Unnamed

Water makes the world chant

A steady whisper heard by billions

of twitching bodies

Resonators constantly receiving

the unfinished news of the living

 

Liquid norms undulate above and below

Even within us

We clatter and churn like water contained

Dash after dash after dash

No longer at home

On our home

 

Listen to the humming secret in your body

Beyond the unseen and insular

A mysterious and intimate knowledge waits

A language we were born with

Wordlessly it cycles through our existence

Evaporating off the dry husk of hardship

Returning in fresh downpour time and time again

Echoes and Edges

Echoes and Edges create sonic worlds inspired by poetry. I had the  opportunity to offer some of my words for them to improvise over. It was a pleasure to hear how the words animated and took on fresh expresssion as a result of their work.

You can listen to their latest response to one of my poems 'On these things and more' -  here

Chatter Speech Screams

Anthropocene we know you will not pause 

Gears grind gung-ho, macho ideas win 

for now, drowning rains we debate the cause 

We callous conquerors turn from dark skin 

Elemental fury has me shaking 

Land ice is sweating to kill in cold blood 

The seas surge god like, human hearts aching 

Flood after flood after flood after flood 

The angry planet holds some special good 

You can hear it at the mouth of a brook 

Each tree has a tongue speaking for the wood 

The loose jaw of nature an endless book 

We have to realign, do something and weep 

Change is here, we are all called to leap

The underwater sound of Heavy Hearts

Last night I was visited by Killer Whales

The thing is I never usually dream of other animals

We were on a kind of theme park glacier

The Whales grew increasingly impatient of the hoards

People who interpreted their presence as a sign

evidence that the human project was blessed

The scientist she told me that the Wales want to be acknowledged

That they wait vigorously to pierce our hubris

so they can broadcast their soundscapes of truth

Visceral messages which would melt our hearts to water our brains

And dissolve our muddled certainty

These creatures are restless to repurpose confusion  

They do not play with our fear they seek to channel it

We have gathered tears from their tear ducts for decades

Yet still ignore their grief

 

A groaning churning world preoccupies us

We dally with positive spins

Thin, cosmetic delusions

The longing for a panacea twists us up

corkscrewing our heads deeper into the sand

Swerving past the gritty grains of truth

As we dash around for cinematic moments of hope

And cast ourselves as saviour to the play things.

 

Play things they are not

They want to be met

They have been tapping out a message

Let’s start there

Swimming through the broken ice of reality

Their heavy hearts are more than facts

Their swirling every day is not friendly

The life all around us is kinetic in its disbelief

Insisting on relatedness

Calling to our wild selves to awaken

And commune with the textured anguish of the deep sea

Their urgency will soon be ours

Discomfort crashing in with intuitive waves of knowledge

Intrusive is the truth

That time is up

 

Killer Whales burst in to my consciousness

Wanting to be acknowledged

Some humans have been diligently listening

I woke up from a dream to write this

On these things and more

When all about you is tornado

And despair

Think on the unrelenting scale of space

And the persistence of a seed

Think on those eyes shut melodic moments

On limbs everywhere responding to rhythm  

Think on those who share what they have

And when more room is made at the table

Count the ways we look beyond ourselves

When all about you is indifference

And cruelty

Dwell on ravished land restored

And moments of play and creation

Dwell on the glimmering touch of rain

And the vulnerability of honest communication

Live in the unfurling flourish of a fern

In that spiral eddy of a lazy river

Then measure the scale of our collective imaginations 

When all about you is shaking

And sorrow

Keep pace with the surging voices for fairness

And the flight path of a swift

Keep pace with roads blocked in the name of peace

And every night spent under an open sky

On taking a stand and being stood by

See the shape of smoke at fireside cooking

Weigh the immediate joy of gratuitous giving

When all about you is yawning

And broken

Meditate on our distance from the stars

And your footprint on the sand

On the expediency of a feather

Hear stillness and singing and laughter

Meditate on first smiles and last smiles

And a gaze returned

On lifting up another's voice, on pause, on listening

Sense the pleasure in logic and the art of intuition

Yes, ruminate on justice, purity and goodness

Know the quiet truth of your changing feelings

Know that people are taking risks for beauty