Alien timepiece

I awake,
dimly aware of its vast presence,
creeping silently through the salty creeks
beyond the black frizz of trees.

The hairs on the back of my neck tingle
but whether it is fear or thrill
is hard to tell.

In the dark,
the sheer weight of its coming,
the magnitude of stately momentum,
bends the land, creaking the rocks
to perceptible shivers that even a worm might hear.

Alien timepiece coupled to the moon,
the tide ticks through the night,
ever later than it was,
crawling round the clock
to strange and awkward times
with steady and relentless pace
regardless of the rhythms of
the human race.

(c) A McN

Since moving to the coast the tide has become an important rhythm but it is so hard to keep track that a few days away leaves me edgy. I love the full flood Springs best of all. They gave me that same feeling of life's bounty that I get in the presence of puppies, children playing, spring days and pregnant women!

Laughing shell

(c) A McN
Shells are irresistable, the textures, the shapes and the clink of freshly crystallised minerals.

The language of water

Long after
the tide slipped silently into the night
the marsh is alive
with the language of water.

I listened in the darkness
to the trickle in the creeks
and the bubbles in the puddles
in the mud.

The water was all verb and adjective,
running, seeping,
quivering, shining.

From mud creek to salt flat,
liquid chat and murmer filled the air,
each creek a different dialect of sound.

I wished I had the wisdom
to know what every nuance meant
translating every phrase to physics,
chemistry and art..

but lacking understanding
I'm content to tag along
just to marvel
at the music
of the song.

(c) A McN

Four small words

Unbidden it came, a short,
bald statement of fact.

"I like my life" he said.

Four small words with mythical power
to send the serotonins
seeping through the brain,
to fly the flag of self esteem,
and shape a shield
against the daily doubts
that undermine.

But for me, his father,
something in me soared
something sang like the wind sings
when it slings banners of cloud to the sky,
delighting in the shapes assumed.

(c) A McN

Snailed

Tonight we got snailed.

The front step was streaked with straining necks and elongate antennae
stretching forward in slow motion frenzy.

One by one we plucked them up and one by one they lost their nerve,
shrinking back inside their shells.

We tossed them on the lawn.
They rolled and bounced in bald indignity.

Remembering their eager sprint across the steps,
the straining, streamlined pleasure as they flew,
I wished I could have left just one
to skip and dance as only snails can do.

(c) A McN

Missing waves

Missing waves...
missing the slip and slide of the hull
on the hills of silver
shouldering silently beneath me.

Dumb beasts
in ordered herds shepherded by winds;
I love your liquid elegance,
your humble, mindless strength.

I love your ecstacies of surging on the shore,
the lion leap, the raging roar,
the dying shingle songs you sing
when sinking in the sand

leaving the kiss
of holy water
on the land.

(c) A Mc N

Suddenly, in a long involved meeting 250 miles away, I needed the sanity of the sea, the company of waves.

Feed the birds...

(c) A McN

We got several of the braver birds eating from our hands. They were extraordinarily good chips though - GJs chipshop in Blackfield is second to none.

In memory

For no obvious reason
we found ourselves in bright mid-morning light
walking and talking in a mosaic of gravestones
and reading messages
from the living to the dead.

We spoke of life and death,
of rocks and writing,
of families and memories.
In the summer sun
grasshoppers sang
and butterfly ballets performed
in the gap
between graves.

You read the tombstones;
I listened to your observations,
loving the privilege of fatherhood
as I watch you move through
the summer days of childhood where
life still has space for the dreamer
and who you are is more important
than the hoops
through which you jump.

These captured moments I will keep,
etched in the air by words
that simply say

"In loving memory
of a well spent day".

(c) A McN

At the Prater Park, Vienna

Keren and crew loop the loop.

Puddles on a tandem

I felt you come alive when the wind streamed in your face
and when I tempted you with puddles something lit you like a bulb.

Three times we split the water,
sliced the mud to peals of laughter.
The shadows that had haunted you that day
fluttered ragged in the wind until they fell
dissolving in the wrinkled waters
underneath the pedals
as we passed.

I had forgotten quite how beautiful
the simple things of life
can be.

(c) A McN

It was her first time on a tandem but unlikely to be her last.

Ornithology in Prater Park

For a heartbeat,
eighty feet above Vienna
the long arc of the swing pauses long enough to tease
then tip us backwards upside down
to face the tiny people far below.

We plummet like a gannet to the ground
but like a swallow skim the earth
and like a lark ascend the air again;

something in us singing as we go.

(c) A McN

I never normally go near a fairground, never mind a fairground ride. It was life affirming in a funny kind of way - feeling so vulnerable at the top of the scary swing.

St Stephens House by touch.

At St Stephen's house
we felt the carvings on the walls.
Skulls grinned as we poked our fingers in their eyes.

The model (with its cold brass geometries of scale)
showed us how small and insignificant we were - as if we didn't know.

But then we stumbled
on a pattern in the rock
upon a block
of limestone in the wall.
We felt the sharp and shelly sand
with semi- rounded pebbles
from the ancient storm and flood
that rolled them into place.
We felt the smoother grains above
that told of later long
and windless weeks and water
smooth as glass.

Through several hundred million years
this memory in rock remained to
teach us how the little things
endure beyond our wildest dreams.

(c) A McN

No-one had interpreted rock strata to him before. It was a Eureka moment when he realised his fingers were touching a weather event from millions of years ago - a tactile photograph of time.

The Lasts

They started slowly and invisibly at first:
the last cutting of the hedge or mowing of the lawn;
the last time winding the pondweed on a stick whilst
water skaters skit like kittens from the growing candyfloss of green.

Then time sublimating from an airy future to a solid present
made the lasts more self-aware.

The last time I cycled to this home from this station.
The last day the bookshelf had books.
The last calling in on my neighbour
or walking my boy back from his school.

Then, they fell fast like leaves from an autumn tree
and it hit me packing the boxes in the small hours of the night
when my eyes misted not with weariness
but with brokeness.

Leaving bits of myself behind,
things I had made,
trees I had planted and pruned
and loved into shapeliness,
memories I had treasured
were dissolving into history.
It is a foretaste of dying.

But it is also the raw and naked vulnerability
of the unknown leap to an uncertain future
that will never be the same.

And that (I believe)
is life.

(c) A McN


15 years in the same house. Four of our offspring passed from childhood to adulthood and the late gift of number 5 passed from babyhood to childhood. It was very hard to leave and yet the yearnings for our roots were well past their sell-by date. Change is risky but the atrophy of dreams is a bigger risk by far.

Poppy pup

(c) A McN

Botanical Gardens, Belfast

Conjunction

Sawing wood in the dark,
my arm swings to a tribal rhythm.
The rasp of the blade is a hypnotic chant and
the headtorch brushes shadows back and forth as
I sway to the ebb and flow of force.

Incense of sap and sawdust rises
to mingle with the pillars of my breath.

Behind me, the moon is a thin, wry smile.
Two planets shine like silver dimples
on her cheeks.

(c) A McN

May Morning

Today started
with the soft snowfall of willow-down
drifting from the riverside trees
in the warm, bright morning air.

Today ended
sitting in the garden in the dark
watching the stars appear,
seeing the moon-milk on the honeysuckle leaves
and wishing someone would share it with me.

Between the start and the end
I have struggled,
looking for things to keep me active,
things to keep my mind from turning inward to the
hint of shadow that,
in some lights,
looks to be a gaping hole.

(c) A McN

Strange how, even surrounded by beauty and aware of blessing, the shadows can cast an unseasonable chill over the inner landscapes of the mind.

Still centre

I liked the eddying of water as the wave returned.

(c) A McN

After the April rain

After the April rain
with the woods still steaming
I stole some time away.

Silence
save the drip of silver from each leaf,
the slow steam pressure of the rising sap,
the soft hydraulic hiss of leaves
unfurling in the blades of evening light.

Birdsong bubbles in the air.
Bluebells perfume the stillness.
An owl begins to tune his call.

A white curl of moon emerges as
the blue sky thins to black.

Distant cumulonimbus mountains
slip beyond the curve of night
flickering now and then in a spasm
of summer dreams.

(c) A McN

Swansea morning

(c) A McN

Swansea beach in the morning light

Life's largesse sprinkled freely

When I consider your embrace of my senses in a thousand ways
I can only delight in you.

Light enters my eyes in multiplicities of shape and shade,
hue and chroma, form and focus.

I walk through an ocean of sound and meaning,
from the whispers of breath to the song of
birds holding the silences at bay.

At the day's boundaries where the air is still
my body fills with the delicate semaphores of scent:
mist and dew, earth and leaf;
the scent of Atlantic salt on the air,
mingled with a hundred miles of living land.

The lure of chips and sting of vinegar;
crunch of vegetables, sweet juice of fruit and the
mystery of chocolate melting in the mouth and washing care away.

I celebrate the sense of touch,
the reassuring flicker of my blood dancing daily in its webs beneath my skin,
the touch of rain and sunlight, friend and lover,
wind and saltspray.

I give thanks for warmth and coolness, fur and feather, hug and handshake,
comfy chairs by sunlit windows, hot drinks in cold hands
and soft abandonment of bed.

These are my gifts from God,
life's largesse sprinkled freely,
flowing like a foaming river.

May my appetite for life be large
(but never let the gift eclipse the giver).

(c) A McN

Misty bridge

(c) A McN

Early morning in York. This bridge - and the people crossing it - captivated me for about 10 mins. Then the geese captivated me more.

Crows dreaming

A long train journey slid from day to dusk to night
and a full moon hung in the trees like a snagged balloon.

Hunched over the laptop glow
my world spiralled down to a carriage,
a seat, a document, an email.

In the tyranny of work without end
life's flavours drained down;
colours faded; feelings fell away.

Then, coming out the station,
breathing the bigger world beyond, imagination reinflated with a sigh.
The moon was high, still caught in the cobweb laceries of tree.
It hung black crow's nests in bright silver frames.

I listened for the cough and caw of crow
but all I heard was the traffic drone
and the feather breath
of a dreaming bird
and the March air soft and
scented by the sea.

The road was a noisy tide subsiding -
interweaving lines of light
ebbing red and flowing green
as traffic trickled through the night.

High in the trees
the bird breath waxed and waned
to the lullaby wind and its tumbling tones
and the bird veins beat with a blood as old as stones.

And the dreams of the crows ran deep;
deep as the roots of the cradling trees;
deep as the earth's fond memories of dark and noiseless nights
before the roads ran sour with fumes and glare:
when only the dreams of birds and trees
troubled the evening air.

(c) A McN


I often marvel at the way life intrudes into our dullness so vividly and unexpectedly in the thinnest sliver of a moment. If I could identify the magic formula and repeat it at will I'd live more richly.

If I could bottle it I'd be rich in the other way as well!

Night music

A slender moon with a wry smile
illuminated the dark fields with a thin milk glow.

A black dog walked beside me,
and a shadow accompanied us both.

Down the dark and hedge-frizzed track we walked in silence
to the barn where the night silences folded in on themselves under high rafters.

There in the shadow of the wall where the moonlight lapped like a high tide
I slide the silver whistle from my coat. It shone pearly white. The fingerholes were six dark planets in a row.

I lifted the instrument to my lips and breathed out the music in my head,
breaking the silence with the dance of scales and melodies,
turning breath into notes that flew like birds across the empty fields to roost in the inky outlines of the wood beyond.

When my fingers froze and I could play no more I walked
out from the shadows to the moon's white spotlight.

The stars were there in silent ranks, swarmed from horizon to horizon,
drawn from the infinite silences and loneliness of space to this one place

where a man filled the night with music
and a dog hunted rats around a barn.

(c) A Mc N

Sunset fire

Sun setting through the edge of West Wood near Sparsholt

(c) A McN

Foggy reflections

(c) A McN - River Hamble in fog

King again

If there was a best time
It was when you were small enough
that I was big on the stage of your lives.

I was a giant in those days,
A kindly king,
A sage,
A playmate
all rolled into one.

And then the slow drip of years washed it all away.

Now you see me as I am;
Nothing special.
Good at some things
Bad at others.
Embarrassing at times,
And infinitely old and grey
Despite the colours and the wonder
Brimming underneath the skin.

In the ordered world of adults
I'm no longer fit to reign..
I think I need some grand children
to make me king again.


(c) A McN


Not that I wish to put pressure on my children in any way, but I miss belonging to the world of little ones. Their world is much closer to the world I prefer to inhabit and it would be nice to have some fellow explorers who regard it as normality rather than senility.

Transcience

I seem to have been snatching at water all my life.

I speak and the words evaporate into space.
I reach out and touch another but the tingle of the contact fades.
I pray but forget who or what I prayed for.

I see beauty but recall only faintest outlines.
I hear the music of voices I love
but the memory is a faint recording dimly heard through the static of the brain.

I have moments of deep connection when love and respect
arc like electricity in the gap between lives
But so soon it becomes a wisp of remembrance
curling like smoke around faint insecurities.

Even standing still a flood of seconds surges round me;
milliseconds froth and spray against my face.

I want to capture life
To catch a little bowl of friendship and experience,
keep it on the mantelpiece where treasures might be counted like iridiscent fish;
But I know the fish would die.

The transcience of life provokes me;
the flutter of days tumbling from month to year unsettles me.
I feel like a child beneath an autumn tree
snatching at the leaves that cartwheel through the air
and wondering all the time if standing still with outstretched arms
would fetch me more.

So I will rest a while;
letting the golden leaves of time still tumble down
without the need for catching every one,

letting the flow of life slip through my hands
but splashing my face in clean refreshing spray.

I will attempt to live with open eyes and thankful heart today.


(c) A McN


It remains one of the many childhood pleasures I still enjoy. When the leaves fall off the trees I have to catch one at least. They fall with slow elegance but are deceptively difficult to catch.

The last goodbye.

Like a statue you were
but beautiful to me.
Eyes shut in your longest sleep;
hands folded like butterfly wings
in white.

I held your hand in mine.
Cool as the earth it was,
still as starlight.

Not grief but peace.
So glad I was for you
to know such stillness.
Freedom thrives in stillness.

I thanked your body for bearing me.
My flesh owed debts to yours.
Now in the grace of death
our hearts might also know their debts
one to another.

Sleep well my friend.
You are smaller in this box
than ever you were in memory.
No doubt it is better that way round.

Remember me in your
new found freedom.
I would have been more a son to you
had I found the gates much sooner
and known the lock was only
there for show.

(c) A McN

Eight years after I wrote it..
Strange how many years it has taken to get that particular poem out for view.

Reaching for the light

Sculptures at Hilliers Arboretum, Hampshire.

(c) A McN

What it is..

So what is it I am looking for with you?

It is hard to say exactly
But I think I'll know it when I find it.

It will be the colour of a purity
Bright enough strong enough to be unafraid of contamination:
sure enough it need not stand aloof.

It will be the shape of a courage
that can question even itself
without defensiveness.

It will have the weight of faith,
not so light as to blow away in every wind but...
nor so heavy as to weigh me down with needless burdens.

It will have the knowledge to
discern the good from the bad;
the bad from the neutral
and the motivation that flavours
every choice I make.

And most of all it will teach me
to be real
human
accepted
loved:

and more holy
than I yet know how to be.

(c) A McN

Ice Queen

The moon was an ice queen tonight;
sledging frost-white across the Milky Way.

I stood alone on a ghost-glowing heathland,
tiny against the acres of space and eternities of sky.

A scattering of small pines
punctuated the moonwashed moor;
levitating above the luminescent land on a
slender thread of trunk.

But the moon was centre stage.
By the edge of a black pond I
saw her small reflection shimmer
as she worked her winter magic
casting spells upon the water,
turning liquid into stone.

But oh, what elegance she brings..
sketching out her ancient memories of sister earth
she sculpts frost feathers from the fossil birds,
and giant crystals from the continents of old.

Needles of ice knit her bidding
in the black and frigid water.

I stood, still as stone and equally transformed.

Ice stitches grew beneath the moon's pale fingering.
Between them, little veins of water shrank away.
The grass around me creaked as its hoar-frost hair stood on end,
saluting the moon.

In the vast spellbound silence
only the mechanical rip and chew
of a horse grazing in the distant darkness
gave me hope that I might
tear myself from iron chains of wonder.

When at last I turned,
shook the magic from my eyes and walked away;
she sent my shadow on ahead
persuading me to stay.

(c) A McN

Splash

Small waves on a small beach at Lepe, New Forest National Park.

(c) A McN

Night Cycling

Weaving through the dark
with a faint wheel-whirring
no louder than the treadle of a sewing machine
I thread a white light before me,
a red light behind me.

This is my flying carpet
I ride the wind silent as an owl;
the air parts to let me through.

Merely for the joy of motion,
I abandon straight lines,
tacking in short needless curves
like a zigzag stitch.

Lamp posts advance and recede,
casting doppler-shifting shadows
that knit and purl around me.

Black road unrolls by the yard.
The sky is sequined velvet
where the stars shine down.

Orion stands defiant in the east,
straddling houses in a single stride;
but underneath his proud and lofty looks
he longs to have
a bike to ride.

(c) A McN

Keeping up

And sometimes I seem to be
someone else when thoughts and
feelings wax and wane
like the watching moon.

I consider how I change;
tracing the dark mark of the poorly aimed hammer as it slides from
nailbed to nailtip at the speed of
a lumbering continent.

A few short months and all my skin and nails are new.
A few short years and hair and bone
have followed suit.

I am a surfer following a wave of life
riding a body that is never twice the same;
like the surf curling through the water or wind billowing through a barley-field.

Small wonder then
that sometimes I surprise myself
with inconsistencies of mood and inconsistencies of thought.

Forgive me.

Though I change no faster than
a speeding continent
I still struggle to keep up.

(c) A McN

Meditative

Taken at MonkeyWorld in Dorset.

(c) A McN

Without

I went out at night,
wilfully unprepared.
without torch,
without phone,
without purpose,
without plan;
save that of being vulnerable enough
to receive the things
from which I normally hide.

Engine switches off…….silence.
Lights off next……. darkness.

Opening the door,
face-tingling cold damp air waterfalls
into the warm car cocoon.
But I am going out.

The sky dark with night and mist and black cloud brooding.
The bridlepath a tunnel of grasping tree fingers groping to touch me
and a breeze blowing through dead leaves;
tumbling them down with a skeleton rattle.

Everywhere, the silence quivers.
Rats breathing, mice creeping, owls calling.
Hidden eyes watch me.
Ears turn to follow me.

Mouse whiskers twitch among the leaves.
Mist whispers in the trees; seethes through ragged branches.

All senses are alert.
I walk slowly enough to be silent,
slowly enough to be unnoticed,
slowly enough to force my heartbeat down.

Time and space distort in darkness.
Trees are airy, eerie geometries enclosing
fractal shapes that shift between dimensions
depending on light, fear and imagination.

But strangeness electrifies.
Every sense is amplified by darkness,
fingering new feelings I never felt before.

I sense the silt of history stirring in the breeze
and phantom memories uncurling in the misted wind.
Long dead shepherds mutter together,
bringing long dead sheep down for the night.

Beyond them the landscape flickers like an ancient film as
woodlands come and go, wolves howl at the moon and far behind,
the mammoths lumber through;
ice frosting the wrinkles on their elephantine skin.

This is the moment of connection.
Time and space flex with elastic ease
and the mystery of life's feisty pilgrimage
hangs heavy in the autumn air.

It only deepens as the decades into aeons run
and standing in the darkness of an autumn night I see
That I will nourish worms one day
wthout diminishing
the miracle of me.

(c) A McN

Grazing

Horses on Plaitford Common, New Forest National Park.

Volcano

In your raging
words came spilling out in
torrents of white-hot anger.
It was like standing
on the edge of a vent
when the volcano is erupting
and you know you are going to get hurt.

But in this way it was different..
I could see that deep inside the magma chamber,
deeper than a man could reach,
there was a raw pain whose shape escaped you
but whose heat boiled underground
from origins beyond the span of memory and
times before your conscious world began.

Oh that time might take those wounds
and cool them in the cradled arms of love.
Oh that the sting of burning lava might
crystallise to strength of solid rocks
then weather down to wisdom's rich fertility.
Oh that I, imperfect as I am, might be
the healing, humble grass that
helps the barren land find beauty in its grasp.

(c) A McN

Nightsong

The room is dark
The clock drags the sleepless minutes
Over the hump of midnight
And onto the long gentle slope to morning.

I listen to the big river of the wind
Splashing round the house and Frothing over nearby trees.

My thoughts tug at their moorings,
Straining against the long cords of consciousness;
Longing to catch some eddie of the air and fly.

I try to let them go,
Try to cut them free
But they are thick and strong and,
Twisted with anxiety.

The darkness rumbles in the wind,
The house creaks like an arthritic barge straining against the flow
And the taut thoughts hum like a tuned string,
Waiting to accompany the morning song of birds.

(c) A.McN

Misty morning

(c) A McN

Captured near Micheldever Woods after very early airport run.

October sun

October sun on a London street.
Time has slowed to the eleven o'clock elasticities;
Cars and people trickle past.
I walk slowly enough to let the sunshine
Stick to my face.

All is brick and stone,
Tar and concrete,
Stasis and order.

Overhead
The distant ocean of blue sky foams with cirrus
And a bird swings on a lone trapeze of air.

Along a dark crack in the pavement
Yellow fingers of light draw three lone blades of grass
Up to the autumn air.

They shine with impossible tenderness of green
Against the grey hard stone.

I watch them nodding deferentially
As I pass.

(c) A McN

Relativity

The moor is a brooding beast.
The grey still night slides closer
On a mist of midges and a fine
Silk drizzle.

The curlew haunts the
Wind-still silence with an ancient tongue.
The melodies stir memories beyond the span of human mind;

But I am thinking of you,
longing to have more to give than words
but these are all I own.

In your darkness I will tread as softly as I can.
I will not counsel
from my storehouse of accumulated ignorance.
I will not patronise
and practise sympathy upon your pain.
I will not presume
to stand too close for your comfort, or look upon your nakedness.

But I will tell you simple truths

You are loved,
You are surviving,
As strong as you should be,
As humble as you need to be.
There is faith enough for your calling
And grace enough for your anxieties
And gentleness enough for your humanity.

You are doing well in the eyes
Of the One you love.

All else is relative to this.

(c) A McN

Wood and water

(c) A McN - fallen tree on the north shore of the Solent near Inchmery

Bedtime

Bedtime.

In the darkened room
the storles dlstil from imagination's swirling vapours.

Your eyes shlne with anticipatlon and your grin widens to a gappy smile as the last links of the story fall into place..

I tell you how much I love you and your skinny arms lock around my neck.
Your much loved dog comes through to settle by your bed and feel your fingers resting in her black fur.
.
I tuck your pyjamas into your socks the way you like me to.
I turn the lights down and turn some music on.

We pray together,
you as always full of questlons,
me as always struggling to explain
the intangible certalntles of falth,
wondering all the while
if this time with you
is not a bit of paradise
slipped through.

(c) A McN

Redeeming the time

We lay - father and son - in a midnight wood
under a fallen birch tree,
with a plastic sheet
tied across the broken boughs for a ceiling.

This was my final fling
my bid for freedom before the holiday ended.
Work strained at its leash,
growling deadlines in my subconsciousness.

This was my last chance to make a memory
worth taking to the grave
before the tyrant of my time
jealously demanded me again..

I toyed with many options and
only tossed this one half heartedly to you,
expecting no response.

But your voice and your eyes
shone with instantaneous adventure.

We cycled out, racing the setting sun,
exploring the woods, spiralling slowly from bridlepath,
to footpath, to deer track, to fallen trees
to a shelter for the night.

You woke me in the early hours,
long after the owls had ceased to call.

You were cold.
We fixed you up with extra wrapping then the rain began.

There was no wind to speak of.
The rain fell under the influence of gravity alone
in long straight water-needles
stitching 3D soundscapes in the darkened trees.

You asked me questions,
not for information but for reassurance of a father's voice nearby.

And I gave you my words,
half asleep but shining like a light
underneath the dark rain-curtained trees.

Sleep was fitful but the peace was deep.
The memory was deeper still
and long may serve us both
with love.

(c) A McN

The thousand thoughts of self unclenched

The morning after a night of summer rain
I awoke early, restless to be out.

The air was too fragile to burden
with the sounds of a car
or the fumes of an engine.

I cycled, the road whirring beneath me.
I wove along random lanes
turning left and right as took my fancy
with all the plan and purpose of a butterfly.

It was a fine, full, maiden of a morning
and love at first sight for me.
Her hair was the wispy cirrus, her breath the warm breeze
and her firm full curves were the green chalk hills.

Steam rose like wraiths from the vergeside banks.
The air was freshly laundered,
fragranced with floral extravagance
and hung out between the trees to dry.

I was aware of some small miracle at work,
one so delicate I looked away
in case attention gave it fright.

I lay in long damp grass on a bank of summer bloom,
buzzed by flies, stroked by wind, kissed by sunshine,
anointed with dewdrops shaking down
from white cow-parsley heads.

The miracle continued to unfold as self absorption drained away.

The daisy petals were unlocking...
one by one the thousand thoughts of self unclenched.

The temptations, the attitudes,
the justifications, the condemnations,
the excuses, the ambitions,
the dreams, despairs and fears
..unfolded.

A hidden spring uncoiled and one by one
the petals of my pettiness unsprung and opened up
to face the sun.

And somewhere just beyond the wide
horizon-curve of consciousness
an old familiar voice, ancient as the stars, silent as the air,
whispered the words I love to hear
'Look at that beautiful daisy down there'.

(c) A McN

Grass at the swapping of the worlds

Swapping worlds

At the time you swapped your worlds
I was stalking the narrow evening light;
Capturing the places where the grass-heads glowed with inner fire
and fingers of brightness reached across some
ninety million miles to anoint
a favoured stem with gold.

Strange how death,
dramatic as he is,
remains so silent in his work.

There ought to be a ripping
In the fabric of the universe;
A tremor in the rocks;
A shockwave of indignity
as life is plucked away
and grief lies bleeding in the gap.

But silently as light death comes
And I was wholly unaware;
Watching the grasses tremble in the evening air

One by one the shadows shifted as the sun shone through;
One by one the grasses blazed,
Anointed by transforming light.

It's your turn now.

(c) A Mc N


A fit man with a twinkling sense of humour, David had been critically ill for 10 days. It seemed so unlikely he could die - despite the close shaves in the past. Then he slipped away. I was only two miles away taking photos in the evening light - it seemed strange that death is so silent; that something so extraordinary is so unobtrusive that you can be nearby - even in a neighbouring room and not know it has happened.

Machinery

I awoke and the night was silent,
save for the rumble of the machine.

A steady thump of the engine ticking over in the darkness;
a scarcely perceptible rush of fluid in the pipes and the hum of static in the circuitries..

I lie awake listening to its softly pulsing purposeness.
Only at night do I notice its presence;
the day is brash and loud and
deftly drowns all other sounds;
but silent night peels every other noise away until..
the old familiar engine throb returns to haunt my wandering thoughts.

Who owns this engine?
Who maintains it?
How long will it run?
Why is it here, beating time like a metronome within?

Even as I write it rumbles on..
auricle and ventricle,
artery and vein
ebb and flow;
breath and blood.

How did the engine engineer itself
and switch the circuits on?
And when did the first
faint flicker of the
dream of living
dance inside
my foetal form?


(c) A Mc N

On the move

(c) A Mc N

Locking the doors

Locking the doors at night
I heard the rumble of rain drops drumming the dark roof.
Grabbing the umbrella
I opened the door.

Black wet night shook like a dog on the doorstep.
The rain teemed down from the infinite darkness.
A click.... the brolly blossomed open,
green, nylon jellyfish launching
into the ocean of air.

Rain pounded on the tight skin
and darkened the fabric with a thousand spots.
Fat, shining water globes dangled from the edges,
turning the lamp-posts upside down.

I walked down the garden,
Grass and soil soft beneath me;
even the cold air soft with the steam of exploding rain.

In the greenhouse I shone a bright torch beam,
up and out through the rain-rippled glass
into the underbelly of the cloud.

And, oh, how my heart leapt to see the rain transfigured,
to see the meteoric streams of light -
silver flashes streaking from a radiant so distant
that torchlight turned to black.

For a fearful moment I glimpsed immensity -
a sheer relentlessness of rain;
a beast much bigger than my comprehension.

I began to understand
how big a billion is, and shivered awestruck,
at the presence passing
overhead.

(c) A Mc N

Bridleway.

When I walked out on this bright spring morning,
I felt like a creature from another world where time had frozen round about me.

I knew the earth was singing like the birds,
But the note hung in the air,
A single tone anchored to the soil.

All around, the green buds burst,
Sap exploding into flower-froth;
hydraulic energies inflating leaves like detonating air bags..
But in the treacle motion of my freeze frame world
I saw only delicate flags of white and green,
Fingering the morning air.

And the sun hung golden
In a mist so thin that the hills were watercoloured by the light.

Everything was soft;
The light, the leaves, the motherly curves of the grass-furred chalk slipping down to the track where I walked.
Even my shadow was soft, draping itself across the dry path where ants moved in intricate perambulations;
clockwork creatures trickling out of cracks with their morning mechanisms slow and half unwound.

My spring unwound as well
and in the long, elastic string of time and circumstance
I tasted the unhurried privilege of peace.

It was a taste I could acquire.


(c) A Mc N

Destiny

It has been a long time
putting me together.
There was the vast improbability
of conception;
a roulette of possibilities whose outcomes might have made a
million other men...
or made a childless stain of blood instead.

But the alchemy of life - my life - began
and destinies were drawn in helix scripts while unseen forces
fashioned faith and watered me with wellsprings from another world.

Then the borrowing of body substance
from the earth;
Calcium from the waters,
Nitrogen from air
and all the others begged from
rock and soil.

We have never come together in this way before.
Flocks of molecules migrate through continents of tissue,
stampedes of atoms, loosed from rock's captivity, leap and frolic with the pulse of life.

This is me.
For a moment in Earth's history
the rocks can play and move
and love
instead of waiting dumbly
watching life with blind
earth covered eyes.

We have waited so many millenia
to come together in this way.
In me the very stones can sing.

Let me live well
in this interlude between eternities.
Let me cherish the possibilities,
nourish the potentials,
adore the mystery of my miracle.

Let me fulfil the purposes
So long awaited in the stones;
And in the dreams of God.

(c) A McN.

On tiptoe.

(c) A Mc N

The colours of Love

In part it was green,
the colour of the trees
that cradled my early years
and the purple rhododendron
that shone like sticky candy
in the deep wood shade.

In part it was
the white of a rabbit in my outstretched palm
the ginger of hamsters, the black fur of dog
and the ruby red eye
of the albino guinea pig.

There were winter colours;
orange stove embers, pale grey ashes,
the bright woollen palettes
of hand knitted jumpers
and days lengthening to
daffodil yellows.

There were blues of a summer
and greens of a sea,
where a dinghy's deck is flecked with the
white salt spray on the
bronze of the sanded grain.

Silver racquet;
green handled hockey stick,
black camera,
lilac bedspread
yellow beaks of birds and
the purple cassock of the acolyte....
these are the colours of my childhood:

And if love has a colour,
these are the colours of love..

(c) A Mc N

Unhinged.

Last week it was black shapes
inked on the pale paper.

Idly I opened the book;
eyes scanned the lines,
taking in the angled shapes,
the geometries of lettering.

Then in a silent moment,
a mere shimmering of time,
the shapes became letters:
the letters became words,
pictures formed in my head and reality unhinged.

I sat in another's soul,
gazing out at a different world in a
different place at a
different time.

But today it was the low afternoon light
lapping like a yellow tide against the heaving
shoulders of the Black Mountains.

I was no longer in a car,
negotiating roads
and Welsh bends.
I was in the air,
riding like a kite on the breath of sunlight,
unhinged again
and scarcely safe to drive.

Sometimes I fear crossing a threshold;
entering a world from which
I can't return
..or maybe wouldn't want to.

Should I close the lid?
Fix the latch and
lock the genie in?

Is this losing of ourselves in wonder,
the first step in the giving of ourselves to life?
or the last step in the selling of ourselves to fantasies?

I will not lock the latch.
Nor will I take away the lid.
Instead I'll take a little time to oil the hinges so they move freely...

in both directions.

(c) A Mc N

Leap of faith

(c) A Mc N

Standing on one leg in Birmingham

Staying overnight in a strange room
I awoke and decided to make something happen,
To create a moment that might be remembered.

So I wrote to my daughter (the old fashioned way with a pen on a card)
And I told her some of the things about her
That were special to me.

Remembering the unposted letters that have haunted my life
I seized the moment and a stamp,
Taking my folding bike through the foyer,
Past the bemused receptionist and
Out into the grey drizzling morning.

Savouring the cold damp air
I assembled the bike then
Stood on one leg
to tuck the trouser into the sock.

Then it struck me,
Standing on one leg in Birmingham,
That a moment had frozen in time.

I was alive, balancing on one leg while the
Earth turned,
The clouds slid across the bowl of the sky
And the wet air wove between the
Brick and concrete mazes of the town.

I was aware,
In touch with myself as if the very
Act of balancing
Brought poise and pause to time.

People around me moved in silence,
Soundwaves slowed and stopped.
My stillness hung in the air
Imprinting memories on
The Rosary chain of life...

A grey drizzle,
A letter, a bike and
A man standing on one leg
In Birmingham.

(c) A Mc N

Sustenance

Not a queue
But a line, waiting
Waiting for eternity to greet them with a kiss and a
And a silence unusually rich with purpose.

The taste of bread, elastic on the tongue.
The tang of wine.
The touch of something deep;
Intangible.
Living off the harvest of another time.

A feather-breath of meaning,
Melting the hard edges of the heart,
Misting the awkward shapes of our clumsy lives with the finest beads of condensation;
In which the light of life
delights to play.

(c) A Mc N

Thistledown

Bubbles of thistledown.
Fragile fruit of a summer's growing;
I watched them, a loose flock flying high,
sliding on slivers of sunbeam in the cool, clear autumn air.

What is fruitfulness?
The statuesque rigidity of thistle stem?
The wiry beauty of spiked resilience defying season's turning?

Or is the fruit the dry and shriveled seed;
the secret store of potencies
distilled from alchemies of life?

When the winds come they will scatter and fell:
seeds to fly and stems to fall.
But all will lead to life.

Fallen stems will fertilise,
fallen seeds will vitalise.
True life is never wasted;
when it out-manoeuvres death.

But there must be no randomness,
no blind chances,
no cold mechanics of evolving.

Behind the season's turning is the contemplative love
that counts the hairs on heads,
and sparrows in the air,
that the names the stars
and clothes the field with colourings
beyond compare.

Such love longs for a shepherding
of life into new life

For a singing through death's valley
and remembering of summer songs
that will be needed
at a future time.

(c) A Mc N

Playmates

Playmates.

(c) A Mc N

Granite stream

It was a sanctuary for me;
Broad valley frizzed with trees
Under the gaze of granite hills,
Serene and cool.

The river wide and self-assured,
Yet intricately wrought with rock and
Stepping stones and secret pools.

Water smooth as crystal murmured
Stories as it flowed.
I listened to the narrative unfold,
Tales of storm and rain and rocks
And hills immeasurably old.

Pure air, pure water,
Washing the restless mind:
Contagious purity of earth and sky,
Trickling to the inner depths
Where faith is old and dry.

In the tingling of a moment
the inner scabs and scars all melt away,
The role-plays and pretences cease
And as they do, the compass of emotion creeps
From stress to peace.

I watch my boy collect pebbles,
Fishing pools for giant eggs of pink and grey.
And from the songs he softly sings
I guess he also feels this way.


(c) A Mc N

Castle of the dogs

(c) A Mc N

Castle of the Dogs on the Morven peninsula, Scotland.

By torchlight

By torchlight
the drift of drizzle
Is a fine feathering of magic;
A dusting of cloudflakes,
Fine as flour
And light as liquid snow.

I watch the wind made visible
By twists and turns of droplets,
Shining like planets,
Flocking like tiny birds,
As the torch illuminates
The soft, dark underbelly of the night.


(c) A Mc N

Stars in my hair

I lay on my back on the dark, dew-slicked grass,
and gazed at the gaps between the stars.

But when I raised my binoculars
to the empty spaces
they had filled with a twinkling of lights
swarming like bright bees
in the black circles of vision.

But even in this swarm
lay darknesses between the lights
so I took a telescope to study
the little gaps between
the little stars.

But when I looked,
even the little gaps brimmed with tiny stars and the
fuzzy smudge of galaxies.

The more I stared,
the more the darkness wasn't there,
the velvet black
merely a diminution
of the light
between the brighter stars.

I lay pondering,
and fell asleep with stars in my hair,
feathering my face with light
and my dreams
with wondering.

(c) A Mc N

Fuinary spit buoy by sunset

(c) A Mc N
It was shortly after taking this image that I realised the strange noise
in the water was 3 porpoises lazily passing my kayak.

Neaps and springs

For ten days
I lived a mere stone's skipping from the salted sea.

I slept to it's murmuring,
woke to it's gulls crying,
And watched it's tides rise and fall.

Gently it caught me in it's rhythms.
Waves lullabied my sleep by night and
By day I counted time by tides.

Like a growing self consciousness
I became aware
Of the moon's slow dancing through the days and nights,
Spinning out and in from full to crescent,
Crescent to full,
While the wide waters surged and sighed
Like a slow drum beating.

I began to measure my life by the rise and fall of the ocean's breath.
Highs and lows, neaps and springs
Gave a finer audit of my days than the cruder count of seasons.

Even now, when my cluttered thoughts clamour for attention
And a long tangle of responsibilities
Wraps me in a paralysing web,
Something in me softly sings
'Highs and lows, neaps and springs'.


(c) A McN

In Twilight

In twilight all perspectives change.

Trees seem taller, bulkier;
Hunchback beasts
Ready to stalk the night.

And the clouds, mere water-carriers by day,
Project the dreams and nightmares of the sleeping earth in
Curdled shadows on the curving dome of night.

I had forgotten quite
How small I am.

Darkness rises like a tide,
Welling from the shadowed depths beneath the trees and
Running out to lap around my heels

I had forgotten how it feels
To be so out of place.
And alien beneath
A rising moon.

There was once a first time,
A first awareness of the world
Outside my constructs,
A world where I didn't really matter.
May there never be a last time.

Only in alienation is a
Sense of self maintained.
Only in being utterly irrelevant to others
Is the strangeness of ownership of self brought home.


(c) A Mc N

Borderzone

(c) A Mc N - groynes on the coast near Stone Point on the Solent.

Day of summer rain

I walked in a wood
Lush with summer; dripping with rain.

The ceiling was a printed pattern
Of leafy fingers and palms,
Shining dull green in the dull gray light.
The wind shook wet mischief from the trees as we walked beneath their shade.

The song of a damp wind's breath,
The slap of leaves
And the rattle of rain
Was symphony enough for me.

I wanted to run with the rain against my face and to cartwheel
In the long wet grass,
But the adult in me said
It wasn't sensible.

But, playful still, I grabbed a narrow trunk of birch
To shake a shower from it's reservoir of rain
And run away before it landed.

The woodland paths were shining,
Filmed with a lovely skin of light.

It was a day of summer rain.
Even the ghosts of childhood
Grew green
and strong.

(c) A McN

The way trees dream.

I listened to the wind of a summer storm leaning on the trees outside my window.

It was late at night but my head was ticking louder than my heart
so I was awake,
taking in sounds
while the gentle simmer of thought
bubbled away with just enough
pressure to keep the lid off sleep.

The big trees bend.
The air sifts through;
leaking between the lacery of
leaf and branch.

The trees sigh,
leaves rattling as the wind exhales,
then a clumsy gust
tumbling out the darkness,
reinflates the canopy.

There is poetry in the motion,
lullaby in the songs of the air;
rhythms in the resonance
of tuning-fork branches
spilling their harmonies
to the liquid night.

Air twists and turns,
Spinning together from mountains and moorlands,
skimming on rivers,
and skating on oceans,
bundling through cities…
threading these woods
with the weave of their travels.

I hover on the edge of sleep,
Listening to the suck and surge of air;
savouring the scents of
a thousand mingled journeys
as they shuffle and spin
Through the shuttle of branches.

Consciousness seeps slowly away.
The wind gushes wild stories
In the gaps between leaves
and I fall asleep wondering
if this is the way trees dream.

(c) A McN

The annual lie

For a long time
I have wanted to dispense with my birthday.
It is a lie.
The colour of my hair is a lie too.
And the wrinkling of my skin.

I am the victim of a merciless conspiracy
between the inadequacies of cell replacement
and the cold counting mechanisms of solar system orbits.

I am still young.
I play, I wonder, I believe.
Innocence is still hopeful, still ashamed of wrong.
Cynicism is still largely locked away in the brown
bottle with a child proof lid and "Poison" on the label.

But life flows like a river in flood.
The earth spins relentlessly,
Night and day flash by and, swept before them,
Seasons brush the months away.

I plan to learn new things.
I plan to invest in friendships
but time sidesteps the good intentions
and work, the parasite of time,
steals the rest away.

So here I am,
wondering how to respond when people ask
"What do you want for your birthday?" and
" It's a big one this year, isn't it?"

It's hard to say what I really want.
A truce with life,
or at least a truce with myself,
might be nice.

And it's hard to say "Could you buy me
One of those sprays that removes insecurity and defensiveness?
Or a mirror with the reflection that doesn't always expect me
To make the first move?"

I would like to rejoice in my achievements without fear of pride
and enjoy my life without fear of failure.
I would like to care more for other people
and care less about what they think of me.
I would like my love to be founded more on the basis of overflow
and less on calculation.

I fear I am merely a year older.
But if you could buy me any of those for my birthday
I would be a year wiser too.

(c) A McN

(c) A McN
Part of the Cromford Canal near Matlock, Derbyshire.

Herding

Cycling along a Yorkshire lane
where the summer grasses graced the verge in a froth of seedheads
I chanced upon the sheep.

Five beasts with brains as woollen as their backs
fled as a flock along the road before me,
demonstrating with fluid practised moves
the instinctive art of synchronised stupidity.

There were no turnings, no gateways,
only the narrow hedge-rimmed verges
so they ran and ran and ran in terror of perceived pursuit.

And when I got to where I was going
I returned to find them once again,
and - unwittingly - chased
as they - dimwittingly - ran
the whole course again.

I wondered how often we,
like sheep, exhaust ourselves
with fleeing from the things that cause us fear
from loneliness,
from memories,
from anxieties,
from haunting thoughts.

Perhaps we should stop on the verge side now and then,
letting the monsters draw nearer
in the hope that if we stand calm and fearless as they come
they will pass us by
...this time.

(c) A McN

Sleeping out

Sleeping out
on a night of soft rain,
I walked into the twilight moor,
into the maze of gorse and bracken, birch and fir.

Foals were silhouettes of shade
twitching in the
silent shadows of a mare.
I walked with reverent stillness there.

The night fell, the wind rose,
Tumbling the sky breath over the sleeping trees,
Birch leaves trembled, black as the ace of spades,
I made my bed beneath their shade..

Slowly, fear of the unknown night subsides,
a territoriality evolves,
my tree, my bush, this nest where I belong.
In the dark I listen to the haunting nightjar song.

Sleep was fitful but the air sank deep
The night-sharp scents drill down
Tingling the stagnant layers of the lungs
Between the hissing showers a half moon hung.

An interplay of light and shade,
Showers and moonlight, filled the fitful hours.
Stiff limbs, but a loosened mind uncoiled in curdled dreams and thought.
And peace was found where it was sought.


(c) A McN

Winter sun

(c) A McN

Twilight mist

On a grey day,
In a narrow, dripping valley
Where the blackbirds sang and scolded alternately,
I watched the mist
Dissolve the trees
Into a formless void
As my splintered emotions
Melted together and settled out at last

The river ran,
A sleek silver snake,
Frothing and hissing on its bouldery bed;
Filling the damp air with the illusion of rainstorm.

This is the netherworld, the misty grey
Between night and day;
Between seasons;
Between the hurt and the healing.

It is a place of peace
Where the mist makes all things insubstantial;
All things isolated,
All perspectives skewed;
But, somehow, all things
Faintly new.

(c) A McN


After my 8 year old's tantrum to end all tantrums I felt thoroughly drained. How do you balance compassion and discipline? How do you teach forgiveness and responsibility at the same time? How do you stop the things someone shouts in anger taking root in your own confidence and self esteem? The mist had no answers, but being there, surrounded by the vastness of nothingness, made the answers less urgent.

Honesty

You have looked inside
And seen the worms.
But I have seen the dark,
Rich soil they make.

You have named the shadowed beasts within
And shivered at their forms,
Forgetting that naming is the first step to understanding;
And understanding is the lion tamer's skill.

You have seen the fragile, sore, self consciousness of the inner self
But not yet realised this second sight
Is the source of all compassion.

You thought you saw ugliness
But it was only unformed beauty
Waiting for the time of grace to fall.

(c) A McN

Bedtime

In the darkened room
the storles dlstil from imagination's swirling vapours.

Your eyes shlne with anticipatlon and your grin
widens to a gappy smile as the last links of the story fall into place..

I tell you how much I love you and your skinny arms lock around my neck.
Your much loved dog comes through to settle by your bed
and feel your fingers resting in her fur..

I tuck your pyjamas into your socks
the way you like me to.
I turn the lights down and turn some music on.

We pray together,
you as always full of questlons,
me as always struggling to explain
the intangible certainties of falth,

and wondering all the while
if this time with you
is not a bit of paradise
slipped through.

(c) A McN

(c) A McNaught

Nesting places

From the distances of eternity,
Along the boundary lines of the furthest and faintest stars
He held back.

Turning his imagination round, retreating from the comfort of creativity
He remembered an ancient pain from the very start of time.

He would act to heal the wound.

Distilling the essence of Godhead,
He shrank the universe of his own personhood and power.
Compacting himself,
Compressing himself,
Shaking himself down out of clusters of galaxies, clouds of bright nebulae,
Swarms of old starfields.

Slowly imploding;
A black hole of being

Condensing, regressing, retreating from grandeur.
Down comes the deity, shrinking in majesty.
See the immortal mutate to mortality,
Creep like a fugitive into flesh cavity.
Trusting entirely to human integrity -
Motherly comfort and fatherly care.

There he grew,
Silent and intimate;
Nurtured by borrowed blood.
Clothed with frail flesh.

Still he seeks his
Resting places
Nesting where a strangers love extends.

Craftsman of the cosmos making time
For making friends.

(c) A Mc N

Morning bridge

Morning light on Orwell Bridge, Ipswich.
(c) A Mc N

Watching

I watch you on stage, holding the crowd with a mix of humour, humanity and bare faced audacity.
You cajole us, coerce us, inspire us by turns.
And nobody suspects.

I see you mingling, moving in and out of conversations, smiling as you do,
Spreading fire and revolution,
Kindling passion for the broken.
And nobody suspects
The broken stand before them.

But I, by some privilege of grace,
Am privy to the tumbled words, half articulated emotions,
The things that can only be half-said lest the saying of them burst the slender fibres
Holding strength and sanity together.

All you seek is a truce with life,
A hiding place, a sanctuary,
A glimpse of hope.

All I have to offer is a hug, a prayer;
A willingness to keep your secrets,
And to share your pain...

A feeble kind of love perhaps
But honest all the same.

(c) A Mc N

Moths

I have seen their graveyards
By the naked bulbs
Where their husks are paper thin
Their scales are dust
And their broken faces lie
surmounted by a
Honeycomb of empty eye.

Moths mistake
the lamplight for the moon
And steered by stirrings older
Than the stars,
Orbit till their spiralled flight
Singe incandescent
On the light.

In my long, uncertain, navigations to the heart of God
Keep me following the ancient truths
beyond the bright, alluring vanities of men;

Remind us of simplicities:
Of confession and
forgiveness,
Of the mysteries of calling,
Of the doubts that keep us on our knees
equipping us with meekness for
inheriting the earth.

Protect us from the counterfeits that kill,
Whose brightness is a trick of distance, not illumination.
Protect us from
Experiences without fruit of change;
Emotion without integrity of will;
Words whose claims outweigh realities.
Visions based on wishes more than needs.

Consider our moth soft frailties;
The smallness of our understandings
The weakness of our wings
The labour of our flight.
Steer us gently, wisely, slowly;
Steer us starwise, moonwise, sunwise,
Steer us Godwise in the dark.

(c) A Mc N

Sunflowers

Rain like rifle fire,
flattening the grass;
ricochets from roof tiles
in a hiss of spray.

Barefoot on wet ground,
both in pyjamas,
I held him in my arms.
We spun the umbrella in our hands,
watching the rim shed spiral streams of molten silver in the air.

"Daddy, it looks like a sunflower"
he said.

So in the rain, under the deep impenetrable grey of cloud,
on a day of unseasonable cold;
we stood in pyjamas,
making sunflowers with only imagination for the sun.

It surprises me how long such
flowers last,
Scenting the memories for many years.

Let me too,
child in my father's broad embrace,
sow gardens of beauty
From seeds of faith and imagination;
even when the sun seems far away.

(c) A Mc N

London sunset

(c) A Mc N

Long pause

I read it in a field,
The dry stubble scratching against the leather of my boots
And the big wind playing chess with the clouds.

And my head was full of the normal rubbish;
Trying to forget what I was all too easily remembering
And trying to remember what had long since forgotten.

So I walked only slowly and I read some old notes
Of things that had once been important
But had somehow faded to the distance.

And I read about the power of pause
And the need to stop, to reconnect
Inward and upward until reality flows again.

So I watched the wind play chess once more
where the white cumulus pieces leapfrogged across the sky
And in my inner wilderness the long pause triggered the move I'd longed to make.

Pawn to King.

(c) A Mc N

Autumn fungi

(c) A Mc N

First fire

It was the first fire of autumn.

The smoke stung our eyes and stained our skin but
Together we fed the hungry flames.

We were hunters and gatherers,
Collecting clippings from the newly barbered hedge to offer to this
Strange capricious creature,
Hissing, spitting, huffing with acrid breath.

The fire tightened our faces until the skin was thin and taut with heat;
But a few steps away the cool September air
Goose-pimpled our naked arms.

We spoke the small-talk hunters ever spoke
And we gathered memories like we gathered leaves.

Overhead, between the spiralling, shifting columns of bonfire breath;
The autumn stars sang in the huge lonelinesses of space,
With only their fires
To comfort them.

(c) A Mc N


The bittersweet smoke of the first autumn fire echoes the emotions of a season where the year dies and yet - more than any other time - is pregnant with life.

Harvest hedge

Although the air was September-fresh and fitted tightly round the skin,
It sang like summer and the plump berries shone like bells;

Blue sheen of sloe,
Red shine of rosehip;
Pregnant hawthorn and the purple wine of brimming
Blackberry.

Hedge rows alive with a rare, rich alchemy;
Harvest-light sparkling in the nooks and crannies of branches;
And a parable half hidden on the horizons of consciousness...

Something about age,
And fruitfulness
And the nature of beauty.

(c) A Mc N

Dancing on water

(c) A McN

To have been there..

On the hillside where the barriers broke down and the crowds gathered together with a mix of curiosity and hope;
There were people like me, knowing from the inner aching that there was more to life than we had ever been told.

And here it was.
Not shrouded in mystery or clouded with ritual.

Here was wisdom, gentle, teasing and shining with life,
So different from the cynics
And so different from the priests.

Just being there made you feel clean and fresh inside.
He spoke of seeds, harvest, the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.
It seemed so obvious. So right.

And everything he said was underpinned by the
Bouyant expectation of a father's love
Brimming over.

I had never thought of God like that before.

I have been to that hillside many times in imagination.
But I often long to have been there on that day,
To feel the sun kiss my face,
To scent the dry grasses and the flower-confettied meadow while his words
Hung like a rainbow over us all;
Making it all so simple, so obvious,
So beautiful
And so true.

(c) A McN

The Sermon on the Mount (Gospel of Matthew chapter 5-7) neatly summarises the radical, revolutionary nature of Jesus' teaching. Our society is more complex than 1st century Palestine yet human nature is remarkably unchanged and these precepts still resonate with a reality that is as true as it is unattainable by human effort. Which is where the grace of God comes in.
Oh to live more deeply in that grace...

Posh dinner

It was part of the conference. A tour of the Guinness Brewery
Followed by a posh dinner.

I meant to go,
But there were streets to walk down, a canal to watch, places to explore and a
wasteland of dockside development to be lonely in.

So I walked. A stranger in drizzling dark in an unfamiliar town.
I felt the loneliness I needed to feel and the freedom of that loneliness.

Then I went to a late night shop to mix and match some supper. Instant soup, a roll and cheese.
I felt the simple frugalness I needed to feel and the adequacy of that frugalness.

Only when a flurry of rain shook the outstretched leaves of canal-side trees
Did I scarcely think of the posh dinner;
And rejoice because I wasn't there.

(c) A McN

I have many friends who enjoy their food and wine, finding my odd tastes little short of madness. To me though the essence of travel is to absorb a place from the viewpoint of its ordinary inhabitants, not its elite. My lonely wanderings (often with a camera) give me a richer set of memories than another meal in another location.
So it's not just my innate dislike of crowds and fears of social ineptness.... honest.... :-)

Same Mould

I watched you on the beach,
In the cool. clear evening light;
Moving like a crab across the
Glistening pebbles,
Blue bucket swinging idly from your hands.

I had been calling you from the spiced air of the barbecue,
But my words drifted like smoke.
I stood, holding your plate of hot food
While you, a hundred feet away,
Stood in another universe,
Deafened by wonder.

At last I realised your world was the better of the two.
Slowly, almost reverently, I walked to you,
Feeling like a disciple at his master's feet.

You were alive with discovery,
Herding crabs, tracing the hypnotic sway of anenomes, and watching the slow glide of winkles on the sand.

And I knew
From the deep love I felt for you
And the intense clarity of the moment,
That we both came
From the same mould.

(c) A McN

Fumaroles

The strange unearthly landscape near the Krafla region of Iceland.
(c) A McN

Two teeth

All evening he tousled with his teeth,
twisting this way and that
until the red thread's
thinning grip gave out.

With a broad grin brimming
He brought them through,
two white trophies
held proudly in pink hands.
.
"Sorry Dad," he said, "for getting blood on the tissues".
And, oh, how I loved this little sharing of himself,
these needless words and sentiments designed
to draw me deeply to a suitable response.

I only wish my mind was fast and free enough
to grasp the treasured moments as they come.
to sweep him in a hug and tell him how proud I am to be his Dad.

But neither fast nor free
I stumbled through congratulations,
half aware of bedtime's elongating span.

So the teeth still haunt me,
and the tissues with their stain of red
and the music of an unselfconscious voice wanting to be recognised.

"Look at me," it says,
"I'm brave and grown up, really I am".

I know that feeling too.


(c) A McN

Lily moons.
(c) A McN

Cycling round a deer park near Nottingham I was struck by the tranquility of colour, shape and texture in the lilies on the lake.

On the bridge

I found you on the bridge in the midst of a city, in a stream of crowds,
but statue-still, looking out over the water
crying.

I had only stopped to take a photo of the view
but suddenly we were together
apart from the crowd;
parallel lives looking out on parallel views
yet a world apart.

I was awkward,
the humanity of compassion made me want to know you,
to comfort you or reassure,
yet we were strangers and you were vulnerable,
alone even in the crowds.

I owed you the dignity of private grief
yet I also owed the blessing of a kind and timely word.

The words we swapped were very few.
You reassured me that you would not jump.
I reassured you that life was bigger than it felt today
and I asked your name that I might pray with meaning
to a God who counts in ones.

I left you, with the lightest touch of hand upon your shoulder.
"I'll be thinking of you" I said and turned away
deep sighs of prayer rising like bubbles in a well
yet inwardly I grieved at my inability to really tell you what I knew;
the clumsy shallowness and guardedness shyness
of my words.

Five minutes later and a mile away I stopped my bike.
I would write a note instead and cycle back to where you were.
I am better with ink than spoken talk
and soon a message formed beneath the pen
and I set off to you again.

But these were many minutes gone and I suspected you
like the footsteps of the clock, would also have moved on.
Though strangely, it seemed to me,
between the looking and the finding,
the looking was the more important of the two -
a kind of prayer made tangible by time.

I never found you. I put my note in a telephone box
Someday someone with your name may open it and be blessed.
A chance in a million that it might be you.

But even if it never is, remember this...
A stranger came to look for you, Rebecca,
and love was in the looking.

This is God's parable to you.

Don't hide away.

(c) A McN

Sound of freedoms

The sea was anxious;

waves jumped and jostled; crowded fretfully
before a cold east wind that streamed with unseemly haste.

The tide being low
I walked across the foreshore,
stepping through the tangled seaweed braids and
round the pits and pools bait digging left behind.

Then I was there,
standing at the water's edge,
offering the kayak to the waves running thin
across the shallow ledge of low tide strand.

A push, a shove and (scraping momentarily)
we enter in another world.

Deeper water shoulders against me;
Waves rise from nowhere, scoop me forwards
slide under me, spill themselves around me.
The east wind whistles through metallic teeth
and the sea smell is sharp and raw
at the back of my nostrils.

In and out the paddle plunges,
knifing the deep green ocean's wave-wriggled flesh,
and leaving long liquid scripts spinning
on the shining parchment of the sea.

Every stroke an effort
through the changing hills and valleys
of this mobile world.

Out across the river mouth,
past the beacons standing sentinel
and over to the empty marshes shining in their
ebb tide nakedness.

The mud is bright in the watery sun,
clothed only with the
delicate geometries
of seabird footprints.

And here, utterly alone,
utterly at peace
I listen to the call of birds against the hissing wind
and faint cacophany of waves;
the sound of freedoms I can scarcely comprehend.


(c) A McN

The marshes at Needs Oar Point on the mouth of the Beaulieu River. Bird footprints in the foreground.

Thin vapours

When the phone rang and you spoke
it was a different you.
You were smaller and further away and I needed to stretch to reach you.

Even then I wasn't sure it was you I had caught because there was
so little substance in my grip.
Where was your confidence, your passion, your opinions?
Where was the cut and thrust of word and jest?
Where was the sparkle now?

I listened. There was little else of value I could do
and even my listening lacked value, being divided between the
compassion of a friend and the mental arithmetic
of times, tasks and what I needed to be doing next.

So what can I offer you?
I'll not be organised enough to call
Nor disciplined enough
to remember you as often as I might.

Although I wish it was, I doubt that
Prayer will be a daily sacrifice;
More likely now
and then.

So this is now.
And then
from time to time
When I will read these lines, thin vapours of prayer
will rise and I will remember you and recall
That even when you died a little bit
It was just a different kind of living
making you more special
in a different kind of way.

(c) A McN

Three phases of water

Copyright - A McNaught

Wildest dreams

I have no illusions about myself
but quite a few disillusions still remain.

I have tried but in the very act of trying
Have been false.
Beguiled by the tyranny of the moment,
My mind is fickle and unfaithful.
Preoccupied with the present, neither past nor future,
Friends nor enemies get the attention they deserve .

Daily I work more than I ought
Rest less than I should
Love too thinly
Care too slowly
Live too coldly.

Only now and then do I stand on tiptoe
To stretch beyond the confines of a mean and self protecting will.

But something oddly cheerful still abides;
An ancient saying resonates defiantly with truth

"Faith, hope and love remain - and the greatest of these is love"
And I am truly loved

Beyond my wildest dreams.

(c) A McN

One of the strangest truths I experience is the way a sense of my own insecurity and worthlessness can nest so closely to the deep sense of being created for a purpose and forgiven for a reason; being loved. These truths taken singly can lead to despair on the one hand or arrogant confidence on the other. Together they recall "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven".

Saltmarsh sunset

Copyright - A McNaught

Treetalk

So we walked at night across the big winter fields
your hand small but warm in mine.

I told you all the important things I knew
like the air being colder in the bottom of the hollow
and why the mist forms there
and what this land looked like a hundred years ago
and where the valley ends.

We watched the trains running along the embankment;
glowing caterpillars dusting the dark with yellow light and electric flash,
then under the echoey bridge and out to the crest where
an east wind bit our ears with sharp teeth
and the black dog, invisible, chased scents across the field.

But it was the trees I remember most;
we stood before them as they spoke
the fluttered gutterals of winter leaf
tongued by the brittle wind.

So real were the cadences of speech,
that you were almost scared but drawing close you rode
the wave of imagination till it broke
and we spoke longingly of snow or rain
that this wild language might foretell.

The clouds were pregnant with a heavy darkness,
distant views dissolved but then reformed.
Leaf prophecies lay unfulfilled as we returned to streetlamp order,
a dog walking to lead,
and cocoa with a curl of cream
on top.

(c) A McN

Power struggle..

Copyright - A McNaught

Rediscovered

It is more than a hole in our lives,
it is a seive of sorrows where a thousand moments, memories, actions
suddenly sting with the new knowledge
that things will never be the same.

And yet, in the heightened rawness
of sensitivity we find new evidences that a life
can never fully end.

A gesture inherited; a look;
a figure of speech; attitudes, outlook -
and values that run like blood in the veins of personality
to keep you alive for generations
yet to come.

(c) A McN

Neither

Neither night nor day,
I walked in the grey light listening to the scold of blackbirdand the raucous pheasants cursing silence.

Neither wet nor dry,
I lay in a damp crackle of brown bracken,
watching the heath slope down a dark valley
to a glistening bog and the black frizz of winter wood beyond.

I was a child here once
nurtured in the solace of this loneliness and peace,
watching the night creep like ink between the clumps of gorse
and shivering at the shadow of the infinite;

neither afraid nor wholly comfortable.

(c) A McN

Dandelion Seeds

Floating,
Light and shining,
Bright inviting and delighting me..

Your love, like dandelion daughters dancing in the sun.

I cannot catch your love by force and cunning;
Snatching merely sweeps your love away.

Warm currents waft the silver bubbles high
I try to woo the winsome wind,
With gentle stroke invoke the laws of gravity and lead
the feathered seed to earth.

Gently, slowly,
Not to crush the beauty….
Here they come.
One by one they nestle in my palm.

I will not harm their fragile form.

Your love is borne to me on whispered breeze
I will not seize the gift you give or cause you hurt

But hold you gently
Near my heart.

(c) A McN

The child in me still has an overpowering urge to catch dandelion seeds or thistledown when I see them blowing. It is an art where gentleness and patience are rewarded, much the same as human love - or even divine love.

Twilight

(c) A McN

Clear night

A damp and winter stillness;
Black tree bones beaded with water drops;
The velvet gaps between the clouds beaded with stars.

A crescent moon hangs crookedly, slipping down the sky and Venus blazes bright above the trees. The light has long since gone; the western fires are less than embers.
Only the faintest smudge of ash lightens the horizon..

Imperceptibly, the clouds dissolve.
One by one the lonely stars regain their constellations and the jigsaw sky reforms.

The air is damp and soft but under this cooling canopy of stars the long thin threads of light will stitch their bright embroideries.
Frost needles fix white sequins into place.

And as we sleep, this gentle, liquid air will harden into stone
To set like concrete round the threshold of my home.

(c) A McN

Temptation

In my heart I know it is wrong and I am ashamed
But I want to with all my heart.

So to resolve the dilemma
My mind comes to the table as a peace maker
Between my desire to protect myself and
My desire to fulfil my passing obsession.

But the mind is a betrayer
Looking only to prove its cleverness to all.

The mind is full of wise arguments
"No, it says, this will not hurt anyone"

And I am grateful to the mind's excuses
Because now I know that that which is wrong is justifiable and if it is justifiable
Then it is not wrong any more...

And this is the tree of knowledge whose fruit I strain to reach
While the serpent, hissing, weaves his way
Through the holes in my arguments
Into the very corridors of vein and artery
That lead to my heart.

(c) A McN

Browsing photography sites the mouse drifts towards the Fine Art Nudes. There is beauty in the female form that can be celebrated but there is a dangerous borderzone of the spirit that desires ownership, power and indulgence in the realms of imagination. The choice is simple - do I justify the weakness? Or resist the temptation? And which will enrich the real me - whoever that is?

Moon reflecting in mud

(c) A McN

Moon surgery

The light is clean,
surgically clean.
The moon wears the whitest of masks and the stars are
scalpel points of polished steel.

The land is anaesthetised with cold,
And even the pulse of time
Is barely discerned in the slow
Tick of constellations round the pole.

Needles of ice implant
with crystalline precision.
Frost acupuncture
Pierces leaf and levers stone
From soil.

This is war against disorder,
Crystals in advance,
Fixing the world in chains
of ordered, geometric
beauty.

Tonight, such order wins.
The water will no longer dance.
There will be living things that die
And cells that freeze in geometries of ice.

But there is also tomorrow.
Always, there is tomorrow
And always another alchemy...

Of sun, and light; of life
and warmth.

(c) A McN

Pale Maiden

Tenderly the green stalk trembles
as the peaty wind slips out of sight.

A bell of petals chiming sunshine
to the hammer of a yellow light.

Gentle beauty where the wiry grasses grow,
I watch your time of honour come and go

that I might learn the hardiness
of gentleness;

tenacity of love.

(c) A McN

The Pale Maiden is a flower of the Falkland Islands, not unlike a Harebell. It is a delicate beautiful plant growing in bleak windswept places.

Badge of honour

She moved with a calculated precision, body erect, back held straight;
But the old familiar animation danced in her eyes.

She spoke in gestures
And her hand was a bird alighting on my arm to emphasise her points
But when we walked, her vibrancy ossified
To a deliberation of rehearsed posture.

We spoke of backs and hips and osteopaths;
"This is my badge of honour" she said,
"Giving birth to a sideways baby first put this out".

Last time I met her she lingered in memory.
Maybe it was the perfume echoing on me where we parted with a kiss.
Maybe a resonance of spirit where opposites attract and her confidence
Aligned the compass of my diffidence.

This time she earned her place in memory again.
Partly the tingle of affection given and received;
Partly the appreciation of kindredness beneath the different versions of our lives;
But most of all the words:

"My badge of honour".

Honour is not in pain endured - you had no choices there.
Real honour is in making good choices,
In choosing to acknowledge the link between life and pain;
In remembering with thankfulness the context of suffering.

That, my friend, is your badge of honour,
And the gift you gave to me.

(c) A McN

St Swithun's gate, Winchester
Copyright - A McNaught

September morning
Copyright - A McNaught

Moonshine

In the darkness of the room
A single patch of light
Like the footprint of an angel
Still warm,
Glowing with the residue of heaven.

We sat in the blackness,
Holding our fingers into the pearly photon stream
Smiling as our hands, irradiated white,
Transformed to glowing liquid light.

We spoke of moonshine;
Then I remembered...
There is no such thing as moonshine
Only sunshine reflecting from a dead and barren land.

If I can stand before Your streaming light
Then even my dry barrenness will burn with bright
Reflections of your grace.

Then darkness will illuminate
Despite my fears
Despite my cratered faith
Despite my pain.

And, like the gentle, silent moon
I'll rise again.

(c) A McN

Bracken

Bracken yellowing in the purple heather,
Too crisp for want of rain.

Crickets whirring like well oiled machines and blackberry scent on the air.

Time stolen to lie in the forest of fern fronds, beneath the underbelly of the breeze to ask nothing
Nor to need a reply.

Only to hold tight and close to life's beauty and mystery
And be strangely moved.

(c) A McN

North westerly airstream
Copyright - A McNaught

Strandline

I see the long white curl of breaker
Kiss the shore
And hear the deeply drinking shingle shiver,
Quiver coyly at the sea’s embrace.

Wave after wave the water
Laps affection on the land in foamed caresses
Growling passion in a gravel song and
Sighing softly back into the seaweed deeps.

And I think of all your daily waves of faithfulness
That wash our lives, the surging tides of love that
Ring compassionately round
The islands of our isolation.

I think of all your unseen flows
When we are cold and unaware
And yet your deep protective love is there
And mercy seeps incessant through our sands.

For I am shifting shingle with emotions tossed
And flung like grains before the storm.
I am not rock that firmly stands against the gale
But I am sand whose weak foundations fail.

But take me as I am and love me
With your ceaseless, selfless sea of grace and
Mould my sand beneath your hand and
Break me by your wave’s embrace.

Then make me, one day, your own playground shore
where your pure waves might run and surge and sing
for evermore.

(c) A McN

Maybe the ability to see such things is a type of madness or a type of gift, but there are times when the interplay of the inanimate - wind, rain, wave, sand - is as delicate, sensual and delightful as human love.

Harebell at prayer
Copyright - A McNaught

Ghost light

Grey light under a sheet of the finest silk drizzle;
Soft moist wind nuzzles the trees.
Everything filmed with water-shine.

Rosehip and hawthorn tight fleshed, swollen to bursting,
Pregnant with a summer long since gone.
A silver rain-bead dangles from each
Red, fat underbelly.

Dusk's dim ghost-light is spangled with
Bright water constellations
Shining under every berry, every yellow leaf. A million
Silver globes dangling;
Reflecting an inverted world
Far brighter than the one I see.

A million silent mirrors
marking me.

(c) A McN

Life and light go well together.
Copyright - A McNaught

Equinox

As the day dimmed
The sun dyed the high
Clouds pink.

I detoured my journey to find a place
Where I could watch the day end
And the night begin
In perfect equipoise.

In the valleys below, dark ribbons of houses
Made a grey waterline against the hills
But a faint mist blurred streetlights
Into fairy lights.

On this September day
Light gave way to night.
For a season, dark will grow
And day will shrink away until the solstice
Turns the pendulum again.

I too have my seasons,
But when I watch and wait
And let the wonder grow,
The light returns,
Whatever month I'm in.

(c) A McN

Strange clay

I have not been myself recently.
Unfortunately, I do not know who I am instead,
But I do not welcome the change.

I am battle weary from resisting temptations,
From attempting a dignity of spirit,
Despite thoughts of which I am ashamed.

I am lonely, from want of intimacy.
Even the intimacy of my own self esteem has gone.
My spirit has dispersed in the wind like my confidence.

There have been times when I am an outsider to myself
Watching what I think and do with a curious detachment,
One step removed from living.

And oh, how I have hungered after You,
Needing to find your realities outside myself
Yet finding it so hard to give you time and space.

And, strangely, needing to find you in the mess
Of introspection and temptation.
Needing to be as free from striving
as I desire to be free from weakness.

So here I am again, shuffling words,
Until they form the shapes of thoughts and feelings.

I have been outside in the dark when the sun died.
I have ridden the wind of a late summer night
And found songs rising from hidden places
Yet still laboured under the melancholies of darkness.

I have listened to the music of those who sing to You with ease,
And remembered that the value is in giving freely,
Not loudly, not confidently,
nor even faithfully at times.

So this is my giving. With gladness and gratefulness
I freely give you emptiness, detachment and temptation’s fire.
It is a strange clay, but you are a strange and skilled potter.

And still I trust.

(c) A McN

Watching the tide rise
Copyright - A McNaught

The galaxies are restless

The galaxies are restless tonight
and the planets are out of orbit.
All the solar systems of my cells are straining at the leash of gravity
to fly apart, disintegrating order. The throb of chaos ripples out from cell to bone to blood to brain.

There are nights like this when peace is a distant world and its memories are dim. Anxieties pepper the night like black stars sucking the light from a daytime sky.

" I have trusted in thy mercy"
and the words are sure.
"my heart shall rejoice"
and the words are strong and strangely true if I should
choose such truth .
The civil war within begins a slow uneasy truce.

The echo in the chaos comes again.
"I have trusted in thy mercy"
It is true.
I have.
I will.
I do.

One by one the dark stars dim
and all the galaxies within
return to ordered orbits once again.

So I will trust
and you will love
as you have always done.

(c) A McN

I have often thought of our own bodies as universes in their own right with constellations of atoms and galaxies of molecules. Insomnia feels like dysfunction on a cosmic scale as each of the systems keep the others awake.

Swallows

Swallows have been in their queues all week.
Summer sun gave way to rain,
storms came,
and then they flew following a favourable wind.

There is a sadness in the empty wires between the poles,
as if the bird's departure stole the warmth away
and brought grey winter
to our gate.

I have wandered this unknown town tonight in rain,
learning its street names, listening to new accents echo
in the empty streets.

I have used imagination like a tool of faith
to see this as an empty nest which you will fill
feathered with new friendships,
lined with love and grace.

Bring summer to this place
as you brought summer to the other nest
which we call home.

Return as seasons circle round the sun;
and may you always find the nest you left a welcome place to be.

We listen eagerly for swallow calls
and watch the evening skies for skimming wings,
yet never make a cage to trap them in.

We hope one day to find more swallows on the wire than left
and know that other nests are fruitful as our own once was
and life is gracious as the gift
was ever meant to be.

(c) A McN

Meeting my eldest boy on his first night in his university town (and carrying all the anxieties a parent ever carries at such times). Five years have passed since then; he has found love, marriage and a community of friendship and faith. Life was gracious as the gift was ever meant to be.

Rendezvous

Long past the midnight hour we ventured out
into the wheeling stardome as the moon slipped off
the sky, sliding to the world beyond the dark horizon.

Then it was only starlight and darkness;
and you and me, tethered together by the cords of love
that only fathers and daughters know.

Like ancient navigators we stood amidst
the swell of landscapes in a sea of wheat where
trees and hedges frothed like dark
white horses on a hidden reef.

We took our bearings from the sky
(heaven always more dependable than earth...).
From star to star, legend to legend we grew;
Cassiopeia to Capella, Perseus to Andromeda;
the great square of Pegasus winged across the south.

As we spoke the wonder watered our imaginations
till they grew like flowers of the night.
The Milky Way defied our counting;
a distant smudge of galaxy defied our sense of time and space.
I knew at once why wolves howl at the moon...

Together we gazed awestruck
at the face of deep infinity, and felt not fear but marvel
at the purpose of our lives.

If ever we be parted from each other
and we long to know each other’s closeness once again,
promise me we’ll rendezvous under Andromeda,
between Pegasus and Perseus at the gates of infinity
where heaven kisses earth and souls ride
winged steeds of love and memory across the speckled sky.

(c) A McN

She was much younger then. We went out to do some work for a Guider's badge and came back with something special etched in memory

Purity
Copyright - A McNaught

Moving on

It has been said that death is
the ship sailing over the horizon.

Sometimes it feels the other way round;
that those we love have finally settled on the shores of time
and with one last gesture
swung the bottle against our bows
to ease us down the slipway
into the ocean of
of our own
history.

Now we are alone,
untied from the bonds that in turn
nurtured us, then needed us.

Now the definitions change
and memory recolours
all the chores, the repeating conversations, the anxieties
of the frail.
And maybe memory will also serve
to resurrect the dimmer days
when life as young and strong as ours
strung days together with a confidence
long gone.

Times and tides roll on;
days will gather distance from the dead
although the maps they gave us
will never cease to set our compasses
and aid our navigations through the night.

And here are we,
nearer by a generation,
to the final shore on which we stake our place of rest;
to launch our children
unguided, unencumbered
on their deep uncharted seas.

(c) A McN

Written for Clive on the death of his father. We did not know how close he was to launching his own children on the deep uncharted seas.

Waterloo bridge

On the bridge near Waterloo
I watched white banners of knitted cloud
Slide over the blue bowl of sky.

The sun was gold as only an autumn afternoon
Can shine and the river was brown with the stir of the mid-tide silt.

People were walking past me, the sound of traffic filled the air
But my ears were full only of the windsong and the tidesong
And the lullaby of lazy waves on bridge piers,

Under that sky the light rang like a bell
Resonating with the light that shines in the back of the mind
When the shadows of thought are stilled and the
Innocent, artless joy of life
Draws wordless prayer from unselfconscious depths.

So I prayed
Without petition or request
And I sang without the need for words
And I etched a milestone of consciousness
In the memory vaults of life.

(c) A McN

Placidity ......
Copyright A McNaught

Solstice

June.

The solstice light
Lending a grey glow
Deep into the night of summer stars.

Arcturus, Vega, Deneb and Altair
Pin the web of constellations on silver nails,
Stringing stories across the sky.
The Milky Way hangs like the faintest streak of cloud.
Nothing is what it seems.

How the air is still, pregnant with scent,
Humming with insect
Vital with life.

You can almost hear the leaves flexing their growth,
Roots snuffling down wormholes,
Fruit ballooning on trees.

Even the moon is bellying through her phases;
The tides easing to fullness,
The world practising beauty
And bounty
For once.

(c) A McN

Hurricane Katrine has passed over New Orleans since writing this. The contrasts between the benevolence of nature and her powerful capriciousness is keenly felt.

Chasing the breeze

If words could ever hope to catch your glory
I'd weave a net with worship,
cast it high from some uncluttered hill
and call you down
to nestle in my concepts...

But as my empty echoes die away on muted ground
I recognise again that, while we live,
you can only be received,
never given, never driven,
never caught and never bought

and you slip through our assumptions
like water through a sieve.

(c) A McN

Summer soars
Copyright - A McNaught

GNER to Edinburgh

On a day devoid of light I travelled north.
Under the leaden sky all sense of direction failed.
The flavour of the passing hours was bland without the
sun's round journey texturing the changing light.

I worked as an effort of will to ensure the hours were not without their fruitfulness
But all was grey, thought mechanical; consciousness dull.
One by one I wrung the words from my brain and laboriously strung them across the screen.
The letters hung from the line like limp washing on a still day.

I sipped coffee in the hope that it would quicken my blood
and stimulate my brain but the synapses were damp as the drizzling mist
and the sparks of thought fizzed with a faint hiss as the waves of intention
struggled to propogate their motion.

Then the view abruptly changed.
The misty shrouded land fell down to sea.
Long curls of swell crawled slowly on a sea of dull mercury..
Ribs of rocks spiked the water's skin and the mist steamed grey.

I saw the lonely desolation of the scene and in an instant I was caught.
Something deep stirred despite dull journey stupor,
some vestige of spirit leapt from me, clinging like a limpet to the scene.
Silently I called back across the opening acres as the train sped on.
There was no reply.

Still that piece of me is missing.
Like a broken parent grieving for a runaway child
I grieve for the neglected needs of my spirit,
the solitudes untaken,
the silences uncherished
the beauties unnurtured.

And even now
As I lie in a strange bed in an empty room
I sense the distant hauntings of my own spirit
Walking on the waters where the dark cliffs rise
And the tide shoulders against the night shore.
Walking where the fish scales flicker;
Silver lanterns of the luminescent moon.

(c) A McN

Cycling to conference

Although my heart burned,
my gulped breaths seemed inadequate for my needs
and only a steel will kept the legs pumping
I was happy (in a funny kind of way).

Maybe it was the perverse stubborness
that wanted to do it differently,
defying convention,
shunning the easy options.

Or maybe it was the pitiful desire to be noticed
the inner child's attention seeking ploys;
the collected artefacts with which to start a conversation.

And - in part no doubt - it was.
But believe me also when I say I was a warrior that night.
I took on gravity with gritted teeth and heaving chest.
I raided oxygen from the evening's still, unguarded air and
Fuellled hot muscle with it's potency.

But I was a poet too, singing on the long freewheels,
leaning into curves with a whoop of praise
As the mind's calculations adjusted
Speed and angle and friction on the road;
No longer sums but
As if they were a set of songs,
not sums.

I have yet to mention the mental gymnastics
of the map, matching and measuring the mind's eye against the bold body of the land,
or the heart's delight in the curves of the hills beautiful as any woman's form.

The sheep called me as I passed,
quizzical faces aligned along magnetic fields of curiousity, turning as one.
The last of the skylarks descended on a song and the blackbird scolded his echo in the silent wood.

In the west light metamorphosed to night through a hundred shades of gold
and the sun flung fine-fingered rays on the cotton canvas of the clouds.

Maybe the man in me had many motives for the ride,
but the animal beneath was pure;
dumb in wonder,
deep in pleasure,
innocent and artless as the evening air.

(c) A McN

Watching ghosts

I came here
just to watch the ghosts play.
In this grey autumnal rain.
I can almost see your movement
in the mist.

You were smaller then
and I was larger to you all
in every way.

We walked here often.
One, perhaps, would hold my hand
another on a trike,
others running on ahead.
Everywhere we went
we were a crowd.

We spoke, we watched;
we wandered in the lands
of nonsense and imagination.
There were always leaves to kick
or puddles to splash
or tales of school to tell.

Now I am here alone.
Leaves lie unkicked.
The rain plays rhythms on the metal roof,
the windscreen mists with breath.
Waterdrops meander down the glass, tears for a lost world.

Now I am smaller in your lives
and missing all the intimacy
fatherhood once brought.

I am lonely,
watching small ghosts playing
in the dim light;
wishing I could join them for a while.

(c) A McN

Curiosity
Copyright - A McNaught

The growing

Wind skimmed, cold and thin
under grey sky.
We didn't ask you to
but you came too.

We played in the glade
where trees twist and grow,
wringing substance from the empty air.
And you were there.

Night grew, dead sun strew
its embers on the shining sea
and you were there though
unbeknown to me.

Now at last you have cast
your lot and from your deep
and inner world of night
you are begotten and now grow
like green and tender grass

grasping for light.

(c) A McN

An unexpected pregnancy. What a gift she has turned out to be.

Selenity

Do you mock me? Or inspire me -
cool moonblue light that shines from high above the broken cloud?

I envy your serenity.

You neither know nor care
for all the woes within the world,
for all the anxious thoughts and
broken hearts.

You glide untroubled through the velvet night
a world apart.

(c) A McN

Moon rise over the church on the pyramid, Cholula, Mexico.
Copyright - A McNaught

Still evening

The hills are silent.
I am silent; save the pulse of life within me.

The mist that tumbles twisting down the hills
sedates the wind.

Only the sheep and crows forego
the holy silence.

I think they know
the hills are far from sacred
and the weather is lying.

(c) A McN

The weather is lying..
Copyright - A McNaught

Innocence

How long I stood in awe of you
little bundle;
as if your solemn peacefulness and steady eyes
could penetrate disguise and know
the imperfections masked below.

You looked at me with such intent
little bundle;
as if your newborn thoughts were weighing every phrase
and your unflinching gaze inferred
the motives behind every word.

Your holiness unsettles me
little bundle;
I too was holy once in milk's white purity
until the subtle tree of knowing cast its shadow on my growing.

(c) A McN

Offering

St Swithun's is a small country church, entirely surrounded by Chalk streams. I went to a service once but mostly I've been to watch, listen and pray.

The day you left

On the day you left
I walked the woods to shake the numbness from my bones.
The air sang with a north west wind. Each leaf shone with a rim of rain; sprinkling silver showers with every shift of wind.

It was very much alive and the sun,
Despite the distances of space,
Embraced us with a kiss.

I watched her handiwork unfold;
Each tree the offspring of a thousand love affairs with light.
And underneath, the bluebells washing tides of fragrance on the forest floor.

Such alchemy of light,such sleight of hand,
stealing the substance of the land
To birth a beauty far beyond the dull imagination
of the naked ground.

And when she shone on you that dawn,
flame and brightness caught your hair;
shafts of gold took hold and drew you lightwards
like a shoot departing company of soil.

But still your roots are long and strong and intertwined among our own.
And we will honour you in simple ways; by nurturing the roots of memory,
by living lives more fully than we might,
and in the darkness, always,
seek (and savour)
light.

(C) A McN

A friend's child dies unexpectedly. No explanations make sense and yet their world - though shattered - was far from ended. Life and death are intimately linked. I remember another bereaved parent telling me that after the grief had subsided they came to feel felt they now had one foot in heaven.

Thistledown

A white light bleaching the landscape colours, shimmering the distant haze with heat.
Grass crackles underfoot, rasping like straw and the cool dark sombreros of the trees are
limp leaved in the oven breath of summer.

Then I saw deep drifts of thistledown, a candyfloss as light as snow with
crystal geometries as delicate and fine .

I fling soft fistfuls to the warm receptive air. Each spidered seed weaves stiches
round the contours of the wind. The liquid air reforms behind the tumbling path.

I cannot help but be a child again, stretching to pluck the silver spheres from empty air, chasing the feathered dreams of future fruitfulness.

In a summer season let
the gracious breath of God blow warm
and gentle on my dry and brittle soul.

Animate the insubstantial lightness of my faith
that though my roots on earth may never hold me firm
I might yet trust the hidden urgings of the air to lead me on.

(c) A McN


A short walk squeezed into a busy day and the mind in overdrive. It is as if I scarcely live but only grasp at straws of meaning on time's treadmill. Then something awakens the child within and time is elastic, experience vital, life reborn.

Rain after midnight

The house an island of stillness
looming large above the strandline of deserted streets,
blind windows sleeping in the holy silences of night.

Rain begins softly, gently,
Distillate of starless sky;
Sprinkled benediction from the whispering clouds
Kyrie eleison

I am washed and made clean,
I am lulled by the rhythms in the darkness.
Christe eleison

While the grey world sleeps
I am restored;
One by one I shed my skins
Until the inner creature shadows the threshold,

Man-beast
(body echoes to the pulse of rain)
And man-spirit (soul singing in the empty air).

Kyrie Elyson

(c) A McN


We are losing touch with the rhythms around us. The ancient liturgies were rhythms of reflection and contained in themselves rhythms and metres of great beauty.
Kyrie eleison - God have mercy
Christe eleison - Christ have mercy
Kyrie eleison - God have mercy.
The rain brings its own rhythms and its own midnight mercies to the unsleeping.

Fire drums

Kids Club Camp - July 05.
Charlie plays the stick drums to accompany Ken's strumming on the guitar. The stars are just coming out. Overhead the Summer Triangle slowly emerges as Lyra, Cygnus and Aquila condense from the heat haze.

It wasn't a long sleep that night but it was memorable and the owls were quiet (despite the larks starting at 3.57 am).

Unexpected fall

Snowlight illuminates the bedroom.

Open the window, let the cold air
Flow fresh and viscous, shouldering aside
Limp curtains.

Inflame nose and lungs with purity and ice.

Breathe. Sculpt statues in still air.
Savour crystalline delicacies.

Be a child in wonder for a while.

(c) A McN

Weather's unpredictability and constant inconstancy is one of the most exciting aspects of living in Britain. Does that imply the rest of British life is commensurately dull? Judge for yourselves.

Reflected

But..

Tonight I prayed in the hour before twilight.

The sea was veiled in mist.
There was no join between the sea and sky,
only a merging grey light from which a lazy swell rolled thousand ton flexings of muscular water.

Each wave an effortless energy
More than adequate to burst my blood and crush my bones to sand
But choosing to dandle me gently in watery hands.

I thought of you,
So real, so frighteningly raw
So awesomely deep.
I might lose myself and
Never find familiar land again.

I floated, rising and falling in the sea's breathing.
The great sea cliffs met the ocean like a knife plunged in the green belly of the waters.
Black sea caves roared incoherent madness down long, dark labyrinths.
Waters boiled and bickered at their mouths where seabirds stare
Malevolent from jagged stone.

And this is why I came.

Fearful and vulnerable,
Alien and lonely,
I recall three truths
I am small
I am frail
But I am loved.

(c) A McN

Fear and vulnerability are not necessarily negative. Sometimes they create the contrasts that help us look in the mirror of our miracle and begin to sense the creative love that invisibly sustains us.

April shower

(c) A McN

Instinctive

Deep inside herself she grew another - knowing not how.
Hidden mechanics are moulding fine frames for hanging flesh from;
cellular chemistries brewing dark alchemies weaved new biologies.

She's making no miracle here,
simply hosting a miracle making itself.

Only the instincts are working.
Simply assenting to love was enough to initiate wonders.

Life will never be the same again.

Let me in my small way unleash such wonders as I can.
Let me learn to love,
let intimacy be embraced where I have hitherto been distant in response.

Let me be a breeding ground where life might find a nursery.
And I might be surprised
Again.

(c) A McN


Watching a woman change shape over the term of a pregnancy always stirs deep emotion in me - mystery, wonder, awe as the complexity of human life creates itself within another human frame. Maybe some of the greatest miracles are instinctive and unselfconscious.

Watching the mist (image)

(c) A McN

Participant

Watching the mist
competing with the darkness
to dissolve trees.

Watching the cinders of sunset
pale into monochrome. Only the curl of distant cloud tops ink fine etchings on watery sky.

Beauty seeps into dull consciousness.
Art arranges from random conjunctions.

Despite the deep tragedies of humanity, our wasted divinities, the shallow emptiness of our indulgences,

We are forgiven enough to be lavished with beauties,
wooed with mysteries, courted with miracles.

In this wonder of life
Let me be glad participant.


(c) A McN

Celtic folklore regarded sunset and sunrise as times when "the curtains between the worlds" were thinnest. Whether they were right or wrong, the slender moments between the day world and the night world is often a time for reflection and an unusual inner stillness.

Cost you dearly

My affection comes cheaply,
Touch is frequent,
Hugs are free
But more intimate than that
will cost you dear.

I will require nothing less
Than lifetime love and
lifetime loyalty.

But do not fear to make your choice.
The oasis in the desert
Is a place of desire
Not entrapment.

And I will pay no less for you and
All my life regard you
As a treasure fit for kings.

(c) A McN

We are designed to be more than animals with appetites. The measure of our humanity is best articulated in love, loyalty, respect and faithfulness; qualities requiring elements of self sacrifice. A culture of casual sex undermines relationships and corrodes true soul-mate intimacy. "Freedom from" is a bigger freedom than "freedom to".

Misty morning at Longdown (c)

Walking in winter

Walking in the winter dark I watched
black tree bones
sift bright stars through skeleton fingers.
Oh, how the hydrogen sang
in the silent star-foundries,
ripping and curling continents of flame through oceans of space.
But in the cobwebbed net of branches
sap lies dormant for the
winter tide is yet to turn
And frost still crystallises earth
Though heavens burn.

(c) A McN


Different perspectives can lead to such different perceptions! It is remarkable that life clings so relientlyin a universe of wild extremes.

Now and then

Now and then the chemistry combines and spirits meet beyond the clumsy incarnations of our speech.

It is the sparkle in the eye, the touch, the timbre in the voice.
It is trust made tangible.
I never understand the cause or circumstance.

Sometimes humour, sometimes depth, sometimes sorrow shared
but often nothing other than the ache of life's deep longing for itself
and the soul's deep need
for company in kind.

Oh to savour all such times
in innocence without the need
to gratify my ego
or satisfy my need for praise.

I almost want to offer my apologies,
but where is love if mind is
ever mindful of it's motives?
Where is friendship when I fret
for what I am?

So I accept a little foolishness in me.
And forgive a little foolishness in you.
Every person is a fool, but
none so foolish than the ones whose clockwork hearts
deny both joy and pain.

Now and then we will regain
the spark of life that leaps across the chasms of our isolated lives.
But when we do, take care
for we are frighteningly alive
and dangerously frail.

I have been clumsy with the hearts of others.
I have tried to own affection for the purpose of my pride.
Forgive me in advance if this should be.

But still I crave simplicity
and child-like love
to let me love a thousand times without a stain.
For that might mean God's
hibernating grace had come to life again.


(c) A McN


Love, affection and intimacy remain the greatest counterbalances to the loneliness of self awareness. Yet the delight in awareness of another is so easily tainted with the self that wants to own or use. True freedom is surely being free from the petty tyrannies of our own egos.
One day, maybe.....

Insomnia

I hear the clock's sprung heart split time as neatly
as the numbers on the face
impose precision and division
on the circle's endless run.

Incessant ticks drip from time's
leaking tap
wearing away the silence
like a stone.

I toss in sleeplessness,
Thoughts are chasing tails across synapses
In the all-too-wakeful brain.

But dreams are brewing in the mind's dark cauldron
as the day's dim ghosts replay.

I live to sleep.
Another day.

(c) A McN

Sleep is evasive, especially when chased.
Writing is one of the few ways I know of fighting insomnia.

In a summer season

In a summer season
On an outstretched hand
A butterfly alights.

Wings warmed by sunlight
fan the air,
delicate semaphores of meaning.

Time is elastic when the
heart is warmed.
Round the axis of a moment memories revolve.

Then there is the loss.
The whispered air,
A weightlessness upon the palm,
Bright confetti weaving long, live stitches in the air,
receding fast between the
petalled nectaries.

I return to who and what I am,
no more a resting place
for metamorphing beauty.

Poorer for the loss am I,
But richer for the day.


(c) A McN



Friendships come unexpectedly and sometimes go unexpectedly too. Delight in the pleasure friendships bring and yet hold them gently. We never own friends, we only borrow the complex and unpredictable privilege of sharing in another's life for a time.

Journey Prayer

I have watched the daylight
bleed away under a gash of skyline
while dark clouds clot the horizon with
a web of night.

I have felt the strong, salty wind of evening
fade to a dying breath as the
earth cools.
Even the delicate leaves
hang with porcelain stillness.
Only the owl tests the silence
with speech from another world.

In your sunsetting, moonrising, nightfalling
drift to the edges of life
may you not be afraid.

May the fragrance of heaven
honeysuckle the darkness.
May the wind be a gentle embrace.
May the starlight be bright enough
to illuminate your wonder
if not your way.

Be still, I pray,
and know the peace of God
turning the globe of your life
from one day to another

from one world
to the next.


(c) AMcN

This was written shortly before my father died when it became clear his remaining days were very few.

The Presence

It is here, in the house, in the dark,
Among us.

There are the tell tale stains
On the carpet
Glowing like an eerie
Spill of milk.

I close my eyes
The air is taut and still
With resonating expectation.
I cannot hear it move but I feel it
On my hand.
Tiny hairs tingle like antennae.

When I open my eyes
I watch it on my skin,
Burning with a cold pearly fire.
My shadow sharpens, takes on an
Independence of its own,
Gangling behind me
Like a monstrous
Insect on the ground.

I feel my senses rearranged according to another's will.
My rationality reduces
to a child's,
But all the others sharpen.
I am nose of dog and
eye of cat
And ear of bat
And skin of worm feeling the
Spider's footstep from afar.

Always it catches me,
Always in darkness,
Usually alone.

It is from another world,
It robs my reason
It utterly enchants me.
It kisses me with madness

It is moonlight.



(c) A McN

Whilst there is little evidence for statistical effects of moon phase on human biology and psychology the mere presence of moonlight has the same impact on me as snowlight, lending a mythical quality to otherwise drab circumstances.

Scrooge speaks

The most momentous event in history is about to be celebrated and somehow I'm missing it again. Dog tired from shopping, writing, posting, delivering, tidying, cleaning, preparing, socialising. It will be a late night tonight and I will enter Christmas day with a headache and another tight schedule.

I long for a year when we are prepared enough far enough in advance that we can reflect on what we're celebrating rather than being swamped by the mechanisms of celebration.


With apologies to my wife and family for the clinical yule-ophobia that always hits me at this time of year. Maybe I should become a part time monk at Christmas and re-emerge in the New Year.

The Prophecy

When Herod saw he had been tricked by the wise men he was in a furious rage and killed all the male children in the Bethlehem region that were two years old or under.

He said his first word today.
Daada - he smiled, clear as can be.
I picked him up and hugged him tightly
"Be a good boy till your Dad gets back".

I thought of Fatherhood all morning in the fields.
It was nearly Spring. I felt the green shoot stirring in the earth beneath my feet and the shy sun shining on my face.
"Life is beautiful" I said and sang the songs of Zion as I ploughed.

Tilling the dark earth as my father did before me, I knew he was not dead, but he lived on in me
as I'll live on in my son when his hands hold this plough and till this land.

Then the beauty of my dreams was broken. I heard the distant scream of women and the brutal shout of foreign men.

Swords in the sunlight, fear and anger in my stomach.
I ran, heart racing, but the blood ran faster.
When I arrived they left in clouds of dust and clanks of armour. Only the smell of horses remained and the slow seep of blood, staining the women's clothing where they held the limp forms cradled in their arms.

I wept great sobs of black, despairing grief.
He was my only child and sinless as the morning sun.
How can I pray in this dark void?
How can I start to believe You care or understand?

But in the silence Heaven wept for Time would
circle to this point again
a father would be racked with pain,
another son, more innocent, would die.

And far from distant in grief's hour
God's own death would prove fatal to death's power.

(c) A McN


If ever there was an antidote to the saccharine, sanitised commercial versions of Christmas it is this episode recorded in the gospels. As a father I found this hard to write. There is a bitter irony that even the ultimate gift to humanity can be so misconstrued as to result not in rejoicing but in heartache and pain.

The Shepherd's Tale - a little bit of whimsy

T’was three o’clock in the mornin’
and I woke with such a fright
the fire ‘ad burned to cinders
yet the ash was shinin’ bright.
The sheep was castin’ shadows,
long an’ lanky on the grass;
I rubbed my eyes - to my surprise
I saw an angel pass

I’m very good at counting
even if I’m half asleep.
I had to check the flock in case
the angel nicked a sheep
but when I’d finished countin’
(well, I’d got as far as three)
another angel comes along
and says “ ‘Allo!” to me.

I says to ‘im - "What’s up, mate? Lost?"
He says “Not me, chum, You!
The other shepherds left the hill
at twenty five past two!
They’ve all run down to Bethlehem
with coats and cloaks a flying
to see a strange and wondrous child
in a manger lying.”

“Well that’s just typical,” says I
“They’ve got no sense of calling;
abandoning their helpless sheep....
pathetic and appalling!
It’s lucky they’ve got me around
so watchful and so able
to keep an eye on all their sheep
while they’re down at the stable.”

“Excuse me if I’m wrong,” he said,
but if I’m not mistaken
you were lying fast asleep
before you were awaken.
Pray tell me how you guard your sheep
when both your eyes are shuttered
(Aside) These mortals have amazing gifts!
The cheeky angel muttered.

I felt a little foolish then,
and just a touch deflated.
It seemed so mean the other men
had gone and hadn’t waited;
And now they’d all be famous
in the stories that were told
while I was on the hillside
all companionless and cold!

But as I stood there miserable
and feeling at a loss
my own dear sheep, young Meadowsweet
my pet lamb, came across.
She snuggled up beside me
with affection, warm and wise
and in the dark her warmth and love
brought hot tears to my eyes.

The angel must have seen my tears
and known I felt unpleasant
he whispered “Hey.... the other guys
forgot to take a present”
I said “Well; thanks for thinking mate,
yeah, thanks for thinking ...but
it really doesn’t help a lot
cos all the shops are shut.

And then young Meadowsweet looked up
nuzzling against my hand
as if to say “Give me away
for I will understand”.
I found it really hard to believe
for she was all I had.
She was like a daughter to me,
I was like her Dad.

But when the angel dropped us off
and I knocked on the door
and Joseph with a weary smile said
“Ay, there’s room for more”
we squeezed into the crowded barn
and kneeled before the manger
and Meadowsweet lay down to sleep
beside the little stranger.

And then it seemed, of all the gifts,
of frankincense, myrrh, gold;
that only one gift snuggled close
and kept away the cold.
And only one gift grew with him,
and trotted at his feet -
it wasn’t gold or frankincense
but my dear Meadowsweet.

So all who hear this tale, pay heed
..the best gifts we can give
are not the sort that can be bought
but are the kind that live.

And when God gives us gifts it’s never China for a shelf,
But living, unexpected gifts
Because He gives himself.

(c) A McN

No Nobel prizes for this literature but it was fun. Parts were a joint effort with my daughter - who learns poetry considerably more effectively than I can.

Star struck

The smell of camel clinging to the cold night air;
spicing each breath I take.
The pool as still as ice; an inky blackness breathing dampness;
misting the mirror of the sky.

I am at the water’s edge alone;
idly counting stars and wondering.
The pool’s black skin is peppered with a
thousand points of light. Each one I know by name
and even recognise in watery reflection.

Stars beneath me. Stars above me.
I stoop to stir the waters with my hand.
One by one the ripples crawl away; circle upon circle, sliding silently as ghosts.

I watch the star reflections bending, bobbing,
bouncing as the waves glide through.
Each constellation quivers in its course.

The ripples run in silent provocation; disrupting patterns of a million years.

I stand; my hand still dripping, fingers faintly shining in the dark.
A shiver runs across my skin; not of cold
but of strange and awesome revelation.

I look to where the guiding star still fiercely burns,
outshines the moon;
a stranger far eclipsing all familiar signs.

I sense a presence in this swarm of stars above.

I almost glimpse a shape, man-like,
move as a shadow in the heavens;
gliding through the gaps behind the stars,
dipping his finger in the ether of galaxies;
stooping to send great ripples
through the old established order of our lives.

The star reflections in the pool still dance to unknown music.
The camel chews the cud in sleep.

Tomorrow brings me closer to my quest but tonight I will
sleep in strange and unfamiliar joy
and dream of starlight dancing in dark water
and dream of Godhood stooping near the earth to shake us
and to break our chains.

(c) AMcN


The Magi - wise men from the East. God revealed himself as much to those studying the stars as He did to those studying the scriptures. Science pursued with reverence and wonder is sometimes very close to worship. I am reminded of Kepler's quote "O God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee."

First death

Lu 1:35 The angel answered, ``The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.


The thing that struck him first was loneliness.

Never had he been this small before.
Never had he known a darkness
that his eyes could not illuminate.
Never had he felt this nakedness before.

Swimming in a universe of night, enclosed within a mortal frame,
a stranger in a foreign land,
a deep and hidden presence in another's life.

Then there was the growing, groping,
filling,
forming,
fusing;
bones to bones,
flesh flowering,
fingers, toenails, toes, lips and hair
till all was there in perfect miniature.

Then the low and soothing harmonies
of pulse
and distant words
and fondling touch
that rippled the starless ceilings of this shrinking world.

A strange and changing world this was
a world within a world where tears and joy
were equally removed and only the dark (and soothing) peace
washed muffled silence with the borrowed warmth
of unknown motherblood....
and, oh, what harmonies you knew as
your pulse grew with hers
and such security emplaced
enfolded in a womb's embrace.

Until the crushing tightness closed around
and suffocating blackness wound
you like a shroud
your universe was shuddering and shaking
to a woman's cry of pain.

This is the first death
when the inner world implodes.
There are other deaths. They normally come after.

You descended, surging on a wave of blood
to cold and unresponsive straw
where cow breath spiced the winter night
with fragrance fit for kings.

Iced air sliced
every newborn nerve as your first breath
hit your lungs like a slap in the face.

You never breathed before.
It's a vulnerable feeling for a body so robust
to need the winsomeness of wind
to enter in and out our frame.

Welcome to this world, for this is our life.
Do you like it?

It is real. It is raw; the raw
skin tingling tautness of the winter cold..
The raw warm comforts of caress,
the chequered light of love and hate
that haunts our fallen race.

You are one of us now. We will teach you how we live.
And you will teach us why
you die.

(c) A.McN

Pregnancy at any time is beautiful but strange to the point of incomprehension. To host a human being from conception to birth is to be a temple of life. What, then, is it to host life's architect and to be entrusted with his care?

Introduction

Words shape thoughts and conjure pictures in the mind.
By playing with words we play with thoughts and create landscapes of the imagination. This blog will attempt to paint some pictures in the imagination.