Selected poems
Do you see what I see?
Do you see what I see?
Tales as thin as milk-skin
taller than the night.
A mother bares her child
to sky, to star,
blessings on our foreheads
a cross to scar our backs.
Holy water falls,
with textures of song & suffering,
a prayer to rinse our mouths in,
a room to box our sins.
Somewhere in the distance
a tomb breaks open,
we remain a voice,
to the past & all its failures.
Buried in our conscience
executed on our knees,
the flow of blood runs deep
on scriptures old and new.
Blessed lips pursed skyward
and down on flinty ground,
do you see what I see?
those lice on holy spine.
— Ellen Shelley
Subverting your world with a handful of stories
The telling of stories
is at the heart of making a new world
they have inherent within them
seeds of many possible futures
that take root in the most rocky of soils
and surprising places of uncertainty
creating strongly blooming imaginations
that have decided to live for ever
— John Cranmer
Words and wings
Words
are our climbing anchors
we bury them deep
into the rock-face
of every living moment
Word by word
lifting our heaviness
towards a possible summit
There to find the one
who has grown wings
and is moving on
towards an horizon
hidden in the cloud-haze
of what might yet be.
— John Cranmer