THE CHANDOS FOUNDATION

 

Love is not the coming together of two committing,

Nor is it the act of bodily union.

Love is not the giving of gifts,

Nor the toil to help another needing.

Love is not the adoring of the crowd,

Nor the weeping of the bereft.

 

No, rather it is the fire that burns within,

It is the constant flame in the soul,

That grows inevitably as it lights,

That receives as surely as it casts.

 

It is, and yet your searching will not find it.

For as the knowing smile of two friends parting

Lingers like a beam of inner joy,

So love will simply radiate the space around it,

And as a sun, will easily light the world.

 

04.06.02

 

 

In the war on fear, everyone’s a loser.

Violence for violence, eyes for eyes.

Blind reaction for measured action,

And a cruel lashing out in ignorance.

 

A blood splattered politics of spin,

Sees only self righteous democratisation.

A creeping liberty of vice,

That condemns all creeds but it’s own.

 

We live lives superior in ability to hurt:

Charitable to the point of cruelty.

Crashing through time, pendulum swinging,

Only extremes by fear determined;

 

Terrorism, genocide, hunger, recession,

Armed with paranoia the damage is done.

Full swing of junk-food savagery,

Too clever to see the sense beyond,

 

Leaving wastelands for the helpless,

Minefields for the children,

Poverty for whole nations,

And a desert called peace.

 

Truly a Pax Romana!

 

03.05.02

 

 

Convention’s sanity grips in festering turmoil,

Life’s feeble rhythm pulls and peters out,

Turns this way and that struggling for meaning.

All form is lost and spirit sinks in chaos.

Time, the old enemy of experience, winks in jest,

And hope struggles through the mud of mockery.

 

Now grief grips without sentiment or purpose,

And darkness casts a greedy gloom over a wilderness.

What can I say to the young, the hopeful, the impressionable,

When all valleys seem grey and every plant withered?

When every instrument wills itself to malfunction

And friendly exchange with the passer by impossible.

 

A struggle against the Archangel would make some sense,

But this is an agonising suffocation of the soul,

Slow dance of death on the end of life’s rope,

And all those precious gifts tossed aside.

All dreams of fulfilment a distant memory.

Love too, that eternal rock sinking out of reach.

 

Forever further from its reach, I become less worthy

Until must come the final release to nothingness

And fears final stronghold.

 

7.08.02