Selected poems
For Astrid
Astrid
There come times
For us to confront
The uncertainty
Of moving-on —
We who are yet
To make that leap
Walk with you
To that edge of wonder —
We tell each other Story
Of life beyond life
And the grace
Of ultimate mystery
Making 'All things NEW'
Astrid
Here for you
Is the opening-up
Of journey's end
Moving us all
Towards intimate discovery —
Towards a knowing
Where spoken-out words
Dissolve into amazement
Beyond comprehending
Astrid
We celebrate
What you have received
Through your searching out
The Jesus Story —
Immensely thankful
That you have walked
This Journey
Amongst remarkable people
Here on the edge
Of this ancient mountain
Sharing Words
Exploring mystery
Searching possibilities
That dovetail into Life
Astrid
With you
may we
Have the courage
To delve and discover
Our journey of wonder
A travelling Mindfully
Into deep-dreaming
Beyond time
Making our quantum leap
Into the strongly real
Finding Gabriel's oboe
I am recovering
something strongly alive
Something deeply rooted
Ready to jump out again
From a resonating memory
Renewed this morning
Through a 'chance' tuning
Into ABC FM
Here a 'thank you' is also due
For the immediacy and diversity
Of listening and a life-remaking
Courtesy You-Tube and Wikipedia
To name but two such transforming hosts
Through them
Ennio Morricone and his 'Gabriel's Oboe'
Resound with stunning amazement
Through that complexity of being
Which is emmerging in the experience
Of one slowly-becoming human
Encountering a numinous musicality
Edging an eternal-grace
An ode for Valentine's Day
There are moments in outside time
When all things come together
In a sense of 'rightness'
All things in their place
All thing knowing their place
All things not so much in stasis
As in harmony with themselves
Here is deep looking
Into the nature of things
Looking from the inside
Building sound taste touch smell
Into an overwhelming symphony
Seeing into the roots of all being
With an infinity of knowing
Life lived with a quality
That may last an eternity
On the inside — and the outside?
It becomes endowed
With that sense of quality
Which can always potently linger
Pulling you back into its embrace
As we respond to its evocation
And in such an ambience of wonder
We come to know beyond doubt
That love is the centre of all we are
Lament for the powerless
Powerless ones
Innocent ones
Called to live timelessly
An ongoing liminality of terror
You destroyed ones
Who have come to be in places
Of age-long contention and hate
In place since the first sensing of empire
Through the long remembered Nimrod
Akkadian — Assyrian — Babylonian — Persian
The names and uniforms change
The oppression simply grows in depth and heaviness
Perhaps ironically resilient ones
It has been the imposition of empire
That has given refuge-space for your clan-family
within your tightly squeezed survival-place
There to find a semblance of holding to life
Born into a world that knows how to hate
That holds sweet vendetta through the generations
Relying on the local functionaries of a faraway Shah
To maintain a semblance of festering order
But never