Here three of the poems from Poems for the Planet:
A Kestrel for Gerard Manley Hopkins
Although it appears immaterial the air has substance:
I watch a kestrel as it swims and hovers -
hangs on to the unbelievable
with palpable results.
This proves the tangibility of nothingness
to those of a religious disposition
who talk in a rarefied way about God
and the Virgin Mary.
They too it seems can swim and hover like the kestrel:
are proof that the testaments are true
and that there is validity
in witness.
They can even fly through the holes
in an empty mind like pigs or seraphim.
For my part, sitting on an infinite fence, that isn’t there
I’ll take the air for what it’s worth -
ethereal or otherwise.
I’ll catch my breath in awestruck dumb despair
as the kestrel and its maker - there or not -
Uphold the fragile substance of a prayer
made up of atoms.
Forecast
I do not write the weather it writes me:
this grey is my dull mood not just the sky
as my internal moisture and the clouds
combine as if our dew points were allied
- were synchronised -
It seems the slanted rays of this slow sun
that skims the tide with sheens of silver light
inclines towards the rhythms of my heart
and all the stars that shimmer as they gleam
and iridesce.
And when the midnight moment comes to pass
and seagulls like the sap in every plant
sink into the silence and the dark of my cold blood
then I like winter’s reason thus defined
become the frosted thermocline of hope
that touches ice as well as summer’s fire -
both phoenix and the frozen reams of bone
that is our text.
Remember as the rainbow arcs and towers
its spectral incandescence will not last -
like us it lives its own prismatic hour
like lark song or the ghosts as breath aspires
and when our autumn corpuscles are grasped
between the mists of memory
- and moments -
that hang their silks and glitter
when we ask and no-one answers
my inner sense of barometric pressure
responds to all the moods and millibars
that nature with its metre and its measures
condenses and precipitates like art
in every stanza.
Hot Line to a Cold Heart
There is a line between us:
a line that divides the water
as it flows on its journey seawards.
It holds
like the morning sun
the unchanging light
that is always changing
yet you and I have denied all this talk an babble
as the river’s slow succession here succumbs
to our strange connection.
You draw me down to the fathomless cold depths of my understanding
where I feel the pulse of something as you plunge and increase the tension.
There is a line between us that this pen cannot plumb or plunder
and as you rise towards me and we fight for our different reasons
your scales and my clear eyes at the point of meeting
are stunned by the sudden flash of recognition -
of the thresh and sparkle.
