In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

Category: Poetry

  • Gathering Fruit

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  • Broken Colour

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  • I Send Greetings from this Place

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      The place I’m thinking of this evening is called St Aldhelm’s Chapel, pictured above. It is a small and simple Norman structure built right on the edge of a Dorset cliff, facing out over the English Channel and beyond that to Europe. The chapel has no electricity and the interior is dark. It has…

  • The Widow

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      Here is another poem of loss and it’s called “The Widow” (the title links to it). I wrote it some years ago, in sorrow for the grief of the person concerned, but also in awe at how she voiced her bereavement, the words she reached for, and the way she flung them out, time…

  • The Photograph

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    “He first deceased : she for a little tried To live without him, liked it not, and died.”     There they stand, those old antagonists, posing at the head of the high-walled city, that vast coronet of ruin.   Above them, the daily familiar blue glare of God’s regard, far beneath them, their radiant…

  • Trace a Fraught Frontier

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    Where’s the fraught frontier between Mercia and East Anglia ? Guards were stationed here gazing out from within. And within was somewhere to die for. And without was someone to kill. I explored it once, that fraught frontier, now footpath between nettles. It was sunday and Cambridge families were out walking there after a good…

  • To Stand upon the Earth

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    This is the last of a daily succession of poems I’ve been uploading “from our seclusion.” They are all excerpts from two series of poems I wrote in the 1990’s, one on Martin Buber’s concept of I-Thou, the other on Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow. They belong together, I think, in some way. The…

  • The True, the Between, the Forming

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    This is the penultimate seclusion song of this series, in which the hyphen between I and Thou has alternated each day with the shadow.… continue reading