Six years ago, poetry arose for me spontaneously. My sleep was disturbed, and I was sitting up in the early hours meditating for long periods of time. I would hear the silence behind and within all forms of life.
It started with the bird chatter at dawn, each call or song drawing me back to the silence out of which it arose. The words, too, were coming out of this stillness. Every ‘thing’ was trailing silence behind it. A year later, I attended my first retreat with Rupert at Buckland Hall. It was there that I read my poems to an audience for the first time.
Initially my poems had a more abstract, non-dual flavour to them:
Listen to Giving Birth to a Me
Giving Birth to a Me
In thoughts of becoming
I give birth to a me.
Safely held
in the cradle of my mind
complete in my cocoon
I miss the heart
of my matter.
I turned my attention to learning the craft of writing poetry and have since used a more concrete language. I focused on the natural world, celebrating individual living forms and their dissolution into transparency, often through decay. By focusing on details, the intimation and intimacy of what lay behind could shine through.
Listen to Wingspans
Wingspans
I
I hang out my wings to dry
in the wild quietude
that I am
like the first cormorant
I ever saw
who took my breath away
a stark cross
louring
against the Cornish sky.
II
A heron glides
over the estuary sheen
parting the airwaves
with slow rhythmic wings.
Its hulk rises above the water’s edge
promising me passage
to the unnamed
III
An owl
heavy with moon
swoops
soars
carrying the breadth of the world
between its wings.
Listen to The Fall
The Fall
Your coat froths into veins of quartz,
the schist rock scattered about you
mirrors the shape of your skull.
A tuft of fleece caught in the crag high above
waves in the wind.
Your flesh has tightened to a gravy skin,
the yellow tag at your ear
is intact.
Your eye socket is watchful
– speaks of absence.
Your jaw is frozen mid-bleat.
Listen to Shutting Down for Winter
Shutting Down for Winter
The nest is smeared like builders’ caulk
along the shed’s eaves, whorl upon whorl
of a white and beige protectorate.
Rounded doorways welcome the in-flight
of worker wasps fattening young queens
with the apple crop.
Later, spiders wreathe cobwebs round
the palace door, striped abdomens throb
in the cold, narrow wings shiver.
No longer hunter-gatherers
the wasps crawl over the soiled meringue
of home, feelers, yellow legs and mandibles
fingering a sacred braille.
Listen to The Gardener of Aleppo
The Gardener of Aleppo
Hearing Beethoven in the barrel bombs
he greens a rubbled city,
plants hazelnut, pear and rosemary.
The essence of the world is a flower, he says.
Young women and freedom fighters
drop in to buy cut blooms.
Feeding his rose bushes,
pruning the loquat tree
he is blown up, meticulously.
Listen to The Birth
The Birth
Today walking across yellow moor
ferns like tongues of flame,
I think, my birthday, but not my birth hour yet.
The leaning hollies are bursting with berries.
Tonight an owl’s lullaby floods cold indigo air.
Darkness velvets me, the moon, soft sponge
daubs me with her silver light. I am here!
During this time, several people significant to me went through their own dying process, including both my parents.
I focused more on narrative poetry around my own family relationships. The poems have expanded into a full collection, The Plumb Line, which will be published in early 2022. The title came from a dream I had after my father thanked me for ‘protecting him’ while I visited him at his nursing home abroad.
That same night, I woke with the words: ‘It’s not me, it’s not me the safe-keeper, but the plumb line between us’. I had had an extremely difficult relationship with him, but in the last three years of his life, I became particularly aware of a ‘plumb line’, or ground of being, ballasting and containing our relationship.
This poem came to me on the third anniversary of my father’s death:
Listen to An Alembic on the Threshold
An Alembic* on the Threshold
I sing as your body shuts down,
watch the doors of your mind
fly off their hinges, a white sun pulsing
through your eyes into the room,
your chest an alembic, gathering you
with each breath you suck in,
I witness your birth as you die
as you suck in your last breath
elated, finally fully alive
and you don’t expire, but keep hold
of the breath and take wing
as I gaze into your brilliant face on the bed
not knowing you’ve left, mesmerised.
* An Alembic is a distilling apparatus used by alchemists.
