A forest woven between the pavements

Poems about a place where things grow

A corner of the courtyard. Photo by John Kirkley, March 2020.

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Two poems, from two decades; meditations in and on the same beloved place.

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                                                                                                    2026


A slender shadow flickers down,
as leaves do, from camellia branch
to earth, and then (as leaves
do not) flicks up again and rustles,
hidden, mid the greens.
A moment gone, another slip
of shadow darts aloft to plunge
between the fern-pine’s boughs, its feathered
shadowed self a trill of sound
and motion. Up and over, back
and down, from bush to tree and earth
to vine, they weave a forest here
above, below, among, between
our human walls and pavements, wing
and shadow, leaf and feather, flight
and nesting, green and wild.

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CHURCH PORCH                                                                      2010


Suppose one day they stopped coming,
gardeners with their pruning shears, congregants
with their prayer books, how long would it take
before the entrance sealed? Blood-leafed bougainvillea,
thorns long and sharp as any rose, reaches across,
wisteria cascades down, knots tendrils up,
curtains become walls — only the sparrow
and the mourning dove still find nest-high windows
upon the open sky.
		                   Unless, another day, a solitary
pilgrim, in human-holy desperation, braves
thorns, bees, impossibility, wriggles a way 
between, under, around — then stumbles, clear,
into a new enclosure: Anglican porch-beams
sturdy overhead, green breathing walls 
on three sides, and the arched red door,
enclosing what it does. Once a public step
where, Sunday after Sunday, going in
or out, they paused to shake hands, shake
umbrellas, now entirely, greenly
a pause, a full stop; once forecourt,
now sanctuary, set apart by leaf and vine,		
by beam and brick, by absence and Presence,
by echoes of old hymns and chants of bees,
by sparrows’ ticking and murmured litanies
of mourning doves.
		                    And now the pilgrim’s
breathing steadies, slows, as he slides his back
down the red door, takes so to speak a pew 
on leaf-littered brick; prayer books left 
outside with pruning shears, yet here he sits, 
watches dust-motes fall quiet between green-
gold shadows, listens as motes of adoration
rise dusty, green-gold, from his shaken heart.

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I’ve written before about the courtyard on the grounds of my church, and my long career there as a Saturday sweeper-up and apprentice gardener. The green and growing bits of the courtyard are mostly in patches around an expanse of plain cement — which sounds bleak until you see it full of preschool families at the end of the school day, or church friends carrying coffee and party out into the sunshine on a Sunday morning after church. There are enough green and growing bits to make the space attractive, both to humans enchanted by the wisteria in springtime and to the winged visitors and tenants who carry on a mostly-invisible social life in the canopies of the trees and shrubs.

The courtyard is the other half of church for me. On days (there are some) when I can’t sit still in the pews, I can step out and sit on the porch steps or the bench across from them, and find myself surrounded by the welcome and quiet liveliness of a holy place. Any time I need a reminder, it’s there: Love comes and finds us, sometimes in the places we expect, sometimes in the places where we just show up and pay attention.