When the deepsong is silent

A poem for when you're struggling to find meaning

‘If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.’
—Rainer Marie Rilke

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Dear reader,

It’s been a quiet month or so for The Green Chapel. High summer is, strangely, a time of ‘wintering’ for me. Creatively I’m just not at my best, so I tend to slow down, lay low (well, as much as a parent of a six-year-old can during the summer holidays!).

This isn’t too far off the rhythm of the natural world. After all the ebullience and bloom of May through July, there is a settling. The heat starts bleeding the green out of the fields; most of the songbirds pack away their music. Both the wild and garden flowers are past their peak. Thoughts turn away from growth and towards harvest. The acorns and chestnuts grow fat on the trees; the hedgerows darken with blackberry and sloe. No longer ripening, but ripe.

I have a couple of longer pieces that I’ve been plodding away at for a while now. Hopefully you’ll get to read those over the next few weeks. I also have some news regarding a book (!) that I’m rather excited about sharing with you soon. Until then, here’s a brief flutter of song from me: a poem I wrote after being startled out of a moment of despair by the beauty of a cypress tree.

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The Cypress

When the deepsong is silent
and the frame within me
breaks; when life plummets past the window
and I can’t even seem to stretch out my arms
to catch it; when effort is clearly no use
and God, you realise, is no scepter and throne,
my feet return me to the living that’s beyond me.
I am found among the grasses, the soft-rippled ponds,
the trees—trees like this old cypress, its body thick with years,
solid with indifference towards anything
except standing alive in the ground of things.
With fear and sorrow grown so large
I try to make myself smaller, so small
that they go over my head.
All my breath has gone through green
and I want to remember it.
The rain falls through the branches,
wraps itself around the long branches,
moves into a soil teeming with so much unseen
and necessary being.
This will all, without doubt,
without even trying,
outlast me. Yet I am here, now, failing
but still (and I don’t know how)
sustained by a resounding largeness, its mind
seeping through the air, its body
full of consequence in cloud and bark, this flesh
that lets my heart
beat a little longer.

©Gideon Heugh

A little note to say…

I won’t be putting The Green Chapel behind a paywall. I believe that poetry and ideas about God and other beautiful things should be as accessible to as many people as possible. Having said that, I am an independent artist, so I need all the support I can get. If you’re able to make a small contribution, I’d be incredibly grateful—it will help me to keep doing what I’m doing, and keep it free. Just click the button below. Thank you, GH.

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