8. Al-’Aziz – Strength of Form

Suggests form, power, strength, connection --- 'soon these two worlds both leave you, one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth' Rilke 
 
An inch of your life
One foot – a blur of sense
Two feet – reach and smile
Three feet – donkey’s hind legs
Four feet – to run for shandy in the den
Five feet – parents fall from grace
Six feet – a time of fantasy and hair
Six feet – offspring in the womb
Five feet – a piping whistle at the throat …

Plant

HOW
O
O
O
O
O
O
  in a red spotted bowl
 almost stable as an anvil
a small orchid with a
green stem so fine
can choose to
ever reach
into a
star
*

Putting into Order

I’ve
always had a
love for the figure
eight, because of the
balancing skill we
display to get
two

Orbs
settling into
place, firstly Earth
below(a belay point)
and above a circle
connected into
God.

9. Al-Jabbar - Repair

Suggests healing, compulsion, creation, restoration --- 'No Teacher, Preacher, Wise Man can decide what's right for you-Listen to the Voice that Speaks inside' S Silverstein 


Poetry
Look, sometimes it sings
and sometimes moans.
It writes of itself through
effort and splurge
from healing dreams

and, in all the words, one
authentic line might catch
a heart in ways not
logical or thought through.
When it works, it's work.

 Blinking
tired, he blinks a lot.
The face in the glass blinks back,
heals each blinking eye.

Flutter

A leaf like a slowly closing hand

drops off

a great mother of a

tree - letting go

(irresistibly

it lets go)

in a shut-down

from winter’s paler light.

How wonderful like a butterfly

to flutter, tumble, still;

only caught by wind - not knowing

that the lattice bark has started on a spree

with sun and rain and waving snow,

of soundness and repair.

10. Al-Mutakabbir - Concentration

Suggests majesty, supremeness, expression, dignity, honour, dissolving boundaries, humility, understanding --- ‘If you love enough you will come into the presence of Love itself’ Rumi 

Sweet Rush 

Is there cake on the menu, mate, cake?!
I’m sure I saw slices suggesting
a cook has been busy with baking
and sweetness is what I crave most.

Look in my eyeballs, mate, balls
to your oranges, apples, bananas;
forget 5-a-day, throw a bolas
at brothers parading with cake and

drag all their cake to the cake stand,
sprinkling sugar deep snow.
I’ve gobbled up meat and potatoes
and now I want glory and joy.

Traveling Man
Train’s tracking north,
when he spots barren trees,
feels an ancient pang
- the missing of a special child.

Even disconnected – like the coldest
winter twigs - he hangs on – and hopes
another summer comes and melts the ice
on hard converging tracks.

Alone, in time and space,
one glance of hares in spring,
of children laughing,
melts his eyes

and turns those rails
left and right – out, away -
into a sunnier heart
- eternity.

Supreme
…and I travel backwards on a train
knowing I’ll return tonight, back to the starting
station - not in light - in the dark…
…but now, many clouds are hanging
united and disunited,
there – a seal; there – a lying man;
there – a dinosaur and there – a map of Sicily;
and there, and there and there… and there…

…but wait - now look - a shape unrealized
and, no matter how I try,
my mind refuses to conceive
one form that hangs and moves
imperious on high;
a glory…

11. Al-Khaliq – Carving and Forming

Suggests creator, maker, carver, infinite and material possibilities -- 'One
starts an action simply because one must do something' T S Eliot  

Rambling
What shall we talk about – what’s up
(we’ve got a little bit of time)
and who will speak and who will follow whom
(what’s new upon this kitchen table top)

and shall we circle round and round
(with eyes and ears and touch and tongue)
giving little pats-on-the-head
(and will we choose to work, eat, dance or sing or sleep)?

Who shall we please and who not please
(tomorrow and tomorrow’s ace
encounters, meetings, semaphore)

or hate or care or love, respect,
or look across the surfaces
and feel for sudden truth - create?

Magic in my hand,

a fresh coloured pen.
New words can sound when I stop,
tip it up, and start to write.

Meeting T.S. Eliot in Russell Square

I might have plucked up all my courage
and asked him to write a little poem
about love. He’d have grimaced and held
his right hand in his left.
‘Future, now, or past?’ he laughs,
‘Stretching before and after?’
‘Here now’ I say ‘quick, now, always!’
He doesn’t smile, looks away

and I guess he picks up a fountain
pen and holds it in between finger and thumb,
nails blackened by a life of significant toil
and there will be a time when the nib
tips like a crane and the still point
dances and flows like a river, or a god.

12.Al-Bari’ - Creativity

Suggests maker. evolver, wave creation -- 'Thus the world grows rich, grows wild, and you too, grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too were born to be' Mary Oliver

Words

Where from? My self
is feeling for the sea
and all I write in early morning's
pure and sweetly dreamed.

Nice words from an amiable man
scratched with pointed nib on paper
or angry words from an angry man
biting, scribbling, biting heads away?

Could I say more? No, no more.
At evening time the sea will fix the sand.

Ready.

He stands with his back to you
still as a lamppost,
shoulders tense, head bowed,
feet apart
like Elvis.

Steady.

You hear him mutter,
clear his throat, murmuring
words of encouragement,
small growls;
an Apollo in very late countdown.

Go!

He jumps around
with a yell ‘Surprise!!’
and starts to sing, you think, too loud
before you realise

‘Love, love changes everything….’

Evolution

There seem points
when even balance is balanced;
like a see-saw or horizontal weigh-scale
or when my car’s milo went through
222222 miles
(all those ducks in a row)
and one day, each year,
every place on the planet
gets almost exactly 12 hours of daylight.

Almost, that is, almost
in balance – more or less mileage,
almost an equinox - but thankfully never,
not quite; a smidgen, a pulse
out of whack and somehow, god willing,
it seems better like that!?

13.Al-Musawwir – Design and Form

Suggests fashioner, completion, perfection, shaper, gradual change --- 'Your children
are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself' Kahlil Gibran  

Love

We look away at the same sky;
a sky that’s always changing.
I fail to make this world benign,
although we see the same sky

and here we are, alone now,
side-by-side with waving trees
and, in a our time, unerring breeze

is dancing down a blinking street,
like dancing thoughts of we, ideal,
the best of me, the best of you.

A poet,
lost in words, sits on a train’s
deluded rails that may converge
like wrinkles on his hands and face
- before and back - through time and space.

Avoiding headlines
but chasing a hunt
for every letter
- like sperm - in word - and sound.

Riding rails,
narrow minded,
cliché trip
up a track:

wondering and gazing,
secretly alive

Nanny
When a magical child is born,
tiny fingers reach and curl,
little feet are gazed upon,
each nail an obvious miracle

and once I saw a family trot
beside a pram with Grandma pushing,
Father holding up a parasol
to protect a sleeping tot from heat

and Mother used a large and painted
Japanese fan to keep the baby cool:
a focused scene of mad control
trundling down a cloudy seaside

street: immutable and soundly safe
as if a human cage protects a soul, a life.

14. Al-Ghaffar – Small forgiveness

Suggests absolver, release, burning away ---
"He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over
which he himself must pass" George Herbert 

Music

Beethoven bawdily twists, as only he can,
beneath a sparkling chandelier in a
central Bruges concert hall – sweet and clear

when a man and his girl start giggling,
taking photos, yelling like fishwives
intertwined with four-stringed instruments

and I feel strong emotion – ‘Shall I, shan’t I?’ urges – you know;
dare I, well, mention it, ask them to shush? When I do lean over,
say ‘scuse me , would you mind being quiet?’ and the man simply

nods, I turn accusing, burning eyes, ‘Are you sure?’ and he
looks away, a little scared. I sit back, indignant now,
fired by inner anger. ‘What if he thumps me

as we leave?’ I say to myself, completely ruining
Ludwig’s capacity. I know this idea – do you have the anger
or does the anger have you? And the string part seethes higher, more

vibrato than ever. Sitting back, eyes closed, I enter the sound
with hundreds around, transported by melody,
letting it go; letting myself; letting my dissonance go.


Shakespeare knew
a word blows into time
with every glittering chance
to heal our headspace, heart, and fly

lifting humans by the hand,
dancing under Vincent sky;
one chord - and then - the next.

Life is for giving
The conch of a cow syncopates my footfall,
a reaching tree overshadows a smaller one,
a farm lights up and winks with power on
and crazy fluffy sheep cluster up against a wall.

My bag bursts open like a circus clown
and I worry like a mother on tomorrow;
my words come clumsy, stuttering and slow;
I scatter all my change, try to smile, but frown.

I drink too much beer and stumble down a stair,
drive too daring and get myself a ticket,
fall off my bike, on my back, in a thicket,
stare at the sky and cannot name one star.

So what? So what? Shall I curl into a ball?
No, God forbid, yes, forgive them all.