01/10/2026
As it’s National Poetry Day, I thought I’d share one of mine.
And, as quite a few of you were at the People’s Emergency Briefing last night, I’ve chosen Kneeling, an exploration of faith in the face of the nature crisis.
As you could probably tell last night, I’m far more comfortable writing than speaking!
Kneeling
I kneel,
hands clasped, eyes closed,
because I do not know what else to do.
The stone is cold through cloth and bone.
Older than my questions, older than any field I have walked.
Light spills through coloured glass in fragments,
saints broken into reds and blues across the floor.
Outside, the world continues.
Inside,
I wait.
If You made it -
the wing and the root, the slow patience of soil,
the breath held in seed, then You made this too.
The silence where song should be.
The fields that do not answer.
The empty sky that no longer offers the things it once carried.
I have seen places that feel like they remember You.
Old woods where the air holds its breath.
Water moving over stone as if it knows to where it flows.
Birds lifting at dusk -
like prayer without words.
And I have seen what follows.
Cut ground.
Still hedges.
Rivers that move but no longer live.
So tell me -
was this always the shape of it?
Did You build it just to break it?
Did You place the curlew
in the long grass
already knowing the moment would come
that the grass would remain and the call would not?
They say nothing falls without Your knowing.
Neither sparrow nor leaf.
Then,
You must have known every silence before it arrived.
I am trying to understand what kind of mercy allows this.
What kind of love makes something so precise,
so intricate, so alive -
and lets it thin, and fade, and vanish.
Or,
is this us?
Is this the work of our hands alone?
Because if it is -
why does it feel older than us?
Why does the loss sit in the bones of the land
as if it was written there long before we learned
how to ruin things?
I kneel, and I listen,
and there is no answer.
Only the quiet shift of air through the rafters.
Only the weight of something not spoken.
If You are still here -
in root, in wing,
in what yet remains -
then show me what this is.
Not in words.
In something that lives.
Because I am still walking the fields as if they are sacred.
Still planting as if it matters.
Still listening as if something might return.
But I do not know
if I am tending a garden or a grave.
And I am tired
of not knowing which it is.
