Dolls’ House, Window Display

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dolls' house, Oxford, window dispaly

This gallery contains 8 photos.

Dolls’ House Window Display, Oxford. Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Red House

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courtyard garden, hornbeam topiary, red house

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Time Marches On

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Graves, Japanese poetry, memento mori

Photo of kanji by Jmettlen on Wikimedia Commons

 

Even our friends’ graves

will one day be ploughed over.

Grief diminishes

through time and we smile once more.

Calligraphy on

headstones will be eroded.

The deceased’s peers die;

his name is then forgotten.

The pines which are deemed to live

for a thousand years

are, in actual fact, chopped down –

disrespectfully,

or just pragmatically,

according to how life’s viewed.

Luna Park, Sydney

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Australia, Big Wheel, ferry trip, fun fair, Luna Park, Sydney, Sydney Harbour

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

No smoke that day.

Sandhurst Autumn Foliage

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Autumn foliage, Copper Beech, Sandhurst, Surrey

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Sandhurst – Today’s Parade

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British army, Passing Out Parade, Sandhurst Military Academy

with HRH Prince Edward

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Oxford Market Lanterns

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Alice in Wonderland, caterpillar, Cheshire Cat, dormouse, dragon, Oxford, Oxford Indoor market, paper lanterns, White Rabbit

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart.  All Rights Reserved.

View from my Window

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Autumn, Autumnal foliage, sycamore

…this morning.

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

 

South Leigh – St James the Great

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Augustine, Jacobean pulpit, John Wesley, mene mene tekel upharsin, ordinand, Oxfordshire, South Leigh, whitewashed wall paintings

Poem as promised yesterday-  see previous post for all photos relating to this poem.

 

Standing in the Jacobean pulpit,

an ordinand preached about promised rest

to some illiterate farm labourers –

those who were the physically weary.

Insubstantial words were like thin phantoms

who lurked beneath the lime-washed plaster, whose

discovery would take a century.

For now, his epistle of straw did not

result in any great harvest of souls.

 

Seventeen years on, he came back, after

his heart had been ‘strangely warmed‘ – awakened.

This time he had a pressing conviction.

He knocked at the door; was not admitted.

As far as South Leigh clergy were concerned,

he was too drunk on non-Anglican wine

and this was his eponymous Church End.

 

If only he had had the eyes of faith,

to detect what lay beneath the surface!

The first time, he was weighed in the balance:

oh, mene mene tekel upharsin.

He could sense the whitewash in his own soul.

 

When he’d returned seventeen years later,

burning, burning, like Augustine before,

perhaps the very stones reacted and

truths emerged, as though Christ passed through a wall,

but restoration was gradualist:

much like his view of sanctification.

‘His first sermon’ – yes, then he saw darkly

and, in his lifetime, never saw the light:

that glorious panoply behind him,

which, though covered, had been always present.

Its secret power had blessed his ministry.

 

I test the meshed door and it gives with ease,

then leave it open, as instructed, for

swallows who nest in the porch of The Lord.

And there is the pulpit and all around

is such a blaze of glorious ochres.

Those hidden things have been made manifest.

 

My spirit is strangely warmed by this feast:

Come ye blessed… – a stern invitation.

Who would not turn their head from the Hellmouth?

 

And, just as Wesley stressed the grace of God,

the Virgin redresses the sinner’s doom,

by gently tipping scales in his favour,

with the surreptitious drop of a bead.

 

(The preacher was a youthful John Wesley)

 

 

St James the Great, South Leigh

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Doom, John Wesley, Mary, Oxfordshire, rosary, South Leigh, St James the Great church, wall paintings

Oxfordshire.  Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart.

These were whitewashed and when John Wesley preached here in

his early days, he would not have been able to see them.

Poem to follow- next post.