Selected poems
Here comes the man(For those into Palm Sunday)
Here comes the man
the one living a vital underground stream
with five centuries of collective memory
that first came to the here and now
in the imaginal mind of Zechariah
the Jewish prophet of national restoration
Here comes the man
the one coming as king on the donkey-colt
declaring to the heart of the nation
a way of universal peace
a way of confronting the powers
of militarism and political compromise
Here comes the man
sharing four days of intense being with the people
sharing story and foretelling
sharing the meal of a new reign of peace
knowing the testing of the depths in the Gethsemane Garden
climaxing in tortured abandonment when the sun died.
Bladerunner 2049 and the Making of Soul(A haiku series)
Where is the soul' he said
'You get by without one' she replied
Dilemmas confront
In this immense arena
Finding your Story
Always quest for depth
Story gives a history
It makes you human
Mythmaking struggles
Alone here yet not alone
Discover saga
In discovering
Such is the making of soul
Amassed awareness
Shallow happiness
Offers no soul-making way
Consciousness through pain
Replicant live deep
You have breath to make yourself
Despair no option
A black tower in Kensington
(A lament seeded with anger for the people of Grenfell Tower)
I am confronted
By this tower of evil
A Mordor in our midst
A Funeral Pyre of dark sacrifice
An evil aflame in its terror casing
Conflagration in the night
Shadows at the windows
Bodies merging into the ashes
Of the indiscriminating shades of hell
Such evil in the hands
Of mid-range bureaucrats
Who hear no evil who see no evil
As they forge their
Cost-sensitive municipal budgets
One budget line to rule them
One budget line to find their remains
One budget line to bring them all to nothing
One budget line to bury them
And quickly forget them.
Pavement Café in a Windstorm
Perhaps sitting in that Place
At that particular Time
Has about it
A degree of misgiving
Siting at those tables
On the pavement
There in Ferntree Gully Village
In that intensity of gusting wind
Perhaps wasn't the safest
Of decisions
Yet it was a Place and Time
To value the immensity of the Moment
Sitting over late coffee
There were unique moments
To observe and enter
Browningleaves modesttwigs
Finding a final exultation
In the scurries of unpredictable windflight
Leaves twisting torquing pirouetting
Along hardened geometricplanes
Eddying in the compellingjoy
Of these vortexmoments
Verging towards the boundaries
Of a Chaos
Hungry and ripe
With uncertainty
John Cranmer lives in Boronia on the outer edge of Melbourne. He is as a Uniting Church Minister (somewhat retired) and, in collaboration with Denham Grierson, has recently produced a collection of poems, Walking on Bones.