This poem was written over ten years ago, when flying was still a safe assumption and planes were common overhead. This year we’ve been been hearing less of the planes, but – thankfully – the swifts are still with us.
In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk
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Centaur
The centaur belongs in Greek myth and is part horse, part human. Some aspects, or strands, of the story portray the centaur as teacher, and as having healing powers.
The photograph here is of the Uffington White Horse. It can be found in Oxfordshire, ten miles east of Swindon, on the Berkshire Downs. It is by far the oldest of the white horses cut into the English chalk downs.
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I Send Greetings from this Place
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 just one small and narrow window in the south wall.
Sometimes I give poetry readings in there. The latest took place on a beautiful Autumn afternoon in 2017 and one of the poems I read was this, below :
I Send Greetings from this Place
I send greetings from this place
to my neighbours across the water
I bid them welcome to my mind
I bid them welcome to our future
and I grieve that in the present
some people on this small island
have been bewildered and misled
into thinking water can be wall
and a little and invented “we”
can be a separate, better home
than true connection, I to Thee,
each frail on a cliff-edge, sharing the sea.
Rogan Wolf
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The Widow
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 and again, to her dead husband. It was just before the funeral and she was sitting there by the open coffin, waiting to go into the church, facing out and away over the graveyard and the orange trees and lemon trees there (we were in Athens). The scene was somehow majestic.
And of course I cannot help but be aware of all the present sorrowing across the world, experienced by those left behind after the Covid-19 virus has passed through their family, meting out an often lonely death among strangers, a death without due words, without due recognition and community.
But here in the UK there is another element in this overpowering, all-embracing sense of grief and outrage and loss. And surely it must feel the same in the USA, in Brazil, in Russia, in all those other nations whose citizenry have lost their way like us, having had their integrity of being, their national honour, their self-respect, stolen from them by those who pretend to lead them.
In the UK, we are “led” by a felon Toad. It is on public record that, on two separate occasions in the past, he has been sacked for lying, and yet still and despite that, we made him our Prime Minister. And of course, thus encouraged, he just carries on where he left off. One of his first acts after becoming Prime Minister was to lie to our constitutional head of state, the Queen ; and of course he is now insisting on retaining his lying “advisor,” this warped creature of chaos and outrage. In humanity’s many-faceted crisis, we are trapped and lost at sea, ill-captained, ill-protected, deceived, reduced, insulted.
“My eyes ! My eyes ! Where are you ? I’m blind !”
The illustration above is an engraving by Gustave Doré. It is one of his illustrations for Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
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