Sky Speaks to Me

Sky speaks to me
wind whispers her breezes

Clouds move inside my mind
and all this seems good:

I have seen the invisible
qualities of God

And I
have understood.

Photograph: Morchard Bishop, Devon

Trembling of the Steady Air

I have always loved to watch kestrels and their amazing ability to hover in the air. On a recent visit to Bettisford Moss, a visiting kestrel was a highlight, and this poem I wrote was inspired by another poem about a kestrel by Gerard Manley Hopkins, called ‘The Windhover’, which you can read here.

I caught that day

In his hovering over

Of the stillness lake

And my heart stirred

Simply for that bird

In flight

As if suddenly

I had joined

His light

Motion and unceasing

Trembling of the steady air

All captured

In moments

Of enraptured stare.

Bettisford Moss itself has a bleak beauty, with the occasional shrub and pond adding some variety to the landscape:

I was only able to capture a rather distant of that day’s kestrel:

Drifting

There are different kinds of thinking.

Mary Oliver captures one particular kind in her poem ‘Drifting’:

“It’s wonderful to walk along like that,
thought not the usual intention to reach an answer
but merely drifting.
Like clouds that only seem weightless
but of course are not…”

We could not live without the clouds that drift through our skies.

And we need different types of thinking other than logical reason – ‘drifting’ thoughts can be just as valuable and “really important”as Mary Oliver goes on to say.

I wrote this poem after being inspired by the sky and the clouds – they also seemed to speak to me.

Sky speaks to me
wind whispers her breezes
.
Clouds move inside my mind
and all this seems good:
.
I have seen the invisible
qualities of God
.
And I
have understood.

A Robin at Wroxeter

Wroxeter is a beautiful place.

There are the remains of the Roman city, of course, so picturesquely situated within sight of the Wrekin, the Lawley and Caer Caradoc.

There is the beautiful village, with the church partly built using stone from the Roman city, and also from Haughmond Abbey.

When I visited recently a robin perched in the February sunshine for me as I wandered in the peace of the early morning…

A robin sang

from the branches of a winter tree

His belly was as bright as the day

his breast red as the sunset

Gracing my winter spirit

with tones of happiness.

Tones of Happiness – for National Robin Day