Faslane: Breath “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.” —- The taxi is already waiting. Marcus’s rucksack leans against the front door. His mum keeps finding little things to straighten— a collar, a loose thread, a sleeve already smooth. The kettle boils. Neither of them has much to say. Last year He had gone to the cinema to watch Spider-Man: No Way Home. Before the trailers, a Royal Navy advert. Travel. Adventure. Learn a trade. His mates Messed about

Heathrow: Lift “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” — The alarm sounds at quarter past four. David is fifty-three. He has flown for twenty-nine years. His wife, Emma, turns over without waking. Downstairs, the kettle boils. He drinks one coffee before work. Wednesday is recycling day. He rinses yoghurt pots, folds cardboard flat, washes the jam jar before putting it out. Outside, the hybrid starts. The M25 is alread

Liverpool: Which Door Stays Open? Nicene Creed Series #9 “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” —- The Liver Birds keep watch above the city. Samuel is thirty-four. He comes from South Sudan. For now, he lives in the Britannia Hotel. One room. One suitcase. His white nursing shoes wait beneath the bed. Inside his Bible lies a folded certificate. Registered Nurse. Sometimes he unfolds it, looks at his name, then slips it back between the Psalm

County Durham: Will Anything Live Again? Matthew is fifty-two. He lives in Blackstone, a village built on coal. Rows of brick terraces. A welfare hall. A Methodist chapel. If you stand at the edge of the fields, the older folk still point and say, “That’s where the pit was.” You cannot see it now. The winding gear came down years ago. The railway was lifted. The earth has grown over what was once the beating heart of the village. Matthew isn’t sure whether that’s healing or

Content note: This poem explores themes of pregnancy, childbirth, baby loss, homelessness, grief, and death. Hereford: And Was Incarnate Nicene #6 “And was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” —— Sarah is fifty six and has worked as a hospital chaplain for longer than she cares to remember. Most mornings begin with the same road through the Herefordshire countryside. Mist hanging above fields, blackbirds lifting from hedgerows, the cathedral tow

Ilkley: What Will Save Us? Nicene #5 For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven… —- Peter is seventy-two. He lives alone in the stone house where he and Anne raised their children. The bookshelves are still full: politics, history, economics - the sort of books he once believed might explain the world. Most mornings begin with tea and Radio 4. Sometimes he sits long after breakfast, watching weather move across the moor. The house is quieter now. Not the quiet of a

Content note: This poem contains references to suicide, addiction and allegations of sexual offending. Glasgow: Whose Am I? Nicene #4 —— Michael is forty-three. He lives on the twelfth floor of a block overlooking the M8. Day and night, the traffic keeps moving: lorries, headlights, blue lights flashing somewhere. The city rarely sleeps, and rain freckles the windows. Sometimes he stands at the kitchen sink long after the kettle has boiled, looking out across Glasgow. Tower b

Manchester: A Longing for More Nicene #3 —— Rachel is thirty-six. Every Thursday morning she pushes a buggy through Manchester towards the church hall. She comes for the toddler group. At least that’s what she says. Her daughter loves it: the train set, the toy kitchen, the biscuits. Rachel likes it too— the tea, the conversation, the warmth. The church hall means a few less hours heating the flat. The food bank runs from the building next door. Most weeks she calls in afterw

Canning Town: Where Do I Belong? Maker of Heaven and Earth —— Jay is thirty. Every morning, on the way to work, he passes the cranes. Glass towers rise above the docks. The billboards promise riverside living. Luxury apartments from £750,000. He laughs every time he sees them. Not because it is funny. Because he still sleeps in the room where he slept as a child. His mum has the room across the landing. His sister, who needs support, has the box room. The waiting list stretch

After Mass, Margaret stays behind. Beyond the church windows, the harbour at Oldhaven lies beneath a low northern sky. A handful of fishing boats rise and fall with the tide. The North Sea stretches beyond, grey as memory. The church settles into silence. She gathers the sacred vessels from the altar and carries them into the sacristy. The chalice bears the faint marks of a hundred hands. She polishes it carefully, the way Mrs Donnelly taught her more than forty years ago. Mr

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