Monday, December 22, 2008

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.

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Monday, December 15, 2008

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

Thursday, December 11, 2008

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

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