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There is a new journal of religious poetry.
If you want to learn more about it, this blog may help. Oh, and you will find three of my poems in the launch edition.
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As kids we mucked
about in mud, dabbled in dirt, frolicked in filth. But lockdown love means sep’rate beds; intimate space holds new meanings: Social distance, isolated, selves sealed off by lines on the ground. Hygienic hands waving hello while longing hearts dare not unleash. © Kevin Scully 2020 My neighbour could infect me
So I will stay away from him. My neighbour might subject me; Good thoughts of him grow grim. My neighbour may dissect me-- I’ll have to tear him limb from limb. Yet my neighbour can protect me So why not shelter him? © Kevin Scully 2020 This is an early draft. Any comments to shape it better? Get in contact. Light lushes on leaves
Angled sunshine on birch trees Birds’ beaks bark questions © Kevin Scully 2020 Another purchase
It is one more gift for you My executor © Kevin Scully 2019 Chinese tourists
go to Blackman's to buy English shoes that are made in China. Go figure. © Kevin Scully 2019 Blackman's is a shoe shop - Cash is King, no cards- in London's East End. 'In God we trust; all others pay cash'. My two good friends
Have two kids each: To each a boy and girl; They watch them bend Beyond their reach: A niche is now the world. © Kevin Scully 2018 When they pinned him
to that tree – Him, I mean. Once and for all – them, you, me – He nailed it. © Kevin Scully 2018 September 14 is the Feast of the Holy Cross The space and silence of monasteries have held a special place for many people, not just practising Christians. I remember one character who propped up a bar with me in north London who used to go a Benedictine foundation once a year to relax, read and dry out. He was a prodigious drinker and would opine that the combination of de-stressing, catching up with a wide range of writing and being off the booze probably extended his life.
I suppose I could draw on a similar threefold blessing. I first entered the cloisters of Wantage as I came to the end of my training at theological college in Oxford. I have gone on retreat there, among other places, ever since. Part of my withdrawal from parochial life allowed me to pray and reflect on aspects of life and ministry, as well as mull over various writing projects. Of late that has been mostly poetry. Anyone who has discussed this art form with me will know of my love of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Indeed, my youthful work suffered somewhat as I attempted to emulate the unemulatable. ‘Mance on a flattop building’ will hardly be up there with ‘daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon.’ Wantage also has the cachet of another, more celebrated, poet, John Betjeman. Once a denizen of the then pretty, small market town, he wrote his farewell in On Leaving Wantage 1972. I have been working on a similar piece about my departure from London’s East End but, as they say in the movie Airplane, ‘That’s not important right now.’ One of Hopkins’s wonders is Binsey Poplars in which he laments the destruction, the ‘strokes of havoc’ that ‘unselve’ an avenue of trees. Wantage is one of many expanding towns with new housing to accommodate what successive governments argue has been a response to a crisis. At the same time, there has been a decline in religious orders in the Western Church. Some, the Community of Saint Mary the Virgin among them, have found their numbers and fortunes seriously affected. How they respond to that is their challenge. Any human development has negative impact. In one area, not far from the convent of the CSMV, there has been an attempt to ensure the survival of a colony of newts while the construction has been rolled out. How successful that is can not be assessed at present. What might be up for assessment is what I penned after one of my walks on retreat there earlier this year. WANTAGE WALK How can I love you in destruction When all that’s fair is crushed, Infinite points beyond construction Which even silence hushed? As now I watch the desolation Of seasons’ growth unblushed, This view of past years’ contemplation, Like human waste, all flushed. Now plastic, brick enshrine creation And stillness now is rushed. How can I love you? There’s temptation, Yet in decay I must. As with all else my destination Is for dust from dust. © Kevin Scully 2018 |
Poetry
Some thoughts and jottings from the poetic pen of Kevin Scully. Archives
October 2023
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