ANAMNESIS
A SEQUENCE OF POEMS FOR ST
JAMES’ CHURCH
for my mother Yvonne
(1915-1976), Anne Jorgensen, and Martin Palmer
Remembrance makes people
desire the journey—it makes them into
travellers
—Jalaluddin Rumi
ST
JAMES’ POEMS: 1.
Traveller: stop a moment.
It is time to stop time, to step inside.
Come into this house of quiet
and let it take your mind. Can you ?
The hardest thing. To stop thinking.
So you can start really seeing
and enter the silent mind
that waits in the stillness, and your breathing.
Can you sit still ? Can you let
everything be around you?
Then you will find new eyes
and the rose in your heart will open.
Then you will know what is true
infinitely made for you, in each moment;
this dew drop, this day’s pearl
this grit irritating deep in your being
where everything is reflected to you.
Traveller, who are you? Under your name
your occupation and your clothes
you are formless consciousness living in time
with a strange disposition to love.
Dear naked soul, come home.
ST
JAMES’ POEMS: 2.
There is a beauty we live for
that never leaves us
however we may abandon it
in careless indifference
faithless, ignorant
and in the shield that encases our hearts
cynical, street-and-worldly wordy wise
But it breaks in: we long for it
in its eros of images—and it streams out
in that wailing saxaphone, in a violin
rising exquisitely pained...
and it is all there is
in your face, freed to itself
with its glow like gold
to bring us back to what we know
inside our skin
where the beauty within
echoes to its own
being the only true healing
here, and as far as the stars reach
into the other worlds.
ST
JAMES’ POEMS: 3.
What is the gift of your life ?
Beyond naming, an utterance
in your throat’s depth, your soul’s
intention to live—
Can you recall it ?
You sit in meditation, surrounded by stars.
What are you living for ?
There is an answer so personal
so passionate, beyond all conceiving
in your innermost coding—
that your secret may die with you,
but not before you’ve had the chance
to witness its luminous traces.
And she, he is your answer
that other one nearest of all within
who shines in you like an icon, a sun.
What else is there ? The spiral climb
hearing your name called through the mist,
ever-stretched towards your blue potential
true self’s surrender, that is the only way home.
ST
JAMES’ POEMS: 4.
Do you remember what we did
in those desperate times
when we met?
I would scratch a small circle in the dust
and you would add another, overlapping
and in that simple ritual moment
heaven and earth were reconciled again.
It’s a secret we seem to have forgotten:
one thing alone can never be the truth,
it takes two—it takes opposition—
but only when two are brought together
and blended, can there be resolution
at the unforeseen higher, holy place.
Sacred sex, and union between nations
tortured by being held apart
in the agony of fundamental righteousness.
While, as only God knows,
when I surrender to you, as you do to me
even a little, then true light returns—
born out if its shadow, glimmering, gold.
ST
JAMES POEMS: 5.
Oneness can be ours.
Walking into a room full of strangers
what is it that divides us, when we can see
our secret purpose together is love
conspiring in and among us ?
When we come back to our natural ground.
Walking into a Maytime wood together
digging a firepit in virgin bracken
‘The problem is not the earth’, you say
‘It is us’. And the birdsong agrees.
Playing music together
listening intently to each other’s melody,
loosening our boxed edges...
And if we can learn to sing together
the way the Spirit of Fire made us
speak together all at once, and yet
each understanding each other’s tongue—imagine
a circle where each of us sounds our note
one by one, high or low, all round its perimeter
then rising together in a single, harmonic shout of YES !
ST
JAMES’ POEMS: 6.
Community, or its reverse
where the music is so loud
you can’t hear yourself breathe
and we’re all out of our heads
living in one fantasy or another—
(it doesn’t matter what we’re wearing).
There must be space for all of us
or we become obliterated
joined by no more than a thumping autoheartbeat
as it darkens outside, where the streets
freeze in danger, and gangs
re-enact their abusive history...
Tribes of No one. No focus, no sun
no transcendence until we begin
to live in fellowship where we are
where we have names and faces.
‘Love thy neighbour’, where it always begins
your commandment, our necessity now
if we want to be human and thrive
beyond the evil we know that clings like fate:
an endless crucifixion of self-hate.
ST.
JAMES’ POEMS: 7.
It’s like a wave—a hundred faces
lying, stooping, standing or sitting
stretched from end to end of the canvas
all of us in the middle of an ordinary day
brooding, gazing, dreaming, grieving
that means we are together and alone
in the community we live in
that is village—which also means
we are beyond each other’s choosing...
Can we believe that everyone we find
is meant to be a thread in our lives
part as we all are of each other ?
That there are no real strangers
only strangely familiar faces
repeated across time, witnessing
that we are closer to each other than we know ?
But only if we take care, great care
of each other as we may learn to of ourselves
like a second skin, but of one flesh beneath—
that is the truth we hardly dare recognize
mixing morality and offal; love, and raw exploding meat.
ST
JAMES’ POEMS: 8.
So what do we listen to
the greater love or the the greater fear ?
How can we find
each other as we are ?
The enemy within
is also of our choosing.
She may even strike you with a smile,
or you imagine her eyes are cold.
Only the centre that cannot be breached
is the centre that can hold.
And that means holding it, too
so that the white circle of our sanctuary
is clear—where we can confuse
love with the realm of its living,
losing the ground of our union.
But still, when we return to it
we may find each other again
in an ever-deepening warmth beyond all reason
more than ready to forgive us.
Lord, help us to
return to each other
into the only
community there is—
transcending our
separate skins.
What does it really mean
to be free in your body ?
To stand authentically,
to move, only moved from within
to let the music be you.
It’s like true love—discovered,
rising in bubbles of cells
like blood, electric
with their own purpose
from their all seeing sense...
in the darkness of transparent flesh.
For every gesture we make
to be from this within
is at last to stand on hallowed ground
in the fine gravity of all we can utter
in a language that transcends our origin
becoming the Word that was the beginning
when all we are was breathed into being;
only now, we may live to see it.