Willow

Tomorrow I will set off for Stuttgart in the south-west of Germany. It's there that my four and a half year old daughter Willow lives with her mother. The pain of the last three years - separation and all the bitterness of divorce - has been worse than anything I could have imagined. It is made much worse by the hundreds of miles that separate us. I was told at the very beginning of all this nightmarish process that I had rights as a father: of course I had rights. What no-one told me was that rights are meaningless unless you establish them in a court of law: until that is done you have nothing. And the establishing of them costs all that lawyers are able to drag from you: not only money, but dignity also. It has been a humiliating and exhausting process. Over those three years I have scribbled words on backs of envelopes; I have written fragments I was barely conscious of writing at all. Poetry was hardly in my head: I lived in four different houses, out of a stack of boxes and bags. How could poetry be in my head? And yet poems have crept in through the cracks of the darkness all the same, and after a long time I gathered them up and read them and put them together. SPCK in London have just accepted this new collection for publication in 2016: I think it is appropriate that it should be entitled Letting in the Light. And this is the last poem from the book, remembering the day my beloved Willow was christened.


We drove through grey silence;
the skies drifting with snow
in a winter that would not end.

At the church I made promises
in a language I did not know -
and a German bell rang out,
strange in the muffled day.

And then you ran to me, Willow,
and you carried the sun in your running;
you poured into laughter and ran
as though all the war was over.

And inside a shell broke
that Easter Sunday morning;
a shell like a bird's egg
flooded over with warm light.

The long folly of words,
the gunneries of rage,
the anger of small conflicts -
useless, forgotten, gone.

The land left open
for the love of sunlight -
the beginning of another spring.