Sunday, March 30, 2008

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

Labels: , , ,

Thursday, March 13, 2008

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.


Tuesday, March 11, 2008

On tiptoe.




















(c) A Mc N

Saturday, March 01, 2008

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