... and for a little while I become important to the fly and part of its life...

I can remember my winter trips to the church tower, climbing the darkened stairs. The carpet (worn and threadbare), in front of the great wooden cabinet that housed the clunking, whirring clock, thick with dead and dying flies. Throughout those cold months I would very carefully tiptoe my way through this mass of black bodies lest one more should die. People in the village had asked if they could come up the tower with me to see the clock and to look down on the village from above, but I would put them off; unable to bear the idea of more feet tramping through this ghastly hades of flies that was washed weekly with hymns and prayers from below.

I watched them slowly and painstakingly crawl, often with just two or three legs working, clawing their way to apparent safety, away from the threat of my shadow. I recognised their will to live. Often they got caught on the nylon strands of carpet, trapped, sometimes up-ended. And I would rage. And as each week passed, my rage grew stronger. I raged against the brutishness of life. I railed against my understanding of God and a creation that could set me free and yet sink me into darkness. If God was any God at all, he must too be the God of this place?

There were times I silently crawled on hands and knees teasing their limbs from the carpet fibres, gently trying to place them once more on their feet; trying to lift them up to the safety of a pile of unused bell-ringers' mats that had been stacked in the corner; trying to understand; trying to make sense; trying to know how to respond...

At other times, I just sat with them in silence, knowing that one day I too would find my own winter bell-tower and feel life seep (fast or slow) away from me. Would spring sunlight fall through those cobwebbed window slits and fill the world once more with the scent of growing grass?

And then there were times when I raved. I dared to feel the lion's breath upon my neck as I held God to account. I spat back all the comfort that I had felt as a child having been told of the loving ways of a fatherly God. I would not kill them. I would not kill these little bodies of life that had clung to this world, in the dark coldness for months. That did not WANT to die; that WANTED, like me, to live. My shadow, that for so long they had so weakly fought to escape from, would not herald the end their lives.
"Is this what it is to have dominion over the earth?"
 "If these are to die, you do it yourself and you better make damned sure that they don't suffer while you do it."
But the musty stonework echoed implacably to the sound of my voice and anger as I cursed and swore at the heartlessness of life...

... as I move my arm, the flies reluctantly fly off and I recede into the landscape (the hat propped on the garden table, the tree stump covered with ivy, the dog's ball lying on the lawn) and I, once more, cease to exist...
              ... and yet, I am the richer for it.

A fly lands in the coolness that my shadow casts upon the lawn and, unaware of my still presence, cleans itself.

Two ROOKS in a DEWY meadow EARLY one MORNING

They rose into the air.
Oh my Lord...
How they rose into the air.

I was coming down from Old Lodge Hill
Boots heavy with mud, wading
A slough
Of sullen emptiness;
The church below me
Adrift in a grey mizzle sea.

When,
On ragged, tar-slicked wings
That flared with splintered fire,
They rose together
Into the air
Above the shrouded earth.

And if this universe
Could have contained
The three of us,
I swear...
Oh my Lord,
How I swear,
Right there and then
I would have stretched out my arms
And would have risen with them.

On a GREY January MORNING we BREATHE grandeur

The stem of grass,
crushed beneath a boot
now growing again
arcing over trampled mud
A green spear of light.

A sparrow,
amid the havoc of blackthorn
torn by winter gales,
with a soul far larger
than its song.

And we see the glory,
don't we?
You ...
and me ...
and God.

WHEN we WALKED to THE wood

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I CANNOT QUITE REMEMBER
              SO TELL ME...

     The day we walked to the wood... And I followed your footsteps up the steep earthen path, cut by rain and as brown as nature's womb... and when, at the steepest places, you reached out and held onto the same trees that I too hold on to; their slender trunks, wet with dew and rain and life... and you said that you could smell autumn and it made you smile as autumn always does... and we listened to the silence and a rook's call and the sound of rain falling from leaf to leaf.

              ... BUT I know there was more...
                                                      SO much MORE...

Two people cannot share an hour in the woods without experiencing a lifetime brimming over with wonder and joy... and I want to remember and to savour every single moment...

               SO TELL ME...

DID the mist hang in the air like dragons' breath so that the tops of the larches touched a different sky?

DID the chimes from the village clock roll up the hills, as sweet as carols, as soulful as owls, as lethal as quicksilver, shimmering among the beech and sycamore until only the moles and the sleeping badgers could hear it?

DID the crows rake the skies with their ragged wings?

WERE your fingers wet with rain drops that hung like glass globes from each leaf and branch and blade?

DID we dance together to the ancient music that the trees sing? And if not, why not?

DID we really meet the hermit who lived in the brushwood shelter, who smoked a briar pipe, and who sang songs and brewed coffee too bitter to drink? And did we sit with him beside his fire to listen to stories of love and hope and of friendship that is greater than both, while badger cubs dozed between his feet?

WERE there pink mallow and yellow cats ear and wood aven that outshone the sun among those dying leaves?

DID we taste together blackberry and wild sorrel's bitter-lemon bite?

DID we stand together upon the cracked concrete of the old airfield, now welcomed back by the wood, and listen, among the mist and the dripping leaves to the crackle and hiss of wartime music and the thud of distant bombs and the sadnesses they bring?

WERE there crab apples and rose-hips and bread-and-cheese leaves, and did we run our fingers, crimson with blackberries, through willow-herb's matted beard?

WERE your scarlet paths aisled with Lords-and-ladies and around your throat did you wear black bryony's bloody necklace?

DID the clouds part and the sun pour down upon us honeyed warmth so we walked through a dappled landscape where Cain was unborn? And I marvelled at the chalk-blue sky and you blew upon a dandelion-clock that was a perfect sphere and feathered-time drifted from your lips and out over field and hedgerow where the soft-eyed cows grazed.

WERE the fields filled with crane flies that rose with each footfall and heralded our way with elven wings?

DID the wind turn and ravage the world with ice and snow so that your breath burned in warm clouds and your nose turned red? And did you say, "This is Narnia" and I replied, "Yes. And below us lies the valley of Huntercombe where the Walker and the Rider and King Arthur meet." But neither of us could feel anything malevolent about the friendly, dancing flakes.

DID I see joy and wonder in your eyes, darting and flaming like fireflies (though I was afraid to look too closely), so that I too could see the world as you see it?

WERE there Chinese lanterns glowing again like painted planets in the Rectory garden below us and was there an accordion playing and the sound of a woman singing beneath the Harvesters' Moon?

DID dragons come and play at your feet? And each tree limb burst into bloom? And golden leaves and butterflies cascade from the skies? And was the world filled with God's laughter?

Perhaps ALL... or perhaps just SOME of this really HAPPENED...

I cannot precisely remember...
                    So tell me about the day we walked to the woods
                           and I followed your footsteps up the steep earthen track...

Night Walking (Infinitas)

I lifted the latch and went out into the night to see what I could see and discover in the darkness what the darkness would disclose. And I went to the place where the air was heavy with moisture and dripped with the dewy sweetness of night-time flowers and there the waters ran silently, as dark as scriveners’ ink. Above me, Cassiopeia and Cepheus danced their slow dance in frozen silence and Banbury town stained the sky above Sunrising Hill with its amber glow. And as I stood, I listened for a voice, but none came and there was no song upon the breezes of the night.

sicut in caelo…

And so in the faint penumbra of my lantern I turned my eyes to another lonely circle of light glinting in the world of darkness; Andromeda, riding high on the wings of Pegasus. Its flaming glory traduced to a tiny blur diminished by unimaginable distance. Its light had taken 2.3 million light years, the entire evolutionary span of humankind, to reach me. Through what icy darkness had this speeding speck of light passed? This dim smudge that danced in the liminality of my vision contained the mass of one trillion stars in a whirling Catherine Wheel of ferocious light, each astral blazing furnace streaking outwards on its own path to the ever expanding tidal edges of the Universe, just as we on our spinning rock hurtling around our yellowing sun are also on a cosmic voyage into infinity.

The brief flash of our life-spans freezes this speeding moment into the illusion of timeless and motionless solidity, as if this is how things ever were and will ever be to come. The high speed shutter of our perception captures the drop of milk exploding into the cup of tea and, to us, that moment will last unchanging forever while our children and then their children’s children are born, live and die.   

… et in terra

And so in that howling blackness of infinity, I lowered my lamp to the solid security of this world of grit and mud and stone. There, around my feet, glittered a spangle of starlight as dew globes glistened in my lantern’s light. A tiny watery orb balanced and quivered on the whirled ridges of my fingertip. As I looked closer, the world opened up. The world that makes up our world; where spinning electrons circle in wide sweeping orbits around their nucleus in their infinitesimal universes. Solid became no longer solid. It was as if my hand should pass through the brute mass of the tree trunk beside me as if it were a wisp of vapour. And I found myself teetering on the precipice of another infinity; another eternity of space. If I were to fall, I would fall, endlessly tumbling, through fractal chaos, a kaleidoscope of complexity. A world no longer trapped by the rules of physics… or even our minds.

Our world, the world of rock and ice and fire, solid and unyielding, is made from a chaos of freedom; a reeling, floating enigma dancing in infinite space. A world of ‘charm’ and ‘strange’; of coloured quarks, strange attractors and quantum entanglement. A space where the events upon which our world exists last for just a fraction of a chaotic second. But my perception is too slow to hold it; like an ancient oak that tries to glimpse a fork of lightning.        

Here I am, standing on the frail skin of this spinning globe, caught between two infinities; one above, one below. I am a being who is bound by time in a universe of eternities. Is it therefore not surprising that, when I look up into the night’s sky, my heart hears the roar of eternity?

In aeternum

                           

And in this dark breathing night, I feel lost, adrift, in this foaming vastness. Perhaps I am the one of whom Teilhard de Chardin wrote that “the world had disclosed itself as too vast”. In which case he was wrong, for I feel no desire to close my eyes and disappear, to crumble before the brute vastness of the Universe. Its vastness affirms in me a singing, dancing energy that I am more than me and folds into its velvet blackness my heart-song of ‘Why?’

It might be a bad reading, but perhaps the NIV translator of Ecclesiastes 3:11 was right after all, that the divine has indeed “set eternity in the hearts of men.” If so, he reveals so much more of himself than he does of Quoheleth’s god. A mistranslation? Perhaps, but it was the one phrase that kept my faith in the bible, when everything else blew away like threshed chaff and clung in my mouth with the taste of death. And now those words come back to me, resonating in my soul like a struck bell. I am a man locked into temporality and with eternity set – no, burning – in my heart.

Balanced on this thin line of time stretched between eternal infinities, is this why we look so longingly into the bowl of the night’s sky for that which we have yet to recognise? Is that why our hearts sometimes sing to us strange songs and we yearn for that for which we have no words?

Is this why, when I sit alone with the wind and the untamed things at an ancient place, that my eyes fill with water and it feels as if my heart is about to break?

Is this why the glow of amber fills me with hope? Or why the new buds of spring are so very potent? Is this why we repeatedly fail to come to terms with the concept of our death - because, at heart, we are the children of infinity? 

One OF these MORNINGS...

... I will climb the rushing slopes of Sunrising hill,
                   under their sigh of larches,
                          just as dawn is bursting apart the night and
                                 she lets her light rage and roll down the fields
                                           and the tangled fortress of badger sett and fox hole...

... And the air will dance with dew and shiver at the might of life...

And I swear I will keep on climbing. And I will climb on up the cloud pillared sky...

... above the hills and these friendly, folded fields. For this body will no longer be heavy enough to keep me earthbound...


And I will keep on climbing up and up
          and into the restless, crow-painted skies
                      blinded with the joy of a small boy's heart
                                   and a timid soul that walks lion-tall among angels and giants
                                              and keeps company with the untameable and the divine.


And I swear that my spirit will break open in wolf-like howls among those castled clouds until the universe pours itself inside of me and my heart beats with its blazing pulse.

... One of these mornings I will be so large my heart will contain universes...

.... and there will be nothing left of me but a hymn of praise.

AFTER the FIREWORKS

After the fireworks the rains came.
Long silvered spears that pierced the darkness, silently slicing the once electric, tumultuous air.
Slantwise and lazy, it fell upon the ground and the cardboard cones that exploded in fountains of colour and light with a hundred gasps of spellbound breath.
The leaves, slippery and wet, drifted upon the same wind that carried fire into the heavens.
The wire of sparklers, as thin as dowsing rods and just as magical, pin sharp and needle hot, lay unseen upon mud and grass (where beetles forage). And the rains came for them too.

The bonfire, built by men with serious faces and the light hearts of their youth, flamed with the roaring passion of a warrior in the wintering dark. Earlier a ring of silhouettes had gathered round it to stare into its strange dance. Its tattoo beating upon the more primal hearts. Fire attracts all, but its power seems to be the lightest upon the children. Excited they run and shout to each other above the roar. It is the elderly who feel its power the greatest. The ruddy flicker deepening the lines of aged faces -contours of grief and laughter and unspent anxieties. They stand, silently staring into the deep furnace; lost to the cold and the ticking of eternity, their eyes once more ageless as they yield to a magic that once stirred their souls.

Stand here and watch those who are entering maturity, see how they will suddenly break away from the jostling throng, as if something has suddenly caught their eye; their eyes drawn to the alchemy of flame dancing under the bowl of night. For a short while they are stilled, silent, feeling the beat of the heat upon their faces. Watch their eyes, the way they stand, poised on adulthood. They see how this light discloses the deeper, truer, wilder beauty of the little group of girls alongside. They are learning to listen to this strange song of fire that is sirening their souls. For a while they stand mute and enchanted, then the noise of childhood pulls them back. But next year, they'll be here. Standing perhaps a little longer... looking a little deeper... losing themselves a little further in the great hymn of smoke and spark and flame. For evermore, each fire they encounter, in hearth or garden, they'll seek out that ancient song that called to them in their youth: The older they get, the stronger it will be.

But the rains came even for this; hissing and soughing, as the wood and hedgerows once more come alive. And now, the embers glow and wink like dragons' eyes and the ash lies thick and black upon the grass. It will remain there for many months to come - this circle of night where once the darkness blazed with light and we stood together to catch, once more, the songs of fire. And then the rain came. The glorious festival of water and light... and with it... the breathing silence of the land, once more, embracing the night.

WHEN we STAND...

... beneath the silent bowl of stars

      and look up into the fire of Cassiopea's beauty.

Let us not fill it with questions

                   or doubts

                           or certainties.


But let us also be silent

      living together this one perfect moment.

The MOON and VENUS...

... ride high over Sunrising Hill,
       on this rook ravaged dawn.

A robin on a fence watches me
      watching the waning moon and Venus
      soar the polished sky.

We both fly off on ravens' wings.

The Carpet Man...

... looks up into a sky that is as heavy and as white as baskets of laundry. The rain cascades in lazy waterfalls from the clouds and bowing leaves and my nose. He hunches his shoulders, and heads inside.

And the rain falls...


The pavement shines like night-filled mirrors. It must be nice to stand here all day - like the allotment scarecrow - in this gentle wash of rain. To feel its fingers upon the skin and listen to its music... and the rooks' call and jackdaws' laugh... and to watch the nettles and dandelions grow.

And the rain falls in a dance...


The big ash and the little oak, the young chestnut profuse with its prickly treasures, whisper and drink. High in the tall beech, on the corner where the dogs like to meet, two pigeons jostle and clash.

And the rain falls in a dance of air and light and...


Leaves and crystals fall upon the grass beneath the beech tree. The sheep continue to graze, unnoticing, their fleeces glazed with a frost of wet-light.  

And the rain falls in a dance of air and light and the softest...


The Birdman laughs and shakes himself like an old sheepdog. For a split second he is surrounded by an aura of water. The hedges of his garden shrill with tiny voices.


And the rain falls in a dance of air and light and the softest brush of life.


Is this what it is to pray?

The WILLOWS stand...

... beside the brown churned Avon where Shakespeare sleeps; lime green WATERFALLS of dripping light. Almost overnight, the bare LIMBS of the chestnuts, beloved by rook and crow, fill out with new LEAVES. They flap and  flutter, hanging low like SLEEPING bats... emerald, fluttering, sleeping, bats.

Down the lanes, blossom FROSTS the blackthorn bushes; white and honey sweet.

But here, the COLOURS of spring are waterfalls of lime... and EMERALD sleeping bats..

SOMEONE tore the CLOUDS today....

.... and the SKY .... 

... wept WATER and...

  .... blackthorn  BLOSSOM...

      ... UPON the shining street...

Some HEAVEN spilt by gulls

Old Hunstanton, Norfolk, where a childhood heaven touches the sea with sandy feet... and the smell of seaweed... and a bluster of kites... and the clink of bucket against spade....

.....  It is a dog's paradise; this land of dunes and sands and retreating waters... We throw the ball, arcing through the sea-salted air, and time pauses....
           
  ... the sky is painted thickly in Prussian blue and the towering clouds, of smudged greys and whites, build and pile upon the cutting north-easterly wind. The marram grass whistles; coarse and leathery, and as parched as a camel's dream...   

  ... among the dunes and the younger lovers, my parents lie, asleep in each other's arms, under the gull crying sky.