All the World Was Broken [dactylic pentameter version] Light and more light: in the dawning of days it was kindled; Upward on weightless and luminous pinions God sent them, Barbary doves in their beauty and confident ravens, Great-winged condors majestically circling heaven. Over the broad and immeasurable grasslands he set there Wild sheep ranging, and bison of powerful shoulder, Also the forests with splendid eucalyptus standing, Firs everlasting and dark with their purple

All the World Was Broken [blank verse version] 4th October - World Animal Day Light and more light: the first of days began. To soar on weightless wings of air, God made Fair barbary doves and cocksure ravens, And mighty condors wheeling through the sky. For broad grass prairies he made wild sheep there, And bison strong of shoulder, white-tailed deer. For forests too he fashioned eucalypts And firs still green with dark and purple cones. He measured out the oceans and decree

Gnosis, Repression, and the Return of the Unnamed: Psychoanalytic and Gnostic Themes in “A Strange Hatching” A speculative cosmogony in which consciousness emerges through exclusion, repression, and the return of what has been banished. “A Strange Hatching” presents a revisionary creation myth in which the origins of human consciousness are inseparable from exclusion, violence, and the persistence of an irreducible remainder. Drawing simultaneously upon Biblical narrative, Eg

The Beast Between the Marble and the Heap, Or: The Mammoth Between the marble wall of City Hall and the slow‑rotting heap of broken crockery and dusty old books — the beast stirred. To think it once tore open the earth with its tusks, raising mountains, or guarding the spirits of the underworld. Now its fur rotted to a brittle husk — the mammoth preserved without reason — the mammoth. Among the first of God’s works, it had been among us from

Before the Clocks Struck Three (Mr. Eliot Had an Apparition in Salford and It Was Very Foggy) Salford is the rainiest place, getting Inside my shoes, wetting Tired feet in undarned socks. Yesterday, before the clocks Struck three, three old horses Munched wet grass Among the relics Of Clifton’s Wet Earth Colliery: Which on reflection, Were beautiful objects Of rust, time and toil. Fog swirls, curls Around the clock tower, The quays, the trees —

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

A Strange Hatching Once there were other gardens, other plots, Other clots of clay. The old gods remembered. Cast from their temples, stripped of tribute and gilt, They kept their camp beside the pagan Nile. Then they beheld a land of light where nothing hissed, Nothing slithered or slipped, Nothing crawled or slunk through sedge and reed. The old gods smiled darkly. The maker had forgotten scales, Forgotten fang and feather, Forgotten fin, fluke and claw, Forgotten the sly

Cometh the Lion Cometh the Lion, cometh the hour. On his head is my name; on his back is my power. The time is narrow, and the world is wide And the Lion comes now with a spear in his side. Look how he bleeds; his flesh is a prize For the cross-hearted hunter with blood in his eyes (Brimming red in the heat of the noon) And vowing to return by the light of the moon. ‘Come follow me,’ the Lion commands, ‘Or the hunter will come and hack off your hands.’

Husserl's Jellyfish The simplest subject In a constantly flowing Stream of impressions – The minimal mind Of a jellyfish.

The Cosmic Covenant And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, this place and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. – Wendell Berry, A World Lost The cosmic covenant — what Isaiah calls the covenant of peace — is, in Robert Murray’s terms, “the belief in a divinely willed order harmoniously linking heaven and earth.” Murray casts this covenant as a kind of marriage: a union binding heaven and earth, God and Israel, into a si

Relics Yesterday, before the snow, three old horses munched wet grass as I walked through the relics of an abandoned colliery, which on reflection, were beautiful objects of time and rust.