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ARTS AND CULTURE

Lament for the powerless

  • 16 October 2017

 

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