Poetry

For Week 1, Sunday of the CoE’s #LiveLent Devotional \\\* Over the cold dark swirling mists, the Spirit breathes then speaks: Light, come forth.

For Day 4 of the CoE #LiveLent Devotional. \\\* All things - the frail and the sturdy, the weak and the strong- hold together, and consist in You Who leaves the saved ninety-nine to find the one; lost sheep who slips into the dark and unclear paths where fear thrives. You offer redemption and finding and saving from the miry clay. Save me.

\\\* May laughter linger here, ring loud in this place where the weight of the burden of living once reigned. May the promise of good news, of sight and freedom come true, bringing life to this thirsty earth.

\\\* I come to lose myself in the brightness of the King, to join the crashing waves the whistling winds and glistening leaves in joyful adoration, to raise a song, like a string quivering at the strumming of the maestro, a tune pregnant with desire its purpose revealed in the reveling of those who hear, many voices, all together resounding as one.

For Lent this year, I’m choosing to reflect via the medium of poetry, inspired in part by Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast and an inability to pray, in any formal sense of the word. What started as a season of uncertainty has evolved into something bigger, hence this, an attempt to use poetry as prayer. These will be a response to the daily reflection from the Church of England’s LiveLent app which this year encourages us to reflect on creation and how we can be better stewards of it. Here goes! NB for a version in which I attempt to read, visit the anchor.fm page. \\\* The bright gleam of sunlight reflecting in the glass and the steel of the hills we have built lull me into forgetting, that this - these monuments to our power and resolve which wrap themselves like a shroud around the horizon, a scar from a wound revived in the present, tethering us to the certainty of the things we think we know- is but a moment, fleeting in its existence. ...

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #95. \\\* It thunders, and then it wafts, its wispy tendrils slowly rising like the white smoke of incense from a censer, held aloft by a priest intoning a muttered prayer. Behind, a bridge to the past hides, disappearing, as it were, into the haze of memory; ahead, the future - not yet glimpsed but in the moment frozen - and enjoyed.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt 93: \\\* Here, prone beneath the weight of things unseen, the vision has begun to fade, the dream once resplendent in its colour, now faint and grey, Between the leaving and the grieving a messenger appears, a key in its wings, a gift of redemption and rebirth.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #90 . \\\* The brilliance of her luminescent eyes lights the darkness all around, twin pricks of desire shining bright, like stars, stark against the tapestry of a night sky. Fire and ice, both together and apart lie here, the wild and the quiet as one.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #84. Image Source. \\\* Behind the grime, and the ravages of time the remains of living now lie, each layer of dirt a sigh, a dirge for the mystery of abandonment, for how easy it is for things once woven into the fabric of the present to slip beneath the shroud of the memories we lose. Maybe this is what leaving is, things returning to the way they always were.

For The Sunday Muse Prompt #83 . Image “After The Rain” by Cyril Rolando \\\* I tremble at the echo of the booming thunder, the resounding of its clap like the roar of a lion stirred, a brilliance incandescent in its majesty as it splits the night sky like a warm knife shears butter. I have shivered in the embrace of a light rain its fluid fingers, by persistence finding their way through my garments till they meet my bare skin. ...