Monday 21 April 2014

Lent Challenge Easter


Wednesday April 16th
Knock and I'll open the door,
When Christ knocks what happens?
Joy could come in.

Maundy Thursday
Washing friends' feet shows
Humble love, betraying that
A deep frailty.

Good Friday
It was the worst sort of death,
Undeserved and cruel.
Beware bigotry.

Easter Saturday
Dawn light strikes the dark,
Stained glass begins to glow
Lent is seeping away.

Easter Day
What is most precious?
Pearls? Gold? No, it is
Love truly given and held.


Thursday 17 April 2014

Lent Challenge Week 6


Wednesday April 9th
Colours of Spring are changing
Leaves unfurl, speckles
Vie with the yellow.

Thursday April 10th
Stone, knapped and placed,
Shaping walls of strength
A jigsaw of skill, like friendship.
       
Friday April 11th
The mine is closed now
The road to it a cart track,
Its traces now grassed.

Saturday April 12th
Bright, hard wastes of rape,
Softened by the green fields of wheat,
Landscape’s chequerboard.

Sunday April 13th Palm Sunday
A single bluebell
Jesus riding to his death,
Above a lark sings.

Monday April 14th
The dark of the night
Breeds black thoughts, old spectres rise
Like a Mary Rose.

Tuesday April 15th

Portsmouth
 Four forts of the sea
Stand in stubby majesty
En guard against invasion.
Rusty, in decline
But between towers and spires
on land, masts at sea
they're trusty bulldogs.

Sunday 13 April 2014

Lent Challenge Week 5

Tuesday April 2nd
Flowers bloom, fade, die,
Pavement art brings joy, then goes,
We must heed the now.


           Thursday April 3rd          
A road called 'Struggle',
Roman armies pounded it
Their ghosts walk with us.
(in the Lake District)

Friday April 4th
Hills tucked up in cloud,
Trees fade into the gloom, then
Sunlight stabs a field.



Saturday/Sunday April 5th &6th

            Hardknott           
  (Mediobogdom)

It was a cold posting on
The furthest edge of the Empire.
It lives, like a guilt, in my mind.
I look now at my vineyards,
The turquoise Adriatic, my villa,
Relax with my veteran rewards,
I should be peace,
And yet my spirit keeps returning.

We marched upwards,
From a derelict, deserted shore
Towards the cloud, the high place
Buried in the mountains: Hardknott.
We were a seasoned cohort
Marching second nature,
But the cold, the endless rain
Numbed all desires but to stop.
The camp was lonely,
Perched in the damp, in the shadow
Of the peaks.

Our life lay in stone. Granite.
Cutting, carrying, laying, the road
To make a crossing for our legions
To guard this hideous outpost of Rome.
And yet, we were a body of men
who moved like a drilled chariot team.
We achieved that wretched pass,
Withstood the deluges of infernal rain.
I'm marking time now, sharing military tales
Of a road that will be crumbling now,
Lost to the clouds, the drizzle and the British.

(The legions involved were from the Dalmatia)


Monday April 7th
Wood around graphite,
A pencil is born,
Write of love with it
          Not fear.

Tuesday April 8th
I look down as I climb
Seeing footfall not hills
Lift my eyes and see.


Wednesday 2 April 2014

Lent Challenge week 4


Wednesday March 26th
 The delight of reading is a right.
The banning of books to prisoners
Brings shivers of past bullies;
Physical escape can be subsumed
Into 'word food' freedom,
Ideas of a differently shaped world
Making another landscape.
Stories dissolve bars....for a time
And finds the imagination.
Hitler burnt books
We should have moved on.

Thursday March 27th
 Shape, line , colour
Trip the brain; the shot taken
A moment is trapped.

I read a chapter,
The day turns monochrome
Storm black
Fiction turns real.

Façade 

Friday March 28th
Alone with yourself
A sole stone on a beach of sand
Reach out for God.

Saturday March 29th
Find the world beneath -
Where there 's magic in dust
More than the mundane.

Sunday March 30th.  Mothers' Day
Bitter Sweet memories
Flow through the daffodils,
Tying love with loss.


Monday March 31st
Small, sour oranges
Grow towards being marmalade,
Orchids simply are.

Tuesday April 1st
 The designer wind
makes patterns with Sahara sand
through Europe: linked worlds.