See you at Greenbelt! (and a poem)

Greenbelt 2012 photo by Jonathon Watkins

I’m delighted to announce that I have been invited to read from Sounding the Seasons, and also from my forthcoming book The Singing Bowl at Greenbelt, the excellent Christian Arts and Music Festival which this year celebrates its 40th anniversary. I’ve attended and enjoyed Greenbelt many times over the years but this will be my first time there as a speaker. As well as doing a poetry reading I shall also be giving a talk entitled: ‘Upend the Rainstick: Poetry and the Music of the Unexpected.’

Greenbelt runs over the August Bank Holiday from 23rd to 26th August and my poetry reading is on Friday at 9:30pm and the talk is on Sunday at 1:30pm both events in the Hub. I know that some of my readers will be on the wrong side of the pond for this, but if you are in England and are coming to Greenbelt then do come and see me and say hello.

Meantime I leave you with a poem which was originally composed about the experience of listening to Mozart at Greenbelt in 2001, but now takes its place as the final poem in Sounding the Seasons:

Mozart at Greenbelt

We lie upon the grass on God’s good earth
and listen to the Requiem’s intense,
long, love-laden keening, calling forth
echoes of Eden, blessing every sense
with brimming blisses, every death with birth,
until all passion passes into praise.

I bless the winding paths that brought us here,
I bless this day, distinct amidst our days,
I bless the light, the music-laden air,
I bless the interweaving of our ways,
the lifting of the burdens that we bear,
I bless the broken body that we share

Sanctus the heart, Sanctus the spirit cries,
Sanctus the flesh in every touch replies