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Golden Guns

I was born just prior to the second world war. I lived through the war years in the UK, and Golden Guns expresses the paradox of a good childhood amidst war.

Growing years in which war was everyday.
Guns pounding in the night,
Reaching for shadows,
Amidst the search-lit
Dappled sky.
Roaring guns singing
Me a lullaby
Of another ordinary day,
Reassuring by what was
Normal in my world.

Tank traps,
Barbed wire barricades,
Rifle shells,
Tin foil from the sky,
And those glorious summers
In Rabbit and stoat
Filled harvesting.
Running behind
horse drawn carts
Full of wheat sheaves
With the street boys.

Climbing up the back rope
To ride on the top.
Looking down on
Old men behind
The horse.

These are my memories
Of good years.
And in those memories
Are the guns –
Those golden,
Golden guns.

Forty Years

Thats how long it took
To get so ingrained.
Forty years!
Well if you are twenty,
Thats twice your age.
If you are forty
It is your whole lifetime.
Even if you are fifty or sixty,
It is still most of your life.

So its been difficult
For me to lose
What took me so long
To gain.
Because I cant go home anymore
Not like I used to.
Home was where my kids were,
All five of them.

Wherever I had been
There was always
One of more of them there
Pleased to see me.
Home meant doing things together.
Every night we read a story.
We learned to cook there,
To talk long talks,
Tease the dog,
Make a bow and
Shoot the arrows.

At home we laughed,
Swapped favourite music,
Held whoever was the baby,
Wrestled, went for walks.
We swam out to sea
With me as a tug
Pulling the others
With the dog swimming alongside.

We never had babysitters.
It was too much fun
To be with my friends
Because my kids were my friends.
And if I was away I would
Hurry home again.
So I never went out
To a bar to be diverted.
There was too much
Going on at home.

We built a boat there,
Learned to fish from it.
We watched the baby
Fall asleep with its mouth open,
Found out how
To shoot an air rifle,
Build a fire balloon
At home.

No wonder I always want to
Hurry home.
Except I keep forgetting,
My house is empty now.
I live here by myself,
And I never got the habit
Of looking elsewhere
For that warmth.
So its always a terrible shock
Just how empty this house is
Without them.

It took forty years
The old habit dies hard.

The Flowing Smile

Who Am I?
That is the question
I am forever
In each moment.
And I am the hunted,
For they chase me
With their snares,
And surround me
With their traps.
These strange creatures
Who call themselves people
Forever try to capture me.
They strive to imprison me
With their words.
They throw them at me
Like nets,
Telling me who I am
And what I must think.
They describe me and
Surround me with meanings
Which I twist and turn within
Writhing to escape.
Injecting words like death
With fears and terrors
To entrap me.
They put before me mirrors
Full of images the people
Tell me reflect myself,
Thereby trying to hold
Fragments of my spirit
As if in magic spell.
And if one tiny part of me is
Held they dance away
Singing – Now I have you.
Now I have caught you
And you are mine
To do my will,
To seek what only I
Can give or sell to you.
For you have lost your
Soul to me.
See, here in this bottle
Is your beauty
That you so long for
And must pay me to regain.
Here is your confidence
That I captured in my
Mesh of words
That only I can give you back –
For a price.
Your love is mine,
And only with me
Can you regain it.
And here is the secret of
Your very existence
That I took from you
In the hunt.
And now here I stand
Like a holy light
That you surround
Like flies seeking
The honey of your very life.
And I, looking at the people
Singing their siren’s songs,
Knowing myself beyond their traps
Undress, until, naked, I am free
Of their false images,
Their clever snare of words.
As a living flame
I burn away their trickery
That tries to make of me
A searcher of myself – a seeker
Of my own identity.
And here, formless
Beyond words and images
I exist in the
Immensity of a flowing smile.

Earth Wind and River

I am a river.

I am the wind.

I am the body of Earth moving.

What I drink

Flows through me like a river.

I wish to keep that river clean.

What I breathe

Flows through me like the wind.

I wish to keep that wind clean.

What I eat

Flows through me

Like the spirit of life.

I will take nothing unclean

Into this temple of life.

Dwarf

I am a dwarf,
Remembering the
Long slow years of misery.
Feeling again
The countless moments
Of exclusion.
Living once more
My desire to run away
From ordinary people’s lives.
From invitations
To “come for walks.”
Where gates are clambered over,
Rugged hillsides climbed,
Long miles rambled.

I am a dwarf
Whose wound you’ve touched,
Laying bare
My naked difference.
You, who so easily
Have loved through the night
And call to me
To join you in those pleasures.
While I,
With such failures
In my mind and heart
Recoil at the invitation.
And you, unwittingly perhaps
Talk to me
Of easy times with sex,
Tearing protective clothes
From off my
Malformed limbs
Exposing me
To all my hurts
And my inadequacy.

Death Is the Loss

Three friends
Stood close to me.
Holding me
With tender support.
And I felt the welling up
Of deep energies
Flow in my body
Lifting me high
Into joy
And the clear huge
Vista of mind.

They stood close into me,
Filling me with tender love
As I watched the river
Of joyful awareness
Carry me beyond myself –
Carry me
To a place where
I felt the presence
Of my late father.

“I come to teach you of death”
He said.
Then he laid his hands
Upon me
Taking my life away,
And I cried with the
Tearing away of all that I was,
Of all people I thought I possessed;
At the falling away of
All I had built.

I know there is death
For I died
Under my father’s hands.
And death was the loss
Of everything,
My children –
My life,
My work,
My woman,
Gone – to be no more.

In his arms
My father carried the
Empty shell of me,
The corpse of what I had been.
And he lay it upon a
Heavenly meadow
Where dwelt
The potency of all things given.
All that, in my life,
I had given to others,
And all they had given to me,
Began entry into my dead form
To become its life.

For I saw,
Nothing of us survived,
In death,
Except what we had
Given of ourselves,
Or been given by others.
And of the latter,
What gave life was
Not what we had been given,
But what we had
Allowed ourselves to receive
Of another.

In this way my new being began,
With my father near by.
And my first awareness
Was of love in its many forms.
The shy love of a child,
Tender love of a woman’s care,
Or the passionate love of jealousy,
A baby’s devouring love,
Or the unexpressed love of
One who simply sits and waits.

I saw these and many more of loves forms –
Wondering in my new life
How often I had closed myself to love,
And whether my heavenly body
Would grow straight limbs,
Or be bent
From lack of giving and given.

Then your love touched me;
Love you had given me
All these years,
And was giving still
Even beyond the grave.
And I felt my
Body of death
Flex itself,
Fluid and radiant,
Alive in its new life.

Art by Jonathon Day

Chains of Fear

For the first time I stood facing the Light,
But my hands were chained at the wrists,
And I held them up to God, the Light, to be freed.
It was then as if God said,
‘Tony, you hold up your arms to be freed,
But you have never been chained – only by yourself.’

For a long time I have believed
In a personal God –
But always as me finding a
Personal relationship
With the Infinite Life.
However, lately
A stronger feeling of God
Being personal has come;
Not in the sense of my approach to God,
But in God’s approach to me.

And at this point of realising my freedom,
A wonderful awareness of contact
With God came upon me.
God was personal, warm, loving,
Communicating with me.
I stood before God,
Knowing I was nothing,
Yet loved by God.
I was, as I understood it,
‘No bloody good – yet wonderful.’

Now a great love rose up in me.
It was so tender.
As tender as the
Love one feels for a newborn baby,
For a flower, or a sleeping child,
Yet as passionate as for a lover.
And expressing these feelings
I said to God, ‘I love you.
I love you! I love you!’

I cannot describe my emotions
Or God’s presence –
Huge, benign, formless,
Yet close, and directed at me alone,
With great love,
Person to person.
There was no personality,
Yet there was person.

I saw I was not chained,
Except by my own fears
And restraints,
And laughter rose in me.
Not because of a joke,
But because laughter itself
Is as elemental as love,
As powerful as the sea,
And it began to flow through me.

I laughed because God laughed,
Because of God’s humour;
And God’s loving smile
Shone on me.
I laughed because I am nothing,
Yet I am wonderful and loved.
I laughed for unknown,
Unsensed purposes –
For I knew not what,
And because everything
Is so ridiculous;
Because we act all the time
Instead of saying
Or doing what we want.
Because we, as men and women,
In asking God to stroke our head
With a loving hand,
Go about it by complaining of headaches,
Of illness, or misery,
Instead of just saying,
‘God, I really want you to stroke me.’

Instead of saying to someone we love,
‘I madly want to get you in bed,’
We say, ‘What a nice dress that is.
Isn’t the weather mild now?’
And on we wander.

As for me,
Feeling so loved and free,
I gently and lovingly
Held myself in my arms,
And sang of my love to God.

Brushstrokes

In one brushstroke a whole life.

In one life a holographic culture.

The brushstroke, as simple as it was,

Carried within it everything the man was,

And in turn he carried everything that was his culture.

And until I accept I am a brushstroke

I cannot see my part in the

Whole picture.

Bringing Home The Shopping

I came home with the shopping.
I love it –
Looking through all the choices of things
And collecting what I need.
And I put the bags on my cane sofa
In the kitchen,
And forgot about them
While I involved myself
In other things.
Later, returning
To take all my carefully
Selected foods and goods
Out of the bags to store,
I opened the first bag
And was almost swept away –
Swept away by the wonder of it.
In that flimsy plastic bag,
With its imprint of the supermarket
Badly stamped upon it,
I saw all the treasure of care,
The fruits of labour
My mother and father
Had carried with love
Into our home,
Carried, just as I had carried
These bags today.
There in glory shone manifest
The skills I had struggled,
Or with joy learned and honed
In order to have something to give
To my fellows,
And therefore feed
My children and myself,
To take as an offering to my wife.
In my hands were the gifts
Of the generations,
The forefathers and mothers
Throughout the ages.
Such common things
All shone with light,
And with a mystery
Beyond my understanding –
And I stood transfixed.

Art By Julie Haile – Email

Beyond

There is a life I’ve seen,
Beyond the limits of fear,
Outside the prison of conditioning,
And through the walls of pain.

I have breathed that life.
The blood of it has
Run through me warm and rich.
The fruits of its vine
Are in my limbs
Sinous and strong.

The seeds of it infected me,
And run through the tissue and substance
Of all I am and all I do.
It eats me until
I am transformed.

Come!
Kiss me –
And catch this
Glorious affliction.

Alone

I know that one day
I must walk alone.
Allow me that.
Haven’t you noticed how
Some evenings when the winds drop
And there is warmth enough
Not to be hurried,
Friends, even lovers,
While walking,
Stroll apart
And watch the sunset?
I never saw this until now.
I have been asking
So much from life.
What I see now
Is that one day
I will walk away
And never return.
All our life
We practice it
In our partings,
In our hours absence,
Or leaving for work.
On the day
When I do not
Turn back,
I hope there will be
No tears –
In me or you –
Because we have done it
So many times before.
It will help me
To go with a glad heart.

Are You Still There?

Can you remember when you died?
And how old you were?
Perhaps you were
Only two,
And the climate was bad
In your parents hearts.
Or did you reach to ten,
Maybe even thirteen
Before you felt the
Touch that kills
The eagerness
For life within you.

I think I was just born
When it began.
When the passion,
And the magic keyboard
Of wonderful response
Was locked up.
What was it killed you?
Was no one there
Who met you,
Longing to longing,
Skin to skin,
With open mouthed
Wonder in their eyes?

Did you get killed
Slowly – or of a sudden?
Did the wound that
Took your life away
Get opened frequently
Before you died?
Or was it done
So carefully that
Even now,
You do not know
That you are dead?

I can see you though,
Walking the streets
Without the light
Of feeling in your face.
Without the tears and laughter
That come with life.
Without the pains
And wonder of love,
Of struggled,
Passionate creation,
And the sense of
Awe,
As the great organ
Of your being
Plays its music.

The Air Raids 1940s

We are being bombed.
I’m only small and I can hear them.
I feel helpless
And cant do anything.
I want my daddy’s help.
Daddy I’m frightened.
Please dont let
Them bomb me again.
I dont want my mum bombed.
I dont want the bombs.
I’ve got to get away.
P’raps if Im very good,
If I dont do anything bad
Will they not bomb me?
Please dont bomb me.
There is nowhere to go that is safe.
There is nowhere to go.
I want my daddy to make them stop it.
Is daddy going to make
Them stop it mummy?
All the daddys in the world
Are trying to stop it.
But why do we do it mummy?
Even we dont know why we do it.
When I grow up I will
Tell people why they do it.
I can hope.
There is hope!

Your Face

One day you told me —
I think these are the words —
That if you find a doorway
Out of life,
You’ll take it
And with a smile be gone.
Yet in the night
When lost in love together,
I looked upon your face
Shining and radiant,
And saw no hope to die,
You were exuberant with life.
Enveloping me in your joy,
The world-weary face was gone.
The load you carried
Of others lives
Had dropped away.
The conflict of will removed.
In those moments
What I saw gladdened me
With your delight in life.
For you, unhindered
By the shoulds
That must be done,
Were shining through.
Then came the vision
Of one love, one light.

Woman

Woman,
I opened a door in you;
And looking through
I saw the mothers
Images etched upon
The corridors of your body.
I witnessed the seeds
Of all they lived
Planted in you
As your own seeds,
And as the seeds of
All you can be.
Strangely you have not
Known that door –
Except in sleep.
And when I peered
Beyond it I found boxes there,
Full of history and treasures;
Boxes you might never
Break open except
In the extremes of need,
Or the excitation of
Greatness or wonder.
And you are so full
Of these things,
Lying quiescent beneath
The familiar lines
Of your face,
And the wonderful
Deception of who you are.
And who you
Know yourself to be.

Wind to My Wings

I want you to know how wonderful it is to fly.
Did you know that I have only just learned?
My wings grew some years ago,
And the great feathers have hardened
As I have lifted into the air,
Soared and climbed on winds of wonder,
And airy rivers of expanding mind.
But only now have I opened my wings wide
And swept with laughter and tears
Over the edge of my world and across the ocean.
There, far below and receding,
I see the security of my home,
Of work, and loved people I am kin with.
And here, in the wind and sky,
Above the Ocean of the Unknown,
Across the sea of Possibilities,
My wings carry me.
Your words are with me as the wind lifting me.
Your love is the current of air carrying me beyond myself.

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Tony Crisp