There’s no sympathy for single mothers
she said.
He sniggered.
Social services:
what do you expect?
I left me ‘usband when ‘e beat me up.
They’d ‘ave been ‘appier to spend
the public funds
on a grave.
No gravestone.
Just a plot to mark the spot
and two tiny tots
clutching a bunch of weeds from the
roadside.
And no place to put ‘em.

I took a walk through the park today.
The leaves were gently dropping
through the light and shade of an Indian summer.
The warmth was quite unseasonal
and that weird contrast between autumnal death
and the arousing sunshine’s heat
struck me with the strangest thought
that that could almost be
a metaphor
for me.

Only the tough survive.
It’s like a baptism of fire;
when the going gets too hot
the tough become firewalkers.
Singed souls
with asbestos soles.

I put myself out there –
all of me on the line.
I knew it wouldn’t last.
The immersion heater’s faulty
and I have to press
reset.

It is a perfectly formed teardrop;
or the gold of an autumnal leaf;
it is the first apple or peach blossom
of spring.

It is the sight of a rainbow to a child;
or the sight of the child itself
observing that rainbow
for the first time.

A miracle is the sight of a loved one
beside me when I awake.
It is her hand in mine
to still that ache.

Yet Hume would have us believe
that miracles do violate
the laws of nature.
O, so not so!

For me the laws of nature
are the miracle.
To know that season follows season
is the awe.

And those who despise reason
to favour faith
are merely
self-deluded fools.

Not for me the accusation
of the psalm that would
make me a fool for
disbelieving god.

That I abandon faith
and choose instead
to reason with my brain
thus verifies belief.

It is as hard for the believer
to abandon a belief
as for a man of science
to discard old laws.

But moral values are self-evident.
I do not need an act of faith
to emphasise
A moral code.

It is enough to know that I am one
with all humankind and
whatever touches another,
touches also me.

I seek no vague salvation;
no sweetmeat in the sky;
it is enough to hold most dear
what is simply “I”.

We’ve wandered far from miracles,
from acts of faith and such,
but life itself’s miraculous
e’en to a worthless wretch.

Each year it happens.
The apple tree viewed from my balcony
gives up its fruit
until at last one solitary apple
remains high up,
beyond reach,
riper, redder, more robust
than any of the others
that have fallen or been gathered.

Unmoved by rain,
unshaken by winds.
It is as if
this one remaining fruit
is determined to resist
the onset of winter.

Day after day
I awaken;
raise my bedroom blind,
rub my eyes
and seek it out
amidst the protecting foliage.

At first resistant to my gaze,
it then proudly displays
its presence,
as if to say
“Behold, I still remain,
a testament to the perseverance of Fall.”

Each year I too remain
despite the apple’s everlasting reminder
that I myself am transient
and will one day
be shaken from my bough.

I am reminded of O. Henry’s last leaf
painted by an aged artist
to give support and strength and sustenance
to fading hope of life’s recovery.
Perhaps the apple, too, is but a dab of oil
on canvas.

Indeed, am I myself a product of
an artist’s keen, unfailing eye;
living in some vast
parallel universe
adjacent to and yet unseen
by all those bygone friends,
amidst an orchard of fallen, rotting apples?

Voltaire said
if god did not exist he would have to be invented.
But god does not exist,
except in my imagination.
Therefore I have invented him.

And according to Montesquieu,
if I were a triangle
my god would have three sides.

But god is of my mind
and thus . . .
god is me, and
I am god.

*quod erat demonstrandum

The apple is gone.
It departed today in the wake
of Gonzalo’s sting.

The sting in the tail
of a hurricane that
should never have touched our shores.

And so the symbol
of tenacious life
no longer bears witness
to my own tenacity:
my own survival in an
irresolute world
now seeks another yardstick
on which to pin a shaky faith.