Daily Poems

The phrases from Morning Prayer today prompted a couple of short poems that I thought I might share with you all.

 

Bread

The bread that you give is your own body

Day by day, skin and muscle, time and salt

Abandoned often

To the arms and wiles of strangers

With neither hesitation nor irony

Under the liminal gaze of the street

And its hustlers and beggars and shoppers

Flesh for flesh

Edible after a long and merciless day’s traffic

 

 

Walking nevertheless

God will provide the lamb.

It’s my wager with every fibre of my body

stretched to breaking point on the path

up the hill. Every stone

is larger than the blue mountain ahead

Every dead body to date is my son’s

And his is stretched out as a question

towards the distant horizon

joining knife to altar to wood to fire

in a pattern than doesn’t quite settle

and yet is visible in the twilight

of our journey.

This I hold in my heart for my son:

Things are not as they appear.

We will both go back down this mountain

Before the day is done