Epiphany

Old enough, they said
To wear shorts to school
Scant protection from
Arctic blasts, gnats, and grazes
Old enough though. Six.

Old enough too
To be weighed down:
Fears of the Foad gang
And dislike of Gypsy Tart
Or four-syllable words

That curious cigarette paper
On which lay black
Hymns, Psalms, and prayers
And ‘Epiphany’
I’d just learnt ph = eff

So, in secret
I sounded out my first
Four syllable
Uninterested in its meaning
Eee-piph-phanee
Eee-piph-anee

Later, years piling on
It became a date
The Magi have come
But somehow still
Shrouded in mystery

Later still, shaving
And loving,
Weighed down once more
I climbed inside the word
And the word inside me

In a moment
Extended for minutes
Standing in the dark
Face upended to the stars
The shroud fell away…

The Pilates Instructor

Unclipping vertebrae, one at a time
A slow, continuous curve
A staircase really, not a wave
Bones and shock-absorbers
Worn from life and living
Unclipping, one at a time

To fold like a rag doll
My low red face restraining,
Like a dam, my innermost,
From tumbling to the floor
Ten whole, lovely long seconds.
An interlude. Hanging there.

Winding down, I lie still
Letting a train of ladybirds
Crawl under my taut abs.
Or is it my glutes?
I flap like a fish, a hundred times.
Only wingless ladybirds remain

Unaligned body meets
Unaligned soul
They rarely talk, but today
With deepening breaths
Their awkward exchanges
Match my graceless moves

Sweeping the floor now
With my extended ballet foot
Drawing anything but smooth
Supple or serene circles…
But, to my surprise,
My soul looks on gently amused

Smiling, in fact, eyes laughing,
A random collision
A friend found inside a moment
Someone, it seems
You’ve always known:
Someone, plugged into Peace

And now, a new voice speaks,
Unclipping sore and stiff spines
And your tension-twisted torso
And your long-neglected heart
Enfin, you’ve become your own
Instructor. Peace.

Six Counties Wide

Normally some wretched
Inner engine-room coughs and splutters its
Rhymeless blood, the national pulse,
Evicting its poetic tenants
Long before dawn. Not today.
Amnesia? No. Whispers of anxiety
‘Not qualified’. Humbled by six counties,
Defeat hangs heavy on my Yuletide shoulders

Sore Afraid

the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid

Don’t open your lips, please
Don’t extend your hand
Nor even end my fear
I’m clinging on
Can’t you see?
To my staff, to this world

No, don’t sing
Don’t bring the glory down
Heaven can’t fit inside me
I am lost now
Shorn like my sheep
Naked to your
All baptising love

I cannot fully return
To the world
Of tousled sheep
And scraggy babes
Surrounded as I am
By this thin disguise

My staff a reminder:
Then a conductor’s baton
Of heavenly choirs.
More than wood
Infused as I am with
Joy inexpressible

A Sense of England

I’m unsure I can feel you, England
So many winds have blown
And waters brought us ashore
Do we find ourselves
Still, in Ælfred’s skirts?

What is your scent? Your signal?
A dysentery rotting
Army in Azincourt,
A weak autumnal leaf
Certain to die?

But we are a miracle nation
With two fingers thrust to the sky
And knees bent, battle breath
Exhaling ‘We few, we happy few,
We band of brothers’

What is your sound? Your voice?
It is not the matchless
Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau
Or the fearsome Tartan drone
Of kilts and pipes

No, it is simply the crack
Of a hard-red-ball on willow
Of stumps and white boundaries
The sigh of a pig’s bladder
And the boot of a mob

Foreigner. What do you see?
Is it not a small place
An island
Armed to the teeth
With Trident and tea and scones at four?

It is an uncertain people
Tentatively sharing their King
With the neighbours
Who may soon be blown
And washed away

And yet, there is that
Unmistakable taste of history
The suppurating wounds
Of wars to make peace
And foreign fayre on the menu

Beef Wellington, Sir?
Served with irony:
Pâté de foie gras
As English as Spotted Dick
À l’Alexis Benoît Sayer

Winds will blow
And waters threaten
The house Ælfred
But her rivers may yet
Run deeper than blood

Salmo Salar

The Moon lying large
Its milky disc of light
Drawing down
Into the blush of dawn
Its last beams crossing
Shallow bends of the Tay
Into the shadow of Schiehallion

Somehow a cold sun
Rises without noise,
Pomp or ceremony
Glinting from surface ice
Swelling with the
Hidden waters writhing
Below, unknowing the night

And, caught in an unlit pool
An eye looks up
Salmo Salar,
Lying in wait
Patient to kill, to spawn
Encased in ice
Not yet undone

The journey home
Like the prodigal
Its ungrateful sins washed
In the oceans
And here, bedraggled
Wounded, and glorious
Lies Scotland, unfinished

This is no grave
This spawning ground
So easily misunderstood
This place of death
This tomb, a womb…
My eyes met her eye
I looked away

© John Stevens

The Ceilidh House

The peat fire crackles and burns with stories;
footsteps scurry through mist and mountain
to warm a Hebridean hearth with stories.

A figure crosses turf where St Columba
knelt long ago beside the Snizort;
the crofter’s creel is laden with stories.

He pauses to watch the snow-stars drifting
on the loch, with its kelp and pebbles;
hares in the lazy-bed leap with stories.

The crofter enters his neighbour’s parlour,
rests on the settle while divots smoulder;
a plaintive skirl fills the room with stories.

Shadows dance round the doleful piper,
whose music makes the embers tremble;
the single oil lamp flickers with stories.

A mother stirs her three-legged cauldron;
sisters spin, or weave at the handloom,
infusing a homemade plaid with stories.

Hailstone tears pound the snow-flecked Cuillin,
recalling the Clearances, emigration:
the Ceilidh House overflows with stories.

© Caroline Gill

www.carolinegillpoetry.com

From: Driftwood by Starlight (The Seventh Quarry Press, 2021)

Caroline’s MacDonald grandfather and great-grandfather were born in Sydney. Her 3x great-grandfather had been a shepherd crofter in the Highlands. The poem was written after visits to the Skye Museum of Island Life and the Clan Donald Archives in Armadale. The poem is a Tercet Ghazal, a form developed by Robert Bly (d.2021) from the traditional Persian Ghazal, a complex form written in couplets and involving a pattern of refrain- and rhyme-words

The Bothy - Grwyne Fawr

Four by eight I suppose
And folded in fraying paper
Lying spread like a body
On the floor
Peered over, not by surgeons
But would be explorers
Unfamiliar with its world
Laid bare

Sinkholes, abandoned quarries
Ridges and sheepfolds
And contours and grid-lines
Point the way…but today
A small black ink square,
Silent, like a mistake,
Pulled and pulled again until
Laces tied, my boots were on

Descending a narrow path
The bothy took shape
A bothy of ones:
One door, one window,
One small log burner
One table, one old chair,
One candle, and one mezzanine
Space for one or for two

Home. A heaven of sorts.
At least for the night
Graffiti illuminated by a candle
Names of lovers, and dates
And a shelf of generosity
A tin of baked beans, firelighters,
Wood left by the burner
A spade, quite clean, and a rusty saw.

And a blessing, in brass, nailed
In honour of a Clive Roberts
Mwynhewch y fangre, hon, fel y Gwnaeth Yntau
‘May you enjoy this place as he did’
With the trickle of Gwyne Fawr,
The unsteady light of the moon,
Flickering flames of a candle and the fire:
The night is yours.

Rearrange

Cats chasing lizards on the sandstone
Politicians after your vote on the megaphone
Heat-seeking girls burnt to the bone
Lying in the sun ‘til the day is done
Our time wasted again on our mobile telephone

It’s what we humans do, nothing can change
We cannot stop, we rearrange
A picture here, a dinner date there
A cherry in my lemonade, lemon in my marinade
But of ourselves we are unaware

 And all the while there is the One
Ignored, unknown, the loving Son
Hands outstretched upon a cross
Bearing our pain, His searing loss
It’s time to kneel and weep some tears

 Hold His hands, let Him rearrange
Our remaining years

The Truth Doctor

It is the uniform that beguiles
A golfer wearing a bowler
A Constable in rugby boots
A violinist breathing through a snorkel
Disturbing the equilibrium

And yet anticipation crackles
Time’s come to disturb
To wreck the rut
And escape across the tracks to
The wrong side

To visit the Truth Doctor
The one unfooled by illusions
Who sees past solidity,
Past interlocking crystals,
Into the space within

We arrive, our five senses
Taking us for a ride to
A world where particles will not
Be confined in solitary places
And Dali clocks drool over the edges…

The Truth Doctor has a friend
The Ghost in the Machine.
Facing one another
They play catch, then wrestle
Ultimate realities, at ease, fighting

In a mist, in the chill of dawn.
We stand by, like umpires
Allowed to judge the Judge
The Ghost is felled and, weeping,
We count …7,8,9, Out!

But the Truth Doctor, laughing and
Folded in pain, erupts and roars,
His words filling the Earth
“Three, Two, One...
We watch as Death loses its sting

Helicopter Seeds

My sycamore clock
Is shedding spent leaves and seeds
In time for winter

Folding In

‘Folding in’ apparently is
‘Combining a dry ingredient
With one of more weight,
And wet,
Whilst retaining much air’

If your parable antennae
Are restless and twitching
You’ve tuned in
To our story -
Mine and maybe yours

Like flour in a recipe
I have been taken, by Love,
Dry, and dead with potential
And folded into a Christ
So ready to baptise me…

…in His story
And, like an author
I find myself in print
An autobiography
Another incarnation

Breathing deeply.

And it’s not even breakfast!

5.25

Turning his head hesitantly
Green glowing digits declare the time.
Malfunctioning lumbar vertebrae
However, cause him to wince with pain, so
Inch by small inch, this great man:
This father, this mechanic, this dentist, this musician
This writer, this soldier, this boxer
Presses his clenched left fist hard down
On the mattress, and, gripping the headboard
Shuffles his bum…
Life, reduced to an hour’s toil

It’s 6.19
Standing now, unable to dress
Surfing waves of pain
A spiritual man, his small prayers leaking
Takes baby steps.
Afraid to lean
He wonders where the rod and the staff are
When you need them most.
This great man
Now weak, decreased, vulnerable
Like the man on Jericho Road
In need of mercy

It’s nearly 7
Sunrise light finds birds flitting about
Fetching twigs and food
But he’s not hungry for anything vast:
His plans; now hidden from view.
Hungry only to put jeans on, a shirt,
Socks; a distant dream.
And yet, with ingenuity and time
On they go, toe by toe.
Life without warm feet
Is barely possible.
Walking pole in his hand and…

7.45
…a hundred tiny steps later
A kettle is filled, a switch thrown
And the noise of turbulence and boiling
Fills the air, strong tea is brewed.
Breakfast has begun.
This great man, toast in hand
Leaning on his elbows
Turns his head lazily and
Through the window
Sees another world;
One he used to know.

The Brimming Wasteland

It’s early October, past dawn
And, without us looking,
Someone has cleansed the air.
Fallen leaves, scurry around after her,
Dancing to the unknown
Melody of the morning rays

The trees are showing off:
They fool us as we take in
The chill of winter to come.
Single yellow, brown, green, and red
Leaves fall and, though we don’t loiter
Long enough to see, all turn into soil.

Why is it after all these years
Conkers lying open to the sun, stir me?
Hundreds scattered liberally on the Downs
Unlike then, only a few trees then,
In Kent, when conker collection
Was an annual, serious pursuit

Then, glossy coats, their glory,
Fading to matt, yielded to skewers
And triple-knotted string.
“There’s five in my pocket today
One is a fourteen-er,
Battle-scared and doomed”

The trees watch and are content
Boys mostly, some girls,
Blind to the brimming wasteland,
Laden with odd green spiky capsules,
Thrown annually from a height, with hope:
The discarded life of each tree.

Distracted, fooled, and blind
They walk by these ancient life-spreaders
Who wait, God-like, patient yet hungry,
Like surfers searching for the wave,
For just one conker to die, out of sight,
And turn, not to soil, but leaf.

Then another…

In Praise of the Middle

Draw a square on some paper
Draw another around it
Cut out the inner square
And jump through the hole
Into Middle-Earth

But do it when you’re young
Draw a circle
Double its size
And let the years slip by
Welcome to middle-age

 Got my ticket, flying to Egypt,
Jordan and Beirut
On the way to Qatar to feel
The heat of an oxymoron
The Middle-East

Fly past Stone and Bronze
Flash through the Dark
And land, tumbling, one day
Like a jester in the Middle Ages
Heading down the tube of time

And in your travels up and down time
Will you notice the Messiah
Stuck in the middle, a closed heart
To his left, and one to his right,
Open, en route to Paradise?

Talking to an Artist

I got to wondering why
Why I have two eyes
And two ears
Not one

All I can offer is a guess
I’ve been stooping
Picking up breadcrumbs
Fragments, scattered clues

Talk to a scientist and
They will animate technical words
Stereophonics…stereovision…
Depth and focus

Talk to an artist and
They’ll animate
You
And open your second ear
And open your second eye

Can you straddle
With your two feet?
Walking into the deep
Of both worlds?

Hearing words and silence
Seeing the shades of autumn?
Or tuned to cries of the heart
Glimpsing spirit touch spirit?

Like two lights merging
Two waves colliding
Or two hands on a piano
Playing bass and treble notes in you

Are you learning to walk now?
To straddle, to waddle
To stumble, stride out, to run?
I wonder.

Shaving on a Saturday

To shave on a Saturday
This I will not do
I’d rather squat on a porcupine
Than edge my beard into a straight line
Even if Moses tells me to

No! I’d rather be circumcised
And on the Sabbath
Lift no heavy weights
Than smooth my stubble
With sharp blades, single or double

A day’s rest – I insist
Nocturnal and diurnal, joys of neglect
Free to grow, to flex, to sprout
To chatter to neighbours
Flout the razors and…drop out

But Sunday has come
And with it a fresh blade or two
Soap and towels – I’m feelings fresh
But shaving on a Saturday
This I will not do.

Things Fall Apart

Am I old when, from a distance, you see

Hair protruding from my ears?

Or when I smile at those I can’t hear?

Am I old when I can’t remember

Catching anything one-handed?

Or when two attempts are needed

To escape from a chair?

No, it’s when old barriers finally fall,

And, companion of tears,

You watch misty-eyed at

The shabbiness of old paint peeling

Painted with the one you loved

And falling into contentment:

Conversations with the mortal coil

Of secret memoirs, that feed the soul

And as you fall, you fall nearer to heaven

On The Sunset Side

It is late; in the afternoon

The quiet of the morning,

Lost in the day,

Has returned

And the clouds break apart

Welcoming home

Their hero on high

The sycamore is full of light

On the sunset side

Watching rich colours appear

And the sky darken

Once again.

Low horizon light

Illuminates my desk and pen

Where does light come from?

The seeing of a man?

No other creature has eyes

Like a composer on heat

Or the rap artist

Pouring his river of rhyme

Over an adoring crowd

‘In His image’ some say

And who can argue?

Are we abandoned, then,

Like Chinese lanterns

Detached and unmoored?

Or are we portals

For another realm?

Light of the morning

Light of the evening

Fall on me

Let me love the shadows

The dents and hollows

The imperfections

In us all.

One Red Line

In the waiting minutes

Working at the old table

With its creaking screws

I use up the time

Supping builders’ tea…

…One red line appears:

On are hauled the boots

And, stooping under the low-lintel,

The garden gate open,

I press my foot on the forest floor

On tanned autumnal leaves

Crisp and curled

From the heat of high summer

Like tinder ready to burn

Reaching for a second life

Nodding past the outsiders

I ship no accusing looks

Suffer no shouts of Unclean

My Covid sentence served;

A prisoner welcomed home

Like the Sons of Adam

Wandering the Earth, infected

Waiting for the soldier’s spear

Running with water and blood

Set free by one red line

Waiting

It’s a Tuesday, hot and humid in July

Heat soaking through from all sides

A sweltering still afternoon.

Forlorn and yellow sycamore seeds,

Autumnal before their time,

Hang listless, like me

Waiting

Waiting, in my case, for the Covid

Power-drain to be repaired

And limbs refilled with

Will and purpose

And a mind to wake up

And imagine more than

Sleep

Progress: twenty sit-ups,

Only to lie long dormant.

Later, a poet, sent to trouble me

Whose words, like piano notes,

Danced me away.

But I have insufficient battle to be

Jealous

One day, I say to my boots,

You shall walk through Welsh mud again.

I long for wild weather, howling hill winds,

Black fingerless gloves, steaming mugs,

And crouching on a frozen summit,

On Sugar Loaf with

You

One day