My reply to Tagore

Separated by a century I reply to a poem....

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? 
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
(RabindranathTagore,  The Gardener, 1915)


A reader replies

Great bard of Bengal, now almost one hundred years since those lines,
I, your reader, descendant of the Raj that you despised, living in a world so different to your day,
read of your garden. My heart leaps! 
I fling wide my garden door. The flowers, bright birdsong and fragrances speak now as they spoke in living joy 
that still rises with the sap and sings of divinity in subtle colours, so pale. My spring morning:
that same elation from floral memories and golden clouds.




(John Butterfield 2012)

Prayer

by John Butterfield

Beating your head

on a rock

can surely be easier

and more satisfying

than this endless round of

asking

petitioning

hammering

and yet never seeming

to get in the door

no matter how hard the battering

standing always on the portal

in the hope

that the householder will

someday emerge

and reward his persistent carollers

if only for their persistence!

God Present and Speaking

By John Butterfield

God is present as we confer:

in the conflicting voices

struggling to consensus.

God is present in small voices

contending with the volume

of the powerful shouting.

God is present where principles

can't allow convergence or

ambiguous common mind.

God is present in argument:

weeping with the defeated,

rejoicing with the victor.

God is love and God is justice.

When love and justice triumph

then God has spoken indeed.

Creed

by John Butterfield






I believe in God
the father almighty
most of the time
but sometimes
I wonder
what life would be like
if I didn't.

If there was no moral origin to the universe.
If there were no origin in love
and no destination in love
just a rabid struggle for supremacy
without rules
in the short years of life.

If we lived and accumulated
and bonked and fought
and hid and cried
knowing that nothing meant anything
and all was ephemeral floss.

If the big brother house
were the model for life
and the animal instincts
we have mostly civilised
became rampart serpents
in the evolutionary struggle
of not so sociable
social Darwinianism.

As we trudge onward
on our return journey
to the primal slime....

I'd prefer to believe in God!


(The image accompanying this entry is one of the series of engravings by William Blake illustrating the story of Job)