Autumnal Buscot

Tags

autumnal, Buscot Park, Cotswolds, Dahlia, Sedum

This gallery contains 4 photos.

Dawn in the Garden this Week

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Cotswolds, dawn, garden, horse chestnut

This gallery contains 5 photos.

Orchids

Tags

acrylics, orchids, pastels

From the Garden Today

Tags

acer, garden bounty, grapes, mushrooms

This gallery contains 5 photos.

Meysey Hampton- a Sermon in Glass

Tags

Cotswolds, crucifixion, Dismas, Gestas, gold frankincense myrrh, Meysey Hampton, Paradise, paradox, Penitent Thief, Romans 5, Sheol, St Peter, wormwood

 Meysey Hampton church (Cotswolds) has stained

glass fragments pertaining to the crucifixion.  I believe they

were discovered in a barn, sold to the Paul Getty museum,

but have been returned home.

I’m Dismas.

 

Who the hell is that? you ask.

And where’s the other rogue – the one who mocked?

 

If I say I’m The Penitent Good Thief,

does that give you a clue?  Through gritted teeth,

I am trying to process a promise

that I’ll be translated to Paradise.

I’d get there sooner if they’d break my legs.

I can hardly breathe for my fractured ribs.

 

At the cusp of salvation/ damnation,

I turned my face, to see He’d gone ahead.

 

Some think my pardon was an act of grace,

bestowed because I showed a flash of faith,

but others say it was a just reward,

because I stopped those bandits – and Gestas

(no longer with us) from nicking gold,

frankincense, myrrh from that Man’s family,

aeons ago, when they were fugitives.

 

I asked then that He should remember me,

should our paths cross again – one day they did.

 

Well, some say Christ Himself was a Good Thief,

since He stole us back from Satan’s kingdom.

Do two wrongs make a right?  I do not know,

but I am warming to the paradox.

 

Salvabitur vix justus in die

judicii/ ergo salvabitur.*

 

I’m a glimpse of your hope of glory.

Hey, you malefactors – just look and live!

Everything else is a heap of smithereens.

 

I joined Him in Sheol and freed captives,

but, for the life of me, I do not know

what happened to Gestas; nor where he is.

 

I was found, restored and here I hang now –

unbaptised, but, oddly, beatified,

waiting for my promised resurrection.

Uncertain of what was meant by ‘today,’

but first in the queue to meet St Peter.

Meanwhile, give me a sip of that wormwood

and, since He didn’t want His, I’ll have it.

 

 

• Romans 5 v 7-9

For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die, but God commendeth His love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Bagpiper in Oxford

Tags

bagpiper, bagpipes, busking, Oxford

Bike for quick getaway!

Abide in the Vine

Tags

black grapes, Jesus' sayings, pruning, The Vine

My first grapes!

Kept thinking about The Vine and the need to ‘abide’ if one is a branch.

I am a minor twig, but I want to be fruitful so I am not pruned and

thrown on the fire.

Within without 2010: Turrell Skyspace

Tags

2010, alembic, basalt, Canberra, cochlea, gnomic, James Turrell, labyrinth, maharajah tomb, materiality, National Gallery Australia, oculus, operculum, portal, Skyspace, stupa, Victorian basalt, Within without

Based on the James Turrell artwork at The National Gallery

of Australia in Canberra…

 

Within Without

 

We have chanced to wonder at the Skyspace

and find ourselves drawn down the sloping path

to the Victorian basalt stupa.

We enter through a portal, so smoothly,

as if flies had followed the labyrinth

of a cochlea, or had gained entrance

to the gentle spiral of a snail shell,

only to hear a quiet ululation.

The universe is made immanent and

we sit on a concrete bench, out of time,

searching for a cloud like a camel, or

a shape like a whale, but all is cloudless.

We are alone and yet we are connected,

within; without – experience distilled –

interior and exterior are

like the two vessels of an alembic.

Are we in a maharajah’s tomb, or

Pharoanic chamber? We are infused

by a laser beam of cosmic insight.

The world tilts on its axis and we see

segments of reality as they change,

until the sun adjusts its slanting beams,

casting a gnomic shadow on us,

branding us with a present awareness.

No clutter of materiality:

there’s only an uncanny sense of peace.

At some point the operculum descends.

Either our eyes, or the oculus blinked.

 

 

Local Hero

Tags

9th Dunbartonshire, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Blighty wound, Clyde, Clydebank, gas attack, Kilpatrick, King's Shilling, Picardy, shrapnel, Titan Crane, Wilfred Pip Squeak, Ypres

Robert- gassed at Ypres.  Lived to 90s

Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

My hero.

 

Photo- Stephen Sweeney.  Titan crane

 

The trench gaped to receive him at last,

over seventy years since he’d escaped its maw

at Ypres.  Other bombshells had been cast:

his daughter’s death at four; her hair as straw-

hued as bales bedded in Picardy barns.

She’d waited for him in the nether tier,

between the pewter Clyde; Kilpatrick tarns –

close to where he’d toiled as an engineer,

in ruts of rusty shipyards, hail or thaw.

 

I stroked Wilfred, Pip, Squeak in childish awe;

loved the sepia photo of Five Bobs;

marvelled that only one of them came back

to supplement the King’s shilling with jobs,

where the main goal was to avoid ‘the sack.’

It was little better than digging graves.

I used to ask him how he’d survived the gas.

He said he’d run away from its green waves.

I asked him to recount how lads would burn, en masse,

lice from their tunic seams with candle flame,

until they heard shells crack.  Then and I unrolled

his trouser leg, amazed he was not lame,

with that lump of shrapnel, which was pure gold,

as a Blighty wound, taking him away

from the Front line, to Palestine.

 

The cranes, his guard of honour, now gone too.

 

 

.

 

 

Buscot Park – end of season

Tags

Buscot Park, Cotswolds, Oxfordshire

This gallery contains 5 photos.