It can be hard to capture emptiness with words, but often that is the primary emotion that I bring to my poems. This poem is a prayer that I wrote originally as the final part of a sequence of poems inspired by John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”. The final track of that album is soContinue reading “Psalm (from “Les Feuilles Mortes”)”
Tag Archives: prayer
Autumn Leaves: a preview
As schools reopen in my part of the world, I have had the strange, disorientating experience of returning to work yet nothing being the same. But beside my office in the school library are some gorgeous auburn leaves that soothe me whenever I pass them. So I’m sharing them here with you today, along withContinue reading “Autumn Leaves: a preview”
A Mindlessness Prayer
These days when all of the socks are odd and all your thoughts are scrambled eggs and, try as you might to talk to God, nothing much makes any sense, for the rubbish awaits in noisome piles, the bills are due and so’s the tax and the laundry measures its depth in miles and theContinue reading “A Mindlessness Prayer”
Learning to ask
Evening Prayer
“Our life does not consist in making up beautiful phrases but in performing beautiful deeds.” Athenagorus
Suscipe
Nighttime cradles you in my arms but I am uncradled, and what strength I have to cradle with is finite and growing finer yet, my widow’s mite at the temple gate, libation pouring out. Daytime is an offering too, a departure yet a giving, an act of will to defeat the Will, a living sacrificeContinue reading “Suscipe”
Christmas 7: Rejoice in your new clothes
2017 is almost over, and today we have two choral pieces to conclude our year with, one early, one modern, both settings of one of the readings for the first Sunday after Christmas, Isaiah 61:10-62:4. The first is the delightfully joyous “Gaudens Gaudebo in Domino” by the 16th century German composer Philip Dulchius. The textContinue reading “Christmas 7: Rejoice in your new clothes”
Christmas 6: Nunc Dimittis
The story of Simeon has given the church one of its oldest hymns, called the “Nunc Dimittis”, after the first two Latin words of the song: “Now dismiss…” There have been many musical versions of Simeon’s song, but today’s poem takes as its inspiration a modern setting by the living Swiss composer Carl Rütti. Rütti’sContinue reading “Christmas 6: Nunc Dimittis”
Spring Cleaning
There are many lurkingplaces in the mind and many nooks… The old man is covered up in a thousand wrappings. (Lancelot Andrewes, Preces Privatae) Open the door. Let sun expose dust, moth-eaten wool and mould around cornices. Years of grime collect on window frames; you forgot that the sideboard had an underneath. And there tooContinue reading “Spring Cleaning”
“With pen in hand”
The fact that a work of such unperturbed objectivity and such deep, radiating peace could grow from a life which, far from being untroubled, consumed itself in strife, gives us an insight into the special quality of the man. (Josef Pieper, The Silence of St Thomas) The branch is not the root system. When youContinue reading ““With pen in hand””
The Consolations of Writing 