Fifty Minutes
Low level attacks
Neither war nor peace
A state of emergency
The terror
The famine
Or simply
The apathy
And what about
The Red-Cross parcels
That are sent back unopened?
What about the aid agencies
That are refused entry?
What about the food that is destroyed
Burnt
Or left to rot?
Humankind’s collected sins
Appear unadorned
Un-atoned
The ordinariness of sin
The banality of evil
In fifty minutes
In the midst of a world
That declared sin an anachronism
And evil always on the other side
In the midst of plenty
Generosity is lacking
And intoxication wins the day
The fifty minutes tick on
The foibles of generations visit the couple
Peter’s betrayal
Paul’s denial
The hope resurrected
Again and again
Out of the ashes of Hiroshima
Links cut
And links re-forged
As for myself
I struggle to accept
What has been given to me now
And entrusted to me down the generations
The seed of truth
In human encounters.
(London 2008 )
*****
Lost In Fragmentation
Dreams fade
And illusions dissolve
A new map is drawn
Among the ill-designed streets
Where steps echo
And fill the crowded rooms of the past.
In the curved space of the real
Where do sounds go?
And do we need a new perspective
To gather together the lost objects
To face a present
That gives no assurances
Apart from our capacity to gather our lost dreams
And face the lost ark?
Do we need a new space
The words that link
The language that brings together
The colours that create a picture
The waves that are part of the ocean
Do we need a new language
To stop the disintegration
That ravages the earth?
*****
The Sea and other Journeys
Where the waves lap the shore
Where the sand glistens
Wet and salty
Where the mermaids sing
And ships plough the horizon
Where dreams are blue
Blinded by the light
So cruel
So naked
The spray on the face
The salt on the lips
How many years
How many centuries
How many epochs
Unaware
Uninterpreted
Before the beginning
Before the word
Before a mind created the story
You are here my child
Innocent of meaning
Not a blank sheet
But a sponge
Absorbing
Dreaming
Dreaming the sea
Creating the sea
Together with mother’s love
You drink in the sea
The living element
Here my child
Where the sea meets the sky
And tears meet with dreams
And transform the universe
And the sun lowers its light
Caresses the waves
And they turn smooth
They whisper secrets
To those who want to listen
The enliven the human cells
Each glows in isolation
And all of them
Into a flaming body
That burns the earth.
Here my child
Meaning meets its end
And the next morning
When God creates the earth once again
When birds and insects awake
And the light of heaven
Hits the hills and valleys
And wild flowers
When sleep wanes
And humans emerge
New creatures
Out of the world of
Dreams and angels
Next morning
The morning of farewells
When silence gives way
To birds and dogs and roosters and humans
When silence is smashed by life
When the journey is resumed
The sound, the fury
And the love.
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