poetry
Would you like to visit us in Hamilton? I have a cottage I do not use. I know this place is expensive: you can stay there. Our last conversation. A few months later, while I was contemplating booking the flight, your body was found in that same cottage. Just 48 years old. I had not heard from you in a while, something told me a bad star was over us. Let’s say you had no money issue: what would you do? […]
The people in this photograph are neither me nor my mother. My mother was diagnosed with cyclothymia. All the family was dragged along in cycles of depression and fits of anger whose heights could last for days. The disease lasted years and its cycles too. I learnt the pain of objects which break on the skin, the sound of body against body, the fear of slammed doors and obscene words. I understood that life had to be the hard way, the […]
Each Autumn, your tuberous roots stretch their arms after their long summer sleep. Your wooded stems become rich and strong with purples and green, with new life. And each year, as naked trees stand against darkening skies and evenings drawing in, your blooms rise above your heart-shaped leaves, bringing a bold defiant cheer to the leaking conservatory of my aging grandmother’s house. These past years, her arthritic fingers, in last vestige of their nimble past, deftly trimmed you of fading […]
It isn’t possible to promise those we love continuous health, happiness, prosperity or freedom from heartbreak. But In the end, all our loves need, is us. Our grace. We are the thread that binds them to life’s joys.
Real people Real people marry more than once, have mortgages, sit at kitchen tables covered with bills to pay. May have many friends or few. Real people have children who no longer speak to them. They grow up in broken families, the best of families or no family at all. Are promiscuous (or secretly dream of being so). They cannot remember the last time they truly made love, dressed for a romantic night out, indulged on the eyeliner instead of […]
Do you remember? You had been away for what seemed like an age. Your assignment was on its third extension. We had been apart over a year. You wrote me a letter. It has stayed with me, always. I treasure these passages, in particular – they are pages from our love’s holy book. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ My love, the distance between us is but a single breath. Think of this… Empty train When I was working in London, traveling into the city […]
Do you remember? We’d given up on the high street jewelers. The rings fit on your finger, but they just didn’t fit us. A few weeks later, we were in Portugal. It was beginning to rain and we ducked inside a tired little shop in that backwater town. It was a place that tourists, and even time, had forgotten. A wizened, arthritic old man moved slowly around the small space. An elderly museum curator, going about his well worn rituals. […]
There is no colour called love in this world. Yet how thoroughly it has dyed my heart ~Lady Kasa, Japan, mid 8th century People have been using the medium of art to represent and explore their spiritual connection with their world, for over 35,000 years. The earliest cave art speaks to us. We sense the human continuum of which we are all part. We can almost touch the moment, millennia ago, when a man or woman’s experience, thought, emotion […]
The art of travel, experienced as an inner journey of discovery and enrichment, is intimately connected with the art of standing still, of observing the workings and wonders of the world and its people and of ourselves.
‘human relationships are as vast as desert’ ‘…stones, even, are smoother for the dust’ – Patrick White, from the novel Voss (1957) The place in which we spend more time than any other, is our thoughts, our inner world. It is there that we constantly converse with ourselves, from infancy to death. It is there that we suffer; unspoken traumas, ancient anxieties and caustic self-blame – all dust storms in our deserts of heart and mind that shape and […]
