This one became more than I thought it would! I can’t say I truly know what all the images mean, but they seem true on a very deep level.

A Certain House

One day, I came upon a certain house

And claimed it for my own.

It stood, high-walled and hedged by hawthorn trees,

As a towered castle deep within a wood

No foot had ever pathed with passing to and fro,

Its bower hidden from all save myself,

Unguessed by any other soul.

For me, the drawbridge lowered lightly

That I might cross the moat where dragons sported,

Spouting fire and water both from their enormous mouths

And waiting for some unwary traveler

To trespass where they lay.

Within, there was a hall of mirrors

That murmured with echoes as I trod its ways,

A maze uncentred, inescapable by me,

Myself the only thing reflected from its walls

Of crooked glass which bent and warped my womanhood,

Turning me traitor to the truths I thought I knew.

But then, at once, the mirrors shook and shivered,

Shattered scattering in shining shards

Like tears upon a window-pane,

And now there was no maze, no echoing halls,

No high stone walls. There nothing now remained

Except a humble hut of wood

Set down by a running stream,

Myself its only occupant.

So, now I keep the fire always lit,

A pot of something softly simmering,

A cheerful candle glimmering in the window

To welcome home the one who needs it,

As I sit upon my doorstep waiting

To be found by someone lost

And to gently free them from their journey for a time.

For, even I will have to take the road again,

To leave this house untenanted and alone

To be taken once more by the woods

Until such time as it is built again by skillful hands,

Its walls of gleaming adamant,

To be a place of feasting and of joy,

One beloved guest for me to gaze upon

As His gaze gathers my being into Himself

And bids me live within His everlasting light.

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All things being equal, this will be the first of a double-header as I missed releasing it yesterday due to random construction noise which prevented me from recording it. It’s one of my typical prayer-type poems, I suppose.

Come

Come take from me what will not let me go:

The love of being liked,

The lingering bitterness of wrongs,

The jealousy that clings to others’ joy

As ivy twines itself around a well-built house,

Destroying it with living green that kills!

Come free my fevered mind from too much care

Which binds and snares my spirit,

Bending it to breaking

Like a martyr on the wheel,

Stealing hope and leaving hardness in its wake!

Come lead my life to love along the road

Where rocks and ruts may bring me to my knees,

But which, with sudden burning beauty

Will at some simple turning of the path

Reveal itself as rich and rare with wonders, waiting

Lonely in the lovely light of day,

A hopeful highway through the desert of despair!

Come stand with me where now and ever meet

Beyond the heat of hurt where all is cool

And dim, still shadowed by immortal mystery,

And bring with You the bright sunrise of joy

Which is at last the truth behind the dawn!

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Here is Day 10 of my 100 Poems in 100 Days challenge!

A Borrowed Light

To wander here where all things welter,

Seeking shelter from the whirling will to power

That kills if left unchallenged by the changeless,

Steadfast hope which yonder springs in fountains

Or falls like tears upon a parched patch of ground,

Is hard but holy work for those

Who bear a borrowed light,

Bringing bright victory of necessity in broken vessels.

We are the ones with hands made rough

And stony with the tilling of sorrow’s soil,

Spilling sweated toil, sowing our gifted garden

With hardened hurts we can never wholly heal

While our hearts remain riven, unforgiven and alone.

And yet there comes at whiles upon the wind

The petrichor of paradise, its scent,

While faint, intent upon its purpose

To haunt our hearts with hopes of home,

Even here, where all seems trouble and travail.

And so we wait and try to tend

The light, not to surrender it

To darkness, though all around the death

Of dreaming steals the breath of life

From the very treasure-house of truth.

This light will lead us if we let it shine

Its willing wonder to this wounded world.

Surrounded by the sea of unavailing grief,

It will with brief and brilliant brightness

Bring us singing from the storm into stillness,

Sparing our craft to reach the hidden haven

Of pure, unperishing peace.

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This is about a time in my life which still echoes down the years and colours all of my days. I was not a Christian at the time, and so this poem is written from that point of view. It would have been untrue to myself and to him who is the subject of the poem if I had tried to paste an artificial Christian meaning onto it. Death is a mystery to all humanity, and that’s what this is about.

At Least There Was Incense

At least there was incense at the last,

As there the one I loved lay dying,

His light dimming, his life laid bare

To the coming of departure

As his body burned to embers

While we who loved him kept watch.

There was incense, as I said,

His favourite, compounded of sandalwood

And the attar of eastern flowers,

Dense with smoky sweetness, his scent, his signature,

Precious token of the presence so soon to be gone,

A solitary stick stuck astoundingly

Into the skin of a banana,

Left to smoulder there while he too seemed to smoulder,

Silent now, his bardic love of language now reduced to meaningless moaning.

His voice, his touch, his intensity

Which once awoke in me the ancient strength of oaks,

Of white pines standing in starlit, aurora-laden woods,

Of sea-smoothed rocks turning gentle swells to foamy spray,

Was now turned inward in a dreadful dance,

And we could do nothing but try to help him take his road

To where the land of summer waited

Warm and green beyond the dying hills.

They told me later, for I was not there,

That when he took his final breath,

He cast his gaze on some amazing sight

Which no one else could see but him,

And then he simply slipped away,

Lay down the burden of his failing body

And let himself go lightly onward,

His spirit spiralling, unspooling

Like fragrant smoke upon the wind.

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This just had to be called Ecclesiastes! I can’t yet decide if it’s an ironic title or not.

Ecclesiastes

Let life somehow be lovely

Even in the bitter hours

When nothing glitters in the gloom

Of grief, its fallen flowers scattered to the winds,

And only showers of tears to water their decay!

Let something stay of beauty,

Though it mocks our mortality with its mirth

As it seeks to warm the wrong-rimed world,

Flourishing where all seems out of joint

And strangely strung, like a tuneless harp

Still rung despite its joyless jangling.

Let broken things be holy,

Wounded, gleaming in their glory,

Seeming weak but willed to adamant

By the One who brings to birth

The beginning and the end of things

In the light of His own eternal day!

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This is about a moment which I can’t explain in which I suddenly came upon Christ, as it were, in my twenties, after a long absence.

While Waiting For a Bus

While waiting for a bus,

The neither fish nor fowl nothing

Of a night in mid-November drawing near

In a dreary drowse of dreaming mist,

The sun setting softly to the distant sound

Of a six-o’clock city bell,

My body hoping only for home,

A place to lay its burdens down

Away from scholarly pursuits

And safe once more in familiar hands,

Feet planted firmly on the platform,

Ears attentive for the slightest murmur of a motor;

In that self-same mundane moment

When time seems all there is,

I am suddenly among eternal things,

The fragments of my soul now fitted fast

As stones are knitted in a dry stone wall,

No mortar of mere ego needed

To bind them now, but only You

Holding myself here within Yourself a while,

Bidding me come to You across time,

Which I will do like Peter on the water.

For this bright and burning clarity

Is vouchsafed me as a gift,

A little lifting of the veil

Between my tragic aimlessness

And the treasure I must surely find

Among Your faithful folk and in their reuniting rites

Of pure and perfect penitential joy.

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Welcome to Day 6 of 100 Poems in 100 Days! I must tell you now that I may have just doomed myself to failure by actually starting a specific ‘project’ for this crazy scheme in the writing app I use. Now, it’s really real, and that freaks me out. However, we beat on, boats against the current or something, and I will try not to let the fear of failure paralyse me.

This poem is about an actual (I was going to write ‘real’) dream I recall having sometime in my twenties. I was a pagan at the time, but even so, the dream seemed to come out of the blue. Now, I don’t know how much of it I remember and how much of it I have embroidered by wanting to remember it, but it’s there and has never left me as most dreams do, and I think it was pointing to the need for love and mercy in the world, or at least a longing within me for the world to be a more compassionate place. Who knows? At least it has given me this poem.

It Was a Dream

It was a dream, I know,

Which led me long ago into a ring

Of standing stones all studded with the stars

And ministered to by the moon in mythic guise

As mother goddess, wise and well-beloved

By me, her priestess and her conduit on earth.

It was a dream, I say,

Which kept me standing there among those monoliths,

Waiting in welcome for the lost ones, the little ones, who came

To take what I alone could give,

True solace for the silent tears they shed,

My arms held out with hidden healing,

Myself the reverent vessel of the mother’s mighty mercy.

It was a dream, and yet,

It may have been a call,

A charge not from the moon but from her Maker

To meet Him in a secret, sacred place,

Allowing His embrace to quicken me to flame

And kindle with His never-fading candle

Those who wander in the wilderness of grief

To have the courage to reject the cold of night

And gather in the day’s bright gaze of deep, undying love.

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Here’s a thing I never thought I’d write, but I’m glad some feeble reflection of what I hoped it might become is here. Eschaton is a Greek word used in Christian theology to refer to the final fulfilment of creation at the second coming of Christ.

Eschaton

The promised final thunder has not come

To bring trembling into triumph this dying age,

To thrill the very marrow of the mourning earth

With its immortal, mighty music

Which will one day wake this weary, weeping world

To welcome home its long-expected King.

Yet thrumming through the dark of doubt and fear

Will sound at whiles the treasured truth of things

Which bids us be an embassy of light,

To live in expectation of the time

When light is all there is within the soul,

And rhyme and reason meet at last as lovers do.

If there is more, and I believe there is,

Than mortal cares of careless greed and graft,

If we can be a raft to ferry folk across the stream

Where dreams of dread lie waiting without warning,

Then let us do so while we mortals may,

For soon and sooner sings the morning song

If we have ears and hearts to let it lead us home.

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I generally don’t like to use my blindness as a poetic conceit, but this one just works somehow, or maybe it doesn’t. We shall, I suppose, see.

And So You tell Me

And so you tell me of the stars,

How their far fires dot the deepest dark

And spark for you the thoughts of things

Unguessed, undreamed of while the sun’s light lasts,

And how, though seeming high and hallowed, hung

As diamonds are upon a necklace,

Strung in mythic strangeness, they wheel

Surely through the seasons as we spin

And spend our lives beneath their distant dance.

Listen! I sing your words to you again,

My parrot’s talk of them a tale

Merely told but never known by me

In breathless, wordless awe,

Only hoped for, living just beyond and within

The bounds of language left as bond

Between you who have seen them and myself

That they are truly there to marvel at.

But I can sing of a thing far brighter,

If you will stop and listen for a time,

A thing sublime and simple, perhaps a dream,

As must seem night’s roving candles

To those who live inside of too much city light;

For as the stars need dark to see them by,

So this of which I speak needs silence to be sensed.

My words will never lead you there,

But neither will they leave you lost,

Unless you lose the polestar of the soul,

That hidden haunting of the heart

Which, though unseen, brings beauty where it beams,

Pearled with the plunder of eternity,

Bringing wonder and true worship

To this long-benighted world.

Thanks for listening to Wonder-woven, a poetry podcast from Reveries and Ramblings! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Here is the third installment of my 100 Poems in 100 Days project. This was an unexpectedly personal one for me, but I think it’s worth sharing. It’s about loss, love and faith and whatever else you need it to be about for you. Enjoy!

There Is a Thing

There is a thing I think sometimes,

That life is far too fragile for the love I bear,

That I might crush it with the crying of my heart

As I take it in my rough and eager hands

And try to tease its tangles into tresses fine

And fitting for the bridal bower

In the green wood beyond the hills of grief.

Those hills I know by steep and stony scarp,

That road worn rutted by long trains of tears,

My footsteps tapping in time

To years on years of yearning

Which burn like fairy fires in the night

To lead me into longing’s clinging clutch.

And so, I never seek the green,

Letting life grow unchallenged and unchecked,

Untended, lest I rend it in my frenzied welcome,

Or in my hunger shatter it to shards,

Leaving its spoiled splendours for the sparrows to consume.

But life will not be left alone for long,

For even in these hills among which I dwell

Come welling water and the willow tree

To shade me gently and to cool

The foolish fever binding fast my heart,

Setting its singing free from fear,

Spreading paradise to my parched and parted lips,

Letting me live, at last unfettered by loss,

Beneath the blossom-laden boughs of bright, unbroken love.

Thanks for listening to wonder-woven, a poetry podcast from Reveries and Ramblings! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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