Poetry Showcase

Welcome to the Poetry Showcase of Tim Jackson's Poetry. Here, you'll discover a selection of Tim's work.

Featured poems

Here you will find a small selection of poetry

Fog

Leaning into the tightening bend,

Squinting into the fog
Gathering in white bands
Along the valley.

Grey shapes looming

Out of the darkness.

Cars with lights

Haloed in the

Opalescent

Filter of mist,
Crawl cautiously past.

It is claustrophobic
To have so limited
A horizon.
To have to peer
For the boundaries
Of the dark unreeling road.

Vision also decays
When there’s fog on the mind.

No clear solutions
Just drudgery and stress,
With the heart pounding
To the question:
Have I taken
A wrong turning?

But sometimes the fog lifts,

And the view soars
Over the tangled wood

And the twisting road,

To the lights across the valley

And the stars glittering
And whispering over
The wide arch of sky.

And you have recovered
Your bearings,
And know you are not just home,

But home in the wider cosmos -

Ultimately safe.

September 1996

Sometimes

Sometimes,
The notes slip past the armour

And dissolve the knots
In the solar plexus;
And I drink the delight
Of music direct
Without the filter
Of intellect and prejudice.

Sometimes,
The bird hops and tilts
His head and skitters

Down the path and chirps;

And I glimpse him

Twinkling through Eden

Heralding Creation
Before the barriers
Came down.

Sometimes,
People smile;
And I know how

Wonderful they are;

Unique before God,

With their mission

To fulfil.

These moments shimmer and fade,

But leave an after-glow of hope.
So when the insight fails
And the daily routine grinds on,

I can remember the touch
Of that humming crystalline reality,

Which is perhaps there always,
But only glimpsed in my frailty

Sometimes.

January 1997

Ann Egan comment on "Sometimes"

The title prepared us for a changing scenario.

'The notes slip past the armour's..

But this is only sometimes but in that time there is the pure delight of music,

welcomed for itself, beyond filter or prejudice.

In verse 11, a small bird hops and tilts and by his tiny actions and song, we glimpse traces of Eden.

The smile of a person gives us sometimes a startling reminder of their uniqueness in God's eyes and a recognition of how surely they are destined to fulfill a specific mission.

The final stanza gathers these observations into ' an after-glow of hope.

And when daily routines grind on there remains...' the touch

Of that humming crystalline reality.'

The poem is another true reminder to us of beauty that is there always for us but not always glimpsed in our human frailty.