Camino Poems (Work in progress)

In the fields

Gods are like crows.
Or perhaps,
crows are like gods:
sharp, voracious,
at once jet black and iridescent;
quarrelsome lovers of shiny things;
loyal and unforgetting, even unto generations;
gift takers, gift givers,
thieves, both transactional and just;
raucous, proud, loud,
grating out their blessings,
and their warnings, without song;
messengers, gossip-mongers, auguries;
hawk-drivers, rain-bringers, scavengers;
harvesters of life, and death.
A part in every story,
everywhere we are.

Un-blythe spirit, hail!

I carry with me the melancholy
of knowing how to name the periwinkle,
and the cowslip, and the scent
of may in a hedgerow,
with my eyes closed against the sun.

These recognitions place me
within a life, mostly, now, unlived;
that was for me, already,
only a childhood-holiday homage
of my parents’ youth.

I remember the pride of knowing
all the country weeds;
my delight in how it pleased them
that I cared to learn, and share,
these no-longer-ordinary things:
not just petal memories of different days,
tap roots that bind the soil,
and will not die.

I no longer trust the throughline
of this country knowledge.
In a world that does not mark the spring,
I only feel the changing of the times:
the wilting of a daisy chain of lives.

In an age where children,
who have never heard a skylark,
must still parse Shelley for a passing grade,
this knowing has no meaning
to anybody, anymore.

*With thanks to PB Shelley

To my young friends

I can do nothing for you, anymore.
My doing is done.
It is put away, with my one remaining
smart jacket and my kitten heels.
(I did my doing in different times).
They’ll still do for a funeral,
as the need arises.
All I have for you now
are words and time.
I can proffer you advice,
but not advancement.
I can give you presence,
if not presents.

We will all soon see if it is enough.

Forest Bathing

The mountain on my left,
the river, old and silent, on my right,
the trees between, bright with spring
and the early morning light.
The sun, just climbing above the cliffs,
has not yet dried the leaves,
much less the ground.

And I am underwater in the trees;
in the coolness of mosses,
the sharp and twisting currents of the ferns;
a rippling green light overhead
and all around, a green
that seems to reflect back
more light than it drinks;
the froth of dandelion clocks,
telling no time but now.

And I am washed by birdsong;
the rhythm of yaffle and cuckoo,
the chink of chaffinch,
the eddies of dunnock and thrush.
The wind stirs, and last night’s rain
and blossom petals fall together,
silver-black and white along the road,
like a celebration.

And now come winking starbursts
and a moment of sky as water in the sun.
And day has come.

This is a spring
that is still raw dough,
moist and rising,
not yet baked into summer
by days of sun,
though this will come.

I have packed away the parts of my father
that served me so very well, in youth:
“a mind like a steel trap”,
so many colleagues said, of both of us,
in different decades, different worlds.
They have gone into the drawer
with my jacket and dress shirts:
too good to throw away, to meaningful to gift,
Perhaps even to be brought out,
for some future occasion. Maybe:
”God is good and life is long”.

Although I pride myself on packing light,
I bring with me the burden of my losses,
not upon my back, but in my chest.

I feel them the heaviest in the sweetest times:
in the scent of elderflower, that takes me straight
to childhood-summer hours,
chasing grasshoppers and ladybirds
at the allotments, while my father planted beans;
when the dogwood flowers
and I recall the rending, the ending
of my first true love,
or when the thyme is heady, heavy with bees,
and the sun is warm and low,
and all of those with whom I would have shared
a glass and stories into dusk are gone,
some from all the days, others just from mine.

My heart is full of them, and there is room for more:
as many more as Time and Life allow.

The path less walked

Two trails diverged in a green wood,
and sorry we could not take both
we whipped out our app and chose
(unsure, but reckless, early on a sunny day)
the unmarked trail.

It was both sparsely blazed and untrodden.
Other pilgrims had preferred
the tamped and stony clarity of a forest track,
to the impression of a way, almost overgrown
with clover, with buttercups,
with sedges and with rye,
yet still suggested by the trees
and the edges of the eglantine.

We pushed ahead, our ankles drenched
in last-night’s rain, caught on leaf and bud;
through the hum of flies;
the rustle of small things in long grass,
scratching as we passed.
Crane flies went spindling. Wasps throbbed.
All was a profusion of small sounds
and burrs and catching seeds.

Then we burst through a cloud of midges,
biting and dancing in the thrall
of a rose and honeysuckle hedge:
all thorns and blood and sweetness…

And there we were, back,
upon the proper, gravel road.

*With thanks to Robert Frost

On the hills

Com trails cross the moon through,
in a one-blue, morning sky,
as if impatient with its lingering,
braised and melting in the warming day.
The lace, the tracery of grasses,
twining and braiding in the breeze
that rises with the sun as the air sheers,
are mesmerising to the eye.
Lythe, they deny any camera:
requiring presence, not only attention;
their intricate, near-silence fluid,
as the sound of birds, noisy in the trees,
whose songs demand the opposite.

La Puy Way, May 2026