Poetry

At my feet the wavelets lap,

they clip and slap each other, and

in the offing they half-open their jaws.

Or is this circle our own field-map

hymned by the sun, the seas of the moon,

each blade and slate ordaining:

‘It’s late, but still not too late.

Our poor planet. Care for her.

Care for her and she’ll care for you.’

Words again. Words.

How am I to put them

in service to silence?

The stretch-fields here

are so rich with promises,

memories, never endings.

Silver-green with flint arrowheads,

golden with proud

and finicky bones.

Or look at the rage,

the flags and rags of oaks

only last year stricken,

the daily drumroll of clouds

towering and threatening,

gentling into dusk showers.

Let me absorb all this

and begin again. Let me commit

to the slow work of unsaying.

True, what I’ve tried to say

– there’s no gainsaying it,

but this unravelling, this denying

myself years of stitchwork,

and all I never questioned

I was born to do …

No longer to sing, to share,

obedient only

to this one calling.

No more than a pencilled line

or two. She was not there

but elsewhere, unknown,

and patient always.

What did Plato say?

Once human nature was entire,

and the name for our desire,

our pursuit of that is love.

Again I faced the white page,

and now I wrote to vow it.

Whatever breathed is no longer

here. Presence, I mean, atmosphere,

the ineffable, whichever words

we choose trying to describe holiness.

What’s left is matter inanimate

– no part of His nature

or even our own nurture:

stories, tears, prayers, laughter.

Can I only prove that God exists

with a new pilgrimage

of denial – by setting aside

all the ways He does not?