STOP
Every child
Should be able to grow up
Without a gun
Shooting at them.
Every child
Should be able to grow up
Without a bomb
Dropping on their head
Making them dead.
Every child
Belongs to love,
So let us join heart to heart
And love them.
© Gwen Grant
It has been very cold here, lately, and the two cats that
are around the fields and the garden, one our marmalade
cat and one his sworn enemy, the black cat, are so lithe
and graceful in their hunting, that I often stop to watch them.
The black cat is a stray which we feed and have put him a
bed in the greenhouse. Our cat is so jealous, he will stand
guard over the food put out for the black cat until he’s called
They both try hard but are never within sight of catching a
bird. If our cat brings in one of the little brown field mice, he
always drops it and then, with it being so small, we have to find it.
Not easy. The last one hid in the round opening for the hoover hose
and took us hours to find. Let out into the garden, these tiny
mice vanish in an instant down the sides of the path where they all
seem to live.
EARLY CATS
If you walk the long grass in the morning
When it’s white with frost
And grey with the visiting clouds,
You see the cats.
They stalk the robin and the doves
Come from a nearby garden.
Those snake quiet cats
Slither through their silent world,
To spring from the stickle grass
With a startling coloured grace.
Those cats!
They go hungry this morning
Because a thin black twig
Fell from a wintered tree,
Frightening the red chested robin
And the gentle doves.
And those quick cats,
Those early morning hunters,
Wailed their anger to the fading moon.
© Gwen Grant
AND WHEN NIGHT COMES
And when night comes
And darkness drifts over the earth
And fields vanish
And hedgerows become blurs of colour,
And the falling frost
Lays a bridal veil on the darkened grass,
And the lovely trees,
And all trees are lovely,
Fill the darkness with their magnificence
And their little inked-in leaves
Chuckle and rustle and whisper of the love
Shown for us in the drenching beauty of the night,
And the thin, thin beam of moonlight
Shines down like hope shining
Through the darkness of all those lost lives,
Well, then, that anxious heart
Staring through the midnight glass
Should find rest.
But those ears are deaf,
Those eyes blind to the radiance of the night,
Seeing only the darkness of the hour,
And then, for it is then, the frightened,
The fractured heart cries aloud,
‘O God, my God, where are you?’
And as the dying echoes of those trembling sounds
Vanish into the vanished fields
And sink into the blurry hedgerows,
The little inked-in leaves rustle and chuckle
And whisper those eternal words of love.
‘I am the light to your darkness,
I am the hope to your despair.
I am the peace to your pain.
I am the love you can rest on.’
© GWEN GRANT
When I was a child, I used to watch rain beetles struggling across puddles of water left after the rain. It would take ages for a beetle to get back to dry land. Sometimes, one or the other of us would drop a blade of grass into the water and the beetle would instantly seize upon it and use it but blade of grass or no blade of grass, they never gave up. Their hard shell like backs were this most beautiful glittering blue.
RAIN BEETLE
Like a blue iridescent rain beetle
Struggling across a puddle of water,
They tried to set up camp
In the middle of an ocean.
Storms battered them,
Winds drowned them,
Sweeping their tent onto the sand
Where they huddled, trembling,
Watching silent movies of people hurrying
Across the canvas.
Sometimes reaching out a hand
To grab an elbow. And missing.
Sometimes sticking out a foot
To trip the hurrying image up,
Meaning to catch them. But failing.
Yet the sea was always singing
Of the sunsets it had seen,
Of moonlight glittering,
Of all the places it had been visiting,
But, especially, of how the cold, clear water
Was perfect for paddling.
Until, tiny splash by tiny splash,
Like little iridescent rain beetles
Fearlessly crossing a puddle of water,
They were, at the last, swimming.
© Gwen Grant
From my bedroom window, I can see stretches of corn fields and walking on the paths alongside these fields, I can always hear the corn fields whispering. These whispers sound so private and yet because the sound fills the air, they also seem meant for everyone who is there to listen.
That particular night, which was cool and quiet, leaning on the windowsill, with the yellow moon picking up the gold of the corn, took me back to when I was a girl, helping with the harvest, remembering how those thin golden spears prickled when they came into contact with skin. There was an enchantment there then and it’s still there now.
As I stood there, I thought of cornfields and other fields of grain growing all over the world and it seemed to me that these fields with their precious harvests were as involved with the world as we are. If that was the case, then, for the first time, I knew that the corn was whispering its love and hope and concern for the world, exactly as we do ourselves.
THE CORNFIELDS AT PRAYER
So the long cool night begins
And through the quiet darkness
I thought I heard the corn stalks talk
Of all the whispered night-time prayers
Drifting over the fields,
Setting the corn to its own prayer whispering.
Then I heard the corn stalks talk
Of all the little living prayers.
The lovely hares leaping
And the small creatures seeking
The bread of life in the earth beneath them,
And quiet lovers walking the poppied grasses,
Breathing promises and prayers
Into the listening darkness.
I know I heard the corn stalks talk
Of the old traditions of hay-making and stooking,
Of sowing and reaping,
Of the laughter of bare armed innocents driven
to distraction
By those thin shining spears prickling and stippling,
Until they almost longed to leave
The praying cornfields whispering.
I expect, though, that the corn stalks talk
Of different things
On the bleak plains of grief, for instance,
Or on the long shades of despair,
Taking for their own the bone bare prayer
Of the suffering heart bleeding into the suffering air.
All is loss and lamentation,
Until they sing of a strong and eternal love
That is forever sowing and forever reaping
Love at the beginning and love at the ending.
So the prayers of the world are heard
In the whispering cornfields prayer.
©Gwen Grant
Poems by Gwen Grant 