Outside Marks and Spencers
though the frost was cruel
three Salvation-Army ladies stand,
blowing their warm lungs and hearts out
through their shiny silver instruments,
breathing into our tired lives
hope and a clean new spirit
to salve our sin-soaked souls.
Sad it is
that the late-flowering rose
should survive the blows
of winter’s storms
then come to this
when April’s kiss
arouses and warms
and the snowdrop swarms.
I saw this guy one fine morning on Iona – 7am.ish – greeting the rising sun by bending over backwards. Birds were singing, lambs were jumping up and down, tourists were leaping off the morning ferry and you felt the whole world coming excitingly alive.
I saw this guy/girl(?) one evening in Glasgow, not even asking for loose change, bending over forwards, shutting out the cold and the wet but not really, not really able to banish the chill dark void inside.
How do you end up where you end up? Were the important decisions in your life difficult to make? Did you not have decisions to make? Were they made for you? How did you end up where you are now?
If behaviour is character in action; if character is basically formed by the age of 3; then there are no forks on the road; no conscious choices to be made. No conscious decisions. We are nothing but a set of obsolete responses; in our end is our beginning; the child is father of the man.
The sun is the global street lamp which goes out when it gets dark, just when we most need it. However we ( the lightseekers as opposed to the heatseekers) are able to turn the tables on nature, to turn night into day, to see in the dark , to hold up to Nature not the mirror but the two fingers. We are in control. We can fly to the moon; we can plummet to the bottom of the deepest ocean… The uses to which we have put our inventiveness is, to use the current vogue word, ‘awesome’. Three cheers for the human race.
You can’t have too much security- or so I was told. Anyway –
davidstrachan611 