Everything will be all right

The night breathes on the water's surface

and in the ripples the reflections of stars 

whisper to the little bird inside my belly,

telling him everything will be all right,

telling him the bulkhead of this boat, 

the hull of his mother's womb,

every membrane and limit that contains him

delivers him safe into the future.

I'm listening too, 

even though they're not talking to me.

I'm eavesdropping on eternity.

The secret of prophecy 

is not in predicting what will happen,

because everything has already happened.

It is in listening when you drift into the space 

between the kingdoms of men, 

on the waters between the worlds they can imagine, 

and so the ancient stars tell my unborn boy

of how he will work miracles and be celebrated,

and in chasuble and mitre 

will preach, Vulgate-tongued,

to the congregated centuries of a great city,

and what do I care for my obscurity? 

I am happy to be forgotten

now I know everything will be all right. 

(Inspired by the story of St Teneu)

The condemned

We shuffle 

towards the end of time,

orderly, unemotional, 

numb from atrocity fatigue,

our smug morality 

a kind of nerve damage,

the botox beatitudes

of cruelty and kindness,

our once righteous indignation

quenched like cold lava, 

congealed into monstrous shapes,

our stiff rage a mask we wear

to conceal our culpability.

The calendar is a count down

to the slow bomb of the solstice

whose noon hangs 

like the bare light bulb

in the interrogation room

of a long hot summer

where we confess our complicity

in everything we complain about.

The year is broken.

We've passed the point of no return.

Time is now a corridor

to a courtyard and a scaffold

where the puppetry of justice waits

to reward us for our hypocrisy. 

Trade

What kind of trade is this?

We attribute all our cruelty to God

while all he tries to do in return

is make us beautiful in His image?

It seems unfair,

but maybe this bargain

was the only way the Creator

could get the void to agree 

to our existence.

Selkie

Am I a human

wearing the pelt of a seal

or a seal in human skin?

The form I take and what I am

are not the same, 

but which is which?

"Per mare per terras" my forebears said, 

at least, the forebears of my human mother, 

in the speech of the monks, 

"air muir 's air tìr" in their own tongue,

perhaps: all words are borrowed

from someone, somewhere, 

to assert lordship and dominion

over the land and the sea,

but, pup or child, I do not wish to rule, 

and so will loiter silent near the shore, 

not knowing what I am,

ready to take what form I must.

The crossing

This water is deep;

this water beneath me

as I cross from Lothian to Fife;

this water within me

as I leave one family

to start another, heavy with new life; 

water dark as the wound

stitched together by the light,

the sun and the moon passing overhead

pulling time like a thread

from east to west, horizon to horizon, 

shore to shore, until at last

the men comfortable with violence

are behind me, and cruelty endured

is replaced by kindness unsought, 

unexpected, but in between, 

between the cruelty and the kindness

the water is deep, 

and all we have is love, 

love, despite it all, 

love as a necessity, not a choice, 

love as a refusal to hate, 

a refusal to die, 

a determination to survive,

not for ourselves, 

because the easiest thing to do

is sink and drown, no, love as a law

that casts down mere cruelty

and makes this crossing inevitable. 

(Inspired by the story of St Teneu)

St Enoch Square

Stop for a moment. Stop. 

Not because of the bones

we might pass over. 

That's not why to pause here. 

Those bones are probably gone. 

What the worm churn left

the hydraulic excavator has surely torn

from whatever modest tomb there was

for the saint once buried here. 

Within this thriving hub of commerce

we are bereft, fundamentally bereft.

The gift I give is nothing. 

The box I wrap is empty. 

I visit the emporium of absence

to buy something meaningless

that will be forgotten and discarded

in time for my next paycheck. 

No, we stop to remember, 

because memory is all we have, 

even if that memory is false, 

embellished with myth and legend

to fortify it for its passage

through ignorant, indifferent ages, 

pressed and folded and kneaded,

seasoned and oiled to lubricate it

for palates accustomed to spice,

unused to utterances replete 

with the mere simplicity of meaning

resting in the unleavened host.  

This stumbling truth is all we have,

this truth with half-truth crutches,

leaning hard on legend, palsied, 

propped up by myth and miracle,

her name changed too, elaborated 

by the unreliable echo of time,

her story packaged up and sold,

then left at the back of the closet

as much as any disposable trinket 

in the shop windows here today, 

forgotten, then thrown away

in the inevitable house clearance.

"Objects are slow events,"

it is said. Nothing endures. 

everything yields to change, 

destruction or transformation

being just a matter of perspective.

We live snapshot lives. 

Knowledge is brief 

and resides only in the increment 

of what we think we know:

the interval of time - 

sometimes geological, sometimes

no more than a split second - 

between certainty and doubt,

proof and contradiction;

the most recent course correction, 

not the wandering north of the compass

we use to take our bearings;

but everything has its origin,

even if it is lost at the beginning 

of a meandering route of wrong turns,

a series of steps impossible to retrace, 

even if its name has been redacted

by the accumulated errors of repetition,

even if she was a saint heavy with sin

and her journey from hate to love

can now only be an article of faith

rather than a matter of established fact,

it is still all we have, 

and we will celebrate it

in defiance of this circus, 

this industrialised blasphemy, 

this carnival of nothing they have built

over where her bones once lay.