Here speaks, at last, Jarama of their knowing
All freedoms ebbed where Ebro held its line;
Till ‘Hold Madrid’ rang out upon their going,
‘No Spanish orphan dies, who is not mine!’

These do not die, who were in love with living,
Enough to lose it for some others’ gain;
Who gave the world, but did not count the giving,
Its unforgotten images of Spain.

We grasp these hands no tyrant can ignore,
Of quiet men of peace when roused to war!

For my Father. Dedication of the International Brigade Memorial.
London, South Bank, 1985

Ours is the gene that cannot be ignored,
That bends the warp of Fate’s incessant spinnings;
Refreshes meaning in the tired word;
Explodes all fraud of endings and beginnings.

Of music still to come we’ve shared the making,
Earth’s restless anthem in which all are singers;
At every dawn and new-tomorrow’s waking,
We are to newer fruits the pollen-bringers.

Nothing’s to come in which we lack all sharing.
Some echo ineradicably lingers.
Each life’s particularity of daring
Informs these patterns at our childrens’ fingers.

Ralph Windle for the Macmillan Cancer Support ‘Soul Feathers’ Anthology 2011

When your voice in the storm is the tiniest whisper,
Your cries on the wind dissolve in the wave,
I will hear, and I’ll know, like the truth of the ages
The call of your love and the promise we gave.

And who else will know how you gave me the message?
How the ache of your longing locked surely on mine,
Across the deep spaces when no words were spoken;
Could they know, as we know, that this is the time?

Time to return, like a bird from the ocean.
Like the wing-weary migrant that limps from the sea;
With only the thread of an instinct to guide him,
I will return when you beckon to me.

Ralph Windle – September 2004

There is no great leap to some distant vision.
Make not your dreams your master, truly said.^*
Tomorrow’s ends are in today’s beginnings,
This moment’s where millennia are bred.

There is no peak that is not its illusion,
While this real, nearer beauty goes betrayed;
This child, this friend, this so familiar blossom,
Jailers an ego-sick pretension made.

This leaf gives total promise of the forest,
This one ray tells of every arching sky.
There is no greater beauty for the seeing
That could out-rival this before my eyes.

It’s here, about me, all that needs be given
To speed the journey through an open door;
Reluctant ghosts of vanities behind me,
Some rediscovered innocence before.

^* Rudyard Kipling

The vivacious, dancing American daughter of our friend, Robbie Davis-Floyd, tragically killed in a road accident a few days before her 21st birthday in 2000.

RW. 15 September 2000

The wonder of it is how the nano-physicality
Of this multitude of happenings in my head,
All with space, time, physiological characteristics,
Induce this further miracle of my thoughts.
Thoughts, I should remind you – even mine –
Have neither weight, colour, nor other tangible properties.

Old ‘mind/body’ dichotomies are clearly dead.

So his question was , how do these manifold activities-
Even of such a brain – go on to invoke
The richly coloured magic of my ‘consciousness’ ?
Raise, from such chaos of hidden dreams,
Such sure, external witness to this unique ‘me’?

Stuffed though I am with all this prodigality of brain,
Its writ – he argued –needs run beyond my head.
For what I know, ( as in the concept of this tree)
Requires an inner-brain in touch with outside-worlds.

Ralph Windle, October 2008

We pledged our pictures to the wire,
And searched the eyes of those inside,
Who guard the fingers that would fire –
Our murder and their suicide.

Have they not children, wives and friends,
And – when the insane order came –
What man, as zero hour descends,
Would feed them to that final flame?

So bring more blossoms by the fence,
More children, as the Spring renews
Our promise to their innocence,
That love will overcome the Cruise!

Ralph Windle – Sunday 18th March, 1984

Even to climb the lofty peak,
To hug the heavens, cheek to cheek,
And glimpse the golden eagle soar,
May pull, behind me, thousands more;
Perversely churning rock to sand,
His solitudes to Disneyland.

How ‘free’ is ‘freedom’ which impairs
The equal sanctity of theirs?
Who chose the ‘choice’ which sets our greed
Above our own, and others’, need ?
Where were we, when the bust-or-boomers
Pronounced us, finally, ‘consumers’?

What ignorance induced the guilt
On which the marketeers have built
Such parodies of what we know
We humans are, and need, and owe?
On what naivety the telly
Prescribed this primacy of belly?

What idiocy oiled the plunder,
Mixed little wisdom with our wonder?
Robbed ‘freedom’ of the saner stuff,
Which knows ‘excessive’ from ‘enough’?
Let’s dream our dreams without the meanness
That mocks the green-horn in our greenness.

Not one more child to die of famine,
Dolphin of our filth he swam in,
Penguin from our oily spillage,
Jungle, strangled by our pillage;
Not one more endangered species
Suffocating in our faeces,
Tributary, beach or skua
Asphyxiated in our sewer!
All die, bequeathing last regards
To our rapacious credit cards;
To ‘choice’ that lives on borrowed worth
And debts, long underpaid to Earth.

Ralph Windle for Lilly Donahue – 2009

What travels swift, and flies with swallow’s wings?
May triumph over what experience teaches?
Once in a lifetime may with history rhyme?
Make gods of kings and kings of meaner creatures?

What’s better travelled with than in arriving?
What was both yours and mine, of equal worth?
What, if they’re dupes, may turn our fears to liars?
Of what was freedom last and best of earth?

What did the happy night-bird seem to know
With me so unaware? And what creates
Through love and patience, and against all what,
That impossible thing it dares to contemplate?

‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’.

Alexander Pope

‘Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper’

Francis Bacon

‘Take short views, hope for the best, and trust in God‘

Sidney Smith

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings;
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings

Shakespeare

‘The triumph of hope over experience’

Samuel Johnson

‘But then, once in a lifetime, The longed for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

Seamus Heaney

‘To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, and the true success is to labour’

Robert L Stevenson

Whatever hope is yours
Was my life also…

Wilfred Owen

‘If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars…’

Arthur Hugh Clough

‘In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the Free… the last, best hope of earth’

Abraham Lincoln

There trembled through his happy good-night air,
Some blessed Hope of which he knew
And I was unaware…

Thomas Hardy (The Darkling Thrush)

To love, and bear; to hope till hope creates,
the thing it contemplates…

Percy B Shelley