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.