A sheet of sea,

glimmering fire on its surface

turning to ashes in its blue depths,

the hills overlook, rounded against the sky,

sloping its heart into the burning waves.

When we first met she had left

her land of faith.

When we married I had found it

and she soon followed.

I found through her and she through me.

But she still has not come home.

We can look into the past

in Scotland, Ireland, Poland, New Zealand

or ahead to Jerusalem.

But faith and love are tender things

which are damaged by being grasped.

We hold out our hands to the butterfly

from our homeland.

A baby playing on the concrete

whose eyes are like the autumn sky

A bird sweep past

the western sky is dark with cloud

The face moved through seasons

as she sat there by the glass

and summer light diffused

in her room.

The entrance of her womb

now open the seed within

the vista of the years

now stretching as the fields

beyond her window.

As night came

the evening draw across her face

and life expanded

at her core.

Grey blue to violet and sea

brown lights in the trees

grass richening

the sky leaves us

Across the sea to a barren land,

ten years an exile.

When we visited her home I saw

that part of me was there.

The Poles, the Irish, a deserted wife,

all familiar with rejection, were

among her forbears.

When I returned to my country

I hated it. But one year on

I could stand and watch the rocks and trees

and love its first people.

“If I went home things might be no different.”

“In the same way men ought to love their wives,

as they love their own bodies. In loving

his wife a man loves himself.”

“Where you go, I shall go, and where you

stay, I shall stay. Your people will be

my people, and your God my God. Where

you die, I shall die, and there be buried.”

The authority of heaven doesn’t rest

in the rod but in the flower.

Like an almond tree it blossoms

early after winter’s ice and fruits

in tear shaped nuts with brittle shells.

In the spring its pink blossoms

flutter in the sky and dew drips

mirror lightening shafts of sunlight.

A hot afternoon light yellow air,

a single cricket and bird call in terraces,

separated by silence and human living.

In the grass were bees and small butterflies

hopping from clover to clover, and above

the other world of the sky, linked to this earth,

its soft clouds floating in endless streams.

Green, yellow, blue – these colours were all

our poor vision of the rainbow.

My little boy stood framed in a window,

a dog chased the bees,

from the join of the worlds the wind blew,

fortelling change.

Over running water the blood flows

which cleanses lepers wounds

and sends his sickness far downstream

In open fields the living bird

dipped in his partner’s life

carries our freedom in the air

Morning branches holding light

and arcs of bird calls poised

between the leaves and ground.

The blades of life clear as

the cold air sharpened dew

on the silver roof.