Cathedral Reflections

Cathedral reflections

St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall

Malmesbury abbey

I have been asking myself why I find myself attracted to old churches and cathedrals, especially cathedrals. When visiting a new city, or returning to one I know well, sooner or later, I’ll need to check out a cathedral or two.

Is this an unguessed hidden desire for conversion? Don’t think so.

Or perhaps a challenge, an infiltration….again,no. I don’t (often) find myself cackling in old hag triumph.

 

Is it because both large cathedrals and smaller churches feel like very planned temple-caves…Ah, now there is a thought: entering great vaulted chambers of stone. The Mines of Moria, perhaps, or the Chambers of Erebor? The Hall of the Mountain King. Walking through stone forests. Castles also have that sense of a stone space and they exercise their own fascination for me but they hold a degree of intentional violence that can be off-putting. Of course, cathedral histories are rarely sedate themselves, but their initial intentions were perhaps less combative.

Partly, it is the atmosphere. The silence and the ability of a cathedral to swallow the noise of a group of excited tourists, say, without that distracting from the overall experience. And these places hold stories, personal stories: of campaigners, heroes, villains. Of the noble couple with their dogs asleep at their carved feet. Of the martyred saint. Of the lost explorer. Here their stories wait among their named stones: no judgement, just stories to read. To hear. There are bigger stories, too, bound into the stones with holes from musket shot in walls, with the legacy of competitive chapel building, with penances bought, prayers sold. Windows tell their own stories: biblical subjects and in their construction, there are tales of rivalries and changing technologies, replacements rallying communities, the glory of colour spilling into the heart of the cave.

St Magnus Cathedral,
Kirkwall

I come back again to silence and reflection. These are places where people gave thought to issues wider and deeper than themselves and the everyday issues of survival. Here they communed, commune, with their connection to the infinite. I may not agree with a lot of the conclusions they reached in such consideration: I have spent a lot of my life as someone who would not be approved of, generously forgiven perhaps, if I came creeping back, but the proud awareness of who, and what, and how, I am would not have been welcomed. Still wouldn’t be for some of these people around me as I wander. I know others wouldn’t care but I have a long memory and carry a legacy of accumulated damnations with me.

 

St Magnus Cathedral,
Kirkwall

But here I can sit and settle into that contemplative silence, can feel old stone shaped with love and skill. I can hear footsteps whispering on stone floors worn smooth by centuries. Here I can appreciate someone else’s wonder and find a connection to my own.

 

As I was writing this, I also spent some time at the Stones of Stenness on Mainland, Orkney. There birdsong falls like rain. There, there is a different connection. There, there is still silence, lying behind the showers of song. Here, being with the Stones is like meeting old friends and the greatest feeling is joy.

 

Stones of Stenness, Orkney

 

CATHEDRAL

 

St Olaf, St Magnus Cathedral,
Kirkwall

They built a ship,

A tall ship of stone,

To sail our souls in,

With a crew of carved and painted saints

To set it on its way.

 

If I had a soul,

That ship could have brought me to pray,

With its power and grace,

But we are the soul-less, my kind and I,

The doors of Paradise closed to us,

You tell us.

Unwanted, unrepentant, disturbing,

The Fallen, the Doomed, the Damned.

 

The wind that fills your ship is song,

And those songs rise,

Bright birds flying,

Soaring,

To be trapped

Against the rafters and the slates,

 

But we are spirit,                                                              

And sing as spirit, not soul,

And the west calls us

To islands in the wide seas,

And a sunset beyond the edge of the world.

We leave these sinking ships

Behind.

 

This poem was inspired by St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall. Originally, it also grew out of a conversation in the hollow hills of Orkney’s chambered tombs but while the second voice began in faerie it could just as easily be me talking as the human that I am

Ravens!

This blade of a beak 

...in celebration of ravens 

Raven, c/o Chris Foote

I like corvids. Big, black and thoughtful; smaller greyer and jesters or flamboyantly jay-bright and magpie striped, they are birds to command attention. They scare some people, annoy others and wake ire in still more but as a family they are a success story. And they have rook-walked into our stories across countries and centuries. They tend to turn up regularly in both the traditional stories I tell or the new poems and stories I write

Ravens, especially, are often sitting there, looking over the shoulders of my imagination and making “helpful” suggestions as I write (even more distracting when they do that when I am ‘telling!).  This is for them…

RAVENS

A blade of a beak
To slice flesh from bone
And shave hair from skin,
To free blood from body
And hope from hearts.
A bright, black bead of an eye
To see now, and then, and maybe.

A dark, silent flight,
A snow fall of crows,
A blizzard for the dying,
To lift soul from pain
And into always.

Watching life’s beginning
And roisterous ending,
Ravenboy shakes a cloak of
Midnight feathers into wings, while
Ravengirl combs hair into quills
And Huginn and Muninn
Fly back to the claw-worn shoulders
Of the All-father’s throne.

And down in the woods,
On the rocks,
By the sea,
A woman,
All glamour and seduction and threat,
Rattles the bones in a bag
Of her own crowskin
And sings the hero to his fate.


The pictures used here are from members of the Facebook group “For the love of crows”
Many thanks to both Chris Foote (portrait) and Faye McNiven (flight). The raven strip pic is my own and is from Orkney

Ravens, c/o Faye McNiven

A Ship Of Stone

St Magnus Cathedral

You built a ship,
A tall ship of stone,
To sail our souls in,
With a crew of painted saints
To fill the sheets of faith with song enough
To lift stone into sky.

Now,
A thousand years of
Eroded stone and windworn wood, and
Watching the sea, and
Reaching for the wind, and
This ship sags against its anchors.

You built a ship of stone,
A tall ship of stone,
Crewed with saints,
To fill her with song.
And she is still here,
Anchored and earthbound.
Have you forgotten the songs
Of stone and hope and heart
That could have lifted her to the clouds?




This poem is inspired by St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall on Orkney Mainland. I wrote the first draft of it before I ever discoverdd that the Cathedral is called the "ship of stone" - its shape had really captured by interest: long and narrow, like an upturned longship - witha crew of painted saints...This year is also being celebrated as the  (probable) 900th anniversary of Magnus' death with exhibitions and events across the islands

Lost treasures?

 By the Broch of Gurness

I was just sitting there, finding a quiet corner out of reach of the persistent wind and being steadily dribbled on by a half-hearted rain shower (it looked great as it swept through in trailing curtains over the hills, just not so much to be in).

Rain

Listening to a spring morning. skylarks, skylarks, skylarks. Every field, it seemed, sprouted larks (not soaring as high as less windswept southern cousins). And curlews. The combination of lark-song and curlew piping could have been all the enchantment I needed.

But I sat there with the broch behind me and the fields beyond that and the swell and sigh of Eynhallow Sound in front of me. It took a few minutes for my eyes to understand those patterns of grey and silver and breaking white, and the shifting shadows that told the story of the dangerous currents of the Sound. I had some binoculars but they were hardly needed.

Razorbill

Lying low and barrelling their determined course through the waves, black scoters ploughed across the scene which suddenly exploded into life. There were birds everywhere. Goosanders, as low in the water as the scoters but sleek arrows to the ducks’ solidity. Eiders on the rocks, and cormorants. They always sound like they’re squabbling but maybe all those wheeling terns are just talking very fast. There is a gull. And another. No, I’m no birder. That is another gull, but a different one. And that is a fulmar. Gliding, sliding along the wind with barely a wingbeat between Midhowe Broch and this Gurness edge. A skua on patrol, dark wings and dangerous thoughts. And two martins, new come from those long migrations, blown sideways into the shelter behind the broch.

The sea, grey, racing, laughs itself into waves and breaks; but turn a corner and there is peace and the bay is still with pale turquoise clear water over graceful sea wrack meadows. And everywhere, always, watching everything; dark eyes, bobbing heads and the sudden roll and splash of a fat body as the seals invite us to play.

In 10 minutes of sitting there on a stone, I felt that i had seen more wildlife than in a day’s walk at home. Is this what we’ve lost from the southern counties? Maybe not those actual birds but that richness of life, that sense of a world bubbling with activity at every level, at every intersection of a habitat…..

Broch of Gurness, 8th May 2016

Raven at the Brough of Birsay

Pictures: no, I didn't take any when i was just enjoying the birds, so these come from before and then later in the day when it sort of stopped raining for a bit

A present of old stones?

Planning for Wintry presents?

Old stones and ancient bones

Gordon MacLellan

ISBN 978-1-291-46593

Looking for something a little bit different for a present? Christmas soon, and Yule and Mother’s Night and Saturnalia, if you’re of a Classical inclination…Why not indulge yourself and a friend with a copy of my book Old stones and ancient bones: poems from the hollow hills ?

Don’t like poetry? Try again! With poems from the dark, peopled gloom of Neolithic tombs on orkney to the windswept moors of Derbyshire, an excitement of skulls and the beauty of stillness before winter arrives, Old stones might just offer you something different.. And if you really don't like it, why not give the book to someone you dislike as much as the poetry?

You can order from Amazon or direct from me at £5.00 a copy (includes UK P&P) and while stocks last, with Old Stones, get a free copy of “River and Sea” a little book featuring two of my stories (you only get the latter if you order from me)

To order:

Email me Creeping Toad

Payment: by cheque, BACS or Paypal (to creepingtoad@btinternet.com)

and to whet your appetite, here is a poem from Old stones.

Anticipation, 2
Autumn waits,
Falling into gold, and yellow, and russet,
As mist gathers,
Wool unraveled through the trees.
In the hollow dales,
The lake anticipates winter,
And the rune-cracked ice.
But for now,
Its dark, cold reflective depth
Is divination enough

autumn rosehip

Kelp enchantments

Kelp

Abandoned on the shore,
Wet leather shrivelling in the sun, 
Knotted club holdfasts useless now.

But even so, breeding flies and rot,

Oarweed, kelp, ribbonweed and wrack,

Still wrap themselves,

In a second skin,

Around my heart.

Serrated wrack as the tide ebbs

Leaving Orkney

Left overs?

welcome to the darkness of Wideford Hill

(notes from the Tomb of the Eagles and scrabbling about in the mud of Wideford Hill Cairn)

To be chosen to lie

In bone on stone

For generations,

Was that the honour,

A privileged obligation?

To wait down the centuries

Bound in stone,

Questioned, petitioned,

Left behind until,

I arrive with a metal light

And listen for your whisper in

The broken dark

Or did a freedom in death

Wait for the flaying

By eagles,
A used skull picked clean

And tumbled off the cliff edge,

Into the sea

And a freedom of soul along the wind,

On the wave,

A chance to turn and run again

In fur, in feather, in family skin?

step out of the Cairn and into a wider landscape

Leaving Orkney

How to write this horizon

That sweeps from blue and shining white clouds

Into rain drifting over 

A bleak shuttered house on 

A bleak stone-walled headland and 

Then out into light again, 

Sunlight reflecting grey and silver on a rippling sea and 

Back into distant rain, 

Shifting curtains beyond those quicksilver waves.

Standing on the sighing deck

Watching our wake curve across the waves

And fade.

Tomb of the Eagles

approaching the Tomb

look out, away, beyond

a very modern entry with trolley for pulling
along the entrance tunnel!

Gulls scream in the brightness

Beyond the stacked stones,

And here,

It is no longer dark,

Three shafts in a concrete cap

Pierce.

But under the stones,

In the corners and the cavities,

The silence remains, until

One breathing fills the space

With sound

Where five thousand years slept quiet.

leave quietly, noticing the small things

Islands of Joy

sunrise at the Ring of Brodgar

Slip into stillness

Beside a tall stone

Bristled and bearded with lichen

Listen to the voices that 

Whisper along the wind,

Through the grass,

Out of the old stone itself

Saying,

Ring of Brodgar

Power of the raven,
Power of the rain on the hills,
Power of the wind over the moor,
Power of the hare in the grass be thine.

Grace of the clover,
Grace of the geese in the loch,
Grace of the gunmetal grey clouds,
Grace of the white clouds that catch the light
Be thine

Stillness of the wave on the shore,
Stillness of stone in the Ring,
Stillness of sunrise behind the hills,
Stillness of long sleep in the hollow hills
Be thine

Strength of the gull’s freedom
Strength of the bull’s endurance,
Strength of the rooks’ gathering
Strength of the crab’s stealth, be thine

May no day be grievous to thee,
May each day be joyous to thee,
May love of each face be thine
May death on pillow be thine,
Honour and compassion.

Turn again into the wind and the rain

And walk dancing to the century that waits with the car park

(The Blessing form is old, coming from Gaelic prayers recorded by Alexander Carmichael. It may not be Orcadian but those are the words that came spinning out of wind, stone and the watchful hare in the field!)