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

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.’

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.