Lent Challenge Week 5

Wednesday March 18th

Plants tucked into soil

Feed our hopes for growth, bees, moths,

Beauty in the wings.

Thursday March19th

Consider blossom

It brings light to dark places

How can we do that?

Friday March 20th

Loss

Sometimes the mind plays tricks,

Anniversaries slip away

Almost unheeded, then

As if to make up time

Loss swoops in

Shattering sturdy barricades.

Babies who should have been,

Should now be grown with lives

Being lived, part of their own

And our, families:

Identities, characters,

loved and cherished

But weren't able to gain life,

Lost in the word, 'miscarriage'.

'What might have been.....'

sterile thoughts, but they

peep out sometimes.

Love which didn't happen

Was channelled elsewhere.

Loss has been aired today

Looked at, valued, but even so

I think I'll rebuild the barricade.

Saturday March 21st

Londonderry

One God, two beliefs:

Division

But old foes burn their past

To begin friendship.

Sunday March 22nd Monday March 23rd

Richard 111rd's re-burial.

Bones betray our past:

Curvature of the spine

Sword cuts, axe swipes,

Richard's mortal blow perhaps.

All tell their tale to those

Who can read the clues.

Once a man, a king, whose skull

Once held memories of the deeds

We debate so hard now.

Grey-friars Priory held his bones

But walls fell, stones 'borrowed',

Monks dispersed, graves were lost,

Til a car park hid all

Plantagenet traces.

Crowds stand in awed hush as

The bier moves through modern streets,

White roses arc to rest beside

His coffin on his last ceremonial journey.

The University give him to the Church

The Church blesses his soul and

God's gift, if given, will bring him peace.

Death in 1485 is honoured now.

As witnesses our sense of time

Flickers between realities,

His discovered bones

in their curve of death

Makes the past a present

But his truth remains obscured.

Tuesday March 24th

Deadly silken threads

Woven round leaves lure their prey

With evil beauty.