The tree was two hundred and fifty years old.
The second largest wild pear tree in the country.
And now it is no more, laid out cold.
Felled by our new bureaucratic gentry.

Felled now to clear a path for progress.
For a high speed line no one now needs.
Why rush when now we can all work at home without distress.
Now all that is left of that great tree are new life, its seeds.

Once under its welcome waving shade we laid.
Once in glorious colours of shivered dappled white, we saw it.
Now over it a brutalist steel track is laid.
Once where there was timeless calm all is cast down into hell’s pit.

But one day there will be resurrection, a new pear tree will grow.
As mighty as the last, all despair laid low.

Lord teach us to pray.
Just as John taught his disciples.
So often, I just don’t know what to say.
Just endless worries the mind recycles.

Sometimes I say the Rosary.
It’s an alternative to worry.
It too is poetry.
A chance our mind’s worrying wanderings to bury.

But if all else fails.
There is always the Our Father.
From us a message sails.
We can lay our lives on his altar.

Perhaps it’s helps if for a moment I don’t think about myself.
But for a change think and pray for somebody else.

Lord do you not care that my sister is leaving me to do the serving all by myself.
Martha, you worry and fret about so many things, yet few are needed only one.
We are always wanting to do things, to tidy every untidy shelf.
We think too much of what we need to do, too little of the moon and sun and son.

Perhaps we should pause awhile.
And metaphorically sit at his feet.
I imagine ourselves on a tiring country walk and take a rest before climbing a style.
By doing so we take one step closer to his seat.

We work.
Maybe we should listen.
We should attentively lurk.
Not constantly hasten.

We fret that we are doing the serving all by ourselves.
It is not myself that matters but the one self.

PENTIRE POINT AGAIN

If you rest awhile and stand high above Pentire Point.
The restless sea is far far below.
It rages back and forth but the sound is faint.
All is quiet here despite the seas fast tidal flow.

Thus must the dead from a high point serene.
Look down on us weary mortals.
Our lives race in and out, our ambitions unresolved though keen.
We come in with the tide and we go out for we must pass through death’s portals.

In this great ocean.
We are a merest bubble of water.
Our lives but the merest token.
All then subsumed and carried away before our slaughter.

For us all is weary movement.
But one day on these high cliffs we will look down, cured of all disappointment.

ST ENODOC CHURCH

It was the stone rejected by the builders.
That became the cornerstone.
Nothing like failure and rejection bewilders.
We accept everything but failure it seems we cannot condone.

As we walked, the wind came gusting in from the Atlantic at fifty miles an hour.
We hurried into St Enodoc church nestled in the dunes.
Once buried in sand now bedecked with flower.
We came here for evening prayer and to unpick spiritual runes.

This tiny church.
Once rejected.
Now a keystone of search.
And which flourishes, thirty of us today were collected.

And here tarry awhile beside John Betjeman’s grave.
And think on what can save.

PENTIRE POINT

I walked slowly up to high Pentire Point, the wind teasingly cold.
Two hundred feet below me the sea surged, waves were crashing.
I pause on rocks where Laurence Binyon wrote his poem, They shall not grow old.
It has been a good time from historically tragic Port Quin walking.

The sea is implacable, beautiful , impervious , so in that sense surely unthreatening.
The sea does not react to ones emotions, it just is.
I find it inspiring yes but still frightening.
You cannot forget or deny it or so close it miss.

I know you are powerful, what you conceive you can perform.
Am I the man who obscured your design.
I am old , dimly can I see the approaching storm.
The sleet and rain are a fast approaching blue line.

Then I look at the cliff top plaque again. As they that are left grow old.
Our life and it’s sorrows should not be a story untold.

ST MICHAEL’S MOUNT

Water cascading over the causeway.
In England’s far South West mist and rain rolling in.
Here the sea will never be kept entirely at bay.
The Westerly wind scraping the skin.

I walk through the Terrace Gardens, a riot of colours.
Indian shot, tree aeonium, blue aster, bigfoot geranium, guernsey lily.
I miss my box of watercolours.
But how could I do justice to this with my hands so chilly.

The crowds walk up to the castle.
All is bustle and interest.
I wonder if people wonder in all this hassle.
What this place was born to witness.

That once this was a priory dedicated to the Guardian Angel St Michael.
From Monastery to Castle besieged and tourist haven a thousand years is but a cycle.

The Lord led her and taught her and kept her as the apple of his eye.
Like an eagle spreading its wings, he took her up and bore her on his shoulders.
Therese felt herself to be so low yet he raised her so high.
For one so weak, so great a love for the Lord in her smoulders.

If anyone is a very little one let them come to me.
She was in her own estimate utterly little and weak.
You do not have to be a hero to be able to see.
You do not have to take great steps to be able to seek.

There is the great way.
Of scholarship or martyrdom.
There is the little way.
Of seeing God in a speck of flowered dust, in one small petal of a geranium.

When she said we were children, our parents loved us as much when asleep or awake.
She as much as any martyr gave her life in her quiet way for our sake.