A Secret Salvation

Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet

My garden after a rain shower - Photo Adrian Scott

A Secret Salvation 

Monday morning wet
in the window-framed garden,
a new pup asleep on my shoulder, 
her nose on my thoughts, as I
tap away on a laptop, iPod 
playing, the would be poet. 

Debussy hovers over the keyboard
as I try to craft honest lines.
I open the window and my
thoughts fly up to the dark peak
and the snake’s pass, where
Kinder Scout receives the clouds’ 
grace with limestone joy.
Watering the valley where my
house perches as a heron rises, 
spreading his wings over the
ruined works where men ground iron. 

The pup stirs, the track changes,
the swan’s lake trembles, violins
then a single oboe sweeps a curved 
neck’s slender whiteness towards the city, 
where horns blare at the commuters. 

Meanwhile, in my writer’s basement
the music ends, leaving silence brushed 
with the edges of birdsong. Now audible, 
the clock marks time and motion,
the grafter’s mockery of the slow
writer. Poets - what use are they when
so many grapple with the hard world? 

But poetry is a pension fund against 
the stealthy shadow, waking you
in the dark demanding,
‘What are you here for?’ 

So in that same darkness I pull 
myself apart and in this morning 
attempt to give form to things unspeakable, 
to record the speckles of birdsong, 
with a poet’s faith that this 
Monday morning has a secret salvation 
- if only I could write it. 

Listen to the poem read by the Anxious Poet

This piece was written when our Jack Russel - Lilly was just a pup. She liked to sit on my shoulder as I tried to write. That was fifteen years ago and I was just starting out on my attempt to write poetry seriously.

She is still with us and I am still attempting to write poetry. We are both much longer in the tooth and much greyer around the gills! My sentiments haven’t changed though. I still think, as I sit tapping away, as I am now, that this is a slightly fraudulent occupation. I think, perhaps that is what other people think and therefore it eats away at the sense of value and self confidence one has as a writer. On these wet Monday mornings there are people out there in the hard world as I called it then. It is probably harder after 14 years this government!

I would sit then, and still do actually, listening to music and seeking inspiration. In those days it was Debussy and Swan Lake - now it is often Einaudi, Olofaur Arnalds or Kate Rusby. I trust, more so now, the green world to both sooth the sense of imposter syndrome and to offer a place for reverie that might have an answer for the stealthy shadow.

So I still return to those last lines. Poets and poetry face into that dark night of the soul I refer to. When the demand is made - what are you doing here? What is the meaning of it all? I still try and pull myself apart and search for that place I write of in my recent collection A Sheffield Traipsing -

Infinity seems a place to her, a refuge she seeks when

the need for reverie is greater than the sum

of all her parts that don’t add up to something good.

From A Moment in Each Day 

From that place comes what I describe as a secret salvation - that moment that William Blake describes here-

There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find
Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find
This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found
It Renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed

Milton 35:42-45

Satan here is that hard world that shuts down our creativity and imagination and seeks to make us thralls of the system. I try to write words that are, as I said then, like a pension fund - an endowment policy that means, even after 15 years I can cash it in once more. Then I am in wonder that it yields, again, that secret salvation and those moments that renovate every moment - if only we can write them.

A moment in the valley where I live - Photo Adrian Scott