We used to live in a little cubical building, nave’s length from a bell tower. An aisle’s length, not quite, but every friday night it was a measured space, although not by paces; in concussions. From 6pm to 8pm the Ringers would gather – I imagine from curious little…
The Highwayman lies severed, cut down in the way, shorn from his mount. And the hand that did it rises trembling. And the eyes rise trembling to behold it To meet their accuser’s eyes wide. And trembling. It was a rough deed, done with razorrrs Watched with glass, that…
THE PREACHER’S PRAYER LORD, when my heart is slow to feel, And when my lips are slow to speak, And yet my heart still Thee doth seek, And yet my lips would Thee reveal; Then send Thy gracious Spirit, Lord, That He may my dull heart inspire, And touch…
1. Deliberation. With less vigour comes deliberation. Those things done, are hard done. Sitting comes to do. Rooted. Even the dust swirls more slowly in the quiet. Golden in tangibility, in this little room of light with walls and dimensions that has taken space within my room. At my fingers’…
For Easter Sunday New, like the second coming To faith of an old man In the love of the plain Faced. Like their autumnal child. Unplanned. New, like a child's crowning, labour's pain. Push, He is coming, Push! As good as like that new.…
I walked around in a daze yesterday. Felt like I’d spent the night going rounds in an underground Fight Club. My tender bits ached. There was this sort of slosh of spent adrenaline, an acid bath, chewing on the strings of my muscles. I couldn’t write words, I…
Part 2 “The wicked flee when none pursueth.” (Proverbs 28:1). In the original novel by Charles Portis, the verse is quoted by Mattie Ross, the girl-heroine, in her dry narrator’s voice explaining the flight of Tom Cheney, the man who killed her father. Mattie is the revelation of…
Part 1 In Sergio Leone’s films (I’m thinking particularly of his trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), for the first time the dirt and sweat and moral complication of life on the frontier seemed to leave its…