Tears of Love

Of your charity, 

oh my Lord, 

let me weep.

For tears touched 

by the magic of sunlight 

become diamonds,

and golden memories

light up my dark road.

In your compassion, 

oh my Lady,

let me flourish 

like a Chinese plum tree

that blooms in winter,

flowers of pink and red,

bright with bitter ice

melting into love. 

I offer you thanks,

oh my Father,

for your sweet angel

who led me away

from self destruction

to a great high plain,

where the circle whirls

and life has no ending.

My spirit may rest now,

your heart in mine,

and mine in yours.

Washed by soft tears,

my eyes will no more

recognise deep despair,

for here is the place

of everlasting love.

                                     Naomi

The Blood-Sweeten'd Beverage

The Blood-Sweeten’d Beverage

Bristol Tea Parties 1778

So many words desperate and tumbling

but failing to achieve any clear meaning

in a city of slaves and of teatime protesting

telling the horrors of of savage dogs hunting.

Rust sailed galleys and black hearts pounding,

shackles clanking and brain shattered yearning

for freedom ebbing away on the tide lapping

on shingle and shell and never returning.

Gown black preacher earnestly preaching

pleading for freedom but the wrack is turning

its iron cold hands in the ache of an evening

to smother the shame of a master’s objecting.

But still the tea party’s challenge is thriving

in the cold dark of a city’s feigned weeping. 

                                                                                    Naomi

Bristol traders were at the heart of the C18 slave-trade, 

as were the many fierce Bristol objectors to the hated trade.  

In 1778 Hannah Moore a Bristol teacher and passionate anti slaver, 

a friend of both William Wilberforce and  Thomas Clarkson, 

joined  the organised boycott of slave-produced West Indian sugar, 

thus avoiding any contact with what the poet Robert Southey 

later described as “…the blood-sweeten’d beverage…”  

St Martin's Summer

Broadstairs, Autumn 2017

Today the fierce heat of high noon
is gone like feathers in the wind,
wheeling and dancing bravely into
the chill sea fret outside my window,
while circling gulls are crying out
for bright summer to return once more.

Turnstone birds have already flown south
from the winter of their Arctic home,
a thousand or more windswept miles each day,
to find here beneath seaweed and stones
a welcome feast of mollusc and shrimp,
their own unique St Martin's Summer.

Come Autumn we too feel the warmth
and comfort of this holy season,
for the Saint has split his cloak once more
to share with a shivering beggar,
cast off his armour and sheafed his sword,
radiant with love, compassion and peace.

October's dark clouds are pierced with gold,
and our souls overflow with the Saint's love.
The brightening sky sings out in praise
for the man who, with gentle hands held high,
comforts us, blesses us and prays for us.
God be praised for Saint Martin de Tours.
                 
                                                   Naomi

March Hares

I met an old man in my wanderings,

with thin grey hair and pale aged eyes, 

who smiled at me as we passed

through the kissing gate at the end 

of the path down from the high town.

By his side a dog of indiscriminate 

parentage, brown inquisitive face, 

ragged ears, eyes as dark and deep

as waves which caress the old jetty.

His nose pushed into my hand, he

bestowed wet kisses on my fingers.

“Privileged creatures dogs -  further 

than a mere man would dare go

with a stranger.” his master said.

He blew me a kiss and went away 

whistling a sad haunting tune,

but his step was brisk and the set

of his head that of a happy man. 

On a bank at the edge of a field

newly greened beneath the wall 

of the old town, two hares boxed

on the March snow dusted turf.

They circled, hind legs erect, 

feet en demi point, long ears

akimbo, front legs curved high

into the sky, two peasant dancers 

in a dizzy rural pas de deux

whirling, bobbing, wheeling,  

then subdued he bowed to her,

and docile followed after her. 

I watched them, two brown

snowflakes, Eostre’s children

who melted away invisible 

among the old trees, their once

exuberant presence marked 

only by faint tracks in the snow. 

I stood at the open graveside

where the old man lay in his coffin,

his small brown dog beside me

long nose resting on brown paws.

‘Eternal rest grant unto him

Light perpetual shine upon him’

The dog, sighing, licked my hand. 

Together we walked the path 

down from the old high town,

past the old dark forest where

young leverets sleep and play

and white wood anemones bloom.

On to the beach amongst the

blue sea holly and grey leafed kale

are two new March Hares running

headlong into the new spring sun.

Brown Dog barks, and chases 

a flock of teetering sandpipers,

while I hold up my arms to

radiant Phoebus, dazzling symbol 

of Love and Light come again.

                                       Naomi

A tenebris ad lucem

From darkness to light

"And so my dearest Aunt I have to tell you

I have been given an old manuscript

of A Tenebris ad Lucem, which I must study

eating my way through its covers and leaves.

Its oak boards would be my book cover of choice,

 but on each vellum leaf of text the miniatures 

 of bright malachite and lapis lazuli, 

of gold and cinnabar, show stories so shocking

that it seems I am embarking on a journey

through a land of diabolical horrors.

"I walk now in a dark forest where dense foliage

overwhelms the light, and the stony path

leads only into a miasma of despair.

I peer out between massive trees to see

a site both of tragedy and savage beauty.

A great wall of water, Leviathan risen

from the ocean, pounds inexorably across

the land destroying everything in its path,

whole villages smashed, animals and men

tossed into the air like feathers in the wind.

"Across endless fields of battle, I hear nations

mourning their dead, the flowers of many forests

are cut down and shattered by mine and gun,

enemies attack in an unseemly dance

of cracking sinew, hot blood and broken bone.

The little Forest Owlet cries out for his home

disappeared under the blade of an illicit axe,

an Amoy Tiger roars in vain for his lost mate

while a single Great Humped Back Whale sings

his eerie threnody to a long empty sea.

"It is as if all the oppressed and dispossessed

of this land are gathered at my back with 

voices raised in a great Anthem of Destruction

which almost completely overwhelms me.

Numb, I shrink back into my orange shell,

fold my six legs and await my gruesome fate.

But the dark canopy falls away and tall figures

clothed in light glide across a sunlit plain,

proclaiming that love alone heals loss and sorrow,

and brings fresh hope into a world of fear.

"Boys who once carried rifles on their shoulders

play again in green fields beside the river,

the starving and the homeless are sheltered and fed,

prisoners are set free and old enemies embrace.

An Amoy Tigress comes out of the forest

two new cubs playing like kittens around her heels,

flowers wash the ground where blood once was spilled,

eager saplings spring from craters of devastation. 

It is a new song this shining world now sings,

a soaring Hosannah of love and joy.

"I make my way along the path through soft grass

into the golden light of a new day, 

through the final leaf of my book to find

the old oak board, gateway back to my home.

As I pass the figures of light, one with eyes

deep and dark as the waters of Bethesda,

gives me a blessing and I see that his wrists

are deeply scarred where nails were driven through.

And I bow low to this Man of Light and Peace.

 Meanwhile,

I remain as ever your most affectionate nephew,

Apollonius Bostrichus Capucinus”

Naomi

The Mark of Love

He sits in my bleak cold garden

perched lordly on the old oak table.

He does not move but stares unblinking,

not asking but demanding more

of the flame raisins he has found

in the cracked old Japanese bowl.

I watch him as he cocks his head

turning from one side to the other,

the dark eyes intelligent and sharp

reminding me of the rare talents

and avian persistence lodged

in this small being of brown and red.

“I am the little bird” he says,

“who, come the Spring, pours out his song

like a nightingale in the hedgerow

singing beneath the silver moon,

rich notes ringing through the warm night

to summon my love back to our nest.

“But once I flew into a cold stable

where a swaddled new born baby lay.

Ox and donkey slept soundly there, 

while the baby shivered in his bed

and his mother stretched out her soft hand

to caress my brown feathered coat.

‘Bird’ she said, ‘can you rebuild the fire?

For the night is icy and I fear

for my baby so helpless and so young.’

I flapped my wings like small bellows

and sang to her until the flames

leaped like fiery darts into the sky

“Consumed with a rare love for the child,

too close I went to the roaring fire

and the dull brown feathers of my coat

smouldered blood red bright in the darkness.

But the boy smiled in a deep sleep

and his mother offered me her thanks.

“She looked tenderly at my burned

feathers, and blessed me with a kiss

to set as a seal upon my heart.

I have fought for my territory,

and beak stabbed my feathered brothers

but still I carry the Lady’s mark of love.”

I remember now his constant harrying 

of the hungry Blue Tits, but how

can I resist those pleading eyes?

So I fill up the old bowl with fruit.

and, as he sits beside me to take it,

‘God bless you my little Red Breast’ I pray.

                                               Naomi

Remembrance

Two Poppies

At the beginning of November

I bought two poppies.

One, with its blood red petals sharp edged symbols 

of pain and death, its thin green drooping leaf and wiry stalk 

wound about with flimsy ribbons of dull green plastic, 

I pinned into my button hole. 

The other flower, soft and white like a velvet star in the sky,

I pinned above my heart, and asked the God of Mercy

to lead us in our search for peace.

Waking to the dawning of the eleventh day 

of the eleventh month,

I looked up at a sky where the sun wove

thick reddening clouds into an empyrean landscape

of poppies, mimicking dark fields saturated

with the life blood of men who, like early rotting corn

untimely harvested, lay scattered across the fields of death.

Beneath this wine red canopy, I asked the God of Hope

that he might bring us out of darkness into light.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day

of the eleventh month

I stood not in a church, nor beside a cenotaph,

but on a bitter cold cliff rising high above the coast of Kent.

There when I listened to the  wind I heard the echoing thud of guns,

there in the rain I felt on my hands warm rivulets of blood,

there, as I remembered them and honoured them,

I wept for all those who died, for every widow who mourned,

and for every sorrowing fatherless child.

Our world today is still wracked with unceasing bloody slaughter,

and in the name of the Man of Peace I ask the God of Love

that we may some day offer to all our enemies

the gentle white poppy of peace.

Amen  So may it be