Posts Tagged ‘Speaking Places’

Thursday in Australia

I came down the stairs, wood bare and talking their talk with my sandals as I took each step. And I went into the kitchen, cool now as the sun has gone from its windows.

The clock ticked on, and again I caught the Silence between each tock. Cool eternal silence, only given spaces and time by the ticking. Moments of a day sounded out within the great silence of foreverness.

The cheap plastic Argos timepiece on my wall, my own personal Stonehenge, telling me of sunrise and sunsets, seconds, minutes, hours and days. Plastic though it might be, its quartz heart is a tiny reminder of the universal magic; the secrets hidden in the very stones around us, children of the universe all.

Not just a churned out factory clock then, but a piece of contemporary art, a person’s careful thoughts and design, someone’s labour and a window to another person’s life in a far off land. Made in China it says somewhere on its body.

But where did that body come from? Born in China in its present form, perhaps, but formed from many parts, like the limbs and head of Frankenstein’s creation. Bits taken from here and there to form a whole. And is that whole greater than its parts, or are its parts greater than the whole? For it has ancestry that clock, just as you and I do. Ancient ancestry, arising from its grandmother the earth itself. And She, well, who was she the child of, if not past stars and cosmic passions.

It’s company for me too, because it talks to me. If that sounds strange, don’t think its because I live alone and so must fantasise. No, the dear clock tells me the time. It tells me when to go to bed. It tells me to hurry to keep an appointment, or to relax and listen to the news. It is so full of things to say.

And sometimes it is philosophical, reminding me of Einstein. Time is relative it says; for although it is Wednesday here, it is Thursday in Australia.

The Wordless Hymn

I have been teaching teachers,
And I have felt sick of heart
At what is involved
In the relationships
Existing in such meetings
In myself and others.

The only relief
In this darkness
Is in the humility
I might find through
My feelings of inadequacy
And failure.

And I walked out into the woods,
And stood among the trees,
Looking upon the beauty of the scene.
A carpet of yellow flowers
Had arisen among the tree roots.
I do not know the name of them,
Only their yellow cups and greenness.

And in the midst of the scene
A large enamelled oven,
Shining in the sun,
Exciting in its endless forms
As my child mind
Saw it as a cave,
A tank, and an aeroplane.

An old rusty bike,
Bedsprings,
A broken pushchair,
Grew there too.
Plastic bags were being cherished
By the earth and leaves;
Whether drawn in
By the earth’s passion for them,
Or whether they themselves
Sought this deeper communion
With the soil, I know not.
But the ants and worms
Found wonders in them.
There were scraps of food,
Intricate corners, and spiders.

And I walked on past the scene
To a village church,
Quiet and full of past worship.
I entered with reverence
To spend a silent moment there.
But the voice of rebellion in me
Cried out over my reverence.
“Why sit here in this
Empty joyless place?” it said.
“Can?t you hear where the
Hymns are being sung?
Listen!”

And the hundred songs of birds
Came to me in that
Empty silent brick house.
A tractor added its chorus to the song.
Cars hummed a background.
Somewhere a man hammered,
A cock crowed and a dog barked.
There was the rhythm of footsteps
As people walked by,
And the whole grand medley
Was the hymn of life.

Leaving the building
I added the quiet sound
Of my own walking and breathing
To the grand song.
Now I too would sing on.

Voice of the Jungle

India.
Squalid.
Dirty.
Uncaring India.
The coach shakes us,
Rattles us, unmercifully,
Through tea plantations,
Over hills,
Across scarred roads.
It moves through jungles,
Sometimes passing rough shacks
Flush against the road.
No protective sidewalk,
Just jungle, shacks, road,
And children leaving school.

Suddenly we stop,
As cars and lorries crawl
Through the shanty village.
And around us,
Screams, calls, crying,
Whistles from the jungle.
The jungle’s weeping.
Monkeys, birds
And unseen creatures
Voice their cries.

And there on the road,
Seen as our coach edges past,
A child’s skull and brains
Sprawled upon the road.
A life carelessly spilt,
And the jungle creatures cry out in pain.

The Way

Etched into a rocky hill on the Greek island Skyros is the path a river cuts when rains run in flood from the high ground. In summer it is a dry cleft rising sharply in a series of steps, formed by boulders, tumbled or revealed by the torrent.

As you walk up the dry bed from the sea, an almost bare cliff soon encloses you on the left with its height. And on the right, a slower rise harbors shrubs and dry grasses baked by the sun.

Climbing the gorge you enter into a deep stillness. Perhaps the cliffs and rising land absorb the sound, for it is like walking into something you can feel, something you are called to stop and listen to. With less bombardment from the world of sound, the other senses open to receive the subtleties of shape and colour in the rocks and contours of the giant steps. There is nothing here that humanity has directly shaped. Only the sun and wind, the water and power of growing things have sculpted the rounded rocks, have cut the groove in the earth. Only from this web of interactions have things emerged.

Into that web, through it, within it, I walked and sat in the quiet of the molded rocks. There was no sound of the sea, of people, or even of the wind. Silence enough for me to gradually become aware of a small live thing speaking to me. It was a woody-stemmed herb, which through the shape of its gnarled and twisted stem, spoke of its existence. Clinging lustily to the very edge of a midstream rock, where scant soil had lodged, it’s stunted wonderful shape sang to me. It’s silent voice informed me how its tiny form held fast amidst the torrents, and in the beating heat drank slowly from the rock, conserving, as with love, each hard-won drop.

And in its song, it told me too, of how it bore within itself, something of all that touched its life. Still as the silent air, yet it danced. For in its twists and curling stems, there were the movement of the rushing waters, the dryness of long summer heat, the hard unyielding of the rock, and still quiet of the gorge itself.

Then in that silent song, in the unmoving dance, it opened my full opened eyes to see the Way. This small plant had joy in its adversity, radiance in its dryness. It clung to life without a fight, it’s very body shaped by the forces that might have destroyed it. Can I too tread that narrow edge between the opposites? And can you walk with me? For this is a trackless way.

The Tree

I can’t remember it not being there —
On the cliff edge overlooking the sea.
I don’t even know how old it is.
There’s no way of knowing.
Perhaps an ancient oak tree
Yet barely to my waist.
Shaped and stunted
By harsh onshore winds,
By the salt and the rock.
It is clinging and growing
To the very shape of the wind,
Perfectly reflecting its environment,
And stunted, as you or I might be,
By circumstances of our birth,
Or events –
Yet still a magnificent oak tree.
Just as you or I, at our core,
Are magnificent human beings.

The Table

We are sitting at TABLE.
Table is very important you understand –
For a family that is.
Table has all the right knives and forks.
It has all the correct glasses.
Table has manners.

Into this ‘table’ comes a little kid.
He is about three.
Mother is on the left.
Next to her is her eldest son.
He is a shattered person.
Daughter is successful.
She is like Mum –
Who is ‘successful’.
The daughter is an attractive girl.
Mum has ‘made it’ –
So everything Mum says goes.

Husband, across the way,
Is shut out.
HE is not even at the table.
But is standing by the
Outside door,
Not allowed at table,
And barely existing.
His task was to fuck her
For her to have a baby.
This is the woman.

So into this came the four year old.
With all this business going on.
The mother doesn’t say anything.
She doesn’t have to.
She’s got the daughter trained.
So well trained she’s running
Hither and thither.
She leaps up –
It could be my own daughter
And her mother –
And says ‘Caleb’ – the child –
‘You either sit here and eat this or -‘

I don’t know what the alternatives were.
don’t think there were any.
As a feeling creature
This small boy was given no options.
The elder son, Eddie,
Is sitting there squirming.
He has already been through this mill,
This degradation.

He groans – ugh ughhh.
But he doesn’t step out of it.
He hasn’t earned his own living,
So he can’t step out of it and say,
‘Fuck you, you cunts’.
He can’t, he is still at home,
And mum is still keeping him.
So he’s got to be careful.

He says under his breath,
‘I’ve got to be careful
Of this dangerous bitch.
Ugh Ugghh –
Give Caleb space.’
And I sit there,
Trying to be polite.
I say to myself,
‘Be polite Josh.
This woman has already,
In front of my wife,
Asked me to give her a baby.
It felt a bit like rape;
Like she was trying to devour me –
Like I was a titbit.

But I talked with the boy,
Pointing out the scene –
Father at the door –
Baby being trained.
The ball was set rolling.
‘Thank you! Thank you!’ he said.
‘You dominant bitch,
You’ve got me by the balls.’

The Cloud

You can’t see space,
But you can feel it.
In the sky,
When the clouds hang
Distant from each other
In the clear air,

The territory of the mind’s
Vision fills the empty miles
Of sweep between the floating
Worlds of white and whiter.
Fills space,
Fills distance,
Fills all the limitless heavens.

Yesterday,
Hanging over the sea,
Ten miles from me,
A mile above the water,
How tall itself I do not know,
A cloud shone
In the sun,
Covering the sea
With light.

And back,
And back,
And beyond
Again and again
Other clouds hung
In the limitless emptiness.
And I laughed
At the radiant cloud.

Quietly Entering Lives

I’ve been painting windows,
Up a ladder,
In the street where Mr. H. lives.
Its his house
That Ive been working on,
In a Bristol side street.
And each day
As Ive worked
Ive watched the people
Of the road go by.
And slowly
They have come to know me,
The old guy
Up the ladder
Painting windows.

Two boys live next door
And they say Hi
As they go by.
Their mum asked me
Yesterday,
If I had heard her
Fall down her stairs
From top to bottom.
She showed me the bruises
On her arms.
I felt the pain.

A man from down the road
Says hallo each day,
And the Indian families
Across the road
Bring out their children
Every morning for school.
Their voices are
Such music to me
As I look down
From up on high.
So many questions
They ask so eagerly.
And when I smiled
The mother smiled too,
To share such joy.

A black guy drove
Slowly by just now
In his large BMW.
And further down the road
An African woman
Always catches my attention.
She has a body like
Ripe fruit,
Bursting with juice,
Full of life.
And several times each day
I see the woman with
Red, yellow and green hair.
Walk by or cruises
On her bicycle.
She dresses like her hair.

And as they each pass me,
Up the ladder,
I feel the sharing
Of the road;
Of our proximity;
Of smiles
And childrens laughter.
I sense the entering
Of subtle things
Given to each other
In Mr H’s Road.

Planes

From where I stand
The clouds spread in every direction.
Multitudes, thundery but not black.
A plane slides under them,
Heavy and slow as it
Approaches landing –
Yet drifting beneath the clouds
Ponderous but floating easy
In its controlled fall.

The afternoon clouds
And the warm sunshine
Are filled with planes
Coming home
Like bees I have
Watched circling their hive
Gliding in weighty
With nectar or pollen.

Planes, cumbersome with lives.
Lives gliding in from elsewhere.
Returning home?
Leaving home?
Parting, endeavouring,
Loving, enduring
Lives come sinking to earth
From the forever sunlit
Starlit place above.

I know,
As the sky sounds to
The hum of another flying giant,
That I want to go home.

Morning

Twelve cockatoos fly swearing and shouting at each other
In the warm air – dropping and weaving,
Lifting and rolling through the sky,
Making the waves washing over me –
Waves of sound, of movement, of being alive.

Then, along the path in the early morning
A snake necked cormorant standing with
Wide wings spread to the sun
Head high, eyes open,
Ageless life, manifest,
In unbounded variety.

Two moorhens, each with a chick,
Small, fragile living fluff moving
Rippling their tiny presence
On the water, in the air,
Through everything.

Further, a pelican, still, waiting,
Watching for movement
Within the lake with patient alertness,
As you or I might watch for opportunity,
Might reach and touch and see each other.

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Tony Crisp

Posts Tagged ‘Speaking Places’