For Lent this year, I’m choosing to reflect via the medium of poetry, inspired in part by Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound podcast and an inability to pray, in any formal sense of the word. What started as a season of uncertainty has evolved into something bigger, hence this, an attempt to use poetry as prayer. These will be a response to the daily reflection from the Church of England’s LiveLent app which this year encourages us to reflect on creation and how we can be better stewards of it. Here goes! NB for a version in which I attempt to read, visit the anchor.fm page.
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The bright gleam
of sunlight reflecting
in the glass and the steel
of the hills we have built
lull me into forgetting,
that this – these monuments
to our power and resolve
which wrap themselves
like a shroud around
the horizon, a scar from
a wound revived in the present,
tethering us to the certainty
of the things we think we know-
is but a moment,
fleeting in its existence.

The beauty
of things which are unseen
is their intricacy,
how closely knit together
they can appear,
how easy it is for them
to unravel like a slip
of fine cashmere, once
a string begins to slip.
This is what beauty is,
observed in the frail,
reminding us that we are dust
and from dust
to which we must return
when time untethers us
from this rock
to which we cling.