I write poetry because I believe imagination matters. Not as an escape from reality, but as a way of returning to it. ……. Walter Brueggemann describes the prophetic task as seeking “to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” That has become something of a compass for me over the years. The older I get, the more I wonder if many of our deepest problems begin in the imagination

A Man Stopped Running - 12 years on, a true story framed poetically. Al carried guilt like a sack of coal. Not a regret.Not a mistake. A sack. The sort of weight that bends a person over even when there's nothing on their back. He thought he had a demon. And maybe the evil one had thrown a few spanners in the works, whispered lies into old wounds, turned shame into something that felt alive. But I never thought it was a demon. I thought it was a man who had crossed a line som

In this part of Liverpool the supermarket stays lit all night. Blue-white light on wet pavements. Lorries backing in at stupid o’clock. A bloke asleep in his car near the trolley shelter. Inside more food than whole streets can afford. Avocados in winter. Strawberries in December. Three quid smoothies. Security tags on baby formula. Nathan Silver sits somewhere above it all. CEO. Millions every year. The sort of money that stops sounding real after a bit. People like Nathan s

He didn’t lose it all at once. Not rebellion, not even doubt in its louder forms— more like erosion, slow, intelligent, socially approved. A summer once: mud on his trainers, arms raised in a field, a voice from a stage saying God was near. Soul Survivor. He meant it then, or at least he didn’t stand outside it taking notes. University taught him how to stand outside things— how to name belief as construction, trace its scaffolding, keep a straight face while dismantling it.

I asked for Your face, for fire, for something certain enough to hold without shaking. Instead: the valley. Long road. Bad weather. Nights that would not speak. Footprints in the dust I could not tell were Yours or mine. I thought glory would split the mountain, light too fierce to survive. Instead it came small— legs that kept moving, tea made by someone who stayed, morning arriving again without asking permission. You hid me in the cleft of things: rock, grief, the narrow p

He reads it online in the waking light of morning, joining others for prayer with Leeds Minster in the background— stone, candlelight, old memorials to war fixed quietly in the walls, names held still by cold brass and silence, boys once sent out and returned as names. The city is already stirring. Buses cough awake. Shops lift their shutters. Someone sleeps in a doorway beneath a bank’s bright window. Leeds remembers, again, what it kneels to. Psalm first. Then Exodus. Then

Yesterday, I was in conversation with someone stateside about influences—what has shaped my writing and where it’s come from. I think that’s what’s prompted this: a longer pause, a looking back, trying to name some of the threads. Something has shifted, though not all at once. It feels less like a moment and more like a tide turning—something you only really notice when you stop and look back. For many years, my ministry held two spaces together. I was part of a mainstream ch

Do not come to me now in the rush. Not in the swell of the room. Not in the chase for one more high place, one more moment to prove you are here. I am tired of mistaking intensity for presence. Tired of thinking you must always arrive in thunder, in tears, in the room lifting itself towards the rafters. No. Come as the whisper. Come as the breath that barely moves the dust in the chapel light. Come as that still small voice that does not force itself through the speakers but

Simeon had waited so long his bones had learnt winter. Dust in the folds of his cloak, incense caught in his beard, Rome at the gate, taxes like teeth, the poor bent double under empire. Still he came. Morning after morning to the place where promise thinned the air, where stone and heaven almost touched. Waiting for the consolation of Israel, for a God who would tear the sky open and come down. Not comfort as the world sells it. Not the soft lie that tells the bruised to mov

It was Easter Sunday. Dawn had only just begun to lift itself over the city. Somewhere lilies were being carried into church. Somewhere a priest was lifting bread with tired hands. Somewhere someone who had slept rough was waking cold under a thin blanket in a church porch. And on the screens the old empire was speaking again. Open the fuckin’ strait, he says, you crazy bastards. On Easter morning. The day we dare to say that death does not get the final word. The day the wom

Night gathers early. The room is dim. Bread on the table. Wine holding the last light. Outside, boots on stone. Empire still turns. Now too: Propellers in the dark. A drone circling above sleeping roofs. The long whistle of a bomb. Glass becoming rain. A child waking into fire. Inside, a bowl of water. He stands, slips off his robe, and takes up a towel. No one speaks. The one we call Lord kneels. Hands in water. Water on skin. Dust giving way. This is where kingdom begins. N

It looks alive. Leaves out, green enough to signal blessing. God on our side, favour resting, certainty thick in the air. From a distance it all looks like it’s working. A people fluent in Scripture, a faith wrapped tight around a nation, prayers spoken with the confidence of power. Chosen, they say. But chosen for what? There was once a promise; blessed to be a blessing, a light for the nations, a people through whom the world might taste what God is like. Not where blessing

Before It Ends in Blood He doesn’t come waving a flag. No anthem, no polished speech about strength, no promise that God will make us win. He comes weeping. Not abstract grief— but the kind that catches in the throat when you can already see the bodies. Jesus the God-Man looks at the city and sees its ending: stones torn down, smoke in the lungs of the poor, mothers learning the language of loss. “If only you knew what makes for peace…” But they don’t. Because peace that does

There were two ways into the city. Two winds moving through the same streets. Two gospels already being believed. From the West—empire. Boots on stone. Iron catching light. Horses restless for violence, their bodies remembering what they were trained to do. Standards lifted—bright, unquestioned. Carried like certainty. A kingdom fluent in power, calling it peace. A kingdom drenched in blood, calling it righteousness. A kingdom that names God without fear of God. Church—be car

Philip said, 'Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.' Jesus answered, 'Have I been with you this long? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father' ------ Tony is from Middlesbrough. You can hear it in the accent. Kindly. Friendly. Geordie-ish— but not quite. He’s been around church for a while now. Not the tidy kind of belonging— not the polished testimony version. More the kind where you drift in near the end for the cuppa and a custard cream, & stay close

How long, O Lord, while cities burn? How long while the earth is lowered into graves? Your disciples once said, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” It is not hard to imagine asking the same. That instinct sits close to the surface — the desire to answer violence with something stronger, to call it justice, to feel certain we are right. You turned and rebuked them. And later, in a garden heavy with fear, you said, “Put your sword back in its p

There is a place for celebration. You feel it when the doors open. Music already rising, hands lifted, voices gathering strength together like fire running through dry grass. People arrive shaking rain from their coats, umbrellas stacked in the corner, latecomers slipping quietly along the rows, someone laughing too loudly near the doors. The room fills with the confidence of people who know how the story ends. God reigns. All will be well. The songs move easily in that direc

Jesus said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. —John 11:34–35 Once we knew where we were. The glass held. Light stayed put. The world obeyed the basic rules of cause and effect, of prayer and outcome. Meaning showed up when summoned. God was mostly punctual. We called this 'faith'— a life where the story made sense often enough that we trusted the gaps, where suffering felt tragic but legible. Then— a phone call that split the day i

The whole creation waits— not quietly, but leaning forward with the ache of expectation. Galaxies tilt toward the dark, spirals cupped like listening ears. Stars hold their breath between burning and blessing, knowing there is more than endless expansion and collapse. Rocks remember touch. They remember being named good before they were quarried, before they were broken for speed and profit. They bear the weight of violence, the long erosion of sorrow, and still they wait— pa