Cumberland Lodge

Chaplaincy weekend away at Cumberland Lodge, 17-19 November 2017, in which I spent four hours walking to Windsor Estate from Egham Railway Station at night with my tripod and rucksack. I wrote two pretentious poems from title-prompts for one of the activities there:

ADVICE TO YOURSELF WHEN YOU ARE STRESSED

Remember, if you will

The bleak corridors, choking heights and stale-green grilles, the

Breathlessness – discordant drumbeats and falling

Card towers. And stars, for it was not so long ago

When they crumbled into floorless depths from

Dark paper skies. And those aching gashes

Sheltered fiercely in scholarly pretention – the round sound of Weltschemerz,

Camus’ hurt in original French – 

As if a foreign script’s mysterious loops and accents

Could paint your secret paralytic pain.

But remember also

How an autumn raindrop in Windsor is most beautiful hanging 

From the tip of a weak weeping twig

Extending uselessly from a tired bough, trembling but not falling;

How the brittle world can suspend upside-down

In its frail transparent sphere – 

Foggy grey skies below the tender rained earth.

SOMETHING NEW YOU’VE DISCOVERED IN LONDON 

One island warmly gave me birth
yet what I am now worth,
I owe entirely to the other…

Rick Ferreira, I Am Two Islands 

London – the lights on the autumn-night Thames
Jeer like the black depths of the Singapore River, consuming and inviting,
Their cold fingertips squeezing, freezing, pulling…

But something new – some reaching flame,
Greater, gentler than the equator’s smiting sun,
From soft candlelight in a college chapel bathed in stained-glass technicoloured sunbeams
And swirling heights of hymning crescendos, from learning
That a soft voice, touch and shoulder follow blurred vision, unsought, unasking; that worth
Cannot be earned like Promethean pretention, can only be given
Through clean tender arms that wrap and radiate
Over hurt and helplessness, scrawling solidarity in heartbeat and breath,
something bright – a strange baptism
Light-years from the Straits, a first warmth, an endless presence,
A home.

Otherwise it wasn't very eventful (besides seeing Her Majesty) but I liked and needed the calm and reflection. I took pictures of some stars and tried to get the milky way but underexposed again so it's not as clear as I wanted. I really should start taking the overexposure of the LCD on my camera seriously and stop getting tricked by its brightness! Or am I perhaps naturally predisposed to underexposing things, failing to acknowledge and glorify the light?

Here they are; I'm leaving out the metadata because I'm tired of having to type them in manually: