A Sonnet for Mother’s Day

…for those who loved and laboured…

We had our Mothering Sunday in Lent this year. but I understand May 12th is Mother’s day in America so I am reposting this poem today for all my American friends and readers.. It’s a thanksgiving for all parents, especialy for those who bore the fruitful pain of labour, and more particularly in this poem I have singled out for praise those heroic single parents who, for whatever reason, have found themselves bearing alone the burdens, and sharing with no-one the joys of their parenthood.

This poem is taken from my collection Sounding the Seasons published by Canterbury Press. Canterbury have also launched a kindle edition

I am grateful to Oliver  Neale for his thought-provoking work as a photographer, and, as always, you can hear the poem by clicking on the ‘play’ button, or on the title

Mothering Sunday

 

At last, in spite of all, a recognition,

For those who loved and laboured for so long,

Who brought us, through that labour, to fruition

To flourish in the place where we belong.

A thanks to those who stayed and did the raising,

Who buckled down and did the work of two,

Whom governments have mocked instead of praising,

Who hid their heart-break and still struggled through,

The single mothers forced onto the edge

Whose work the world has overlooked, neglected,

Invisible to wealth and privilege,

But in whose lives the kingdom is reflected.

Now into Christ our mother church we bring them,

Who shares with them the birth-pangs of His Kingdom.

A Sonnet for Mothering Sunday

…for those who loved and laboured…

The fourth Sunday of Lent happens also to be Mothring Sunday. Continuing in my series of sonnets for the Church Year I have written this one for Mothering Sunday. It’s a thanksgiving for all parents, especialy for those who bore the fruitful pain of labour, and more particularly in this poem I have singled out for praise those heroic single parents who, for whatever reason, have found themselves bearing alone the burdens, and sharing with no-one the joys of their parenthood.

This poem is taken from my collection Sounding the Seasons published by Canterbury Press. Canterbury are now also launching a Kindle Edition which will be available from March 21st.

I am grateful to Oliver  Neale for his thought-provoking work as a photographer, and, as always, you can hear the poem by clicking on the ‘play’ button, or on the title

Mothering Sunday

 

At last, in spite of all, a recognition,

For those who loved and laboured for so long,

Who brought us, through that labour, to fruition

To flourish in the place where we belong.

A thanks to those who stayed and did the raising,

Who buckled down and did the work of two,

Whom governments have mocked instead of praising,

Who hid their heart-break and still struggled through,

The single mothers forced onto the edge

Whose work the world has overlooked, neglected,

Invisible to wealth and privilege,

But in whose lives the kingdom is reflected.

Now into Christ our mother church we bring them,

Who shares with them the birth-pangs of His Kingdom.

A Sonnet for George Herbert

On February 27th the Church of England keeps the feast and celebrates the memory of George Herbert, the gentle poet priest whose book the Temple, published postunously in 1633 by his friend Nicholas Ferrar has done so much to help and inspire Christians ever since. In an earlier blog post I gave a talk on George Herbert and the Insights of Prayer, today I offer this sonnet, part of a new series I am working on called ‘The Household of Faith” which will be a celebration of the saints, intended to complement my sequence Sounding the Seasons. As always you can hear me read the sonnet by clicking on the title or the ‘play’ button.

George Herbert

Gentle exemplar, help us in our trials,

With all that passed between you and your Lord,

That intimate exchange of frowns and smiles

Which chronicled your love-match with the Word.

Your manuscript, entrusted to a friend,

Has been entrusted now to every soul,

We make a new beginning in your end

And find your broken heart has made us whole.

 

Time has transplanted you, and you take root,

Past changing in the paradise of Love,

Help me to trace your temple, tune your lute,

And listen for an echo from above,

Open the window, let me hear you sing,

And see the Word with you in everything.

Fahrenheit 451 and the opposite of Ebooks

The Folio edition of Fahrenheit 451

A few posts back I mentioned that I had “been reminded recently in three very concrete ways of how precious and irreplaceable real books are with their tang, tinge, smudge and wear, and most of all their tangible personal history.” Well the first reminder was that Family Bible, here’s the second. I recently received a beautiful book, in its own slip case from the Folio Society. If you know the Folio Society you’ll know they produce beautiful editions of books the way they used to be, the way they should be, beautifully bound and printed on good paper with pleasing typefaces, a pleasure to handle and made to last and hand down the generations. Well I have a few of their editions but so far they’d all been classics from an earlier age; Shakespeare’s Sonnets, The Canterbury Tales, the poems of Coleridge. But the other day I got a modern classic. It was Fahrenheit 451.

Now I can remember vividly the first time I picked up and read that book. It was a cheap ‘pulp-fiction style paperback with a lurid green cover and already-yellowed paper which I picked up as a teenager from a charity shop in downtown Hamilton. I couldn’t tell you where it is now, maybe I lost it or gave it away, but I never forgot the story.Indeed as so many of its predictions began to come true (the interactive entertainments, the dwindling attention spans, the ubiquitous ear-pieces and flat-screen TVs, the persistent dumbing down of the public sphere, the distress of others made a spectacle to titivate the jaded, the concerted attack on memory and learning) I began to realise how deeply that cheap disposable paperback had shaped me and sharpened my take on modern life.

But the deepest influence of all was the terrible image of burning books, burning books as part of an orchestrated assault on the past, a collective amnesia. And memories of that book came back when I first got involved in the current debate on the merits of ebooks versus paper books.

Now I have lots of ebooks and I find their searchability and portability very helpful, but alarm bells rang when I discovered that they could be centrally altered or even deleted whenever I logged in, that the e-medium was essentially transient and manipulable. Ever since then I’ve made sure I have a real, hardbound paper copy of every book that matters to me.

Which is why, when my beautiful folio society edition of Farenheit 451 dropped through the door it made such an impact. Of all the books they could have chosen to print in such a sumptuous and beautiful way surely this was the most appropriate. To present the book which was itself a defence of the power and permanence of the printed page, in such a beautiful and permanent form was itself to validate and amplify the meaning of its contents.

If in some future dystopia the cyber-firemen of a totalitarian state delete every e-copy of Fahrenheit 451 I’ll be reading and sharing this copy in secret with the other die-hard old-age survivors!

Mothering Sunday; a sonnet

...for those who loved and laboured...

Continuing in my series of sonnets for the Church Year I have written this one for Mothering Sunday. It’s a thanksgiving for all parents, especialy for those who bore the fruitful pain of labour, and more particularly in this poem I have singled out for praise those heroic single parents who, for whatever reason, have found themselves bearing alone the burdens, and sharing with no-one the joys of their parenthood.

I am grateful to Oliver  Neale for his thought-provoking work as a photographer, and, as always, you can hear the poem by clicking on the ‘play’ button, or on the title

Mothering Sunday

 

At last, in spite of all, a recognition,

For those who loved and laboured for so long,

Who brought us, through that labour, to fruition

To flourish in the place where we belong.

A thanks to those who stayed and did the raising,

Who buckled down and did the work of two,

Whom governments have mocked instead of praising,

Who hid their heart-break and still struggled through,

The single mothers forced onto the edge

Whose work the world has overlooked, neglected,

Invisible to wealth and privilege,

But in whose lives the kingdom is reflected.

Now into Christ our mother church we bring them,

Who shares with them the birth-pangs of His Kingdom.

The Old Revolution

Three days of peace and music

In my last post I was reflecting a little on Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock. continuing in that vein I thought I’d post a little reflection in Ottava Rima about what went wrong with those dreams, prompted partly by a sense of hope and ferment in the air again. I think the real problem was that consciousness-changing insight somehow crumbled into consumerism. People felt that they could deal in and purchase bliss and joy, chemically manufactured, rather than letting it flower and fruit from deeply planted spiritual roots, but maybe next time it will be different. Anyway what follows is a kind of  ‘confession’ for a generation (not enirely and privately my own confession you understand, I was a little too young at the time for some of that stuff) but a confession of failure which can, I believe, be put right and begun again, but this time with prayer and meditation rather than easier and more delusory substances. Here it is ‘for what it’s worth’ (As Stephen stills would say)

As always you can hear it by clicking on the title or the play button.

Revolution

I fought in the old revolution” Leonard Cohen

When I turned teen in nineteen-sixty-nine
I heard of revolution in the air,
Or on the air, in fact on ‘Caroline’.
Lennon and Lenin had so much to share
A change would come and change would be benign,
A fairer world, and all the world a fair.
‘Here comes the sun’ we sang to blissed-out skies
And thought the bomber jets were butterflies.

We conjured faeries out of every flower
But something wicked slipped out with the weed
Stoned circles never yet spoke truth to power
And groovers were grasped soon enough by greed.
For, after Altamonte, our world turned sour
And self-consuming souls turned onto speed.
The times were out of joint,oh cursed spite!
We thought that one more joint would set them right!

Now revolution’s once more in the air
Will we repeat mistakes we made back then?
We took a lot of everything but care
And we were just consumers in the end.
My counsel is no counsel of despair
It may not be too late to try again!
Our trips could never switch an institution
But just one crank can start a revolution.

someone started this

The Words for ‘What If…’

Since I mentioned my poem ‘What If’ in the previous post and linked to my audioboo reading of it, various people have asked me for a copy of the words, so here they are, including the quotation from Mathew’s Gospel which is the poem’s point of departure. when I first posted this poem on facebook I prefaced it with this remark:

For different reasons we have all on both sides of the Atlantic, been reflecting on the way our words can travel and unravel beyond us, on the need to care for the tenor of what we say, here’s a poem reflecting further on that:

What If…

“But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” Mathew 12:36-37

What if every word we say
Never ends or fades away,
Gathers volume gathers weigh,
Drums and dins us with dismay
Surges on some dreadful day
When we cannot get away
Whelms us till we drown?

What if not a word is lost,
What if every word we cast
Cruel, cunning, cold, accurst,
Every word we cut and paste
Echoes to us from the past
Fares and finds us first and last
Haunts and hunts us down?

What if every murmuration,
Every otiose oration
Every oath and imprecation,
Insidious insinuation,
Every blogger’s aberration,
Every facebook fabrication
Every twittered titivation,
Unexamined asservation
Idiotic iteration,
Every facile explanation,
Drags us to the ground?

What if each polite evasion
Every word of defamation,
Insults made by implication,
Querulous prevarication,
Compromise in convocation,
Propaganda for the nation
False or flattering peruasion,
Blackmail and manipulation
Simulated desparation
Grows to such reverberation
That it shakes our own foundation,
Shakes and brings us down?

Better that some words be lost,
Better that they should not last,
Tongues of fire and violence.
O Word through whom the world is blessed,
Word in whom all words are graced,
Do not bring us to the test,
Give our clamant voices rest,
And the rest is silence.

A Wound in the Waters of the Gulf

“Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.”
So Milton describes the moment of the fall in Paradise Lost, the moment a single human action breaks and wounds both the relation between humanity and God, and the relation between ourselves and our world. Milton sees the deep link between our spiritual state and the state we keep and leave the world in. But these harrowing lines might well describe the tragedy unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil welling up uncontrollably through a hole that we have made and cannot cap is a sign, to many o us, of our wounded planet, a sign of the damage we have done and are doing, and of our seeming inability to put it right. And it’s no good blaming BP. They are deep-water drilling to meet our demands, and the real cause of this tragedy is our collective addiction to oil itself. We have a lifestyle, an economy, even an agriculture, entirely based on burning oil; a way of life that is not only unsustainable but invisibly toxic. But this wound in the earth’s surface, this oil welling up through the waters, has also brought the toxins of our whole way of life to the surface and made them visible. For those recovering from addiction it has sometimes taken a crisis to make a change, it has needed a break-down for a break-through, and it maybe that this crisis in the gulf, an environmental disaster on an unparalleled scale, is th world’s wake-up call, our Kairos moment. If we can face it at its worst we can also have hope. Though Milton wrote ‘all was lost’, his poem is alive with the promise of ‘one greater man’ who would ‘restore us and regain the blissful seat.’ Christians, who know that the wounds in our world stem from those same wounds in us that Jesus came to heal, have a special calling to speak both judgement and hope into the present crisis. I leave you with the words of another poet, Wendell Berry, from an interview about the oil spill in the gulf, in which he names the values we need to espouse in order to have hope:

‘diversity, versatility, recognition, and acceptance of appropriate limits or getting the scale right, and local adaptation — those ideas, it seems to me, put us in reach of work that we can do. To assume that all experiences like that oil well can only be handled by experts at great expense is a mistake.’

heres a link to that interview

Love in the Red a song for the Prime Ministerial Debate

I won’t be in the audience as Clegg, Brown and Cameron debate the economy, but if  I was, I might warm the audience up with this little song composed the day Woolies closed in Huntingdon. Frankly I think these debates would be transformed if Caroline Lucas, the Leader of The Greens was on them, then we really would be hearing a voice for change. but their day will come. you can hear the song and download it free here (apologies to Steve Earl and GK Chesterton)

The shop fronts are all empty
The house-hold names are gone
They boarded up old Woolworths
And stripped it to the bone
The brand new cars are rusting
in car parks by the sea
And all that we’ve got left is love
At least our love is free

The bankers took our money
For their mansions on the hill
And lent the poor that funny cash
That makes them poorer still
They taught me not to trust them
It cost me quite a fee
But we’ve still got some love in tryst
At least that love is free

Cho:
Come over from the window
Come over from the door
Come over to the mattress
I spread our on the floor
The bailiffs, they might take our bed
But the bastards cant take me
And we can make love in the red
Because our love is free

And now they’ve thrown our taxes
Down the city’s silk-line hole
While the bosses throw the workers
To the dogs and on the dole
starlets still throw their parties
For the moguls on TV
But throw me out the lifeline
of a life-time’s love for free

I remember when we started
In the times that went before
We spent our ingenuity
In making love not war
And I was all the world to you
You were all the world to me
So lets make love not war again
And set the new world free

Cho:
Come over from the window
Come over from the door
Come over to the mattress
I spread our on the floor
The love we made without our bed
Is the best there’s ever been
And once we’ve made love in the red
We’ll go out and vote Green

Now we’ve still got a little room
To play at boy meets girl
While I pick out this little tune
I picked up from Steve Earl
I know its just a cheap guitar
And a borrowed melody
But I can vouch for every word
And all my love is free.