Excerpts and Poems
“There is a loneliness I must not abandon too quickly;
it sits within me like the trembling bud of some flower,
too fine for the world to ever see…”
From ‘A Loneliness I Must Not Abandon Too Quickly’, ‘Poems of Pilgrimage’, 2020
“…Here is my hand, simple
and wanting just to feel you;
to be with you, to melt with you,
to mingle and to grow,
to lay our heads on one pillow,
our strands of hair twining,
our roots sinking down
through the same silent Mystery,
our breath meeting mid-air
and free of our bodies,
as I lean and I kiss you goodnight.”
From ‘Here is My Hand’, ‘Poems of Pilgrimage’, 2020
Where No One Knows Your Name, I Will Learn it
Here: my presence distilled.
In this hour, if you’ll have me,
I will be companion to you:
witness to your simplest existence.
A friend in an unfamiliar, liminal land;
where no one knows your name, I will learn it,
your favourite colour,
the house you lived in as a child.
I will come empty, so the melodies
of your life may resound in me,
and you may hear them, clearer than before.
I will come empty, so in my eyes
you may catch your own reflection
and meet it like a sweet, blameless stranger.
We can speak or not speak,
we can stare at the floor together.
Happily, I will sit and breathe beside you.
I know the difference it can make:
a familiar tree waving on the side of the
highway; a robin fluttered in
amidst the grey walls and corridors;
a second cup of coffee
on the table beside yours,
steam curling in sync in the air.
From ‘Courting the Mystery’, 2021
A Mirror, But Kinder
When I’m with you,
I feel so myself that I realise
I have no idea who I am.
You stand there like a mirror, but kinder,
so kind it makes me cry.
I see not a trace in you of turning away,
and so I don’t either;
I anchor my gaze to the sun.
Some say it blinds one to look so direct and so long,
but I say blindness is something else completely.
I have known blindness all around me and inside me;
it has made me cower before shadows and fight wars
that I did not believe in, over things that made no
music in my heart. This is different: this brazen thing
flipping the tables in my temples,
smashing commandment tablets with a dandelion’s touch.
This is a Presence we pilgrims stand before, silently,
muted by its immensity.
This is fields of coffins flinging open on Judgement Day;
doorway upon doorway in the place of solid wall.
Who am I to calculate?
Who am I to fight this grace?
When I’m with you,
I feel so myself that I realise
I have no idea who I am.
From ‘Poems of Pilgrimage’, 2020
Like the Lily Wears its Dew
Your loneliness is beautiful.
You are not lonely like a scavenger
rifling through a scrap-heap.
You are lonely like a poet,
staring for hours at the icicles
forming on the windowpane;
like a single tree growing on the
peak of a mountain,
catching the last rays of the sun.
Your tears fall like fine crystal
in a rough and blunted world.
I catch them and they are worth
more than kingdoms of the earth.
You wear your sorrow like the lily
wears its dew.
From ‘The Black in My Bedroom, the Star in the Sky’, 2019
