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.
Trees unfolding time
light of the west in their sides
the wind, fierce, surrounds them.
Dawn stalks the day
behind darkening skies.
johncarrollpoems 