Beyond a bridge somewhere...

Beyond a bridge, that leads the way,

between tall and slender arching trees

that line a long and winding forest road,

there is a spot, they say, where light,

bursting thru with such force and focus,

with such palpable intensity and blaze,

has spawned effects defying nature's law,

reason, and the teachings of experience;

but more than this the rumours also speak

of a strange beam of wondrous flaming light

that, as though heaven-sent, swift descends

to wreak such magic on passing folk

who later speak of having felt a force,

of being swiftly borne aloft above the trees,

of looking down from high on all below,

held there as though by an unseen hand,

for a span of time as none are able to agree

until, as by some magic unknown to man,

they find themselves again on terra firma,

on the selfsame spot now dark in shade,

quite unable to make sense of that which

sense defies by any human measure known,

or any other means conceived to understand

the nature of the seemingly unnatural,

of a beam of blinding light that takes

and lifts and flings and holds quite still,

before it loosens, lets slide to freely flow

back to where moments before one stood

full bathed in the hush of a heavenly light.

Waiting for Christmas...

Part of the Christmas magic

Christmas had come and been and gone, 

the candles had lived out their life and were no more,

the baubles were in a plastic bag and so was the tinsel,

all stored up in the hold-all loft to hibernate away,

keeping company with a thousand and one other things,

some there for a short while, others for rather longer,

all shrouded in unbroken darkness and silence.. for now,

until one fine day they might be sought out again, 


some to serve as they had done before, but some.. 


some to be cast out and to serve no more.

For the Christmas things their time would come again,

twelve months was not so long to wait, and then…

then they would shine again, then the party would begin again,

then they would glitter and glint again, bathed in fairy light

and in the special magic that was forever Christmas.

The Sower

The statue above, located in the city of Kaunas, Lithuania, is evidently a man sowing what must be seeds of one kind or another. We do not know what the crop is and there’s no practical way of showing the seed grains flying out from his hand, but nonetheless it’s clear what his activity is. Now if we go on to focus on the wall behind the statue, there appears to be an array of stars drawn on it, which fan out as they get closer to the ground. As things stand, it’s not clear what this is all about. At first sight, one might take it to be some form of graffiti defacing the wall, the handiwork of a disrespectful and inconsiderate youth who wants to leave his mark on the urban environment, an all too common feature of our undisciplined modern society. But is it really graffiti? Is it just the unrestrained daubing of a mischievous individual? The second photo below reveals all.

This is the same statue, the same sower of seeds, in the selfsame place, but now we see the scene at night, and all is suddenly revealed to our astonished gaze. What seemed to be mindless graffiti on the wall behind the statue is now seen for what it is, and we cannot help but marvel at the ingenuity of it all. Thanks to a clever positioning of the lighting, a shadow of the sower is projected onto the backdrop of the wall and we now see what is being sown - not crop seed at all, but a constellation of stars that sprays out from the right hand of the sower as it is scattered on the ground. The sower of seeds is in reality a sower of... stars! And by analogy perhaps a sower of dreams. And how apt that this should be seen at night, for it is then that dreams populate our sleep and transport us to a world of mystery and magic.

This transformation may also be regarded as an allegory: that things are not always what they seem and that seen in a different light or from a different perspective their true nature reveals itself. For those of us who are all too ready to jump to conclusions, it is a salutary reminder of the risk we run in prejudging what at first appears to be obvious.