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3rd June 2017
“You are part of the very weave o silken thread,” Rainer Maria Rilke
On the day of the Writing on the Wall festival at St John’s Church, Waterloo, heavily armed police officers patrolled the train station. Within hours, Britain’s latest terror attack had claimed innocent lives at nearby London Bridge. Amidst troubled times, and with the currency of care and consciousness as their starting point, living Poets are asking the important question: "How can poetry save the planet?"
Caduceus Journal's poetry Editor Jay Ramsay gathered the influential speakers together at St John's, each one prefacing their talk with a poem of choice. Giles Hutchins, business leader and author of The Illusion of Separation and Future Fit got the ball rolling with one of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, who is entreated to be transparent, transformed and aware of the bigger picture.
Giles does not doubt that this is the hour of humanity’s reckoning, a moment to rejoin the hands of science and spirituality. He said timeless wisdom and long understood deep interconnectedness and sacredness replaced in the West by materialism and reason is causing separation and increasing fear, anxiety and individualism. A poetic way of being in the world of harmony, compassion and wisdom is the ground on which we now must walk.
The Reverend Peter Owen Jones, aka BBC2’s Extreme Pilgrim accepts that humanity stands at the threshold, and that “We have journeyed to this amazing, fragile, beautiful, dangerous point.” Acceptance of the real has completely changed the way he walks through life in terms of his responsibilities to himself and to the rest of the planet because it is happening now. We are called to attend, nurture and give birth to what is becoming, he said. “We are reforming our understanding of reality and that is so exciting, what a privilege to be alive at this point and that understanding is immanent within every single moment of existence, we just have to be known by it and tap it to it and to surrender.” His was an immersive poem by John Clare.
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All I could hear was the voice saying to me:
'‘Your fear is a wall you must overcome and ultimately bring down.
To tear down this wall is your calling,
to challenge the fear instilled in you by others,
and not to let terror overwhelm you, no matter how small you feel.
This wall was sent to test you,
but you must prevail
to scale it,
and break it down,
brick by brick,
and rebuild your house.’
(c) Sam Burcher 2013 First Published in Garland, Flowers of Spirit (2013) and Caducues Magazine (2014)
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For the women…Saving the Arctic by Jay Ramsay
The very thought of it
could make your palms sweat.
Sheer dizzying ascent of glittering hot glass ice!
Scaling it, this monument
spire of spires
bared under a Godless sky
pyramid of Mammon
where only corporations rule…Pharoahic
summit sheared off like a knife
tip snapped to skeletal scaffolding…