Graeme Chapman. A First Offering: Poems from the Years 1985-1994. Mulgrave, Vic.:
Privately Published, 1994.

 

 

EXPLANATION

I have always enjoyed reading and writing poetry. It has particular appeal for a shy intuitive with a feel for balance symmetry and quintessential economy.

While my thinking has been used to breathlessly scurrying after a muscular intuition, and is therefore relatively well developed, gaining access to my feelings has been difficult. They have either been illegitimately subsumed by my mind, intellectualised, or been confused with emotion or sentiment. Writing poetry has been one of the ways in which I have been able to discover, caress and flow with my feelings.

Several years ago I determined that I would take up my pen whenever I felt pain or joy. Poetry was a catharsis, a means of engaging feelings and processing emotion and helped me avoid burdening my body with unresolved affective tensions. These were also the times I wrote my best poetry.

This small book is divided into four sections. Under Biographical I have included , besides a limited number of pieces that were occasioned by less distressful circumstances, a range of poems that reflect a wrestling with personal, relational pain resulting from the disillusion of a dysfunctional relationship and an eventual emergence from the valley of the shadow.

These poems were written for myself and it took some time for me to overcome an initial reluctance to publish them. Under Occasional, I have included poems written for special occasions. There follows a section containing Meditations, pieces written mostly for church services. The final section, A Study, was the first of a series of three talks I gave to Victorian Churches of Christ ministers at their annual camp in 1985. Entitled "Being", it was followed by two other addresses, "Being Together" and "Being Together in the World".

These poems are my gift to you.

Graeme Chapman

 

CONTENTS

 
BIOGRAPHICAL
 
The Road to Point Signet 7
Spirituality Camp 89 7
Visceral Hell 8
The Struggle 10
The Dilemma 12
The Retreat 12
The Beach 16
Encounter 18
Antinomies 18
Centring 21
In Pursuit of Bliss 22
A Future 23
Neate's Glen 24
On the Brink 25
The Descent 27
The Night Man 28
Waiting for the Dentist 29
Gifted 30
Mothers Day 31
Rain 32
Sydney Airport 33
 
OCCASIONAL
 
Mulgrave: A New Beginning 35
Graeme and Eileen: Wedding Meditation 39
Wendy and John: A Wedding Prayer 41
Pat Shaw: A Eulogy 42
Murray and Dorothy's Wedding 43
 
MEDITATIONS
 
Newness 45
Dying to Live 49
The Promise of Fulfilment 54
1992 56
 
A STUDY
 
Being 58

 

At the author's request, "Visceral Hell" and "The Dilemma" have not been included in the online edition of this book.

 

Biographical

THE ROAD TO POINT SIGNET

Fire,
a tiny point of incandescent energy,
of ecstasy and pain,
burning through the gut,
exploding through layered feelings
and tired senses,
filling the mind with wild fantasies.

An afterglow of guilty pleasure
trailed along the rocky shore,
filtered by Mozart and Haydn.


GC
29 Aug 1988

 

SPIRITUALITY CAMP 89

Curving in on myself,
a centripetal tension,
but gently coaxed out
by others,
but mostly God,
towards healing,
yet ever so slowly.


GC
21 Feb 1989

 

THE STRUGGLE

I struggle for identity
and for affirmation,
the ingredients of self-forgetfulness,
freedom's rootedness.

Others are there
feeding the furnace of my needs
or distressing me with an intimacy
laden with uncomfortable questions.

Self-accepted in part,
but still insecure and anxious,
I pretend to fuller knowledge
of the shadow self
that haunts my studied peacefulness
with threats of self-denouement.

To rejoice in your giftedness,
that's the rub.
My feelings,
more true to who I am,
give the lie to
my willing and my words,
chiding me with unauthenticity.

The old man and the new
strive for mastery
within the repertoire of responses
that is me.

The journey
out of self
is never-ending.
Incremental gains,
hardly won,
are the stuff of progress,
of the real self,
of the no-self
that is the most substantial
self of all.


GC
Pre-sessional Camp
Monbulk
1990

 

THE RETREAT

Time out,
two half days;
meandering conversation
and the promise
of intimacy.

Banjo sharks on a jetty,
wind in the face,
tall stories
and a shifting of masks.

A return to beginnings,
graves on a hill,
fishermen mending their nets;
anger over pretentious scholarship,
ignorant and self-deceived.

Waves foaming
through solitary molars,
worn sentinels;
board riders
skinned against the cold,
effluent kelp
and an expanse of sea.

The view from a hill,
capes, points
and a distant island
of dark skulls,
reproachful, but beautiful.

Fewer trees,
congested masonry,
an aortic blockage
of cholesterol-rich humanity.

A Roman feast,
giftedness uncelebrated,
rich food
and a relaxing of tensed coils;
sated hierarchs.

Sleepily serpentine,
burdening the springs of old chairs;
occasionally touching
the quiet places of our souls,
affirming the daemon.

Laughter,
stories,
shards from our past
and the affirming of a vision
jointly owned.

Differences,
a mix of skills;
pride in each other
but also envy,
the stuff of inspiration.

The last
gasped mouthfuls
of a new yesterday;
sleep,
oblivion at the mercy
of overtaxed gastric juices.

A stirring,
water needling the skin
and the sound of dissolved sleep
soaping the floor.

Lazy iguanas
around a table,
burnt toast
and scissored legs
stretched between chairs.

A quiet drive,
a wooden walkway,
dusty rocks
and the sharing of secrets.

Parents -
saints and bastards;
a new intimacy
and fears for our children.

A silence,
pregnant with presence,
broken by leftovers
and the readjustment of defences.

Farewell
to a framed moment,
captured forever
but slippery with time,
redolent with the ordinariness
of our reality.


GC
19 April 90

 

THE BEACH

The sound of hammering,
alien to the wash of water over stones
and the caw of gulls claiming territory
over the sheen-grey ripples
dampening the sand.

A lone windsurfer,
triangle of red,
scudding the peppered blueness of the bay
beyond the cloud reflections
that lathe with gentle laziness
the bluestone barricade.

Voices of children
and a flotilla of birds
sensing a meal;
an innocent squadron
ducking the radar.

Gentle cliffs
disappearing into the bay,
scrubbed green
and occasionally worn through to the rock,
like old fabric.

Beach houses,
an array of colourful garages
brightly painted,
mocking the pride
of the turreted and flashy houses
that rise with studied modesty
from the cover of gums.

A distant haze
dusty with greyness;
ranges of mountains
and the square pylons of a city
hid from view -
the graced swathe
of a palette knife
erasing a cacophony of congested buildings.

The Hindenburg,
a vast grey mass
of blown water,
hiding the sun
and raining liquid bullets
on us all.

White gulls on the sand
and the lone windsurfer
bent double rolling his sail
into the future.
Sun, rain and a patch of
ethereally calm water,
a pastel afternoon
shortened by lengthening clouds.


GC
Easter 1990

 

ENCOUNTER

Gentle rain
warm against the skin.

A flower
open to the sun,
offering its perfume to the wind.

Glowing coals,
gently passionate,
filling the room
with a contented warmth.

A damaged reed,
limping with tall strides
in solemn rectitude,
tensed against the elements
and stumbling into the dark
of shared pain
and an empty tomorrow.


GC
26 July 90

 

ANTINOMIES

Hot and cold,
earth and sky,
steaming lava
and
frozen icebergs.

Love and hate,
intimacy and distance,
sensuous passion
and
chaste reserve.

Seeking and finding,
grasping and letting-go,
raucous laughter
and
silent pain.

Freedom and bondage,
life and death,
a play at control
and
abject surrender.

The hope of the world,
the bane of existence,
nature's saviour
and
its blight.

Anima and animus,
male and female,
Yang and Yin
androgeneity.

A God out there,
a God within,
emboldened faith
and
craven fear.

Yes and no,
simul justus et peccator,
a child of God
and
a scion of hell.

Self in God,
God in self,
fullness of joy
and
a haunting sadness.

God is one,
God is three,
God is light
and
God is dark.

Paradox,
a meeting of opposites,
reality's essence
in
coniunctio oppositorum.


GC
Spirituality Presessional
Feb 91

 

CENTRING


A hollow centre;
tangle of thoughts,
feelings, expressions,
repertoire of behaviours
and a revolving cylinder
pedalled by anxiety.

Now and then
the feel of reality
in a stab of anger,
in uncontrived affection
and in the pain
of burst illusions.
Feather-light
transparent gossamer,
formwork of an identity,
self's shadow
and its reality.

A God-burst
illuminated by darkness,
cave paintings,
archaic etchings,
shadow of a shadow
on the wall.

Self's Other,
its identity,
its substance,
its freedom,
its God,
embarrassingly close
but asphyxiated
under an agitated mass
of worker thoughts
expert at distraction.


GC
Spirituality Presessional
February 91

 

IN PURSUIT OF BLISS

Sudden flashes,
bursts of incandescence,
deep passion on the hoof
retreating into silence.

A juxtaposition
of insecurity and pain
and an ecstasy
tilting at its evanescence.

A generous love
desperately courting the affection
that is its pre-supposition,
the security that will ensure its permanence.

Voices in dramatic dialogue,
embattled personae
wrestling integration
from sharp-witted bantering.

Explosive energy,
gaseous shadow
belching symbols
into the Dreamtime.

Earth and sky,
pain and pleasure,
fibrillating feelings
self affirmed
but
longing for equanimity.

A gift,
an island in construction,
colourful, variegated,
seeking access to other islands
bartering authentic selfhood.


8 March 91
GC

 

A FUTURE

Lightness,
a flash of colour
deep in the eddying darkness.

An analgesic
lightening the pain of failure,
relieving a suffocating sadness
and calling into question
the accusing voice of conscience
which has been
tutored to self recrimination
by siren voices
from the past.

Building from the rubble
a future
rich in possibility.

Reordering priorities,
cherishing relationships
and
taking time to be.


GC
Spirituality Camp
25 Feb 92

 

NEATE'S GLEN
[coaxed beyond fear]

A hint
of ecstasy,
deeply bedded,
swelling
into an explosive rush
of intimacy.

Warmth
in the cold,
light
in the darkness,
relief
from a sadness
worrying the gut.

Pleasured
by the caress
of brokenness,
a disciplined energy
weeping
through open wounds.

Promise
of wholeness
beyond duplicity;
woman with man,
world without end.


GC
26 Feb 92

 

ON THE BRINK

Deep sadness,
a longing,
an emptiness enervating the gut
and
feeding on
diminishing reserves of stored vitality.

In search
of
a new mythology,
new rituals
beyond dogma
and moralism.

To live
my bliss,
burning at the centre
without diminishment,
overfull
with an
emptiness of self,
honest
to the point of authenticity.

Offering
my neediness,
beyond captivity,
but vulnerable
to the other.

To die
to the old,
the sine qua non
of resurrection,
founders
between desire and fear
and
awaits a grace
that will give
passage
to the new world.


GC
22 March 92

 

THE DESCENT

Feelings of desertion,
forgotten echoes of childhood
prejudicing the present
with fulfilled prophesy.
A deep inchoate sadness
voiding the gut
and overwhelming the moment
with distraction.

Descending the centre,
chasing the pain
to an infant grimace;
castrated manhood.

Opening the space,
holding the moment,
channelling the grace,
explaining the mystery.
Retracing the journey,
ascent to the present,
focussing the words,
peaceful exhaustion.


Thursday 18 August 92
College retreat
GC

 

THE NIGHT MAN

Soft descent
to a vacant oval;
tender flesh
on wood
warmed by the sun.

Relief,
sweet exhaustion,
time to muse
on creepers
and uneven cement.

Tissue,
gentle against the skin:
checking the damage,
sawdust
and eucalyptus oil.

Music,
weatherboards
and a night man,
silent as dawn,
sustaining the magic.


GC
4 Jan 93
Kin Kin

 

WAITING FOR THE DENTIST

Weariness
phasing the edges of awareness,
fraying the sheath
to a tender sensitivity.

Vacuous attentiveness;
flashes of lucidity
in a near narcotic stupor
struggling to connect.

Capacious memory
dulled to a stutter;
cumbrous dinosaur
rendered witless.

Genetic endowment?
diffused fear?
A diminished ego
weeping in silence?

Gentle zephyr,
dispel the fog,
resurrect the gentle giant,
bring him to life.


GC
18 March 93

 

GIFTED

Scent of yesterday,
etched in sepia
on muscle tissue.

Memory,
beyond nostalgia,
bordering the present
with hope.

Shared pain,
the texture of friendship,
taunting
forgetfulness.

Lives touch,
Spirit-born,
exquisite gift of
synchronicity.

Wisdom,
a deep knowing,
the dark journey
of enlightenment.

Acceptance,
self-love,
the gift of friends,
treading lightly,

And of that
encompassing Self,
cosmogonic love,
divine breath.

Yielding
to the flow of
the cacophonous
music of life,
we discover
ourselves,
each other
and
God.


GC
25.3.94

 

MOTHERS' DAY

Morphic resonance,
the double helix,
static tapes blurbing
parental wise-talk.

Mothers' Day,
a fortuitous gift;
three aged Nubians
guarding the queen.

Separate centres,
different static,
scripted children
and a history of failed achievement.

Bitter-sweet generativity,
swapped notes of anxious debility
checking for heredity.

Passing intimacy,
soul music,
humouring the aged goddess,
riding her intensity.

Fragrance of yesterday
in Autumn hues,
scrambled apart
by the exigencies
of time and space.


GC
8 May 94

 

RAIN

Falling rain,
misted bullets,
sky tears in flight,
whiskered dampness
and the smell of wet wool.
Layered nakedness,
a depth of steaming wetness
seducing tiredness
and
flushing bone chill
into beads of epidermal moisture.

Rain
crocheting mobiles on the windows;
fire
dancing, leaping, pirouetting;
two pairs of legs
extended towards the warmth,
contemplating intimacy.


GC
8 May 94

 

SYDNEY AIRPORT

Rows of blue chairs in an airport;
people contemplating people;
the murmur of nervous excitement
punctuated by an occasional, uninhibited
greeting.

Reflected lights on a wet tarmac,
giant penguins with arms outstretched
disgorging passengers into metal tubes,
flashing lights signalling ascent.

Numbered destinations in fractured bytes,
the silent call of familiar exotica,
a sumptuous aloneness for the solitary
traveller,
respite for the harassed addict.

Opportunity for solitude,
womb of the meditative moment,
abstracted beatitude
broken by a boarding call.


GC
8 May 94

 

Occasional

MULGRAVE:
A New Beginning

New grass,
pastel grey walls,
tan bark
and a bank that leaches water.

Students
coming and going,
tickling the carpeted floor
of the coiled reptile that
swallows them.

Lecture rooms
expelling the sated
who have gorged themselves on God-talk.

Cups of tea and coffee
downed in haste,
and bowl movements.

Back for a second session
of chalk dust,
ethyl alcohol
and a juggling of verbal symbols
in a vain attempt
to express the inexpressible.

The sound of tiny hammers
on taught strings,
the sharp resonance
of strummed guitars
and the embarrassed whisper
of tentative voices.

A reflection,
a word from God,
slides thrown on the screen,
a final prayer.

A dark womb
expelling caviar
along a colonnade.

Sun on the shins,
hands in the pockets,
whispered comment.

A cup in the hand,
treading carpet,
catching up on tomorrow
or a quick game of pool.

Re-entering the womb,
a second gestation,
news,
rules
and an anxious visitor
venturing tentatively
beyond the protection
of the lectern.

Inspiration,
irritation,
words as long as centipedes
and belly laughter.

A final gasp
of Church talk:

Death,
divisiveness,
those damnable deacons!

Or a quiet read in the library,
head on elbows
and long draughts of air.
 
II
Balls of fire on long sticks
and strips of light.

As yet soul-less.
computers
spitting paper
to flurried attendants.

Glass screens,
cubicles for workaholics.

Welcome mats
and an absence of people.
 
III
Grief for the past,
an intimacy lost,
orphans in a decontamination chamber.

Brushing shoulders with a future
as yet unfelt.

Working on leadlight windows
for the yet-to-be-born.

Creating history,
community,
tradition
and a fund of apocryphal nonsense;
the stuff of ethos.

Lonely pioneers
without a past.
 
IV
A terrarium without flowers,
two lines of cylindrical columns
and miles of wires.

A vision for the future,
a salute to the past
and a national symbol.

Callused hands,
chequebooks,
late hours in an empty library
sweeping lost dollars into the light.

If the heart is where the treasure is,
we have been treasured into existence
and kept there.

We are here to:
train ministers,
educate Christians,
explore the faith,
foster creativity,
push back boundaries,
develop spirituality,

to encourage an openness to God
and to run with the consequences.


GC
5 August 89

 

GRAEME AND EILEEN:
Wedding Meditation

Memories,
debris from the past,
flashes of colour
and the dull ache
of gutted souls.

The teasing love
of youthful idealism
taunting wisdom
with its crippled genesis.

Energy
to begin again,
welling hesitatingly
from the new-found promise
of another love
and the discipline of failure.

Two lives,
encumbered with
the gift and slag
of origins
and the experience of other unions,
revisit Pan
with sobered expectations.

Two people
committed to life,
offering
their strength and vulnerability
to each other.

Yielding,
discovering a new freedom
to be themselves
beyond possessiveness.

Grace,
embrace of love,
fructify their vision
with realised potential
and the bliss of intimacy.


GC
23 Feb 93

 

WENDY AND JOHN
A wedding Prayer

Waiting ripens the wine
and matures the wood.
Passion gives way
to a nervous contentment
that anticipates the fruit of patience.
Marriage,
that state of bliss and trepidation,
beckons us to fidelity
to a bitter-sweet journey of self-discovery,
and to the pain that nurtures and binds.

What begins as an overlay of mutual
projections,
of romantic love and judgemental
recriminations,
leads us deeper,
through layers of inherited repertoires
to a healing of the core,
to the gentle collision of open vulnerabilities,
to a sense of fibrillating togetherness.

Enter upon this voyage with measured
confidence,
with commitment to each other
and to the emergent mystery
of the deepest of all human relationships.


GC
17 Oct 93

 

PAT SHAW:
A Eulogy

Emptiness,
anaesthetised pain,
gutted grief
and
a mind
shuffling inanities.

We knew her,
each of us differently:
the light and the shadow,
the energy,
the wound that birthed
compassion,
the laughing eyes,
the teasing girl-like chuckle,
the skilled hands,
the organising will.

We loved her
each of us in our own way,
and it wasn't difficult.

Her shadow
lengthens in our hearts,
calling us
to courage
and
to life.


GC
6 May 94

 

MURRAY AND DOROTHY'S WEDDING

Life strands
tossed by the wind,
caressing irritatingly,
knotting into a ganglion of desire
that strangles individuality
and
eventually leaves
two strings of fragile raffia
flapping agonisingly in the breeze.

Limpid time,
slow with the weight
of
an ever-present eternity,
bridling a desperate possessiveness,
creating space for intimacy,
a thoracic cavity for the breath of life.

Gentle silence,
grace of presence,
help them yield
to
the unspoken, the unspeakable,
to find themselves
and that larger Self,
whose gift is
to shape and nurture us
and to
discover to us
the incomprehensible Reality.


GC
14 May 94

 

Meditations

NEWNESS

Newness is an illusion,
a sleight of hand that fools even the wise.

The ruby,
dislodged by the gem-collectors pick,
faceted and polished to a ruddy perfection,
had been forming in the bowls of the earth
over millions of years.

A pure white rose,
budded open
by the warm caress of spring,
traces its lineage,
through time,
beyond the cultivators skill
to a wild and less pre-possessing parentage.

The slippery body of a new-born child,
fresh from a nine-month gestation
in the womb,
bears the genetic signature
of a myriad ancestors.

The idea,
that exploded in your mind
and to which you laid claim,
was the product
of the ideas of others,
newly synthesised,
and the gift
of a larger world Mind
crackling into consciousness.

Newness is an illusion,
a sleight of hand that fools even the wise.

There is no present.

If you are disbelieving
then try to touch it.

The present is the junction
where freight is off loaded from the past onto
the future.

It is
the moment of opportunity
that has no substance,
for it doesn't exist
except in our thinking.

Yet we need
to live in it
so that we don't waste our strength
regretting the past
or
dreading the future.

We must vault beyond
the past and the future
into the eternal present,
into
that pregnant timelessness
that is
the womb
of
being and consciousness.

There is no present.

There are no beginnings
and
no endings.

Beginnings are the overflow of endings
and
endings
the seeds that harden
and
burst into new beginnings.

What has gone before
is the medium,
the decayed vegetation,
that nurtures the root-burst seed.

There are no beginnings
and
no endings.

You are on a journey
that shall return you to the place
whence you began.

If you persist
you shall discover
that the priceless treasure,
after which you have quested,
is within yourself.

You can only discover it
by first seeking it elsewhere
and in the company of others.

The stuff with which you have to work
is what you do not like about yourself,
the painful peculiarities
that are rooted
in the rubble
of your pre-history
and in a damaged childhood.

Coaxed into this journey
by
the master of the universe,
the father of our lord Jesus Christ;
the love
that holds it all together.

You need to leave behind
your old insecurities
and
yield yourself to the
gentle but insistent flow
of an accepting, healing grace
that will gift you with your true identity
and with an authenticity
that will be the measure of your wholeness.

You are on a journey
that shall return you to the place
whence you began.


GC
11 December 91

 

DYING TO LIVE

A child,
head buried between her mother's legs,
darting anxious eyes
at clusters of diminutive strangers
transfixed by desertion
and the foreign feel
of the classroom.

Unceremoniously
expelled from the womb
a second time,
a tearful transition.

Dying to live.
 
II
Hormonal phantasies
building to commitment,
visions of
lace and domesticity,
mutual projections
promising fulfilment.

A different reality;
a clash of repertoires,
a baggage scuffle,
tangled transferences
wrestling in the dark.

Relinquishing independence
in the interests of
one flesh,
the task of a lifetime.

Dying to live.
 
III
Jigsaw pieces
fitted together
tentatively,
then re-arranged.

Configurations,
offering comfort,
scrambled
in the interests of
broader comprehensiveness.

Inherited
world views
challenged by peer perception:

Adolescent certainties
critiqued
by discriminating egos:

Egoic matrices
challenged
by the increasing openness
of the
centred self
and
the dawning awareness
of the paradoxical nature
of ultimate reality.

Levels of understanding,
stage transitions.

Dying to live.
 
IV
Muscles,
glands and bones
suffering the history
of ancestral struggle
and
the emotional pain
of need-driven behaviours
promising fulfilment.

Surrender of the false ego,
descent into the shadow self,
relinquishment to an inner deity
in whom all existence is grounded;
the way to resurrection.

Dying to live.
 
V
Charmed existence,
featherlight,
free of stress
and the worry of indigence.

A chimera,
filmy nothingness
leading nowhere.

The scourge of pain,
the way to knowledge,
to mellow wisdom
and
to compassion.

Dying to live.
 
VI
Non-involvement,
self preservation,
avoiding the scars;

The way of the coward,
an ultimate emptiness.

To rescue the victim,
braving the violence,
hazarding the future;

The way of Christ,
a rich fulfilment,
losing your life to find it.

Dying to live.
 
VII
Cosmic pattern
defying appearance.

Cellular secret,
galactic mystery.

Point and counterpoint.

Crucifixion and resurrection.
Christic texture,
enfleshed,
explicating reality.

Dying to live.

Dying so that others may live.


GC
26 March 92
[for retreat]

 

THE PROMISE OF FULFILMENT


Childhood,
rich in promise
and bursting with energy,
like new-budded fruit
greeting the future.

Youth,
impatient for pleasure
and lusting for mastery,
indiscriminately disgorging its energy
into shallow channels.

Young adulthood,
fingering the future
and ripe for commitment,
backpacked with idealism
born of wishful inexperience.

Middle age,
uncomfortably jammed
in a maze of responsibilities,
resigned to the present
and the grit of reality.

Maturity:
the fight has gone
but not the quest;
the children's children
make for happiness.

Old age,
hard-fought resignation
to decrepitude and an unknown future;
enlightened simplicity
or dishevelled despair.

Life's promise,
beckoning in childhood,
submerged in adulthood,
re-emergent in old age,
tantalisingly distant.

Realised fulfilment,
scion of a cosmic love,
contingent upon openness,
manifest as wisdom.

Wisdom,
rebirth of the child
sleeping since childhood,
loved to a new innocence,
veined with suffering.

Fulfilment,
wisdom,
the eternal child,
promise of life,
gift of an embracing consciousness
warm with love.


GC
19/7/92

 

1992

An end
and a beginning,
sudden descents,
clawing the rock-face,
lying exhausted.

An ego
pained and hollow,
gaining strength
and standing
its ground.

Fragile
and vulnerable;
delicate steps
towards personhood
and life.

Affection,
warmth,
generous intimacy
and a history,
a tangled past.

Incarnate salvation;
a child is born.


GC
Mulgrave Service
6 Dec 92

 

A Study

BEING

Drowning.
sucked into a sea of words.
the gentle newspaper - curtained yesterday.
Today the awful screech of "a, b, c", all run together.
The disc-jockey, the face on the screen,
the plastered hoarding,
trains and coughing buses, speaking money,
supermarket ticker tape and the ubiquitous bumper
sticker.
Teachers, politicians, preachers- verbal competence.
relationships bogged down with words,
which haunt us in our dreams.

A moratorium,
a ban on words.
Devalued, they breed scepticism.
We do longer answer, or are close.
Reality's substitute,
not God, but theological god-talk.

We talk, but also run around
fixing up the world.
We too are caught in this unholy scurry.
meetings, visits, services, engagements, projects,
diaries filled with manic scribblings,
spurred on to be accepted, compulsive.
Pelagians, saviours - all of us.
early burnouts.

Thoughts atrophied
and so much fury of doing.
Kidnapped by modernity, its wisdom superficial,
we have no time to be.
The crest of an elusive and forbidding future
threatens us with death.
We are not at peace.

Must it be this way? No!
Dance no longer to others' expectations.
confront the world.
Its mould will fit, but no, don't let it.
Not alone; we'll win.
It's not too late,
a graced "cease" echoes in our ears;
an authentic voice in a world of confused rage.

But why don't we?
Why don't we stop; why don't we change?
The supportive scaffolding, too comfortable;
talkative friends, telephone calls, meetings, books,
music.
Guilt, self induced,
a programmed paralysis, unceasing activity.
Compulsive workaholics, who can't stop long enough
to be introduced to themselves.
Tapes made in infancy, pressing things,
separate us from ourselves.

Myself, who am I?
I am afraid.
I have externalised evil to feel comfortable.
The devils are outside, don't look within.
Of course I'm mortal, but who believes it?
Let's huddle, cherish sentiment
and hate the prickers of illusions.
When I dream, I'm superman.

Escape from the cage of words ,
from frenetic activity.
The way forward:
silence, self-discovery.

To become pilgrims again,
in search of life and God.
A false security and a contrived spirituality,
must go,
along with desultory musings
that bed us down forever in a
sleepy hollow,
and fix us to a moment of the past,
defined, self-explained, but without movement.

Silence and discipline;
the horse's mouth needs the bit.
A mouthful of pebbles will hardly keep the words in;
and even when it does, our minds churn out thoughts
that are the siblings of our words.
We must rein in our thoughts.

In this voyage of self-discovery,
in which we are alone, yet not alone,
we should begin
by listening to our bodies;
the knotted twine in our stomachs,
the tension working through our eyelids,
the nervous movement of a hand,
the secret muscles of the face that betray
the strains and fears of everyday.
What is happening?
What is all this eloquent cacophony?

Let us not neglect the voice of nature,
gentle, yet so strong,
speaking us into eternity with the fall of a leaf,
fixing us in the pregnant present
with a breeze along the cheek.
Let us listen to the water and its talk of flux,
its invitation to a restful flowing with the present;
a yielding to the tide of time.
Listen! The elements, orchestrated, harmonious,
bring Him near.

Let us live those nagging questions
we wish would go away.
Let us use our lonely moments
to force a solitude
in which we reach beyond clock-time
to where the newness of our moments never cease.
Let us recollect our days, and search our dreams,
those crazy half-brothers of our waking thoughts,
and spy the self we drape with our illusions.

Let us use our defeats,
when the waves leave us broken on the sand,
winded and half-conscious.
Let us face the stubborn fact of illness,
that threatens us with the dust of our beginning.
Let us cherish our imprisonment,
free of activity and talk.
Let us reach out to God,
whose voice calls us out to meet him
in the radiance of the walls that hug us round
and then release us beyond the picture-window of our cell.

In the bitter-sweet of solitude
let's face our real selves,
haltingly at first.
Resurrection needs its crucifixion.
Excellence for ourselves!
A subtle pride
that does not love God, and less, others.

To face the anger and the greed
we see in others,
to acknowledge them as bosom friends,
part of ourselves.
O horror!
To face our quest for silence, and watch it, chameleon-like,
turn into another thing,
a covert aching for relief, a therapeutic place:
when what we really need to ask of it
is radical conversion,
heroic surgery.

How guiltily we pull back from the shadow self,
the reverse image of the coin with which we pay
our tax to popular acclaim.
This stubborn, awful silence,
damn silence!

God, thank God you're there.
When, in a real moment, I confront who I am,
you double guess my loathing,
and clothe it with a love,
an acceptance that affirms even the shadowed ugliness
that I can then claim as me.
"OK, You're OK",
you speak and I can own that part of me I fixed on others.
I can take it back and love it,
because you do.

We various "me's",
we come together,
no longer schizoid particles, dissociated,
into one.
I've found me and You;
perhaps You first, but before I really knew it!
Sometimes you're there, sometimes I feel an absence;
but whatever, I know.

In this fruitful silence I am no longer my parents,
or my friends, or the world outside.
I am myself,
I am unique,
I am and am becoming.
It is because you love me that I am.
I am me - and You; though not all of You.

I can see myself,
I can see my friends,
and we are separate.
Accepted, I can accept them.
I can love them, give them space to be,
without crowding them with the demand
that they be everything for me.
I have found them by not seeking them.
So long I sought the treasure,
suffocating friendships with my heated need.
Now I can let them be,
different, imperfect,
and love them for their faults.
It is as a stranger that I come,
a new me.

My words, a camouflage no longer,
no longer the baited nothings of a shallow wit,
touch bottom, sometimes,
and I notice interest.
I see the weary, those chained by unforgiveness,
their own and others',
the fatherless, orphaned by the speed and pace of life,
the halt, the main, the blind:
I notice that they stop and look.
They may not pause,
but in my faltering self-confession
they find a grip, ever so tenuous,
on the reality they are, but do not know.
They listen, and they think.
fellow pilgrims on the way, who cannot see the road,
catch a fleeting glimmer,
pebbled moonshine.
They look again, and tremble.
I feel Him there,
I hear Him in my words.
He dances over them and lights them up,
they throb,
and in their mirror,
one, and two,
begin to see themselves.
These words, these speakings,
though more mine than ever before,
I do not claim,
they are the words, the deeds,
of Him who sent me.

To be in touch with this love is scary,
like holding a new-born child.
A child that is mine, and yet not mine.
A love that allows to be,
and yet changes those answering to her invitation.
They are birthed to a new self-creation which is not theirs.
They become so much more themselves,
and yet more again are they self for others.
Compassion grows in the womb of solitude,
and, with its author,
distances itself near.
A compassionate solidarity -
of the stuff that community is made,
Spirit-gifted fellowship.

To stay within this centre?
the marriage of gift and discipline.
Taking time to listen
to the Word,
written and enfleshed;
a willingness to follow in the slipstream of the Spirit;

Standing naked in His presence,
vulnerable, for Him and all to see,
standing there in love and hate,
exposed to other frowns,
but, self-accepting, because accepted;
moulding protest,
hardly speaking,
never ceasing,
with the mind in the heart, before God,
loved;
an hour, no hours, every hour;
pulling up the spuds,
and alone,
crying blood into the ground.

Words, who needs them?
Silence! The precursor of all acts!


GC
1985

 

Electronic text provided by the author. HTML rendering by Ernie Stefanik.
1 October 2003.

A First Offering: Poems from the Years 1985-1994 is published
as an online text with the kind permission of the author.
Copyright © 1994, 2003 by Graeme Chapman.
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