POEMS/LYRICS

HOME?

Stockies 150

The theme for the 4 Corners Festival 2025 is Home? This was my take, as I read on the first Sunday evening of the Festival.

 

Home - question mark.

Where is my home?

Is it Ballymena 

My hometown

Galgorm where the Stockmans are from

Harryville, the Kernohans

Is it where I was nurtured in Granny’s cottage beneath the thatch

Where I kicked my ball against the wall

The shops where I bought The Beatles

The church where God told me that I’d found him

Or is Belfast my home

Where I have now lived more than twice as long

Where I met my wife

Raised my children

And live out my vocation

Home?

 

Home - question mark

Home is where the heart is

What does that mean?

Do I need to go to some home because my heart is there?

Or is finding my heart wherever, home?

When all of me stretches out relaxed

In contented belonging

As if swaddled in a warm embrace

The arms of God’s grace

In Janice and Caitlin and Jasmine

All around me

Whether on sofas, or at a table, or on a beach or singing at a Ryan McMullan 

Whether in Belfast or Ballycastle or Cape Town or Arua

Home?

 

Home - question mark

We are always heading for home

Or hearting for home

Or souling for home

Pilgrims tumbling and stumbling behind Jesus

Close enough to gather his dust

Following him home 

And 

As we journey

There are moments on the way

Where home comes and meets us

Which makes eternal sense

Because this will be home - no question mark

At the end of the ancient text

On the very last page

As everything comes to its end

Or the end of the beginning

Home comes down out of heaven

To us 

Here

In a garden of shalom 

With a tree of forgiveness 

A river of justice

Where love is the air we breathe

Then,

Then, 

Recycling will be recreation

Repression relieved

The riven are repaired

Reprobates redeemed 

And remembering will become that hoped for resurrection

Home will be where my heart

Is known

Is healed

Has all it should have longed for

All it ever needed

Home.


SURMISE ON ST. BRIGID'S DAY

St. Brigid

There's a lot of fascinating but unfounded myth surrounding St. Brigid that my own spiritual sensitivities dismissed but as her day lands during 4 Corners Festival this year and our Knitting Event made St. Brigid's crosses I surmise a truth I found in the myth...

 

In a myth

That needs not be true

To shine truth

We gather

Around St. Brigid’s hearth

Inside mercy's threshold

The peat 

Smoky waft of wild outdoors 

Smoored through the night

Fanned back into flame at dawn

Perpetual light and life

That darkness and death has never snuffed out

Bright Emmanuel

Home?


SURMISE IN THE LOCKERBIE GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE

604489-lockerbie-memorial-dryfesdale

 

The unfriendly silence of innocent ghosts

Lockerbie's sad sacred sombre space

Lives, never wanting to be a headline,

Dead, staring at me photo to face

Sweet smiles, Satan's sovereign collateral 

The heart aching stretch to comprehend

Catharsis in the words of Dylan

"Death is not the end"

 

I'm praying for quiet and gentle

In our exits from skin and bone

No matter how our ending comes

May we be more than inscriptions in stone.

 

I remember where I was on December 21st 1988. We were just home from celebrating a friend's 21st birthday when the news was coming through about a plane crash in the south of Scotland. It wasn't long before we knew that it was a terrorist attack and that Pan Am Flight 103 had been blown out of the sky on route from Frankfurt to Detroit via London and New York. 243 passengers and 16 crew were blown out of the sky and as the debris landed 11 residents of Lockerbie were killed too.

Almost exactly 18 months later I was the back up driver for two friends, David Montgomery and David Baldock, who were cycling from John O'Groats to Lands' End. We spent a night in Lockerbie and the Russell family talked us through that nightmare night in their lives. The next morning, before the boys cycled off towards the English border, we stopped off at the Lockerbie Memorial Garden. 

It was a haunting place. The silence. The long list of names on the memorial stones. Even more hard hitting to my heart were the photographs of the victims. Children's faces and smiling teenagers looking me in the eye. The reality of the futile loss of life made a deep impact on me. They are back in my mind tonight as the world remembers.

I wrote this at the time, probably as I drove ahead of the Daves, seeking out places for lunch. Bob Dylan's album Down In The Groove, with Death Is Not the End on it, might have been playing in the car. It was raw of rhyme and I've fixed it all these decades later. The obvious realisation was that I could be a name on a memorial stone some day too. What was I going to make of my life in the meantime? 

 


NEW YEAR'S SHORE

NYE beach

A first draft surmise from our walk on the beach this afternoon

 

Old Year’s Day 

Last walk

On Ballycastle sands

My soul drawn

To debris all strewn across

Beached, out of the memory of the Moyle

 

Plastic bottles that it needed spewed out

Like toxic vomit from its stomach

Immoral impediments to this holy beauty

 

Driftwood crashing in, landing with a pummel

Like a life that’s done, vocation over

Yet still so animate, decorating our horizon

 

Seaweed, there every night and day

Scattered as if we need something familiar

Not wanted but ever invading our perspective.

 

And the sea glass swept in and out, up and down

Honed by the friction of tidal scrub

Until like treasure we pick it up, a shining jewel.

 

All the good, the tears of joy

Whirled in the bad, the crying ache

Washed in on waves now gone

May we know grace and mercy

As we walk

By an ocean’s buoyant mysteries

Of New Year's shore.


(YOU LEFT US) MORE THAN GRIEF

Jani at Grave

 

Too much space on the landing

Where we gather to go down

The dog wagging our excitement

The tree and gifts all scattered round

 

A Santa sack lies deflated

Punctured of what might have been

No one saying “Oh my goodness”

To unwrapped surprises he’s seeing

 

The empty chair at the table

Laid out without bread sauce

But centre still, that smell of spiced beef

That you handed down to all of us

 

God knows that we miss you

But you left us more than grief

A million hours of practical kindness

And this Christmas morning belief

God knows our hearts are breaking

But you left us more than tears

In every story we are sharing

Your gentle love forever appears

 

You left us more than tears

Your gentle love forever appears

You left us more than grief

This Christmas morning belief.

 

This is a very subjective heartbroken poem for Janice, and us all, for our first Christmas without Janice's dad, Bryan. I hope it becomes objective too and might resonate with anyone missing a loved one. I pray that you see that your loved one left you so much more than grief, though grief they did indeed leave.

The photograph was taken on Christmas Eve 2024. My photographer mate Gordon Ashbridge used to teach my Chaplaincy students, before trips to South Africa, to take one photo as a record of the event and then... then lie down or climb a ladder and take a more arty one. He said you never know what else comes out of that approach. I took a photo of the grave and then told Janice I was going Gordon arty. When we looked at the photo we could not believe that Janice's reflection was right there. It might be the best photo that I have ever taken... speaks a thousand words that my efforts at poetry could never say.


POINSETTIA (IN THE LONGEST NIGHT)

Poinsettias

As we come to Christmas, these days can be a particularly sad time for those who've lost loved ones in the past year. Indeed, for everyone carrying loss down the years.

Someone in Fitzroy (Gillian Fitch?) thought that it might be an idea if everyone feeling grief would bring a Poinsettia to remember their loved one.

The Stockies are thinking of Janice's dad who we lost in February and feel his loss more now, not less.

We also remember Lucia, my daughter's wonderful soul mate, and Rob from our 78 Eaton Wood Green Community from Dublin days.

Just a few days before Christmas and we are in the shortest day, longest night... before a wee stretch in the evenings

 

We bring our Poinsettia 

Heavy in its soul sign

Set its open wound down

Midst the bread and wine

In the disorientated tears

Disturbance of heart unquelled

Leave it as a prayer

To know Emmanuel

God with us

When our loved one is not

Shining on every smile

That our memory brought

 

This

Is the darkest day

Here 

In the longest night

Now 

We wait until tomorrow

Then 

Hope of a little more light

 

And a little more… and more

Until a day when the sky is blue

May the Holy Spirit be your comfort

Embracing God’s love around you.


ALL PART OF THE EXPERIENCE (THE PAST LIKE A PLAYLIST)

Cousins in BC

 

Hedges and bridges

The Moyle and 4 swans

Sunshine and rainbows

Rock pools and prawns

Whiterocks and whiskey

Causeway and castles

Sorley Boy and Casement

Tractors and hassles

Rathlin and Jura

Tor Head and the Glens

Sheep and Belted Galloways

Tunnels and scary bends

Morellis and Mortons

Insults and belly laughs

School room and Skerries

Graveyards and photographs

Selfies and stories

Chartreuse and black nuns

History and now

Ancestors and cousins

 

It’s all part of the experience

These unscheduled rites of passage

Blessed heirlooms handed down

The scars on souls all damaged

We carry the past like a playlist

In the subtle melodies we bring

At the mercy of the grace notes

The songs future generations sing

 

This is about a wonderful couple of days ion the north coast of Antrim with Janice's cousin Heather and her husband Tim from Canada. We were visiting sites of Janice and Heather's parents, grandparents and great grandparents.

I was also influenced by James K A Smith's book How To Inhabit time where he suggests that we carry the past, even the past we didn't live, with us. I agree.


SOUL SURMISING

Soul Surmise 2

I am often asked why I call my blog "Surmise" as "Surmise" is about guessing rather than being certain. I use it, of course, poetically rather than theologically but it was always my intention. I wanted to throw out ideas and reflections and reviews without arrogance. 

 

Surmising

Pondering gargantuan ideas

Wondering what God knows

Knowing we don’t know much

Never mind it all

Who am I to tell God what he thinks

Surmising

 

Surmising

Translations of ancient texts

Our contexts culturally shocked

To grapple with our day

And how it lands

Peering through a glass darkly

Surmising

 

Surmising

Mesmerised by Rough & Rowdy Ways

Silenced before the Pieta

I hear the poets and philosophers

Seeking to make sense

In every way religious

Surmising

 

Surmising

Afraid of the absence of doubt

Abhorring the arrogance of certainty

Scarred by the know it alls

Heart, mind and soul

Do nothing out of vain conceit

Surmising 


GOD IS GRADUAL

Jesus Mosiac

 

"The waiting is the hardest part" - Tom Petty

"I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope" - Psalm 130:5

“The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”[g] (which means “God with us”) - Matthew 1:23

 

Waiting for the calendar 

Waiting for the plane to depart

Waiting for the arrivals’ door

Waiting in my heart

 

Waiting for the appointment

Waiting for a bed

Waiting for the test results

Waiting in my head

 

Waiting for apocalypse

Waiting for my role

Waiting for an answer

Waiting in my soul

 

The world is instant

Patience unusual

In the waiting

Emmanuel

God is great

But God is gradual

In the waiting

Emmanuel


STOP THE SPINNING WHEEL (About 9/11 Attacks)

9:11

 

Do you remember when the sky exploded

Do you remember the sick stench of rubble and skin

Do you remember the children left waiting in nurseries

Do you remember the funerals without a coffin

Do you remember the lingering fidgeting agitation

Do you remember the paralysis of nothing you can do

Do you remember Jesus saying Do unto others

As you would have them do unto you

 

Do you remember the heart of the nation crumble

Do you remember the rip in the lining of your soul

Do you remember the day fair could not be mended

Do you remember despair spiralling out of control

Do you remember the news men lost for words

Do you remember fiction blurring into what was true

Do you remember Jesus saying Do unto others

As you would have them do unto you

 

And in vengeances vicious circle

In the perpetual cycle of hate

Someone has to stop the spinning wheel

Or everything is gonna be too late

Jesus said do unto others

As you would have them do to you

That grace can blow holes in our waging of war

So that peace can squeeze through

 

Do you remember nowhere left to run

Do you remember the long cast shadow of death

Do you remember the people falling, falling, falling

Do you remember the fear for your next breath

Do you remember the panic ‘neath the dust of hell

Do you remember the heroes trying to make it through

Do you remember Jesus saying Do unto others

As you would have them do unto you

 

And in vengeances vicious circle

In the perpetual cycle of hate

Someone has to stop the spinning wheel

Or everything is gonna be too late

Jesus said do unto others

As you would have them do to you

That grace can blow holes in our waging of war

So that peace can squeeze through.