Ian's Poems

Ian's Poems It began as scribblings after hearing Dylan Thomas recite his poetry on a BBC recording.

Then being encouraged to write poetry, when I was 17, by an inspirational, student, English teacher whose name I forget.

06/15/2026

My Angel friend

A name that lingers,
Like sunlight slipping through silvered clouds.
Your smile, a soft sunbeam,
Shining with the sweetness of spring,
Never fading,
Always a bloom in the garden of my heart.

I remember your laugh,
A river rippling through the quiet corners
Of our shared days,
A symphony of silver notes,
Swaying like willows in a whispering wind.
In your eyes, a kind of knowing,
Gentle and glowing,
The deep, delicate dance of distant stars,
Suspended in time,
Silent yet speaking of ages.

You walked through life,
A tender thread of twilight,
Like a leaf, light and luminous,
Caught in the calm cadence of the breeze,
Graceful, yet never still,
Always weaving through the spaces of our souls.

When time took you away,
It didn’t steal your light -
It only scattered it across a new sky,
One where the stars are boundless,
And your spirit shimmers
In the sacred spaces between moments,
A serenade of love,
Forever fluttering in the folds of memory.

My Angel friend,
You remain the warmth in the wind,
The sweetness in the air,
A soft symphony of love
Woven into the fabric of forever.

Sunrise Over Tideswell Returning home after Ann's funeral via a morning walk up the Slancote.Ann of Tidza.Ann’s gone.And...
06/12/2026

Sunrise Over Tideswell

Returning home after Ann's funeral via a morning walk up the Slancote.

Ann of Tidza.

Ann’s gone.
And Tidza feels that absence in the frost,
In mornings that go crackling through the town,
In every glance that checks the Co-op door,
As though she may return with one more word.
She came to suit this strong limestone country,
This wind-scoured plateau, wet with old rain,
To drystone walls, to winters hard and bare,
To that great church that stands as if it means.
She belonged to shops and cafés tucked close
Within the ancient limestone streets and gennels,
Where gossip ran ahead of weather fronts,
And kindness passed from hand to hand uncounted.
She minded my children when they were small.
They loved her then; and in some quiet way
We, too, became her people, part of home.
Such kindness does not leave the heart in peace.
It stays. It sits down after all have gone,
A chair still warm in a room emptied out.
She loved the drama too, the village play,
The Community Players in Congos’ Hall,
The bright good fuss, the make-believe made local,
That old small magic of pretending well
And somehow telling truth through borrowed lines.
A cheerful face.
A generous heart.
A woman who held more together
Than even she could know.
And I think still
Of those old words on the temple’s portal:
Quam Delecta Tabernacula —
How lovely are thy dwelling places.
Ann became one.
A shelter.
A warm door
In weather that would bite.
Now Tidza moves on, as towns must do,
Yet carries one light missing in its lanes.
And dales, in their blunt, beautiful old way,
Hold her name now among their craggy echoes.

06/07/2026

Searching

Seek
And you shall find.

So I searched
With the small lantern
Of my appetite
Held up against the dark.
And yes
Something came.
Not a neat answer.
Not a polished pearl.
Not a sermon with a clean surplice.

More like
A door unlatched
In the wall of my certainty,
A shaking in the ribs
Of my tidy little world.

Finding,
I discovered,
Does not sit still.
It dives.
It disturbs.
It pulls the floorboards up
And asks the old questions
To dance again.

The cage of my paradigm
Began to rattle
Like a loose gate
In winter wind.
Then,
Just when the mind
Had nearly learned the shape
Of its new sky,
A larger sky opened.
Vast.
Strange.
Bright with unsolved things.
And understanding
Was not an ending,
But a beginning
With its sleeves rolled up.

So I kept going.
Searching.
Because every found thing
Becomes a doorway
To fresh bewilderment,
And every bewilderment
May be
The first ache
Of a greater creation.

06/04/2026

I Remember When the Men Came to Dig Up the Road

I remember
When the men came
To dig up the road.
It was always summer then,
As memory keeps it...
Blue sky,
School holidays,
The town washed clean
By sun
And innocence.

They arrived
In a lorry
Packed with spades,
Smiles,
Winks,
And the sacred clutter
Of the working day:
Tattoos,
Roll-ups,
Wellies,
Weathered faces
Creased like old maps.
They looked
As if they had stepped
Out of some older England,
Some older earth,
With black donkey jackets
And hands
Rough as bark,
Calloused by faith
In stubborn things.

One wore a beret
That had, no doubt,
Seen off bullets
Somewhere far away.
One was missing a finger.
One carried a scar
Like a sentence
Never finished.
And always
There was tea -
Mucky mugs
Frothed at the rim,
Balanced on the edge of the world -
While one man
Sat on a stool
Beneath a tarpaulin tent,
Smoking,
Spilling instructions
Into the dust.

The brazier breathed.
The picks rang out.
Tarmac split
With a shuddering groan.
Slabs gave way.
The smell of tar
Rose hot and bitter,
And underneath it
The older smell -
Soil,
Wet stone,
Buried rain,
The ghost of ploughland
Penned for years
Beneath suburban certainty.

And we children
Stood on gates,
On fences,
On the thin bright borders
Between play and history,
Peering down
Into those wounds in the road
As if they were
Windows.
We watched like archaeologists
With grazed knees,
Our brows furrowed
With borrowed importance,
As if every broken layer
Might yield gold,
Or empire,
Or at least
A good story.

Heinrich Schliemanns
With Geordie accents -
Digging,
Hoping,
Misplacing treasure
And finding, instead,
The ordinary miracle
Of what had been here
All along.
The road was only road to them.
To us
It was a throat
Opened to the past.
And the men,
Those sunburnt masons of memory,
Kept digging
As if history were nothing
But a buried thing
Waiting to be found
By the right hands.

06/03/2026

Profiteering Prophets.

The old prophet did not sell light.
He carried it through smoke, through mockery, through the hard hands of a hard crowd.
The new one shines too clean, too loud, too pleased with the sound of applause.
One speaks for truth.
One speaks for tickets.
And the silence between them aches.

05/31/2026

Trinity Morning

Before bells.
Before bustle.
Before the bright busyness of the world.
Mist moves across meadow and mind.
A blackbird breaks the blue hush.
Father:
The fountain behind all beginnings.
Son:
The scarred sun rising in the heart.
Spirit:
The soft wind through waiting branches.
Three.
Yet one.
Silence is not empty.
It is the still pool
Where Heaven leans over
And Earth
Looks back.

Conveyor Belt at Montserrat Masses rolled pastlike items on a conveyor belt.Neat. Efficient. Forgettable.And I wonderedh...
05/25/2026

Conveyor Belt at Montserrat

Masses rolled past
like items on a conveyor belt.
Neat. Efficient. Forgettable.
And I wondered
how far we have wandered
from the old meaning of priest.
Not CEO.
Not performer.
Not religious manager.
Something older. Rougher.
A man among the people,
holding memory together
like an old shepherd
mending a wall in winter
to keep the sheep from the dark.
Somewhere along the way
we mistook movement
for meaning.

Homage to Catalonia (Placa de George Orwell)I sit in the squareWith your name on the wall,In the sun-dazed noise of Barc...
05/24/2026

Homage to Catalonia

(Placa de George Orwell)

I sit in the square
With your name on the wall,
In the sun-dazed noise of Barcelona,
Where stone remembers
More than the tourists do.
Homage to Catalonia
Is not only a book here.
It is dust in the light,
A warning in the paving,
A human voice
Refusing to be polished
Into obedience.
The cafés hum.
The city goes on.
A man can still sit still
Beneath a famous name
And feel history
Breathing through the cracks—
Sharp,
Wry,
Unforgiving,
And oddly kind
To anyone
Who still believes
Truth matters.

05/22/2026

Gatwick Mass in F Minor

I am listening to Byrd
In the departures lounge
At Gatwick
On the start of a Bank Holiday weekend.

The flight is delayed.
Of course it is.
The universe loves a queue
And a small act of humiliation.

The hydration station
Offers me water
That tastes
As if it has travelled through
Three broken pipes,
A mop bucket,
And the opinion of a urinal.

Around me
My fellow travellers
Are frayed,
Rumpled,
In this kraaled chaos,
Half-risen from their own private purgatories.

A child is wailing
With the conviction that this is not a good idea,
Someone in another language shouts into his phone,
A man stares at the screen
As if his soul might board before his suitcase,
A woman has the look
Of someone who has already forgiven no one.

I remind myself:
Image of God.
Image of God.
Image of God.

It is difficult.
Especially with a sandwich costing
The price of a minor sin.

So I retreat
Into the F Minor
Of a Tudor Mass
Where mercy has good posture,
Where sorrow is ancient
And beautifully ordered,
Where even delay
Can kneel.

And for a moment
Above the wheeled luggage,
The plastic coffee cups,
The fluorescent glare,
The little kingdom of panic,
There is harmony.
Not peace exactly.
More like
The thin bright thread
Of heaven
Stitching itself
Through airport chaos
With a needle
Old as prayer.

05/18/2026

Sounds weird...

Then it became apparent,
Real.
Prayer begins not
As a match striking darkness,
Or a lonely man
Trying to wake a sleeping God.
The music was already playing.
Laughter already moved through the halls of heaven.
Somewhere beyond the thin wall of the visible,
Saints were lifting their ancient hymns
Like lanterns against eternity.

You simply entered it.
Like opening the door of an eternal feast
And feeling warmth strike your face in winter.
Like stepping into a cathedral at dusk
While incense climbs slowly through gold light.
The angels did not pause when you arrived.
God did not look up in surprise.
The mercy was already flowing.
The welcome had already been prepared.

And all my life, perhaps,
I thought prayer was shouting upwards
Through ceilings of silence,
When all along
Heaven stood open beside me
Like the sea beside a child
Who never learned he could walk in.

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