THUNDER CRACKS IN THE HEART

1.

We are not often where we are,
we have become past and future,
we remember where we might become.


The slow flags of music and what our parents said
and the way everything in their lives was already history.
the God and what he might mean and the convictions of
teachers and priests and what we loved about houses and
garden paths and stories that nested in our silent places.


And then the cracks ;the great grandfather still weeping
for a lost son, the slightly crazed cousin who told us about
the meaning of flowers and grass, the things in father's desk
to do with the wedding night, the way Jesus floated between.


And earth.



2.

Every field with its messages;
in Cornwall it is about belief and stone silences
and what the seasons say about trust and stories;
the way we stand with soul ghosts and bird journeys
and holy wells that sink beneath mindscapes and what
has been written and whispered between winds and lichen.



3.

These letters in the head ;these memory messages and faces
from the past and the sudden exposures to fields where we have never
stood before, as if we wished for more, searching silences and secrets
and stones of recognition, mind dances and trusts and moss warnings;
and there is sometimes the broken horse, the place where it lay in a field
of winter silence, no birds and the sky so low everything bent over;
the shape of the broken horse and the man on his knees trying to scream,
his own body bent by the hurt, the helpless hollowness, the distortion,
as if there were no life left, no reason for anything, as if he
were burning as the snow slowly hid everything,
the blindness of his being
and the dead horse
disappearing
now.



4.

What do these stories tell us, why do we need them,
why do they sometimes hug the heart,
how can we walk about with them all our lives
moments and people and places that never existed,
dressing the living and the dead in radiances
as if we could be forgiven, faithful, friends?


© David Grubb 2015