Face to Face

This is my own tribute to Bob Dylan.  Folk singers apparently don't have any problems with other folk singers borrowing their tunes and adding their own lyrics. Here's my version of "Forever Young".

Face to Face

May you meet the God of Heaven

May you hear His gentle call

May you step into His kingdom

In surrender may you fall

May you know yourself forgiven

May you receive His grace

As you stand before His presence

May you meet Him face to face

Face to face, face to face

May you meet Him face to face

May your walk with Him be precious

May your fellowship be sweet

May you listen as He talks to you

Each cherished time you meet

May the world become less pressing

May it be a paler place

As you’re seated in the heavenlies

May you meet Him face to face

Face to face, face to face

May you meet Him face to face

May your hands be always open

May your songs be full of joy

May your prayers demolish strongholds

As His weapons you employ

May you be a generous sower

May the lost find your embrace

And carrying your harvest home

May you meet Him face to face

Face to face, face to face

May you meet Him face to face

Mel Kerr (c) 2014

In tribute to Bob Dylan

May you walk with mum

Foerver Young

I’m a sucker for a singing man. One of my Christmas presents was the Alfie Boe CD “Trust”.  I’m not quite sure where Alfie and I met – not in the flesh you understand.  I think it might have been a morning interview – you know, the religious spot the BBC air on a Sunday morning.  I think he was being interviewed by Fern Britton.

I have played some of the CD, not in a careful way of listening to each song but as background noise while I am doing something else.  I love the timbre of his voice.

My husband picked up the CD sleeve and had a good look at the contents.  “Forever Young” was the ninth song on the list.  I hadn’t listened that far along.  The title meant nothing to me. I know – it’s hard to believe. Everybody knows “Forever Young”, don’t they?

“I hope he doesn’t murder it!” Unbeknown to me, Alfie had trespassed on the sacred ground of Bob Dylan songs.  I know everyone does covers of Bob Dylan songs – but, according to Joe, no one does them as well as Bob. Joe scorns those singers that have pure voices. He likes something with a scratch to it. Bob has the best scratch going.

So, this morning, while the husband was still in bed, I thought I would listen to the track.

It was love at first listen! 

Take away the music and what remains is a beautiful poem.  It’s a poem I wish I had written.  I f I had a child and if I knew the song well enough, and if I had a half decent voice that didn’t scare the birds away, I would have sang that song as a lullaby to my child. It’s a prayer that every mother would pray over her child.

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young

The final verse reminded me of a conversation I had with a young friend.  At the time she was thinking about subject choices she had to make for school. She had her whole future stretching out in front of her and was almost afraid to scupper it with a wrong decision.

I was at the other end of the spectrum.  After over thirty years of a very challenging career I was thinking about early retirement. It seemed as if the best of my life was behind me.

“If you do retire,” said my young friend, “it’s not really the end of something but the start of something new.”

Mum wasn’t one of the lucky ones physically as she got older. Things stopped working.  Her hands were always busy with knitting. The wool on the needle was in constant motion of being knitted, being taken back a dozen rows because of a dropped stitch, being knitted again.  Her feet were not so swift.  She moved around the sheltered housing flat with zimmer frame.  Outside the flat with the zimmer frame was too frightening.  The pavements were not smooth.  People were not patient with her as she crossed the road.  A group of young lads that stood at the corner of the road seemed threatening.

There is only so much a person can do to halt the passage of time. My only weapon so far has been a box of “Nice and Easy No 76 – Light Ash Brown”. 

There is another battle to be fought and won.

When the winds of changes shift

May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung

I would like to say that my mum’s heart was always joyful and there was always a song to be sung.  For much of the time that was true. But there were days when the joy was absent and the song was silenced.

My aim is to have a joyful heart.  Shifting winds of change are part of my daily life now. The habits I develop now, physical and spiritual, will all contribute to how I deal with those challenges to come.

Thanks, Bob, for a wonderful song. Sorry if Alfie didn’t do it justice.

God Sings

Our Saturday routine usually begins with breakfast or brunch out somewhere.  OK so it’s decadent.  It is a luxury that we could do without.  There is nothing to stop me cleaning the grill pan some weekday night and buying all the breakfast ingredients for the Saturday – and sometimes I do.  We don’t have many vices and it’s nice to let someone else deal with the grill pan and the washing up afterwards.

This Saturday it was a late morning brunch…more like a lunch.  Yes, it was lunch.  Both the husband and I had not been well throughout the week.  His illness was more serious than mine.  He was prescribed a course of antibiotics.  I drank Lemsip.  He made it into work.  I dived beneath the duvet in the front room to watch re-runs of “Babylon 5”.

We went to a café in town called Little Italy.  The “Little” part was apt.  It was a little space packed full of tables.  The walls were festooned with black and white framed pictures of what might have been Italian film stars, or possibly the Mafia.

We were coming to the end of our meal.  I was interrogating Joe about his meal – some kind of Italian sausage and mozzarella layered creation in tomato sauce.  It looked like something I could re-create at home.

Suddenly the waiter, a man called Alphonso, broke into song.  I looked around to see if a birthday cake was going to emerge from somewhere.  But no, this was just a song.  It was in Italian – what else?  We were in Little Italy.  Alphonso, not the youngest of waiters I have ever encountered, had the most glorious voice.  We are not talking opera – just an Italian Bring Crosby kind of voice.   There was no band playing, no accordion or guitar – just Alphonso.  Someone asked him afterwards if he did requests.  He confessed that he chooses his songs carefully to flatter his voice, paying careful attention to the key. 

It was so incredibly unexpected.  If breakfast out somewhere is not decadent enough, being serenaded while you eat it – In Inverness – is that much better!

It was kind of nice during my duvet days to spend quality time reading the Bible and, I would say meditating but the brain wasn’t capable of that kind of activity.  I read and I let the word just wash over me.  I am a Bible passage-dissector so it was nice not to do that. 

It says in Psalm 42:8 “By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me—a prayer to the God of my life.”

Listening to the radio one morning, the man doing word for the day talked about making New Year’s resolution and how it’s a silly idea because we all break them anyway.  He proposed making the whole year a year of something.  For him it was going to be a year of patience and a year of being kind to people. I liked the idea, gave it some thought and decided to make this year for myself to be “the year of singing”. 

Reading through different versions of the Bible I am not sure who is doing the singing in Psalm 42:8.  Some would say it is the writer of the psalm that is singing the songs given to him by God.  Other versions would say that it’s God doing the singing.  Both have their appeal but I like the picture of God singing.  A song at night makes me think of a lullaby.  There is surely nothing more comforting to a child than a parent singing a lullaby.

Of course the “night” referred to doesn’t have to be a literal night.  Dark times happen when we go through difficult times – the space we occupy long before we see the light at the end of the tunnel.  There are some that would still keep singing in the middle of the dark space and remind us that we are more than conquerors.  I think that God sings to us during those hard times when, perhaps, we just can’t sing. 

He gives me His songs in the night

When dark are the clouds and hard is the fight

The times when my soul is downcast

He sings of His love that is mighty and vast

Bearing Fruit

It had been a while since I was last at Poetry Club in the Sunset Cafe.  I had fallen into the “Strictly” hole with all its sequins and sevens.  I wasn’t greeted like the prodigal son.  My absence wasn’t even mentioned. 

Marcin, the man that managed the café was pleased to see me.  He had, he told me, sold one of my poetry books just before Christmas and handed me my share of the booty. 

I spent some of my booty on a pot of tea puzzling over the information that he had sold one of my books.  I didn’t remember giving him any of my books to sell in the café.  There were other poets in the group whose books vied for attention on the shelf.  Maybe he had got them directly through the publisher, or sold his own copy bought the night of the book launch.  Yes, it’s called clutching at straws.

“If you have any more of your books…” Marcin was quite happy to add them to the pile.  Being Poetry Club I happened to toss in a few copies into my rucksack – on the off chance someone might ask.

Marcin frowned at the book.  It didn’t look familiar.

“New cover?” he asked.

I couldn’t keep living in denial.  The book Marcin had sold wasn’t my book.  I wanted badly to hold on to “my” part of the earnings – which were not mine at all.  It wasn’t huge sum.  It probably wouldn’t be missed.  And it just felt so good thinking that someone had bought my book. Except they hadn’t bought my book at all. 

Marcin rifled through the books on the shelf finding a copy of the book he had sold.   I handed back the booty.  The other poet was short, like me; she had dark hair like me; she wore glasses like me; but she wasn’t me.

So what about the book?  My nephew thinks I am raking in royalties and now that I am rich, I am like the queen and don’t worry about mundane things like money.  Both he and I wish that to be the case but it isn’t.

So what about the book?  Let me just say that I think it is a marvellous book.  I am proud to have my name attached to it. My biggest concern when it was launched into the world was that it was a second class collection of less that great poetry.  It is first class!  It is wonderful stuff. 

Quite a few books were bought as Christmas presents for mums and grandmothers, aunties, sisters and friends.  I have unintentionally identified a specific market demand.  The poems seem to have found their own prescription – one before breakfast and one at the end of the day.  My own copy sits beside my Bible on the coffee table.

So what about the book? Waterstones in Inverness never took up my offer of selling them in their store.  Although they might have a policy of promoting local authors, a clearly Christian poetry book – poetry not being so easy to sell, or religion for that matter – they never really got back to me.  My husband boycotted the store for a week or two, but his Waterstones card lured him back.  I shall become like the persistent widow to Watertsone’s unjust judge in time for Easter!

Two Christian bookshops, one in Inverness and one in Rugby, were supplied with books.  They have certainly sold some of them.  I could have cut out the middle man or woman, and sold the book directly to friends of friends, collecting the whole booty instead of sharing it.  But I wanted the bookshops to be able to sell them and ask for more.  It is a book that is amazing and not just because I think so.

Feedback from those that received the book for a Christmas present is filtering through to me.  So far it is all positive.  It is unsolicited positive. Mothers and grandmothers, aunties, sisters and friends all across the country are being blessed by the poems and finding encouragement in them.  

We were reading and praying through some of the opening verses of Paul’s letter to the Colossians.  The phrase “bearing fruit in every good work” v10, caused me to look back over those closing months of last year.  I may not yet have convinced Waterstones that they want my book; I may have a relatively full box of the books under my stairs still to sell; both Christian bookshops in Inverness and Rugby may not yet be making repeat requests for new stock – but I am convinced that the book is bearing fruit in the lives of those that read it.