What you'll find here

 

Welcome to this jumble sale of writings, musings, observations and inspirations: I hope you find something to help you on your journey home.  It's all storytelling, in the end. That's how we understand things; the stories of who we are, where we came from, where we're headed. The stories of other people, how they came to be who they are, which stories shaped them, why our stories sometimes run parallel, and sometimes clash.

When we're motivated enough, we can change our stories, write new outcomes for ourselves and our people, our planet. All it takes is imagination, where there are, genuinely, no limits.

Warmest regards

Peter Neary-Chaplin

Writer. Poet.

 

 

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    Wednesday
    Jul072010

    Sadhu and the flat rock

    Sadhu sits

    still

    on a flat rock made just for his bones,

    breathes his belly out

    and waits until he can hear the upseeping sap

    in the legs of the forest.

    'Make a eucharist for my children,' says the flat rock.

    Sadhu jumps down like a boy,

    breaks a loaf and scatters it.

    'Both loaves.'

    Sadhu smiles, breaks his last loaf.

    I have no wine, he thinks.

    'You are not looking,' says the flat rock.

    He gathers blackberries,

    squeezes them into a small smooth hollow.

    Sadhu sits,

    the afternoon eternal.

    Sparrows, mice, ants come

    pecking, nibbling, carrying away the crumbs,

    wasps hover over the stickening juice.

    As the sun's tap closes and the light pools,

    deer loom not far off,

    mosquitoes gather round their warmth,

    bats and foxes stretch.

    Dusk pangs move Sadhu on, and in his way

    are pignuts, wild garlic, and the bitter leaves of elm

    who also listened for the flat rock's voice.

    Friday
    May212010

    The old man and the baobab tree

    The world's run out of wisdom,

    building roads where no cities are

    and praying for traffic and pastry sales,

    accelerating the tow of stupid seeds in hot exhausts.

    But the soul still travels overland,

    over sand,

    at the speed of a camel,

    and when you're older

    and the glassy-eyed twitching has stopped,

    you'll regret the cutting of the baobab tree

    that needed you

    even less than you needed me.

    Wednesday
    Apr282010

    Does my foot know it's Monday?

    Lumpen, silty stirring

    around the tremulous half-buried flat fins,

    elegant eddies of waste, waltzing.

    No-one can see me down here

    quilted by fine sand, camouflaged.

    Think I might stay.

    Haven't been a fish before, soft warm stomach-sleeping.

    Now a filament of sand glides by

    down and left,

    in and out between green fronds

    abrading, nibbling at flakes of skin

    between yellowing toes.

    Toes?

    Watery dawn rays play on feet cold

    from uncovering,

    tingled by the sunlight

    and sending a slow signal up the long drowsy tracks

    towards the capital,

    where feet have heeled shoes.

    Does my foot know it's Monday?

    I was happy as a fish.

    Wednesday
    Apr212010

    Priest

    When God's white eye lifts slowly in the east

    and heats to vapour the swollen millrace of dreams

    that call the priest

    awake and up and into dazed attention,

    and thankfulness arises in his heart

    for light and warmth

    and all the teeming stuff of earthy life

    that comes with just a little tilling

    and ancestral knowing of the place,

    the woodpecker his alarm,

    the timid deer his wife,

    then he knows no better way to start

    than touching forehead to the ground

    and painting blessing

    in every chamber of his heart

    so that it leaks a bit with every beat

    and blesses every tiny space

    just like the worms beneath his feet.