Seeing, Being… Like Alice’s bluebell, though not surprised into view, Sophia’s soul is visible in this photograph. Seeing and being… Sophia thought a great deal about being. In Rough Sleepers, her last collection, the nature of human consciousness—what it is to be a thinking, sensate yet spiritual being—is a central theme. One of the poems from a longer sequence, A Hot Summer, written in response to the death of her father (a year after his
The Gift of Seeing “A book should be like an axe for the frozen sea within us,” Franz Kafka memorably said. One can argue with Kafka about the extremity of his imagery (he writes, in the same letter, of books wounding or stabbing us!), but he is right about the capacity of a creative work to make us open to understanding, to make us truly see. It is the gift of seeing that Alice Oswald
Lessons of History An unlooked-for benefit of moving house was in being able to meet Sophia at all stages of her life: infant, toddler, child, adolescent, young woman, there she was in a host of small and memorable items. One of them is a poem, Cassandra, which was written when she was 12, and for which she won a national competition run by Amnesty International. It reflects her love of history and her growing knowledge of
Always... Sophia 30.07.1991—17.01.2014 There is a song Which is not voice There is an absence Which is not empty When I cup my
Bearing Witness to the Truth Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
July 30th 2022 It is Sophia’s birthday today. Her presence in this world was a gift. She is, and ever will be, a joy and a gift always. Swallows There were swallows at the cemetery today In winged canticle above me Each loop and circuit a shout of joy For the heaven that holds them So much blue, it enters the eyes and lives there afterwards With its song of sky and wings and light
Everything a Symbol It was the Feast of the Ascension recently in the calendars of both the Western and Eastern branches of the Christian Church. Always on a Thursday and celebrated 40 days after Easter, this is the day on which Christ is described in the New Testament as ascending into heaven before the eyes of his first century followers. How wonderfully, gloriously strange! But we live in an age in which the concept of
Easter 2022 It is Easter Sunday in a world that has forgotten what that means. Two thousand and twenty two years ago, the women went to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his body with sweet-smelling unctions, to tend his fleshly being as those who love and honour their dead seek to do, and the tomb was empty. The tomb was empty. Most of us have listened to the words so often we have forgotten
Visions One of the poems Sophia wrote in her last year of life has gained added resonance in recent times. As the world has increasingly “slipped into the crazy timeline” (in the words of a perceptive friend), this poem reads like a warning. From the wry opening stanza, with its ironic referencing of Oppenheimer and the Baghavad-Gita, to the scathing judgement of its final lines, it seems to map out the lethal combination of hubris,
Reaching into Silence “Words,” says T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets, “after speech, reach/ Into the silence.” No matter how imperfect, how incomplete or broken are the tools we use to get there (as Eliot states: “Words strain/ Crack and sometimes break, under the burden”), the dance between time and stillness is where we find ourselves. Words reach into the silence, into the stillness. Searching, failing, searching again. Yes, Sophia understood this. It was central to