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...

The country I now call home is bleeding a senseless and panicked red, diluting its pain in the silence of normal morning routines. I still make my love the coffee I promised before we'd risen and seen the news, before we'd thought of the inevitability of children at fireworks, and how this the attacker knew. She looks so beautiful,  eyes heavy and glistening with unspilt tears.  Neither of us knowing how to use words,  how to understand the reality of atrocity.  Beyond the consolations of world leaders,  beyond social media reactions,  beyond the spin this will be used for,  beyond the excuses and explanations,   beyond the claims of responsibility and repeating backlash,  beyond the reports and crafted articles,  beyond the frames of the chosen photographs.  The truth is shards of lacerating glass.  It is a blood-stained truck and pieces of people.  It is a child's excitement dashed ...