I

God is in the field if she’s anywhere,
in the settled fine dirt that takes my boot
print and holds it like an unspoken prayer
giving homage to those ancients ever here,
in the dog’s eyes protecting sheep with a
recognition older than the cathedraled church,
in the way a farmer sniffs the air after rain
and stands there breathing in the trees and
the muddied earth, hearing a language of
country we all forgot when we crafted cities
and started needing reasons for everything.

II

The dead lie still beneath this ragged place.
A father, a mother, are under stunted grass
and their silence is no different from the silence
they kept sacred while living, that thick quiet
of sun-drenched folk who knew theology
was in the fencing wire, in the fragile lamb
carried stooped across aching shoulders,
in the ordinary mercy of feeding what needs feeding
and not asking what it means, for heavens sake.

III

I have stood at the edge of belief like a person
stands in a river crossing, water up to the waist,
the current insisting, the other bank afar,
and what I know is this: body and country make
the truest scripture, their fragility the only
honest covenant, with drought, hunger and thirst
the first true hymn, and whatever waits beyond the
last breath on that eternal shore, be it paddock
or void, paradise or the dazzling face of something
beyond we were too small and too alive to name,
it will not be debated into existence, it will
not be shoved away, it will be ordinary as a
magpie’s first call through the mist at dawn,
ordinary as the cry of every creature born who opens
eyes to new light and for one astonished moment, is.

 

10/2/2026