There are times in our life where we need courage and we need perspective and we need others' words. And I do remember a time when a friend of mine was going through a kind of extended trauma, extended difficulty, and you accompany that person through as a kind of companion, although you can't experience what they are experiencing. And there was a realization I had as she was going through these difficult months that she was actually becoming much more real as time went by. But of course, if you're a good friend, you'd keep this to yourself, because the last thing a person wants to hear is that the awful things they're experiencing are actually good for them. But I did go aside and write this poem for her. In a way, I did want to give her the gift of another perspective, and this was the way I did it, called The Journey. Above the mountains, the geese turn into the light again.

[01:04]

Above the mountains, the geese turn into the light again, painting their black silhouettes on an open sky. Sometimes, sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you. Sometimes, sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you. Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart, sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out. Someone, someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. You are not leaving. You are not leaving. You are arriving. Above the mountains, the geese turn into the light again, painting their black silhouettes

[02:07]

on an open sky. Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens. Sometimes everything. Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you. Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart, sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out. Someone, someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. You are not leaving. You are not leaving. You are not leaving. You are arriving. The poem The Journey is full of the imagery of the Pacific Northwest, of the United States, where I now make my home. But I grew up in a very different landscape, the northern landscapes of England, of West

[03:11]

Yorkshire, of moorlands and endless horizons and hills and valleys, and a particular solidity of architecture, gritstone architecture, and in many ways gritstone people in that fiercely independent and fiercely stubborn part of the world. There's a particular relationship with death in Yorkshire. There's a kind of intimacy with death. You feel it in the enormous and imposing old gravestones in the old chapel graveyards, and you feel it in the humor around death and the stories that are told about the dead in a loving kind of way. And so this poem, Yorkshire, begins with a whole intimacy between the landscape and the dead who now live beneath the surface of that land, Yorkshire.

[04:15]

I love the dead and their quiet living underground, and I love the rain on my face. And in childhood, I loved the wind on the moors that carried the rain and that carried the ashes of the dead like a spring-sowing of memory stored through all the winter's past. In the dark November onset of the winter in which I was born, I was set down in the falls of that land as if I belonged there. And in that first night under the evening shadow of the moors, and most likely with the wind in the west as it would be for most of my growing life, I was breathing in the tang and troubles of that immense and shadowing sky as I was breathing the shadows of my mother's body, learning who and what was close and how I could belong. What great and abstract power lent me to those particularities I cannot know, but I know my body and soul were made from that belonging.

[05:17]

Yorkshire is as hard as a spade-edge, but the underpinnings of the people and the land in which we lived flowed and turned like the river I knew in my valley. The blunt solidity of my elders floated like mountains on the slow but fluid lava of their history. But on this solid yet floating land, I must have been as Irish as my mother, and amid the straight certainties of my father's Yorkshire, I felt beneath the damp moor's horizon the curved invisible lines that drew everything together, the underground stream of experience that could not be quarried or brought to the surface, but only doused, felt, followed or intuited from above. Poetry, then, became the key my way underground into what was hidden by the inept but daily coverings of grown-up surface speech. Something sacred in the land was left unsaid in people's mouth, but was written into our inheritance. And that small volume of Tom Gunn's youthful poetry from the library's high tiptoe shelf

[06:27]

was the angel's gift to me. Opened and read in my young boy's hands, it revealed the first code I sought and needed to begin speaking what I felt had been forgotten. For stretch I reached again along the spines and touched another, other life, pulling down into my hands the hawk in the rain, Ted Hughes' dark book full of northern omens, hovering above my own child's shadow on the ground, my heart and mind caught in those written claws and whisked into the sky the first rush of poetry's extended arms, a complete abduction of my person. The first rush of poetry's extended arms, a complete abduction of my person. That was the beginning, the first line on the open page of my new life. The rest would be more difficult, but that was the soil in which I would grow, and that

[07:28]

was the life into which I would grow, blessed and badgered by the northern sweeps of light and dark and the old entanglements to which I was born, always, always on the wuthering the gifts and stories and poetry of the unknown and unvisited dead who brought their history to the world in which I grew. Orphaned by poetry from my first home, to find a greater home out in the world, I wandered from that land and began to write, youthfully and insubstantially, slowly making myself real and seeable by writing myself into an original world which had borne and grown me so generously, belonging to one old land so much by birth, I learn each day now what it means to be born into a new land and new people. The open moor of the American mind, gusted and shaken by imagined new worlds and imagined new clouds and the fears and griefs of the peopled and unknowable distances of a vast

[08:31]

land, and still, amidst everything, an innocence which survives here untouched amidst a difficult inheritance. Let my history, then, let my history, then, be a gate unfastened to a new life and not a barrier to my becoming. Let my history, then, be a gate unfastened to a new life and not a barrier to my becoming. Let me find the ghosts and histories and barely imagined future of this world, and let me now have the innocence to grow just as well in shadow or light by what is gifted in this land as the one to which I was born. And let me now have the innocence to grow just as well in shadow or light by what is gifted in this land as the one to which I was born. The other inherited landscape in my family through my mother was the landscape of Ireland

[09:36]

and, of course, the landscape of its history, which comes down to you through the blood and through osmosis. And so the events in Ireland and the events of contemporary history, particularly around the difficulties and troubles in Northern Ireland and the awfulness of that situation, I've always followed very closely. And there was a moment during the time of the writing of The House of Belonging where things had been going quite well in the initial peace process, and then due to a combination of obtuseness and political cowardice on the part of the British government, it seemed like the peace process was being thrown away for no reason. And I came to a kind of apprehension that the essential qualities that would actually bring Northern Ireland to peace would have nothing to do with rational discussion, but we would almost be like an emergent form that was greater than any of the forms of desire

[10:42]

that any of the particular populations wanted for themselves in Northern Ireland. It would just be time for peace, and there would be almost like a magical healing of the place. And I transposed this image to this old Irish image and this old Gypsy image of the horse whisperer, the man or woman who simply by whispering closely into a horse's ear can calm the beast and then work charms and magic on this enormous and powerful creature. So the horse whisperer, which is an attempt to look at what needs to occur in a mythical kind of way for peace in Ireland. The horse whisperer. Ireland's the ghost horse, all right, rearing out of history like the wraith herd seen at Fenoa. Ireland's the ghost horse, all right, rearing out of history like the wraith herd seen at

[11:47]

Fenoa. After the events of Bloody Sunday and after the peace thrown away and the guns still hidden and the red hand taking the ghostly reins again, we saw the tiny twinkled lights of violence from every townland. Looked in the lamp of one another's eyes, felt that animal presence riding the night fields again, and the encroaching loss of control in the village that we knew heralded the ancient panic. So now, so now they were waiting in the autumn rain as they used to wait by the crossroads, gathered on both sides to see what was anticipated to be a miracle. Though at first, everyone averted their eyes from what they knew to be in these times too old and too innocent a magic to believe in. The beast somehow caught and led between everyone and the man waiting in the hushed hysteria. His mouth moving close to the ghost ear, they saw a hand pass over the twitched shoulder

[12:49]

and felt the first frightened shudder of the horse pass through the crowd like a wave breaking. Then they strained to hear what they knew could not be heard. In the silence, they could only wait, their split hypnotic faith now joined involuntary as they watched the calmed violence fall away, caught in the animal body of his first word. Then they strained to hear what they knew could not be heard. In the silence, they could only wait, their split hypnotic faith now joined involuntary as they watched the calmed violence fall away, caught in the animal body of his first word. Another landscape which resides inside the geographical inheritance of my own history is the landscape of the northwestern part of England, particularly of the Lake District.

[13:59]

And it's a place that I often think of, a landscape that I feel unutterably at home in and a place that I quite often pine for because it seems that no matter how many years as an place there are certain experiences of growing into a place as a child that make it yours and give you a blood inheritance with the place. And the Lake District in the northwestern part of England is certainly that for me. It's also in my mind a landscape of friendship, a place where I cemented a very close companionship with my reading partner and climbing partner and good friend Edward Waits. And I wrote this poem as a way of evoking a period in our lives of a few weeks concentrated climbing in the summer of 1986, which seemed to be one of those

[15:06]

entrance times, one of those threshold times, one of those halcyon periods that you would measure your happiness against for the rest of your life. And we had a particularly rewarding experience both together getting to know one another, apprenticing ourselves to rock climbing, which I'd neglected since my early 20s, and coming to love again the Lake District landscape together. And this is a poem called Edward. Edward. There was a picture Edward used to show me of his father who died almost at the moment of my first meeting with Edward and whom I never met, and this is referred to in the beginning of the poem. Edward, aquiline yet youthful, resembling still the photograph you showed me of the father I could never meet. I see your face now set

[16:08]

against the evening glow of hills, your lit profile to me well loved and familiar, like each Cumbrian crag and steep to which I brought you that first summer of our friendship. I hear your laugh now in the quiet dark of a fell side, our limbs tired from a thousand feet of rock and summer heat, the gold light of fireflies haunting the trees below, and the grounds embracing warmth like a loving dream. No talk but the sound of our feet on the quiet path to the valley floor. We live in the shadow of those memories as we sometimes live in the shadow of those with extraordinary gifts. Sometimes the days are generous and miraculous in what they can bestow, and sometimes a life must be measured against a certain remembered epoch when the veil between heaven and earth was thin as gossamer, and the shared experience close to the angels. For I felt our winged flight above the valley floors, roped in one another's care, brought us to that earned

[17:11]

necessity which we look back to and name as love, and we know now that out of that towered landscape of rock and cascading fell we forged our friendship for a lifetime. Each warm summer then for years we'd take the long drive north talking together, letting speech and renewed friendship merge the year we'd spent apart. Our voices warm and our eyes following the sun's low track in the evening sky until our stories grew darker and quieter like the evening ground, and the shape of those hills once more resembled the silhouette of our familiar and imagined arrival. Our silence in the car by then, a pure anticipation of that heaven of grey and likened stone to which we drove. The dormant and sleeping ropes of perlon coiled in the back, waiting to be unwound into the upper light of a Cumbrian cliff face, you at one end, me at the other, two minute figures intent on their ascent

[18:16]

into the shadows formed between the sunlit upper roofs of rock, ourselves exultant and glowing in the evening light, far above the sheep walk of the waiting ground. For it seems to me that always, even under grey and solid cloud, our stalwart and quiet resolution on the journey up, watching the rain on the windscreen, would earn its just reward in weekend sun. The great amphitheatres of rock become our silent stage, long climbs following the evening light for a thousand feet into the upper shadows of the coming night, for you and I, in my memory, are forever framed in sunlight, our newly youthful hearts full of that impossible and vertical world we learned to call our own. Now, now, putting down the phone, looking east through the window, over these once foreign, now familiar mountains toward you, your voice receding into darkness over six thousand miles

[19:17]

of land and turbulent water, I feel you at a great crossroads of movement, hesitant only for a moment before this new and unknown life shaping before your eyes, and I remember you intent, eyes narrowed and searching, watching the curve of the cliff above you, one arm kept limp beside your waist, saving its strength while the other holds you balanced, feet barely touching rock, the black edge of your climbing shoes smearing across the airy nothing of a wafer ledge, you tiptoe across the hanging arch and disappear from view. I watch the rope pay out into sunlight and wreathed mist, and see your reappearance in the columned roofs above, the way you love to work slowly up a long groove, escaping through a daylight gap barely visible below, while I paid out slowly the lengths of patient rope. I watch you now, and mark your ascent into this other

[20:18]

and difficult territory, each step your own, but me still careful to watch you and your progress, the rope between us like a living bond, and you, thankfully unaware, my brother, intent on the passage, not seeing in the closeness of that living earth the terrors of the height to which you step, and you, and you, thankfully unaware, my brother, intent on the passage, not seeing in the closeness of that living earth the terrors of the height to which you step. Sometimes it seems to me that we witness a friend's courage and we are just astonished and astonished and astounded by the steps they're taking and we're in awe somewhat of what they're about, and the last lines of that poem actually were dedicated to some very

[21:21]

fierce and courageous steps that my friend was taking at that time. It seems to me that friendship and those who are held in our affections live on for years after they've passed away, and certainly in my own family there was a person who I never met but who was a big part, I felt, of my father's inner life and whose story was passed down and now has been passed down to my own son, and that was the story of my uncle Dougie, and Dougie was my father's older brother, a brother who lost his life on the beaches of the Normandy landings. He died on Sword Beach on the 6th of June, and there was an awful hiatus after he went missing whereby my grandparents, his parents, simply did not know where he was or if he was safe,

[22:25]

and it was three months or so before they finally, through the help of their local member of parliament, had news that he had died, and I think of the sheer grief and terror of that time, both of not knowing and of finally finding through this bald and austere telegraph that a person who was very close and at the centre of your life no longer exists. One of the abiding memories my father had of Dougie was of him teaching him how to swim, and I think it's one of the last memories my father had before he marched off to war. Dougie. My uncle Dougie was killed on Sword Beach the 6th of June, 1944. My uncle Dougie was killed on Sword Beach the 6th of June, 1944, the cadence of the date like a slow chant in my father's mind

[23:28]

round the one central memory. Dougie taught him how to swim before he died. There are other words still said in unassuming reverence when our heads bend over the letters and you remake and relive the familiar loss as if forging his absence new again, each phrase measured by its careful placement in silence. His regiment, the East Yorkshires, I remember since childhood, and your grandma and grandpa didn't know for months, and now, in final silence, the bleak, unnatural, and late-arriving telegram folded and unfolded down fifty years. Sometimes, sometimes I know my father is a young boy again, and Dougie, teaching him how to swim, has suddenly turned away, as if in a dream, and looks toward France. And Dougie, teaching him how to swim, has suddenly turned away, as if in a dream, and looks toward France. Then he is low down in the water, near the horrific shore,

[24:30]

and my father's arms, so recently taught to live in that element, are reaching to pull him back. But the weighted surge of his elder brother's pack and rifle pull too much for the young boy's arms. But the weighted surge of his elder brother's pack and rifle pull too much for the young boy's arms. Now I remember my father's repeated weekend need for the ice-cold waters where he taught me how to swim, and his fatherly satisfaction at the slowly growing strokes that kept his son above water. I could not know what was being given then, not knowing how, as the years passed, we must always strike boldly to save those close to us. I could not know what was being given then, not knowing how, as the years passed, we must always strike boldly to save those close to us, hold them above the drowning water with our words

[25:31]

so they live again. If not the man, then the loved memory, father to son, brother to brother, hand dipping in the water toward shore, saving them now as we could not then, phrase by repeated phrase. I could not know what was being given then, not knowing how, as the years passed, we must always strike boldly to save those close to us, hold them above the drowning water with our words so they live again. If not the man, then the loved memory, father to son, brother to brother, hand dipping in the water toward shore, saving them now as we could not then, phrase by repeated phrase. There are times in every family life, it seems to me, when you would love to have the powers to freeze

[31:47]

time and place and to hold your children in one particular epoch of their childhood, where their whole essence seems to be completely present and exuberant, and the moments of the particular time of their growing is etched in your mind and in your heart. And this next poem is named after my son, Brendan, and it memorializes a moment which I glimpsed out of my garden gate, looking down the alleyway that leads down into the seaside town where I live, and I could see my son walking away from me down that alleyway with a fishing pole over his shoulder, and he was silhouetted against the sea and the sky, and in the sky there was Jupiter there, so bright above him, and it just seemed as his fishing rod swayed backwards and forwards across that expanse, that he was just about to huck that star and reel it in, and it seemed like just a remarkable moment. And there's a way in which

[32:53]

when you recognize your own child's silhouette against the sky, there is no other child that you could mistake them for. They have a particular slant of their body that is in unutterably theirs, and which as a parent is your own kind of territory of recognition that you would never give away for anything at all. So this is about the recognition of a child by a father, and it's called Brendan. Jupiter in the western sky and my son walking with the wide arc of the sea behind him. Jupiter in the western sky and my son walking with the wide arc of the sea behind him. Above his head the fishing pole bent as if to catch the day-lit star hovering on the broad horizon. The mere shape of him in silhouette I love so much, the whip of his wrist and rascal slant of his cap

[33:54]

like some hieroglyph of love I deciphered long ago and read to myself again and again. When I first heard him in the fluid darkness before his birth calling to his mother and I from the yet unknown and unseen world to which he belonged, I could not know that particular slant of his face or hand. I could not know how he would speak to me. Our love then was for an unknown promise, but just as strong as if the promise was known. May all our promises from now be just as strong as they are hidden, for no imagining could have shaped you, my boy, as I shape you now with the eyes of a fatherly love that must be shaped itself by your growing. If I was asked what my gift had been, I should turn to look at you, you and your beloved fishing pole, casting for a star. For no imagining could

[34:57]

have shaped you, my boy, as I shape you now with the eyes of a fatherly love that must be shaped itself by your growing. If I was asked what my gift had been, I should turn to look at you, you and your beloved fishing pole, casting, casting for a star. Speaking of shapes and silhouettes, there was one particularly solid shape and silhouette which I was actually commissioned to write about, and that was the shape of the 777 passenger jet, newly developed by Boeing and now being launched. I'd been working with Boeing during their senior executive program as a kind of creative consultant, and I was asked and commissioned to write a poem for the award of the Collier Trophy to the Boeing Company, marking the introduction of this new 777 passenger jet. And I took on the commission with some

[35:58]

trepidation, because there's nothing worse than a forced poem in this world. And I was sure that if I couldn't come up with anything decent at all, then I wouldn't actually hand anything in, in the end. And things actually worked out much better than I thought, and I managed to keep my integrity and honor and pass over something that I felt was both specifically about the plane and specifically about something larger at the same time. And I took as the title a phrase which had been used during the building of this remarkable machine, and that was the phrase working together. And Boeing had used this ordinary, everyday Anglo-Saxon combination of words in order to totally revitalize their workplace and get people working and talking together who previously had been in totally separate parts of the business and who rarely spoke to one another.

[37:04]

So the plane itself was not only a testament to the human ability for engineering, but also the human ability to work together in new ways, and I wanted to try and speak to that and about the invisible hand, in a sense, that works in that kind of communication. It's called working together. Working together. We shape ourself to fit this world, and by the world are shaped again. We shape ourselves to fit this world, and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible, working together in common cause to produce the miraculous. I am thinking of the way the intangible air passed at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we, so may we in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine, and look for the true shape of our own self by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.

[38:07]

We shape ourself to fit this world, and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible, working together in common cause to produce the miraculous. To produce the miraculous. I am thinking of the way the intangible air passed at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine. So may we, so may we in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine, and look for the true shape, and look for the true shape of our own self by forming it well to the great intangibles about us. Seems to me that we're surrounded by intangibles, by untouchable things, and there's also a corresponding portion of ourselves which is intangible and untouchable, and it's this

[39:11]

untouchability inside the human spirit that I feel poetry celebrates and courageously brings our hearing and our vision toward, so that we're forced to remember in a way what's right at the root of ourself. And I found myself writing this little piece called Loaves and Fishes, again one of these childhood images from my Sunday school bible lessons, appearing suddenly in my adult body, Loaves and Fishes. 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. This is not the age of information. This is not the age of information. Forget the news and the radio and

[40:15]

the blurred screen. This is the time of loaves and fishes. People are hungry and one good word is bread for a thousand. This is not the age of information. This is not. It is not. This is not. This is not the age of information. Forget the news and the radio and the blurred screen. This This is the time of loaves and fishes. People are hungry, and one good word is bread for a thousand. People are hungry, and one good word is bread for a thousand. I had a question there amidst all the thousands of channels of information that are available to us today about what the one good word would be that would make sense of all this chaos and complexity which surrounds us at this present moment in time. It seems to me that the real freedoms are always buried beneath the surface conversation,

[41:20]

the surface societal conversation at any one time. At the moment there's tremendous emphasis on the question of freedom as far as the number of channels you might have to choose on your television set to be able to choose from 500 channels, whereas I feel the real freedom is actually the freedom to switch the thing off and to sit in your own silence, which is not to leave the ability to communicate with others behind, but to have a place in your life so that at least sometimes you could know who is communicating and who is moving out in that world, who is speaking, who is writing, who is listening to the news. This poem is a form of communication, direct communication to a very intimate friend of mine, and that is the listener, the reader of my poetry who takes a thousand different forms. But there was a particular form of affection I felt as I was writing this piece, and in a sense

[42:29]

I was writing it to others, I was writing it to myself, and I was writing about the joyous remembrance that takes you out of your normal every day into something that's not extraordinary but just essentially a most ordinary you. So this is called This Poem Belongs to You. This poem belongs to you. This poem belongs to you and is already finished. This poem belongs to you and is already finished. It was begun years ago and I put it away knowing it would come into the world in its own time. This poem belongs to you and is already finished. It was begun years ago and I put it away knowing it would come into the world in its own time. In fact, you have already read it, and closing the pages of the book you are now abandoning the projects of the day and putting on your shoes and coat to take a walk. It has been long years since you felt like this.

[43:34]

It has been long years since you felt like this. You have remembered what I remembered when I first began to write. If poetry is an act of remembrance, it's also an act of coming awake to what is around you. And there was one period in the writing of this book towards the end as I was sitting and writing four, five, six hours a day in the white hot center of my own creative passion in a way which normally occurs right at the end of the book and where poems will be born whole on the page which months before might have taken weeks and weeks to bring to fruition. But there was a week there I was writing where in the background there was the tremendous stampeding of hooves and the neighing of horses. And there were four horses in the field next to my house that had

[44:36]

been released there from a much smaller field which all that week were traveling constantly and forever the perimeter in a kind of joyous exploration of this new and larger territory into which they'd been let. And they were full of a kind of exuberance that was quite amazing to witness. But I didn't really take full notice of them until I walked out of the house and a friend said to me, did you see the four horses Mr. Fossick let into the field last week? And I looked around and at that moment they sailed past the garden on the other side of the road in their field. And I was suddenly aware of how that energy and exuberance had filled my whole week of writing. So I walked right back up to my desk and wrote this piece in half an hour or so. It was called Four Horses and it's full of the exuberance and creativity of that end of summer

[45:38]

time. Four Horses. On Thursday the farmer put four horses into the cut hayfield next to the house. On Thursday the farmer put four horses into the cut hayfield next to the house. Since then the days have been filled with the sheen of their brown hides racing the fence edge. Since then I see their curved necks through the kitchen window sailing like swans past the pale field. Each morning their hooves fill my open door with an urgency for something just beyond my grasp and I spend my whole day in an idiot joy writing, gardening, and looking for it under every stone. I find myself wanting to do something stupid and lovely. I find myself wanting to do something and see him stand back laughing in his grizzled and denim wonder at my innocence.

[46:42]

I find myself wanting to run down First Street like an eight-year-old saying, hey, come and look at the new horses in Fossex Field. And I find myself wanting to ride into the last hours of this summer bareback and happy as the hooves of the days that drum toward me. I hear the whinny of their fenced and abandoned freedom and feel happy today in the field of my own making, writing non-stop, my head held high, ranging the boundaries of a birthright exuberance. I hear the whinny of their fenced and abandoned freedom and feel happy today in the field of my own making, writing non-stop, my head held high, ranging the boundaries of a birthright exuberance. During this period of intense application to the writing, I was also reading one of my favourite

[47:45]

poets, an Irish poet, Patrick Cavanagh. Cavanagh was a very fierce older man who lived more or less from bar to bar in Dublin, though he'd originally come from the countryside near the Northern Irish border. And he had an astonishing way of keeping in this wizened old body of his this youthful, expansive, exuberant, birthright part of himself alive. And there are some particular poems of his which were love poems for a woman called Hilda, with whom he'd been in love years and years before, and whom he wrote about decades later. And these poems are called the Hilda poems. But there was one particular morning where I got out of bed and walked past my desk where the open book had lain since the night before. And there was one of these Hilda

[48:47]

poems. Hilda, to me, she was the sun. Hilda, to me, she was the sun. And I thought about how each of us have a particular kind of sun that warms us in our own life. And I also, as I was reading Cavanagh, and the way that Cavanagh reminds you of what's at stake in life, I realised that we're the one part of creation that can actually turn away from our own belonging. You know, the creatures of field and forest are simply living out their lives in a marvellous, unconscious way that is unutterably them. And the first line of the poem was, Oh, Hilda, to me, she was the sun. Oh, Hilda, to me, she was the sun. And I looked at the line of that poem on the open page, and I looked at the sun falling across that page. And I thought of everything that warms us every day and keeps us

[49:48]

alive, and everything that warms us from our own past history. And I also thought of the way human beings are the one part of creation that have the volition and choice and ability to turn away from that warmth and to turn away from their own essential belonging. We're the one part of the world which can voluntary walk into exile. And I thought what an astonishing privilege that was, in a way, but also part of our essential unhappiness in the world. But there is a way in which, and certainly you find this out through the disciplines of writing poetry, that you simply have to enumerate and write all the ways that you are exiled from the world in order to feel an almost physical sense of your bond and belonging to your true place in the world. This is called The Sun, and it's an evocation of my thoughts having seen that line

[50:52]

with the sun falling across it early that morning. The Sun. This morning on the desk facing up, a poem of Cavanagh's celebrating a lost love. She was the sun, he said, and now she still lives in the fibre of his arms, her warmth, through all the years, folding the old man's hand in hers of a Sunday Dublin morning. Sometimes, reading Cavanagh, sometimes, reading Cavanagh, I look out at everything growing so wild and faithfully beneath the sky, and wonder why we are the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our flowering. And wonder why we are the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our flowering. I know, in the text of the heart, the flower is our death and the first opening of the new life we have yet to imagine. But Cavanagh's line reminds me how I

[51:57]

want to know that sun, and how I want to flower, and how I want to claim my happiness, and how I want to walk through life amazed and inarticulate with thanks, and how I want to know that warmth through love itself and through the sun itself. I want to know that sun of happiness when I wake and see through my window the morning colour on the far mountain. I want to know when I lean down to the lilies by the water and feel their small and perfect reflection on my face. I want to know that gift when I walk innocent through the trees, burning with life and the green passion of the pasture's first growth. And I want to know as lazily as the cows that tear at the grass with their soft mouths. I want to know what I am and what I am involved with by loving this world as I do. And I want time to think of all the unlived lives. Those that fail to notice until it is too late.

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Those with eyes staring with bitterness, and those met on the deathbed whose mouths are wide with unspoken love. Every year they keep me faithful and help me realize there is more to lose than I thought, and more at stake than I could dream. They remind me why I want to be found by love, why I want to come alive in the holiness of that belonging. And like Kavanagh, I want to be courageous in my terrors. I want to be courageous in my terrors. And like Kavanagh, I want to be courageous in my terrors. I want to know in life or death all the ways the warmth of that great rose-fire sun in its heaven has made me. And everything that made me has been a sun to my growing. That is the article of my faith. That is the article of my faith. Everything that made me has been a sun to my growing. That is the article of my faith. Even the darkness of that soil

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that went before the time of light was another kind of sun. What I am is what I have been grown by. What I am is what I have been grown by. The sun, that great love, all the many small loves, and that one love, too, who waited so long to find me, and who has always walked by my side, folding my remembering hand in hers. The act of memory in poetry is, to me, always like greeting an old friend, a person that you are desperate to see again. It's always the act of seeing them fresh, like a greeting at an airport of someone you haven't seen for years, like the face of your children, like the face of your spouse or lover, a person who, once again, makes the whole world fall into place simply

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because of their presence. The act of writing poetry is the act of reacquainting yourself with a kind of deeper self that is almost like a partner or a spouse or a lover. This next poem is called The True Love. It's really about claiming your happiness in life. The whole experience of living in this house, this house of belonging, was the attempt to claim my own happiness, and the understanding that when you do see what you belong to, you must drop your identity as a searcher and pick up the identity of the finder, and you must give yourself over to that timelessness and that eternal kind of experience. And it's true for anything in life that when your true love comes along, your true treasure, your true work, whatever it is, there'll come a moment where you have to step out dangerously, you have to step out courageously,

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you have to step out onto a medium that you feel will not hold you, and that is the medium, the surface of your new life. I was forcibly reminded of this image of stepping out when I was invited down to Galveston to speak with the Sisters of Mercy hospital system, and it was myself and 140 sisters for a whole weekend together, and in the briefing phone call before I flew down, I was asked to work with some very specific images, and of course these were images very dear to the Christian story, and that's the image of the disciples going out away from the multitudes in their boats into the center of the lake, and at night the storm coming up, and the disciples waking particularly to begin with Peter, and seeing across the water Jesus calling to them, and there's a moment there where Peter has to step out of the boat

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onto the water towards what is most precious to him. In the briefing phone call I was told that this stepping out of the boat was the focus of the whole weekend, and the whole retreat, so I took my life in my hands and flew down there, and we had the most marvelous time together working with this image of courage, and of stepping into the unknown, but it was also corresponding to a courageous step I had to take in my own life at that time towards a particular person, and it's called the true love. In the poem there is an image of an old man in the western isles of Scotland, where there's a particular kind of Celtic spirituality which has lived through the centuries, which is full of the imagery of nature, and people will say their prayers out on the mountainside opposite by the side of streams or forests, and especially by the

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seaside you'll often see older people down by the water with their hat pressed to their chest speaking their prayers into the water, and there's an image here in the poem of that of that old kind of faithfulness, the true love. There's a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours. There's a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years, and especially if part of you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way. I am thinking of faith now, and the testaments of loneliness, and what we feel we are worthy of in this world. Years ago in the Hebrides I remember an old man who walked every morning on the grey stones to the shore of baying seals, who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus

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hidden in the water, and I think of the story of the storm, and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them, and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love, so that when we finally step out of the boat toward them, so that when we finally step out of the boat toward them, we find everything holds us, and everything confirms our courage, and if you wanted to drown you could, and if you wanted to drown you could, but you don't, because finally after all this struggle, and all these years, you don't want to anymore, you don't

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want to anymore, you simply had enough of drowning, and you want to live, and you want to love, and you will walk across any territory, and any darkness, however fluid, and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours, and if you wanted to drown you could, and if you wanted to drown you could, you could, but you don't, because finally, because finally after all this struggle, and all these years, you don't want to anymore, you simply had enough of drowning, and you want to live, and you want to love, and you will walk across any territory, and any darkness, and any darkness, however fluid, and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours,

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