Peter Lilly: Poems

You took on flesh, True flesh and grew With the same astonishing  Life-long quickness  Of my one-year-old son. You had a first birthday,  Finding your feet, The Word, imitating language With sighs and groans, The Word of Life, so deep within, So clear and true, In unadulterated expression Of a conviction beyond Language. On the 28th of December my son, Gabriel, will have his first birthday. The year has been indescribable. Yet throughout all the challenges, just revelling in the privilege of being with our little boy as he grows has brought such sheer joy. At this time of year I'm obviously thinking about the incarnation. But rather than Jesus' birth, I'm thinking of him at the same stage of life as our little boy, as a one-year-old. Gabriel has been walking for a couple of months now, and often makes long convicted speeches in sounds that no one else understands, waving his hands like he's teaching some essential truth to a captiv...

I'm really pleased to announce that two of my poems have been published in Issue 2 of the Heart of Flesh Literary Journal .   Absolution  was written while I was working for the Watford Homeless charity New Hope.    It  is inspired by working with a homeless teenager with a particularly harrowing past, and explores the theme of redemption.  To find more about the extremely important work of New Hope, please  click here .  Your Stare  is inspired by my baby son, and how observing the beauty of an infant can reveal so much about humanity, communication and consciousness. Click here for Issue 2   Here to read issue 2 as a .PDF And here to go straight to my poems. Heart of Flesh is a very exciting and unique new journal that seeks to publish poetry, fiction and art 'with a Christian element' though not necessarily explicitly Christian or by Christians, believing that ' God’s truth as written in the Bible can be found in both...