This is a poem I wrote roughly 30 years ago, which has recently re-emerged in conversation. Sark is a unique place, the smallest of the four Channel Islands, and on the boat back to Guernsey I tried to write something unique to capture it. Here it is!

Sark, July

Bare island teeth
stumped by sunlight
The sea’s blunt bite
grey-flecked hound with

no anger left.
Mysteries crowd
the hot shadowed
sea-valleys, cliffed

by salt weather
out of old rock
Ochre dusts choke
streets of other

nature, hoof-packed
brown with stale time
Secret ways climb
from the tide-wracked

beaches into
green-hushed conclave
deaf to the waves’
call.  Here trees grow,

careless of years
So the island
counts time in sand
not calendars

Lush woods, dry grass,
silent as feet
pad the soft dirt,
keep their witness

Reckon such groves
within the isle
more than people
And only the waves

crowd this harbour,
pale sea-children
catching the sun
in their laughter

Ubuntu
A translation into Tibetan
Soften… dissolve… let the wave cap
of ego slip with a sigh back
into the ocean of common awareness,
touching the world with such vivid
humility, gently fashioning a cradle
of compassion: see there the world-child
gaze back with your own eyes, see
your true self in the pain and joy
of other lives, of a larger nature
that births us all. Patiently await
the miracle: to see; touch and taste
and listen too, but above all,
allow yourself to see with newly
opened vision that “I am”
because we are

Magnificent Desolation
Those far-voyagers,
eclipsing the world that birthed them, trusting
the motor on their tail to catch them
and latch them into the Moon’s tawny influence,
turned the almost-last corner in the maze
of mission milestones leading from the July-hot
and thrust-blasted Kennedy pad
to this final staging post
for the descent to the surface
and into history.
Now, as they’d decided
some weeks earlier, they’d view
the real mission as finally underway.
A ballet of burns, hard-wired software
trajectories and commit points brought Eagle
not to the preplanned landing site but long
and over a boulder field. Nothing for it
but to take the stick, full manual,
helicoptering close across the aeon-tumbled ground
for a better spot. Houston keeping schtum –
out of their hands – as the last seconds
of fuel slip by; then “Contact light,”
a breathless pause, and “Tranquility base:
the Eagle has landed.” “Roger tranquility,”
Cap com comes back, picking up the novel
other-worldly call sign,
“we copy you on the ground.” Sometimes tech-talk
becomes purest poetry; no lyric stylist
could replicate it.
Soon
and cunningly timed for prime-time
the first and second man would emerge,
stand on a lonely little world,
and wonder. They bunny-hopped
efficiently about, a few pounds of likely-
looking rocks selected, a couple of experiments
set up, Armstrong venturing over
to the tiny crater they’d set down beside,
his walk-back limit less than a stone’s throw
to their faithful lander.
Back inside,
they photographed each other’s tired, triumphant grins,
then left that place for ever. The whole trip had been
a surreal kaleidoscope of phases:
not like the Moon’s phases,
flowing seamlessly into one another as poets
through the centuries have noted, but grotesquely
disjoint: the bat-out-of-hell thunder-climb
to Earth orbit; then the time-suspended
translunar coast, the stack turning leisurely
as if on a spit, the Sun’s fierce-heating glare
evenly spread; the dream dance of manoeuvres
to kiss the Moon for one lingering summer instant;
homeward-bound through re-rendezvous and brisker
return coast; and last, the meteoric
ride down from interplanetary speed
to gently parachuted plop into the welcoming
warmth of the Pacific.
Except, then, an epilogue endured
of decontamination suits, quarantine facilities –
the three heroes crowding the trailer window
for awkward words exchanged via prison-visit-style
phone handsets with an insincere
and unsupportive new President – and finally
the ticker-tape motorcades and world touring
beginning the long slow fade from fame’s hysteria
into old newspaper front pages and science
picture books for kids.
As for their legacy: just flags
and footprints? The likely origin-story
of our outsized satellite accidentally
discovered through well-chosen moonrocks?
Or, as the decades start to turn
into centuries, will future perspectives open
onto a Columbus moment? No earlier inhabitants
to kill off this time, but a barrier
brought down: the Moon, Mars, Titan and Galileans
not end goals but stepping stones
into the endless dark from which new worlds,
children to other stars, worlds unimaginable
in ’69, shyly emerge: debutantes
at a galactic ball that’s far
more magnificent than we ever guessed
and far from desolate.

I’ve been writing again this past month and I’m sharing the fruits of that here. Enjoy!

The speed of sound

Between one beat and the next the music is flying –
so very fast and yet immensely still
and I feel like laughing and like crying
or just coasting on this magic carpet ride
as Edge’s mesmeric lead-and-rhythm fill
propels the juggernaut of U2’s “Pride”

or on the second 12 of the second solo
of “Crossroads” at the Fillmore as Slowhand is
abruptly airborne: a god-kindled flow
of countermelody to the blazing riff
comes leaping from the strat as fast as his
mind and fingers can move, and yet as if

this moment had existed all along,
a heart-impaling shard of eternity
suspended between breaths. Or again, the song
of french horns ecstatic in a rising quartet
forged of swooping arpeggios, the pity
of Schumann’s desperate bipolar fate

lost in that limitless arc. Maybe a touch
of genius-madness waits in each normal breast
for angel wings to dip by just so much
and snatch us eagle-high above the ground,
the lands below remote and pin-sharp, dressed
in soaring thermals of transcendent sound

The Gospel according to Thomas

“The kingdom of God is within you and all around you” – Gospel of Thomas, verse 3

Reality is many worlds
within my mind and many more
around me shared with quite certain
other beings – Leo Tolstoy writing works
nor I nor any other could in a thousand
years, warranting his life beyond
the solipsistic cosmos of my own, and thus
warranting so many other lives; the constant
surprise of your creative fecundity
telling me that you are exactly
as real to the wider world
as you are to me

Communication is relationship,
not ownership; flowing, not fixed;
touching, not deflecting. It is
how all worlds are one, all around us
and within us
and among us
and finally beyond us

Generational trauma

When you’re mayfly-close to the surface
of a stone-touched pond, each wave
is steep, high, overwhelming, sourced
from an abstract origin you place
far in the past, if ever; faced
with churn and eddy, you survive

in desperate leaps and darts, lunging
for a second’s safety, another gasp
of life. But imagine if instead
you lofted higher, senses ranging
over a wider perspective, read
as freely as if you could just grasp

a glimpse of some much deeper truth,
a pattern written out in rings
upon a deeper medium,
its depths still undisturbed. Your mouth
slackens an instant, reaching for some
familiar note as nature sings

its untold harmonies, not quite
beyond your ear’s reach, but altogether
unlike anything you’ve heard, even
in dreams; and at once the stark, bright
pain of generations is woven
into something changeable as the weather,

slapping the surface of your being,
stirring a squall of thought, yet leaving
your deeper, wiser self untouched,
placid in the current; not seeing
but intuiting a spiritual calm, latched
to peace, and granting space to grieve in

This website is intended to showcase what I can do with words. From time to time I arrange them into poems, something I feel an increasing sense of vocation about. I also read words out loud, an activity which various friends and strangers have encouraged me to pursue more seriously. So, I’m presenting here a poetic portfolio, to which I’ll add by posting new poems as I write them and as (I think) they merit the light of day; and also an invitation to request voice demos and browse my performance résumé. Enjoy!
— Tom Moss Gamblin

About the quotation: It’s from Auden’s great poem, “September 1939″…
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man in the street
And the lie of authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the state,
And no one exists alone;
We must love one another or die.