How do you do that?
With the same time of night
Turn the day’s benediction
Into pretty pastel pixels of light
How do you do that?
In the very same cloth of skies
Tie dye all these colourscapes
With swathes and swirls of surprise
Every night it’s another picture
We click in vain hope of capture
The tossed dust of God’s imaginings
As we gasp in holy rapture.
(American friends... this is a quick, emotional response... though to be honest it is hardly quick after years upon years of the same headlines .. but forgive me if this is insensitive... or I have got it wrong... BUT we are exasperated, frustrated, confused... and in mourning with those who lost loved ones...)
America oh our friend
This time its Dayton and El Paso
Where next, the random madman
Russian roulette of no one knows
Who will be the next child wasted
"Bang Bang" just cover over your ears
Today’s not the day for politics
And the days turns into years
And years
And tears flow
Upon blood and tears.
America you are our mystery
We’re all confused by your altar of guns
And how a right in anybody’s constitution
Can cut down all these innocent ones.
America oh our friend
We pray for your mourning nation
Oblivious to the patently obvious
So lost and in need of salvation
It seems everywhere you’re fixing
As if all the rest of us are owing
But there you are a broken heart
Cancerous sins rampantly growing
And growing
More seeds sowing
In the cancer growing.
In the racism
Between the walls
In your increasing division
The devil calls
“Let what you love
Blur what you believe
You’ll be better for it
Just be prepared to grieve”
America you are our mystery
We’re all confused by your altar of guns
And how a right in anybody’s constitution
Can cut down all these innocent ones.
photo: Janice Gordon-Stockman
Just how sensational is that blue
The one made by these light beams
Not the darker cathartic kind
That soothes the bluesman’s bad dreams
This one's made by the evening sun
Setting low above the town
Just two hours before the candle glow
That deep orange of it going down
Just how many shapes can clouds throw
Like they’re belching out smoke from a fire
As if they’ve built a hundred chimney stacks
All across the Mull Of Kintyre
And the ripples and dimples and sky waves
As they float out towards Rathlin Island
I’m not sure Dawkins has it right
‘Cos I’m pretty sure God is smiling
And I look at who I’m with
You’re the image of something higher
Higher than sunset's bursting colours
That set the sky on fire
Just how vivid is this evening air
The Fair Head’s deciding to strut right out
Veins of rock with heaven in the detail
Leaves the atheist a mountain of doubt
There is a beauty elusively placed
That picture postcards just can’t capture
Like you walking this beach beside me girl
God has me by the throat with his rapture.
And I look at who I’m with
You’re the image of something higher
Higher than sunset's bursting colours
That set the sky on fire
This is our place
Our mystical space
Where we clear the clouds that have been
This is our time
The verse to our rhyme
Where we find visions of pictures unseen.
Sun shines across hillocked green
West Nile beauty uniquely pervading
Signal pocked masts blight the horizon
Alien rhythm and unwelcomed invading
Women lining the road to Nebbi
Cassava baskets filled with nourishment
When Jesus said, “Worry not about tomorrow”
Is this the perfect balance he meant.
The western rhythms
They hypnotise us
Customise us
Conform our feet
Yes our rhythms
They can seduce us
Even reduce us
To an off beat.
Then between Arua and Nebbi
We climb over another rise
See the land laid out forever
Under mesmerising African skies
It seems like everything is possible
No need for a crammed up schedule
Maybe the more empty are the days
The more chance of a life that’s full.
These African rhythms
Can untangle the knots
To soothe our thoughts
And sense the Spirit move
Yes their rhythms
They come and find us
And realign us
To a soul chilled groove.
When I cross the bridge at Pakwach
There is always a tear in my eye
Joy in the coming
Sorrow in the going
The hello or goodbye!
Last Friday we were on the rowdiest of school playgrounds. 450 children in Onialeku Nursery and Primary School were singing, cheering, dancing and crying as we partied on the last day of Fitzroy's annual Partnership Trip. The noise and the hustle and bustle was loud!
Twenty four hours later we were in Murchison Falls National Park. I said to a few of the team the noise levels would be different. Everything was different. Both experiences were awesome but the noise levels...
Feel the silence
The quiet of God’s calm
Distant from soul sucking static
That takes from who I am
Listen to the solitude
The calm of redeeming love
Restoring all that’s stressed
In our modern push and shove
The elegance of the kob
Our lingering crocodile fears
The gentility of the giraffe
The Elephant's swaying ears
The Crested Crane’s royal pose
The Kingfisher’s kamakasi drop
The Grandeur of the water buffalo
Egret grooming her on top.
In the liturgy of sunrise
The hymn of creation calls
Mystery comes flooding
As Murchison falls
The water bursting through
The narrow crevasse space
Cascading all life’s fulness
A torrent of amazing grace.
(A rather rushed poem of anger... watching bulldozers cut roads into Murchison Falls National Park... we still reach for tempting forbidden fruit... and still end up damaging our humanity... and the garden)
No animals at the gate
They all have run for cover
Sensitive to the dangers
That we have made our lover
Bulldozing elephants off the savannah
Ripping giraffes from silhouette horizons
Tearing the coloured birds from sky
And extinguishing the lions
Power lines
Industrial enzymes
Stocks and share crimes
Beauty thieving
Reach for progress
We all become less
That is our fallenness
Wonder grieving
Dashing Mother Nature's dance
Crashing God's Creation jive
Here come the killers of earth
And we are watching it live!
Two becoming one
Into duo or duet
Like the sound of love the angels played
At that moment that you met
Two becoming one
Listen for the melodies
Oh so much more beautiful
In Shannon and Danny’s harmonies
In the verses of your lives
The middle eights of your vocations
Carry the chorus of the Kingdom
With redemption's reverberations
May the Moore’s become that song
Where the Word’s made flesh and moves
Into the neighbourhoods your called to sing
Jesus grace notes in every groove.
photo: Caitlin Stockman
Sam, reach out and take my hand
Even though you don’t know who you give it to
Like when I used to put mine in yours
To do everything I wanted to do.
You taught me, keep my eye on the ball
And then to swing the club right through
They talk about the sins of the fathers
I got so much more than that from you
You did your job as my front runner
I tucked in and you set my pace
It’s hard to watch you step off the track
To leave me to find my own space.
I turn off Tim Wheeler at the Roundabout
A round about a mile away
Take a long deep breath in the silence
To find the resilience and something to pray
The knot in my soul when I’m going in
Is only bigger and tighter when I’m leaving
Walking and talking in your glass coffin
Living in the pain of perpetual grieving.
Sam, reach out and take my hand
Even though you don’t know who you give it to
Like when I used to put mine in yours
To do everything I wanted to do.
Grá
Irish word
For the English word
Love
But much more robust
Like onomatopoeia
A thump in the chest
A thud in the heart
Grá is who we are
Not what we think
Or define, or write down or preach
It fires what we do
It points to where we go
It gathers who we are with
A veto on everything else
Half the letters of grace
With twice the literary impact
The quintessence of who we are
What is our grá?
50 years ago
In the school playground
In the blink of an eye
Without much thought
Or was there
Had it been frog-spawning
In the pond of Uncle Jimmy’s constant naming
Of Bell and Lee and Summerbee
Becoming tadpoles in the peer pressure
Of Derek Cunningham wearing the kit
Sky blue and white, claret trim on the socks
To the jumping frog
Of changing sides in the lunchtime game
From United to City
To even up the teams
Stephen Martin, I see your sneaky face
There was no turning back
I became City 'til I die
And soon we were dying
It wasn’t fun for a while
If a while can be 35 years
Excruciatingly painful actually
For decades I wanted to find Derek Cunnigham
And tell him that I resented him
That he ruined my life!
But today Derek Cunningham
I could kiss you
Thank you
Today we won the FA Cup
To clinch The Double
That was a holy grail
But not just The Double
The Domestic Treble
That no one ever thought about
Dreamed about
Or have ever won before
For my 50 year anniversary
We won everything!
There will be begrudgers
They will talk about the money
And I wish this could be done without the money
But it’s not 50 years ago
So if you want to play
Like that
Fast
Furious
Freewheeling
Perfect footballing poetry
Then this is the way.
So, 50 years
Of low lights
And even darker
(Macclesfield away in the League!)
There have at last been highlights
But the years and years of deepest gloom
Have made these bright days brighter
All the more joyous
Like the Promised Land after wandering in the wilderness.
It would all have been worth it
For just that one moment
“Agueroooooooo…”
As The Sawdoctors songs goes
“To win just once
That would be enough”
The rest is showing off
Constant laps of honour
Still, I will always remind myself
Where I was for that Sergio injury time winner
That snatched the title from Sir Alex’s pesky grasp
I had lost faith, given up and left
To face my hurt
In the garden
Missing the very greatest moment of the 50 years.
That moment about sums up these 50 years
But here I am
In my City shirt and tracksuit bottoms
And there is the Premiership trophy
With The FA Cup
And the League Cup
All in City’s trophy cabinet.
Blue Moon
Wonderwall
Na na na, City!