One retreat, two poems

I was on retreat on the Island of Lewis last month with three friends, directed by a fourth friend who lives on the island in a community of two Anglican religious. We four stayed in a self-catering house in Back; Sister Clare came over from Gress - though one day we walked there for the Evening Office. It was memorable in several ways, which I don't intend to go into here, and produced two poems.


OUTBURST

O, be silent when the God speaks - 

do not blurt your blunted vision

to distort or seek to bend

the flow of love and pain.

Listen. Open. Feel the keenness

of the shaft that wounds the soul;

feel the way you change, but quiet

like a child that hears a call.

Only then, within that silence

can the music truly sing,

make the wordless song of heaven

sweep you up until your tongue

is freed from all the weight of language

 - free to wonder, free to cease -

and your soul can shed what has been,  

free to wander heaven’s peace.

© C.M.M. Back, Lewis, June 2019

JORDAN

The burden of that sudden light

Overwhelms my shrinking self

As I step into the surge

Of life and what will come.

The holy dove, its wings outspread,

Hovers close. No comfort there.

I see the darkness pressing back

Around the edges of my world

Through eyes half closed,

Through lash and hair

That covers my defenceless face.

The water swirls. I feel the tug

Of forces far beyond my reach.

I will obey. God, I accept

- will lift this burden that is Light.

© C.M.M.

Back, Lewis, June 19.

This second poem was inspired by a painting by Daniel Bonnell of the Baptism of the Christ, which you can see here: http://www.bonnellart.com/2012-2015.html

(The Baptism of the Christ II, 42x68", oil on canvas, Sold)

Springing thoughts

Two days after the last snow left

I saw the tiny hint of life

in colour, purple, on the mud

which rain had flooded winter-long,

and thought of Spring.

Encouraged by the silent sun

the lack of wind, the sudden song

- a blackbird sitting on a pole -

in air so silent I could hear

the rush of wings above my head 

as pigeons - should I call them doves?

 - set off briskly over roofs 

and gardens, sodden mossy lawns

and foodless shrubs where dunnocks live

I stopped, for long enough to feel.

But what I felt was not the joy

that children feel when freedom calls

but rather that nostalgic pain

more keen with every passing year

that tells me each Spring takes us up

the path towards that distant peak

where only faith says flowers will bloom.

C.M.M 02/18

Another Advent

Another Advent

For Andy, who suggested the possibility.

From the darkness that returns
each year we sing our plaintive song
and ask that God will come again
and fill our lives with what we know
and hardly know is all we need.
The fire burns low, the night is long,
and yet we feel in some way held
within the circle of this flame
that still we tend with anxious care
in some place hidden from the eyes
that mock and laugh and turn away
with restless ease towards their end.
The world too turns, and we await
the power that fills our life with light
and let our alleluias ring
within the darkness of the earth.

C.M.M. 12/17

Dreich weather and a sonnet: Argyll Weather

I haven't written a sonnet for 37 years. At that time, I thought I might be halfway through my allotted life span and wrote my first attempt at a sonnet about being at "life's watershed". You can hear the iambic feet, can't you? This afternoon, it being utterly miserable outside, and dark by 3.30pm, I thought I'd make my Christmas puddings and then - maybe - write some cards. Then I got a message from a good friend that he'd been shown a poem of mine on a window of St Andrew's bus station. In St Andrews. There was a photo - it's there, right enough, in black letters on the glass. Extraordinary.

In the comment thread that followed, others joined in. One of them threw down a challenge. "Write a sonnet about Argyll weather. Walking in the rain". This wasn't an entirely random challenge - I'd pointed out that I didn't participate as much as I might in the poetry scene because I was always walking about in the rain in Argyll.

Reader, I tried. Once the puddings were burbling and the (extensive) washing up done, I sat down with my preferred poetry-writing tools (the back of an envelope and a biro) and a copy of Edwin Morgan's Glasgow Sonnets for inspiration.

This is the result. I've dedicated it to my friend Jim Gordon, whose fault it was.

Argyll Weather

A Sonnet for Jim

The rain drifts in grey curtains from the hills
and turns the loch’s black surface into lace
before a random wind takes up the chase
that now obliterates the day it kills.
The burn beside me gurgles as it fills
and overflows. There’s water on my face,
the path I followed gone without a trace,
enthusiasm drowned in sudden chills.

But as I turn to make my sodden way
to shelter, warmth …dry feet … a sudden gleam
appears. It’s like another day.
The wet rock all around me starts to steam
and birdsong cuts the air as if to say
This is Argyll. Things are not what they seem.

C.M.M. 12/17

A song for a sad day.

Brain keeps singing songs - even today, when the news is so bad and the country has gone crazy. Scotland votes to stay in Europe? No matter. We don't have the say. But the songs keep coming, and maybe it makes me feel better to let them. I'm not up to more cerebral poems anyway.


Unity no more

I woke up this morning
with the sun on my face
for a moment lay peaceful
just a moment of grace

till the memory roused me
of the graphs and the polls
and I reached to discover
that we’d traded our souls.

The country had chosen
to be duped in their choice,
to reclaim some lost freedom
to follow the voice

of those who shout hatred
for the lost and the strange
who would make us a fortress
put up barriers to change.

But the sun is still shining
and the birds sing in tune
and it’s only the people
who will recognise soon

That it’s too late for thinking
and it’s too late for love
and the voices have drowned out
the song of the dove

And the magpies are fighting on the grass
And the magpies are fighting on the grass.

C.M.M. 24/06/16

Song

It's strange how one can be so influenced in one's writing by what's going in - visually, through reading the work of other writers, or - as in this case - audibly. I've recently been listening to a good bit of Leonard Cohen's music - realise I enjoy it far more now than when he and I were both much younger, when he had the kind of voice I didn't care for at the time. But what interests me now is that with that rhythm in my brain, I've found myself thinking in a lyric metre - and that the journey there was far more seductive than the suggestion made over the years by one critic of my work that I should discipline my writing in this way.

Not that this is disciplined - and not that I took much time over it. It's a song looking for a tune, and it's a song for now, for me now and in this time, when I know that all over Britain people of my generation are going to vote to leave Europe and I feel ashamed, when politics are vile, when my friends seem self-selecting and everyone else is lost.

 I also feel furious - but all that happens is a song without a melody.

But for what it's worth ...

SONG

When I think about today
and what I am and where
and the world keeps crashing in
with anger - do I care?

Well yes, I find I’m thinking,
though nothing seems to move
in the world that I inhabit
in the people that I love -

but the violence and sorrow
and the voices screaming hate
cut across my passive questions
take me out beyond my gate

to the people sunk in apathy
to the old and the unwise,
drive me far beyond the safety zone
to where the world cries.

And though I’m growing older
and common sense says fear
in my heart I’m still protesting
in my head it still seems clear

that we cannot stand and wonder
while the world dissolves in flame -
we must fight to save the future
not live content with shame.

C.M.M. 06/16

Unpredictable - a poem revisited.

I've finally got round to some revising - a poem I wrote in Vietnam, in the heat and humidity of our first days there, before I'd settled into accepting it all. I was put off by the comments of someone I'd considered a sympathetic critic - made the mistake of letting him see the raw first draft. However, re-reading it and changing the structure more than the content, I find it recreates the moment, the strangeness, the otherness. So here it is, more than I year after I first wrote it.

Unpredictable

The lawns of rice deceive the eye
until one sees unwillingly
the ditches and the depth
and something strange and out of place

like graves or shrines in centre-field
and recognises foreign-ness
as tangled in this alien world
as mats of green inexorably
drifting on the muddy tide, which
people eat, like snakes in wine
and scorpions, and spiders piled
in glistening heaps to tempt the eye.
And flowing round the air’s embrace
is heavy with the drifting smoke
of stubble burning in the fields
beyond the river’s parapet where
sunset comes before its hour.
A song comes from a hidden bank
and cattle, golden in the light
descend to drink and all is strange
and lushly vibrant in the dusk.

C.M.M. Vietnam 03/15

The meeting

THE MEETING

This the night when under the dark dome
the hard stars shine and that one
shines brighter than them all, the night
when power and pomp and wisdom and wealth
come seeking a king and find instead
love in ordinary, human love, vulnerable
to all that wounds beneath the sky -
This is that night. It comes again.

For earthly power was melted then
in tears of joy, of journey done,
of understanding what lay there
in poverty of place and rank
and all they knew, these visitors,
collapsed in shards of sudden loss
and left them free to live again -
This is that night.

©C.M.M. 6/01/16

Remembering on All Souls

Holy Trinity Dunoon: All Souls

This evening we remembered. We lit candles in front of the altar for family and friends lost. We considered our mortality, and our human response to it. We were reminded how faith and raw emotion can make difficult bedfellows. And I remembered a poem I wrote over a decade ago.

Communicating

Today I would have phoned -
wished to share the small
details of my life, the
safe return, the laughing
at the rain which fell
as if the Flood would come.
But had I rung the number
as familiar as my name
you would not be there.
A stranger’s voice would say
your words, and the strangeness
would be too much to bear.
And contemplating this
a glacial shifting in my soul
gave promise that in weeks not lived
the frozen tears would find the way
and spill into a distant sea like
drops into the ocean of my love.

C.M.M. 4/05

Washed up - a poem for today

Washed up

The children on the beach
have no cares.
Their garments lap upon the waves
that brought them here.
They are not playing -
they are dead.
Hair like seaweed in the foam,
their small bodies come to
rest where other children play.
So small, so dead. The hot tears
flow but cannot warm
those tiny souls that drift
and sigh into my heart as I
turn away, their image
floating useless in my mind.

©C.M.M. 09/15


When people take their children into leaking rubber dinghies in the dark to cross rough seas, knowing how many die every night, there is nothing “bogus” about their desperation. - Polly Toynbee, writing in the guardian, 3 September 2015

The Road to Siem Reap

Listening to Vaughan Williams as I am borne along 

a Cambodian highway

the red dust billowing at our passing

I hear the cool, silver tones

of choristers in the echoing chill of

vaulted stone and know

as never before

the music rooted in the land

of its gestation.  A white ox

wanders over dusty grass

as the road beneath our wheels

Turns to dry, rutted mud

and the red cloud envelops

two small determined girls

emerging from a school

as crisply clad as if they too 

could sing qui tollis peccata

with the boys whose voices sound

a million lives away.

C.M.M. 03/15

I actually wrote this on a bus - an air-conditioned coach - on a six-hour journey over roads of varying degrees of completion through Cambodia. I scribbled it on the back of a daily bulletin in handwriting that I could barely decipher and transcribed it onto my phone notes when we stopped. I was listening at the time to Vaughan Williams' Mass in G minor, consumed by the strangeness of the contrast between what I heard and what I was seeing.

Taking Advent seriously

ADVENT PROSE REVISITED

Rend the heavens, come quickly down –

Can we mean it? In the dark

to ask the God to come like this

would have us tremble at the presence

sought that Sunday as we sang.

Behold, thou wast angry and we sinned – 

dear God, we try, we know our sin, 

we see too clearly where we are.

The veiled women weep, the bomb

explodes on distant soil:

we worry lest our own are there,

care less about the ruined lives

among the debris of our wars.

All our deeds are like a polluted garment -

hung about us in the cold

as if we fear our nakedness,

would do anything to hide.

The child dies at the hands of those

whose task is care and love

while we, appalled, avert our eyes

from innocence betrayed.

We all fade like a leaf

and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away –

light little things in the face of creation

and yet, and yet …

Lord, we continue. You have never

swept us from the face of earth.

We love and beget and children

lovely children, innocent and clean

come naked into the world

in your eternal promise of what can be.

Your Son will come, again, again

and we have hope, another chance

to use your world in precious ways

to hold your people to your face.

As tiny fingers clasp round ours

we reach into the dark and feel

the strength of love enfolding us.

The heavens are rent as if a cloud

were parted at the end of rain

and light will come too bright to tell – 

we sing again. Come, Lord, and soon.

©C.M.M

I wrote this some time ago at this point in the year. Sadly, the world that I linked to the words of the Advent Prose has, if anything, become a sadder place - and one very much in need of the promises of hope.

November - a poem for the season of remembrance

NOVEMBER

The month of remembering -

the lines of men in the stubble fields

the hideous scramble over a muddy

parapet, the cringing death in the

eye’s blink - this month recalls

wars past and wars still trailing

death and mutilation in their wake.

But not just that.

This month of remembering 

lines up before our wavering prayers

the souls of Saints, the souls

of our beloved dead, guttering

like candles in the fitful 

illumination of our faith.

The tears come, yes - 

but do we weep for them, or do we

shrink at the sudden blinding glimpse

of our too frail mortality?

We who live trudge on to where

our companion dead are waiting

among the red flowers at the years’ end

in that land to which we go.

©C.M.M. 11/14

This owes its conclusion to a fraction of an idea from R.S.Thomas, whose words tend to haunt my subconscious and of whom I will always be in awe.

Normandy Landing

From heroic effort to the pathos

of the broken dead, a child’s toy
abandoned in the road, is only
a single step into randomness.
Why this one, who leapt so fearless
in the surf, why was he
destroyed and swallowed in the 
red tide, he and not the next
who followed and prevailed?
These men at once machine and 
vulnerable flesh cut off
from life and love and being young
now lie in rows too numberless for thought -
no randomness allowed in this, the 
garden of the lost. No laughter now, 
no language to describe
the lives that made them friend or foe, 
but the differentiated dead
are still beneath the plaque or cross
of those who held and those who came
and we now walk these quiet parks
and think upon the unlived years.
I am the child you never had, 
my son, and weep a mother’s tears.


© C.M.M

I wrote this in the garden of the Chatêau de Molay after our visit to Omaha Beach. The hideous futility of training, travelling halfway across the world from some deep Western state of America to die the moment the landing craft dropped its ramp - all that made a deep impression, as did the serried ranks of graves on the cliffs above the shore.

Radio 4 discusses Maths - a poem of bewilderment

Radio 4 discusses Maths

There’s a magic number

called e, that has the 

power to solve the world’s

problems, to be practical in ways

we never dreamed, and I

think of pi and other

imponderables, and I feel my brain

reeling, eyes fluttering, under

the onslaught. It was ever

thus, x years ago, when I sat, 

uniformed but uninformed

at a wooden desk scarred quite

fascinatingly by the past.

Are there any numbers out there

that cannot be written as a 

fraction? That’s it. I break, 

fractured by fractions

and irrational numbers.

© C.M.M. 09/14

I wrote the above yesterday, on the proverbial back of an envelope, while listening to Radio 4's Melvyn Bragg discussion on the radio. I stopped eating my toast while a horribly familiar sensation from my distant schooldays crept over me. My brain had gone into free fall  and my tenuous grasp on the discussion had snapped. However, I was happy that normal activity was still intact: the poem just flowed out and I've only changed one line since. 

I am grateful to my friend Frank for sending me the mathematical statement that provides me with an illustration when all else would have been as meaningless as ... e.

Referendum Question - a poem for the aftermath

Referendum Question

Would there have been tears
when the old Union died,
a bitter mourning for the loss
of joyous hope denied?
Or is this death forever theirs
who dare to look beyond the past?
The autumn sun is lower now,
the wind blows cool, the petals drop; 
the hills lie purple as the pheasants’ cry
foretells their death before the guns,
and far from here contending claims
engulf the promises held out
to save a tryst whose love was spent.
The question asks the aftermath:
would there, would there have been tears?

© C.M.M 09/14

Cloudy morning

I started writing this before the current spell of dry weather, when I was longing for it to look and feel like summer. As the solstice is rather cloudier than anything we've seen in the past week, it seems a suitable time to finish it off and publish it...


As I step outside
the damp, birdsong air opens wide
freeing my claustrophobic brain
from the confines of waking thought
and the fears of night. Why do we
close ourselves in grey, these days
that threaten rain? I want to
sing with the birds in the promise
of the new light, the freshness of green - to forget 
to fear the darkness that awaits 
at this day’s end, at all our ends.

And in the rain-washed morning
a hidden bird repeats why
not, why not, why not?

© C.M.M. 06/14

The Well

©Sieger Köder

It is a well, God, a pool

so dark as to show me only

myself. It draws me to look 

compels my absorption

demands my irretrievable commitment

to its depths. And there

within that dark mystery

I am at once lost and no longer

alone. Can there be returning

to the brightness of a sunlit

morning? I think not. Will it feel

like loss? Or will the fearful leap

reward me with the companionship for ever

of the love that in the shining air

I wear like a wound?

The ripples spread on the darkness that

enfolds my falling soul.

©C.M.M., Iona, March ’14        

A second product of meditation on retreat on Iona. A response to an intriguing postcard as well as an even more intriguing - and to some disturbing - video.

Greylag - a poem out of meditation

 Eileen Lawrence: Greylag 1978

GREYLAG : watercolour and handmade papers

It disturbs me, this feather, plucked

from a hurrying greylag goose, or

caught by the wind’s impetuous 

wing and now quiet on the

artist’s page. I see myself in

the sharp-cut shine of the

leading edge, the vulnerable

wisps from deeper down, 

close to the panicked heart of things.

But that swift-curving quill - what

can I see in that but only

the Spirit’s arrow, clear and keen,

piercing the soul but in its arc

the colourless strength

that keeps me whole?

C.M.M. Iona, March ’14.

                                                                                                             

On our recent retreat, we spent time in silence. Sometimes we had a visual aid for our meditation, and this card was the first of these. 

Vernacular - a poem from a sermon. Sort of.

The opening two lines of this poem appeared unbidden in my mind as I was listening to the sermon in Holy Trinity last Sunday. Hugh, this is for you!

Vernacular

Abraham, Abraham - gonnae no?

Gonnae no dae that?

Is that how you might hear the God

these days, the moment that you’re poised 

to do whatever horrid thing seems suddenly 

a pressing need - the familiar

cadence of a homely voice? No

thundering winds, no wildfire roar

but unmistakably addressing you

with some urgency - no chance of

misunderstanding that.

You drop the knife right there, son,

and your boy lives.

How was it in the dark of night

when the Temple slept and the voice 

whispered through the echoing space

where the lamps flickered 

and the boy woke and heard

his name - Hey, Sam, Sam, 

gonnae waken up? 

And Elijah under his solitary bush?

Son, ye cannae sleep - Elijah 

eat your tea and get your strength and

get tae where ye’re gaun.

Are we bereft because we listen 

for the voice in perfect prose

preferably with a touch of

sixteen hundreds charm

and then we miss the total

urgency of what we need 

to hear, to heed, to know?

And so the cosmic words go on

in Babel tones among the crowd:

Écoute-moi - escucha -

 hören - ascoltare! The voice persists, 

the voice of  friend, of stranger

in a bar, a chance 

meeting by the way. So, all of yous

gonnae listen the noo?

©C.M.M. 06/13