Easter Sunday Morning

... quite early, and the street was as still as the ghost of sheep on the high hill. But dawn had broken. Oh Lord, how it had broken, sending splinters of light into the victorious, ringing, bird-carved, air. Even though snow still lay as white as sea foam on Sunrising Hill and lay under each hedge, ribbed, like the bare, bleached bones of ship-wrecked schooners, the sun had risen high; higher than the turbulent rooks and higher than the breath that billowed in clouds of steam from my ragged body.

I walked abroad in that slumbering village, and as alone as a blushing, rib-full, Adam, beneath a sky of thrush egg blue; as blue as the cornflowers of summers past. Down Main Street, past Quo Vadis. No curtains twitched, though the garden hedges bristled with song. The occupant of each house slept warm and deep under the soft hills and folds of their duveted wildernesses. Jackdaws wheeled and laughed among the sleeping bones of the old oak on Fourways Corner to see the sun beams of that beautiful morning trying to prise their honeyed fingers through the neat, new shutters of the Old Shop and its cymbal playing tin monkey in the window. A blackbird stood as proud as your mother (should she see you now) in the middle of the road. The sun warm on her back. She watched me pass with beetle eyes, a harmless spirit in her eternal Eden of sun and ice.

Only two other souls were awake that morning. The vicar who, with knitted brow, played with whirling fingers the organ of the braying heating pipes in the village church. Climbing down from one of the Jacobean, dark oak pews, he fussed some dust into the morning air as the sun poured like Eucharist wine through the great east window and stained the altar cloth crimson and blue and, oh, such golds. Does he know that, when no one is looking, the faded saints and the firemen in their smart blue serge climb down out of their stained glass windows to ring out the hour on the faithful old tenor? Or that, in the church tower (made of rough brick and cobwebs and prayer), the stone angels play hide and seek with the umbrella-winged bats, piping and squeaking, in the belfried dark? Or that, behind his back, at every Pentecost, the yews in the churchyard burst into flame and that tongues of fire dance upon every shaggy branch?

The other is the runner who outruns the dawn, red faced and breathing out dragon's breath, down past the village hall (built in 1929), newly painted, and then past the Post Office, bursting with wool and flowers and unlicked stamps, and on past the shuttered tearoom. But not even he can outrun my nose in this impudent north-easterly wind that has been sharpened by the claws of polar bears, and the clash of icebergs, and carries down these whistling streets the sound of Saami bells, and shamanic gongs and the deep green waters where the blue whales sing. Past the Peacock, smelling of booze and laughter and last night's fires. Down Saddledon Street to blow on my fingers and breathe in the sweet smell of the cattle barn on the frigid air. The old dog at Herbert's Farm snuffles where foxes loped, loose-limbed and laughing, under the frosted thatch and snow and dreamt of the days he ran wild and free over Orchard Hill. A woodpecker drummed out his exuberant life among the sighing trees. The morning whistled and trilled.

As I returned home, the Keeper of the park gates opened his front door, stood in his front garden and roared out his approval of the triumph of that morning.

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.  

WOLF wind

Send Newsletters to your fans from ReverbNation.com

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...

Free EPK from ReverbNation.com

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.

St MARY'S, Middle Tysoe

Free music player widget at ReverbNation.com

Click for audio version

The church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Middle Tysoe

Wood pigeons gather in the trees
about Church Farm and swifts
contemplate their flight, as late summer
light falls upon Jacobean pews
through watery Victorian glass.

Silence curls in the evening
air, clinging to the chancel
walls like the memory
of swung incense or the faith
of ploughmen; rough-hewn
from the rich red soil and grey rains
that give birth to the racking cough
and burning ague.

Beneath the stony gaze
of the Norman Horseman
and panting dog,
    God
    and
    I
sit opposite
each other,
eye to eye
toe to toe;
Job before his maker
(but which is which?).

                     We lay our complaints
before each other. Mine written in
guttering candlelight and the arrow
of a sparrow's short flight,
His written in Levantine dust
and the bitter taste of cheap red wine.

Together we survey the distance
between us and silently
wonder why.

The FOLKS...

An ocean light haunted by avocet and tern
and the knapped towers of North Norfolk churches.
Towering clouds above
the flint and gorse of
a wide East Anglian landscape

And my Folks

The way I have ALWAYS known them

Pacing out the country paths

Arm in Arm

and

Hand in Hand

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.

WORDS on an EBB Tide

Work (paid and unpaid)... words that ceased to fit my world... that sense of turning inwards (positively and negatively)... shadows in the stillness... have all contrived to take my time and keep me away.

I have long learnt not to fear these fallow times; these times when words dry up... when you pick up a pen and it feels dry and lifeless. For I am dug from a world of ebb and flow; the tide, the sap, the sun's warmth. It is right and proper that those rhythms also pulse deep within me.

These spells are not to be feared - they are a part of us. They make us who we are. It is not as if I rely on words for my living...
No, my need to write is far more important than that.
I write because it reminds me how precious and beautiful it is to breathe.
I write because my heart would explode if I did not.

For awhile I haven't had the heart to open my blog and now that I have, I am touched beyond words (ironically) by the comments I find here.

I know the tide will turn and I will write again, for it feels as if my heart is so heavy with unborn words and with feelings that have no name. I want run up Windmill Hill and to take a broom and write in fire across the skies so that it will rain my heart down upon the woods and fields, and that the winds will find music to those words that lie mute and unformed in my soul.

The nestlings are beginning to flex their wings and I too share their joy of the early summer winds.

BESIDE the JIGSAW table...

Beside the jigsaw table stands a mug of hot water, tepid now and mostly undrunk. All the edges of the jigsaw are complete, bar one missing piece, and a picture emerges, moth-eaten and frayed in the centre. Outside owls hoot as they have always done; a sound so redolent of this little room enclosed in the night time, atop this house where so much life has been lived.

She sits hunched over the board, her long bent fingers brushing the chaos of pieces as if drawing music out of the colours. On the chair next to her is a little, rather threadbare, toy fox. I pick it up. Its stuffing is firm and unyielding, like stuffed toys used to be. "It is over 70 years old." she says, "I had it when I was ten."

There is a story; a story I have known since I was very small. It was always told with the ring of laughter, but its repetition spoke of darker fears. There was a spinster aunt, whom she loved dearly, and with whom as a special treat she would visit to stay for a night or two. This aunt was full of character, and drove a car when it was almost unheard of for a woman to drive; and she drove it with a reckless zeal. She was artistic and bohemian, had a female lover (although we did not talk about it in those days) and she was ferociously clever and independent. On one visit to her aunt, when she was about 10 years old, the aunt jokingly said to her, "My dear, you have been SOO good I think I might want to keep you here to live with me." But she didn't know if she was joking or serious. Every time after that, when she went to visit the aunt, she was terrified that she would never return to her home or see her mother again. She then got this fox and it became her talisman. It was always by her side. She took it everywhere to watch over her and to ensure that she would always get safely back home. She walked together with that fox through the night time valleys of those ten year old's deepest fears.

She tells me the story again and as she tells it she absent-mindedly brushes its muzzle with the back of her fingers and I don't know what to say, no longer knowing quite how to relate to this very elderly woman, bent like the hawthorns on Windmill Hill, but who is also the mother who chased away my childhood nightmares, and who, even now, is this little ten year old girl, with her fox who is watching over her, facing into the dark night from which she fears she will never return.

We turn off the light. An owl shrieks in the tree next to the house and through the dormer window there are stars and the black silhouettes of geese in flight. All I can do is smile a smile of understanding that says 'I understand and that its ok that I understand.'

WHEN we WALKED to THE wood

Learn how to get your music noticed at ReverbNation.com

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...

On BELAS KNAP I sat down...

An old one, but a recent visit prompted me to post it here:

Email newsletters for bands at ReverbNation.com

Belas Knap (GLO1) lies on a gentle hill-slope overlooking a steep-sided river valley. The name is derived from the Old English words bel meaning a beacon and cnaepp meaning a hilltop. It displays many of the classic features of Cotswold-Severn long barrows and is often seen as a type-site for examples with lateral chambers.  The wedge-shaped mound is over 50m long and stands nearly 4m high; it is orientated north-south. At the north end is a deep forecourt between two rounded horns, and in the back of the forecourt is an H-shaped setting of stones, perhaps the remains of a portal dolmen. The ditch that seems to define the sides of the mound is a product of reconstruction work during the 1930s; the bank of soil and stones outside the ditch is in fact material that has weathered off the top of the mound.

Timothy Darvill. Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (2004:262) 

On Belas Knap I sat down

For I felt in need of some sacred ground

And I had no strength in my ragged soul

And for me the nonetide bell had ceased to toll

And so to Belas Knap by the withered tree

I hunted him who haunted me.

For I’d lost my way in Bethlehem

And I’d bartered my name to Rome

And the body of god was a dry wafer crisp

And my soul felt as cold as stone

And the book in my hand had lost is voice

And the altar candles their flame

And the blood had turned to cheap red wine

And the world had lost your name.

Then I heard it in the earth

And I felt it in the air

And the crowing of the birds above

An older voice laid bare.

The spilling of a wilder blood

The beat of shaman drum

The smell of earth and woody moss

The cycles of the sun.

And its…

1 for the man who counts our bones

2 for the woman who carries our souls

3 for the man who reads the stones

4 for the woman who flies with the crows

5 for the man who rides the moon

6 for the man who catches the dream  

And the primal drum beat pulses

Through the veins of every leaf

As before the Christ and devil danced

To the frozen music of our creeds

The Alpha and Omega busts out of Palestine

No longer held by cultures

No longer bound by time.

And so to Belas Knap I came

And kindled there a dying flame

And as I sat on ancient ground

It was an older God I found

As in the shade of a withered tree

I hunted him who haunted me.

On WASHING Days...

Free Electronic Press Kits template from ReverbNation.com

... particularly on April washing days like this; when I stand at the sink, hands as red and furrowed as the antique faces of babies, and I can look up to a sky so heavenly blue that if I were to reach up and drag it down and were to bury my face in it I would smell the wax crayons of God; and amidst that sailor boy blue the proud castles of cumuli, boil and bluster, cauliflowering the almost spring heavens. It is on days like these that I hear loudest the call of the my childhood imagination - so real I could have dreamt it only yesterday.

Perhaps it is the sight of washing billowing before the galleon-ing wind and the walks I had with Mum, down the Green Lane that squeezed its way between the long narrow strips of back-garden terraces and allotments. A silent no-man's land; a furtive quiet place from which other worlds could be spied through gaps in fences. It smelt of compost heaps and midday lunch being cooked and the smouldering bonfires of weeds. It was filled with the sound of dogs barking and their wet-nosed snuffling and most of all, the wild tear-filled wind played among the washing, pegged and propped, like a clipper's sails.

Mum was never happier than when she had pegged out her beaten but clean army of washing on the line after a morning steaming in the kitchen, until the condensation ran down the windows and walls like rain and the air was sliced by the sharp smell of boiling handkerchiefs and washing powder. And I was never happier than when, tilting like Don Quixote at the ballooning sheets and bedspreads, I raced through them feeling their coldness trickle down my face and Mum calling me in so as not to get her washing dirty and we had jam on our bread while the radio played.

But for some reason, what calls to me the most is a couple of pictures from a book I have long since lost. They are of towering clouds in a powder blue sky (a washing day sky) and in those clouds was a whole town, with shops and lampposts and a sun that shone yellow. It seemed to me that all the men in it were avuncular uncles with bald heads and wide smiles and they wore old fashioned Sunday suits. The type of uncle who made sixpences appear from inside your ear, even when you knew that there were no sixpences there, because you had checked. And the women all looked like the Queen, when she was young, and wore long dresses that swept along the red-bricked pavements. There was a friendly red dragon in the picture too. I assume he was friendly; he had big smiling eyes and a head shaped like a Labrador.

I say assume, for, as I recall, the book had no covers. It was just a few stray pages and so it had no story. It was like me, without beginning or end. Just as I, one day, found myself alive in a world of sun and colour, noise and scent, this world within these few pictures, just was. And it was those pictures that captivated me and it was in them that I found my stories beyond words.

From 3 to 30 I read very few words, I immersed myself in the pictures. I inhabited them, I explored behind every wall, every hedge, and over every beckoning, windmilled, church-spired, horizon. I played with Janet and John, and Dick and Jane outside their world of words. Lanes were adventured and streams raided for sticklebacks and pirated treasure. I read pictures with the skill of a textual critic and hours could be lost over just one page. Sometime ago, I bought a secondhand copy of one of my most favourite childhood books, a Ladybird book about a mountain adventure. I opened the cover and began to read the unfamiliar story that lay beside the oh so familiar pictures. A little while later I found myself, once more lost in those pictures. The story remains unread, but the pictures await for more adventures.

Easter SUNDAY Morning...

Sell music on itunes at ReverbNation.com

... quite early, and the street was as still as the ghost of sheep on the high hill. But dawn had broken. Oh lord, how it had broken, sending splinters of light into the victorious, ringing, bird-carved, air. Even though snow still lay as white as sea foam on Sunrising Hill and lay under each hedge, ribbed, like the bare, bleached bones of ship-wrecked schooners, the sun had risen high; higher than the turbulent rooks and higher than the breath that billowed in clouds of steam from my ragged body.

I walked abroad in the slumbering village, and as alone as a blushing, rib-full, Adam, beneath a sky of thrush egg blue; as blue as the cornflowers of summers past. Down Main Street, past Quo Vadis. No curtains twitched, though the garden hedges bristled with song. The occupant of each house slept warm and deep under the soft hills and folds of their duveted wildernesses. Jackdaws wheeled and laughed among the sleeping bones of the old oak on Fourways Corner to see the sun beams of that beautiful morning trying to prise their honeyed fingers through the neat, new shutters of the Old Shop and its cymbal playing tin monkey. A blackbird stood as proud as your mother (should she see you now) in the middle of the road. The sun warm on her back. She watched me pass with beetle eyes, a harmless spirit in her eternal eden of sun and ice.

Only two other souls were awake. The vicar who, with knitted brow, played with whirling fingers the organ of the braying heating pipes in the village church. Climbing down from one of the Jacobean, dark oak pews, he fussed some dust into the morning air as the sun poured like Eucharist wine through the great east window and stained the altar cloth crimson and blue and, oh, such golds. Does he know that, when no one is looking, the faded saints and the firemen in their smart blue serge climb down out of their stained glass windows to ring out the hour on the faithful old tenor? Or that, in the church tower (made of rough brick and cobwebs and prayer), the stone angels play hide and seek with the umbrella-winged bats, piping and squeaking, in the belfried dark? Or that, behind his back, at every Pentecost, the yews in the churchyard burst into flame and that tongues of fire dance upon every shaggy branch?

The other is the runner who outruns the dawn, red faced and breathing out dragon's breath, down past the village hall (built in 1929), newly painted, and then past the Post Office, bursting with wool and flowers and unlicked stamps, and on past the shuttered tearoom. But not even he can outrun my nose in this impudent north-easterly wind that has been sharpened by the claws of polar bears, and the clash of icebergs, and carries down these whistling streets the sound of Saami bells, and shamanic gongs and the deep green waters where the blue whales sing. Past the Peacock, smelling of booze and laughter and last night's ashes. Down Saddledon Street to blow on my fingers and the sweet smell of the cattle barn on the frigid air. The old dog at Herbert's Farm snuffled where foxes loped, loose-limbed and laughing, under the frosted thatch and snow and dreamt of the days he ran wild and free over Orchard Hill. A woodpecker drummed out his exuberant life among the sighing trees. The morning whistled and trilled.

As I returned home, my hand on the garden gate, the Park Keeper opened his front door and roared out his approval to the triumph of the morning.

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.

The ASH TREE across...

... the road (friend of jackdaws and crooked hearts)
           stretches up into a dusk of glassy gold.
                 Her leaves steeped in autumn light.

A fountain of yellow falls upon the dying blooms of the carpet man's tender care.

I wait under the silent skies... silent save for the transcendent whoop of life and the distant laugh of rooks. I can feel my heart beat... and hear the pulse of blood around my head... and the sparrows in the hedgerow... and the pop and swish of falling leaves...

The church clock strikes, rolling over rooftops and fields and on and on up to the wordless woods.

The earth sings such magnificent hymns to the soul.

MAGICKRY - A Gypsy Heart

As Autumn strides laughing across the fields, scattering raindrops and berries, I thought it might be a good time for some unabashed romanticism. 
Life teaches us two things:
1. Romance does the heart good and brings a smile to the soul - and,  on these darker and chillier evenings, who would deny us that? 
2. Small boys will always be totally captivated by a smile and a wild, gypsy heart ;)

Magickry - A Gypsy Heart

There was a pretty gypsy maid

In auburn glades she’d wend her ways

And soft among the elder’s shade

In summer’s haze, and silvered days

The oak and ash would sing to her

And bring to her their autumn blaze

And butterflies would follow her

And over her, in thistle-down

Would thread a web so spider thin

Of rainbow hues to dress her in

And dew-gems for a crown.

She sang her songs of mystery

And wizardry and magickry

And spells that bind and mimicry

And filigree the stars that spun

Around her head with silken threads

Of orbits dark and distant suns

In ancient lore and alchemy,

And rune-wise, the words that she

Would weave among the grass   

 

She found a world of gallantry

Of errantry and pageantry

And though she longed to tarry there

And lose her heart and marry there

Her gypsy heart would carry there

The far off winds that harried her

Of distant lands that promised her

With silken words admonished her

Of oases green and fountains tall

Of stormy seas at the cliffs of fall

And zephyrs breathed vermilion

And gilded gold pavilions

And stallions and sherbet from

The opium fields of Avalon

In darker days, the wind would say

“There are other paths that call your way”

At night these paths would sing to her

And bring to her, and wing to her

The friends of her, of wings and fur

With wilder hearts astir.

By badger light and lantern’s sigh

And lonely flies the vixen’s cry

And all would come to sit with her

With heart and soul close-knit with her

Find comfort ‘neath the ash and briar

They sought beside her dreaming fire.

When alone among the moon beam’s dance

Schoolboy did chance to steal a glance

And held by her smile of golden bliss

He sought her kiss upon his cheek

And by this feat, he’d be a king.

As sparks flew up from firelight’s glow

And fireflies show the crystal’s globe

She held his hand so merrily

That happily and gallantly

He walked this world as new.

And now beneath the forest’s moon

And soft among the moths that flew

And swans that glide down woody steams

In dreams, he sings her tune.

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?