Spurned Goddess - Ted Walter

Let us consider earth, explore the ache
That comes from losing touch with where we've been.
Fifteen billion years it took to make

the Earth from star-stuff, us. And now we take:
we overfish, we tamper with the gene.
Let us consider Earth, explore the ache.

Residual pesticides, a lifeless lake.
A forest burns to ash. Remember green?
Fifteen billion yeaars it took to make.

Forged first in cosmic fire we cannot fake
a species. Dead, it does not rise again.
Let us consider Earth, explore the ache.

Spurned Goddess, will our children learn to speak
her name in hope, honour her return?
Fifteen billion years it took to make

this peopled planet. Was it a mistake?
Will we find the slate can be wiped clean?
Let us consider Earth, explore the ache.
Fifteen billion years it took to make.

The South Downs, Ted Walter

Long before names, before we thought of naming,
seas roared through, dividing Sussex Downs
from what is France: carving through millennia
of laid down life – this chalk, these flints, the land
we came to know as home. Long before that
the cosmos dreamed of consciousness, filled space
with elements that one day would lead to us.

Now every grain of soil, each artefact,
the air we breathe, the sweep of shadowed grass,
directly links us to our common birth,
and every crafted work, each photograph,
each stone we gather from a storm-washed beach,
points always back, reminds us of the time
it took to get here, step by step.

Self-portrait, David Whyte, 1992

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

Loaves and Fishes - David Whyte 1999

This is not
the age of information.

This is not
the age of information.

Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.

This is the time
of loaves
and fishes.

People are hungry
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.

A vision - Wendell berry

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility