Author Archive

Loving You

These are the long hours of your night,
When I, alone in daylight,
Walk paths unaccompanied, and miss you.
No hand to hold, no face to kiss,
No warm presence near me.
Somewhere ahead of you in time I live my life;
A capsule travelling without you through space,
Waiting for you to catch up
Or perhaps for me to fly high enough
So the world turns under me
And when I land we are together.

Loving Touch

I was touched on that day,
By the love that
Is at the heart of things,
And yet we only glimpse it
Occasionally at great moments.
And being touched
I wanted it to flow
From my fingers to others.
I felt that presence,
The love that spans all life;
And feeling it
Knew it as something
Sacred and beautiful.
I wanted, so much
To share it with the others.
And I asked it,
As one might a loving friend,
How that could be.
And gently the presence
Told me the secret.
I must learn, it said,
To wash a person’s feet.
And as it said this
Understanding filled me.
For that loving presence
Didnt simply mean
To take a flannel,
And a piece of soap,
To wash the dirt from
Someones feet.
No — it meant to be a servant.
To be a simple servant of life.

Time Space and Love

Longings reach across the spaces of lives.
Living deep within the unseen places of us,
Calling through time,
Pacing through the avenue of human faces,
Looking, searching for a response.

Longing is older than you or I.
And yet it needs us to know itself.
The restless passing of years,
The insistence we try to understand.
Is that you? Is that me?

I hear it calling from before time –
I need you!
Where are you?
And then it conjures us
Out of itself
So we can meet.

Isnt that a strange magic?
A magic that spreads signs and wonders
As it moves toward its longings.
Did you do that?
Did I?

No – it is enchantment
Sprinkling stardust at its passing.
Did you see that falling star?
Can you hear that voice singing?
Do you feel what I feel?
Have you dreamt that too?

The sweet mystery is love.
Calling from before time,
Falling upon us poor mortals
And enchanting us
With it wonders.

Be gentle with us
Fragile creatures.

Tides

Love is never far away.
Sometimes it just seems to be
Like one of those beautiful creatures
That blends into the background.
Have you ever seen that?
Looking at trees and grass
And there is nothing there.
Then an ear flicks and
Suddenly there is a whole animal,
Sleek with the lines of its natural life,
Three dimensional.

Where did it come from?
Where was it hiding?

Love is just such a lovely animal,
Only apparent when it is moved,
And you move it against
The background of my life.
As still as it might have been
Now you can see it.

Be quiet and
Let it come to you slowly
As you hold out your hand.

For it is shy.
Like all wild things
It is urged by the tides of its nature.
Let your tide flow to it.
Speak softly to it,
For the sound of your voice,
The webs your words form
Call to that nature in it,
And it loves you.

This Infant Grave

Loving you,
My woman,
Is my birth.
And at that beginning
I was torn from love.
The umbilical of life
Was cut –
Leaving me abandoned
And dying.

So here and now,
With you and I,
I try to mend that breach
And meet the threat of death.
The cut cord
You joined once more
Through unfailing love.
And I feel life once more
Pour into what was dying.

And there’s the pain.
For as life enters,
The babe once left to perish
Now feels its terror
As it comes alive.
And dearest woman,
Understand that this
Is not an injury
But a blessing.

Know too, my love,
That this man,
Who loves you
As a newborn child might,
Has never bared
This buried horror
To another.
The trust you felt I lacked
Is there
In that exposure.

No other woman
Have I dared this with.
None have I bonded with
So deep that it laid bare
This infant grave
With all its grief.
No one offered me the balm
To heal the wound
That I might
Learn to love
Completely.

The Selkie – (Mermaid)

My love has been calling out
To you, across the miles and
Ages, like the mournful
Siren’s Song…

Secretly disturbing you
Through all these years.
I know you felt me
Trying to find you
To make you return to me.

But you were unsure of
The insistent echo that lingered
Beneath the shadows of your
Deepest dreams, just beyond your reach…

Now, as I stand here
Alone and naked, before you
Finally it makes sense.

I shed my selkie’s coat for you,
Lover, I beg you take it from me
And lock it away, so at last
We can be together
As it was meant to be.

KGW

The Plain Woman

It is difficult to remember how we met.
But I recall we walked along
One soft and warm afternoon.
Slowly we became arm in arm,
And then, quite naturally
Our arms were around each other,
And there was that delicious
Warmth between us
That I am sure
Only men and women know
Who begin to discover each other.
So it was with us.
She, a plain woman,
With nothing on the surface
To show this wonder of
Tender feelings that flowed
To me from her.
Even her aging body
Advertised nought of
Who I was discovering her to be.
For now, in our closeness
Breathless pleasure glowed.
And arriving home,
Walking indoors,
Suddenly we were face to face,
Such tender loving lips on mine.
So much adoring passion
As we pressed close.
For there, under the surface
Of her plainness I discovered
A beautiful woman,
Young and eager in her embraces.
Mature and deep in the way
She took me into her
Sweet and hungry body.
And so we merged,
And I found myself lying
In the garden of her love;
A garden grown and tended
Over long years,
Full of flowers and secret places.
Such was my love
Of the plain woman.

That Man

I stood upon the hilltop of my life
And looked across the years,
Seeing the enormity of it,
And feeling the impact of
The journeys made,
The relationships navigated,
Often on rough seas.
I knew again the great dreams
I had tried to live,
The heartbreak of failure
And the wonder of success.
The vision, like a sudden
And massive blast of
Profound music,
Moved in me once more
Everything I had
Ever been or felt.
I wept with the enormity
Of what was revealed;
For I had not known
I had
Been that man.

Kama Ananda

Kali I called you to me.
Across mountains and forests,
Seas and deserts
I called you,
And you came.
I am the spirit of Life
Singing my song.

It is the music of my
Sojourns in the body.
It yearns and cries out.
It weeps and laughs.
This song whispers love to you.
It lifts you as easily
As it wounds your heart.

For I am all things lodging
In the soul of the man who loves you,
Who is giving you everything,
His power, as well as his weakness.
For this is love,
To know each other,
To treasure what is revealed.

You are singing your song to me,
And I hear it my darling.
I hear it and it lifts and wounds too.
And that is love.
I know it, husband that I am.

Just a Stick

Its just a stick,
In the same way a temple is just stones.

Or, like a tree, unfolding its boughs and leaves in wind and sun, reaching its roots in relationship with soil and microbes, fungi and minerals; living its life in the ever present moment of change, in the inextricable connection with sun, earth and the fullness of things, is just a tree!

And this stick is etched, some would say, by larvae boring and eating its substance under its bark.

Some would say that. But this stick is etched by its relationships with things; by its relationship with what has been and what is. And what is etched is script. And that script says:

Look upon me and know.
For I am the story of life.
Upon my body are the marks of your existence.
For I am life as you are life,
And seeing me you see yourself.

As life I give form,
And I consume what I have formed.
But in the midst of my creation and destruction
I mark upon my substance
The passage of experience.
And experience forms valleys and mountains,
Brightness and shade,
Misery and laughter.
These valleys and peaks,
With the light and shade,
Are the script with which I write
The journal of my being,
The record of my life and death.

What does my script tell you?
Is it a story of hope,
Or a record of despair?
Does it tell of love gained,
Peaks scaled,
Of dreams made real?
Does it speak of despair
Or long loneliness?

Perhaps it unfolds the mysteries
That lie behind everything,
That connect and shine
In common things.
Or maybe it stays in your perception
As a series of meaningless scrawls
The work of random soulless events
Upon something that itself is mute.

For I am Life, and can be only
What you bring to me.
I am a stick,
Saying so much,
Or so little,
Depending upon your art!

I Am Yours

Darling – You have me.
Even now you breathe in the atoms
Of the air I too have breathed.
And is not your body,
Somewhere therefore partly mine –
A body we share?
So are not you and I
Part of the same dance?

I was raised in such a small world,
Taught to posses, to own, to control,
And to believe in my separation from you.
Yet now, walls fall away,
Old roofs crumble,
Revealing sky and stars –
Always there but hidden beyond layers
Of beliefs and thinking.
But what do I own
Now the walls have fallen and the roof gone?
This body, with its trillions
Of particles and atoms –
Do I own them,
And the stars and cosmic creation they arose from?
Do I own the food I eat,
The water I drink –
For money is a strange hallucination
People dream of ownership in –
And do I really own or control any of it?
For if I did, surely I would carry
What I owned beyond the grave.
And as this bomb of realisation exploded
And my old dwellings blew away,
I stand with such laughter
At what I believed myself to be;
Such joy at being dispossessed.
For I own no body or mind.
I possess nothing of the world
That I can ultimately control –
Except perhaps as children control toys
In imaginary worlds of play.
But I see the question in your eyes.
No, not even my mind.
I did not conjure out of my being
These wonderful words I use.
Syntax nor concepts grew from
My own efforts.
The whole glorious expanse of ideas
Are really ours – not mine.
Even an original idea
Only emerges from our collective awareness,
Our shared language,
Our given communications,
Creating webs of thought we weave together.

Yet in the midst of all this we have existence.
Owning nothing,
Controlling nothing except toys,
Having nothing except existence
And each other,
Dancing together
Amidst this swirling paradox.
So yes my darling partner in dance,
You have me,
As I have you;
As close and as personal
As my own breath,
And as unpossessed as the air.

Hunger

Life is always hungry.
Hungry to be,
Hungry to absorb and grow,
Hungry to know.

And I am Life,
With two legs
And eyes seeking food;
Hands reaching out
For what I need,
What I hunger for.

And in that reaching out,
My hands touched yours –
Or were yours the first?
And woman –
The ache of hunger
We both then felt,
Drawing us together.

For I had hungered
For you
Without knowing.
And I believe you
Hungered too.

Then came the feast,
The open mouthed wanting;
The deep yearning fulfilled.
The mouth, the guts,
The genitals
All desiring
And fed.

You are my feast still.

Freeway Jungle

It was so long ago
When you and I
Walked almost unclothed
Through the grand forests.
Everything had meaning
In the world we walked.
The birds and wolves
Were spirits,
Brothers and sisters
In the great garden of Life.
And Creator was everywhere,
Touching mystery and wisdom
Into the sky,
Into the leaves and herbs,
Into our every deed.
And I thought
That world forever gone
Until I stood in the
Clearing of years
And saw your face again.
You were standing
In the Freeway Jungle
And we reached out
To one another
With the new magic
Of electronics
And digital words,
All streaming
To each other with
The old magic of Mysterious love.
And the Jungle of meaning
And fragrant dreams
Opened to us again.
Right here in the cement
And the technology.
Creator enveloped us
In the mystery of things.
Wrapped and transported
Us through distances
In the mind and heart.
And we again
Knew the sacredness
Of a stick,
Or a sea washed stone.
We became kin once more
To our brothers and sisters
The hawk and the wolf,
And sang with them
The sacred heart song.
And they gave to us
Their forest lore.
And, as one living being knows Life,
And in knowing Loves and mates
With the Beloved.
So did we – and are blessed.

On A Dusty Road

You see, I didn’t know.
Maybe it was like being blind.
You have no idea there
Are things you are missing.
That’s how it was for me.
Things were hidden from me
Because, I suppose,
I was dead.
I don’t mean dead – not breathing;
Dead in my heart –
Dead in being aware of
The wonder and beauty in people.
I get it now because
Slowly I came alive.
It is so painful – coming alive.
All the parts of you that have
Been lifeless, like limbs
That have been to sleep.
Now, waking,
I see so plain,
Love flowing through
Eyes and faces
Moving them as wind
Might move leaves
On trees and branches.
And the limbs of my love
Hurt in a beautiful way,
Hurt with the way love
Stretches you and
Dances you
In movements that
Push you beyond yourself.
So it has been for me,
Coming alive and
Seeing people for the first time.
Seeing them moved like
Flags in the wind of love;
Seeing them flow fast
And turbulent with that love.
Now that love touched my eyes
And healed my blindness
Those things are visible to me.
I see the beauty of a person
Bubbling like a child with
The love they feel;
A child at a party
Hardly containing laughter.
I see those faces and bodies
Full of love that
Has been rejected
And the pain of having
So much to give with
No one to receive it.
Then I see the face of the dead.
I see death as it must have
Appeared on my own face.
A face without the movement
Of life flowing through it;
Perhaps twisted with
What cannot be allowed,
A face held empty of feelings
Except of despair,
Of pain at parents who
Never knew how to
Give themselves to their child.
So many stories I now see.
So many eyes wanting to
Be looked into with warmth.
So many hands seeking
To be held and held again.
But love touched me,
Held my hands
One day on a dusty road.
Love pulled me close
And asked nothing of me –
Only to let love in.
Now, maybe I too
Can walk dusty roads
And take a hand to
Pass on that magic.
Maybe I too
Can touch with love,
Heal the blind
And raise the dead to life.

Flying West

Fragments of you were everywhere.
Bits of your face,
Body shapes,
Even your breasts.
It got more pronounced
As the day unfolded,
A long day, flying West.
And it was only
As I was dazed
With unmet sleep
That I really saw you at last
In the many women
I had watched
During the hours.

I had almost seen it before,
But suddenly there you were,
The spirit that lived through you,
Lived and loved,
Held your kids,
Expressed that easy communing,
The ease with existing.
And I knew
Who you were at last,
Who we all are
If we are lucky.

For you are the living expression
Of that great woman
Who made America,
And raised her children.
You are that female pioneer
Who managed
To love and be a mother
And a wife
In the beginnings
Of a great land.
You even told me once
That you are an American girl.

And it’s true.
You mothered us,
Filled us with your spirit,
Gave us your body
As a wife.
And everywhere I looked
I saw you.

Dear God,
How I wished
I had married you
And been with you,
In those beginnings
Pioneering this land.
To have been with you
As the spirit of manhood
You gave birth to.
I wish I had been that man,
And you were my wife.
For that great man
Shines through your sons,
As you shine through
Your daughters —
America!

Firelight

Sometimes
When the clouds are heavy
Around these Welsh hills,
Especially at night when
The world goes quiet and
There is only the wind knocking on my door,
I sit with the lights low
Letting the firelight dance for me.
This house, that you and I built with our love,
Stands the buffeting and the rain,
Strong enough for storms and even winter snows.
Warm enough to keep life in me vital and
Looking for you in the movement of the flames.
That is how I sit this night.
Loving you my darling.

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Tony Crisp