Speak into the darkness
like a child praying.
Age does not lessen
your need for faith.

I don’t mean
blindly binding soul to dogma
or sacrificing intuition at devotion’s hands.

There is another faith
that lives beyond these,
waiting for you–
not on the mountain top of wonder
but beyond, in valleys
deep with yew, oak and hazel,
moss, cress, mushroom and stone,
fine leg, hoof, snout, fin and tail,
hiding behind the mask of many.

It is the faithfulness of love
that dares to look straight into the
Heart of God
and melt into that fierce sun, again and again.

To feast at the table of faith is
to open your mind
to the vulnerabilities of being
human,
to admit without shame
that you can never live up
to your own expectations.

Instead, faith is bringing home
the subtle fear
that makes you believe
every other story but your own.

When you tread with faith
up the spiral milky Way,
you are a star in the night
a naked light without agenda
or any other power but to
shine.

Only when the inner heat of longing
burns up the clothes
of what you thought you knew
and all other loves you claimed for yourself,

Only when there is nothing left
between you and the darkness
can you make love,
skin to skin and breath to breath,
with the Heart in all hearts.

Only then does faith become
another word for “know”.

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“Climb with me to the top”,
picking berries in autumnal sun,
warm and sticky, hot breathed wind
carries her promise of love.

We wend our way in curves,
dizzy with lust, that untamed bird,
leading us up the hill of pleasure,
shy but laughing, intending more.

I chase you, feet wild in pursuit,
rampant in my longing like
Grainne demanding of Diarmuid
unbreakable vows  … or else.

Tumbling, you fall, into the bosom
of the earth, a heather bed made
ready for two eager-mouthed youths,
our legs already a lover’s knot.

Not even the gods of this place,
could come between our bond,
as I share with you my fruit,
a marriage feast for two hearts.

Juice explodes in our mouths,
sweet hunger for more and more,
dripping with red-lipped desire
and stained by a heavy harvest.

We are two wild things, two
blackbirds starved to madness,
two waves rolling into the other,
as we heave our delight to heaven.

“Climb with me to the top”,
to the height of heady dreams,
where even Sliabh na mBan
becomes inflamed with our love.

*Sliabh na mBan is a place in Co. Tipperary, Ireland, where Grainne (one of the most beautiful women in Irish myth) fell in love with Diarmuid instead of her older and rather elderly betrothed Fionn (a bit like Trystan and Isyllt). It was traditional in both Ireland and Wales for young couples to go ‘berry picking’ in late summer, early autumn on the hillsides, but of course, it was also a euphemism for so much more! Both in Irish and in Welsh, there is a close tie between the words for ’sex’ and for ‘hill’ (they are almost identical) showing how ancient the practice of lovemaking on hillsides was. And they still do it, haha.

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Out here,
amidst the damson trees,
there is another time beyond time.

I gather fruit,
one basket, then another,
but feel the closing in of otherness.

tree roots descend down,
down into the hidden layers of life.
Like a mist

Out here,
amidst the damson trees,
memories speak and secrets flow.

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Berry mother
Fruit mother

arms laden with generosity,
your blackthorn eyes of damson purple,
blinking brightly, jewel of the harvest,

a hundred good things gathered together,
made sweet by the fullness of sun and time.

Berry mother
Fruit mother

arms outreached in hospitality,
your rowan red lips and rosehip cheeks,
laughing merrily, kiss of delight,

a hundred happy times kept in store,
ready for winter’s darker disarray.

Berry mother
Fruit mother

Giver of jams and jellies, marmalades, pies and tarts, syrups, wines, cordials, spirits, sauces, toppings and dips

Like a child,
each autumn,
I run to you

and greet the bounties of life.

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Sat in the dark,
cross legged with my pain,
this is the place of practice.

I don’t expect it to make me feel better,
or release me from the anguish inside.

I just want to sit,
for a moment, to
be

even in the intensity of mind
rising up from
the solitude of a broken heart,

forgetting what I know and don’t know,
what I thought happened, what did and didn’t

just
breathing

just
feeling

just …. living.

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No bus in sight or house around,
just a weary place with cloud coming down,
a gown of white and hail-stone tears,
dropping hard like forgotten years.

And at the corner of a hawthorn’s back
stood an old woman with a smoker’s hack,
hack hack hacking at the cold night air
and in her eyes a menacing glare.

Chain smoking on cheap cigars
with clothing from eccentric bazaars,
her eyes all green and eerie slats,
outlined bold like a luckless cat.

Her hands are hennaed in blue and brown,
gypsy scarves wrapping themselves around,
tentacles of some entrancing witch,
or the unleashed mane of a she-wolf bitch.

She shakes a fist at the ice-bitten sky
and curses God in a soughing sigh,
all the wind wailing within her words
and the prophetic cawing of forlorn birds.

I shiver and quake and turn away
from the strange old woman with the deathly stare.
I would rather walk home in the stormy fray
than face the Cailleach who’s forsaken care.

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Everyone is a little heartsick or homesick,
looking to belong to
their own humanity

like cattle to the land
or birds to the sky.

It’s as if by sweat and love and
long years’ journeying,
we aspire to find the secret of our species,

what it means to be alive,
to be utterly, totally
human.

I left home when still a child,
seeking out my own place
in the pattern of things,
holding the space between
broken and whole
But now,

time to walk forth into the gap
between who we think we are
and who we’re meant to be,

centre of gravity shifting like
sands from underfoot

never coming home, but becoming home,
one step closer to the humanity
we’ve been all along.

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There is such a yearning in me tonight,
a burning to look into the
face of another
and reaffirm my own humanity.

It’s as if the whole world
is being born
in the darkest confines of
my heart

until I am left
with no other choice
but to

love even more.

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I should have known
all along that
it wasn’t about him or
you.

It was about winter versus summer,
the way a storm fills the air with terror and
pure electric joy,
and how my heart could not contain

two dreams, two loves, two futures
without a future of my own.

Shadow danced with sunshine
until I hardly knew which was which–
love has a funny way of blurring all the edges

and making psychosis the unconscious hero.
You were me and I was him and we three were one, then two, then none.

Crazed with longing, I
abandoned the border of half-felt dreams
and journeyed to a far country,
red and fair, .
until I found my face in the water and the wind.

Then I knew
it wasn’t about him or
you.

It was the cry of one lonely owl hunting for her nest
before being caught by the rising dawn.

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I love you like the edge you are,
hard and breathless, senses intimate with disaster,
and hung half way between heaven and earth.

If I just let go of your precipice,
then I would fall heart-first into the ocean of love,
overwhelmed in waves, un-making my soul.

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