Busy Bees

I'm not a morning person. I'd like to get up before 7, but that has to do, most days. And one of the first things I do when I get up is go straight down the garden to have a look at the wonderfully coloured, bright, yellow, orange and red, peach and pink nasturtiums in my tubs and to do some deadheading. Because if you deadhead them religiously they just keep on flowering with these incredibly bright and vibrant colours. And down there this morning I noticed straight away a bee busily visiting the blossoms. Buzzy and busy already, at that time in the morning! And as I listened, I heard the birds in the trees chirping cheerily to each other. It made me think - what a busy place the natural world is, right from their start as soon as the sun peeps over the horizon. 
Many times I've sat down there at dusk enjoying the sky and the trees. And because at the bottom of our garden there are many trees, the sound of the birds in the evening is magnificent as the sky gently darkens and the bat comes out to join them, seeking tasty flying morsels. But there's a certain point of the dusk when all the cheeping and chirping of the birds falls silent. That's because they have to be up first thing in the morning to be busy and busy and busy. How active and alive the natural world is! No lie-a-beds there. 
And why is doing something 'religiously' to do it with commitment and purpose and determination?
Is the natural world, the bee and the bird and a thousand other creatures, strange thought, doing it religiously? 

Street Poem

This is my first post on this blog.

One of the things I do is work with a homeless charity called New Hope here in Watford.
Sometimes, I reflect on the issues, personal as well as social and political.
Here is a poem that reflects on those personal issues.

Battered and defeated people,
Walk the streets with sullen eyes.
See the cracked and heaving pavestones,
Dimmed before the brighter skies.

Lost and lonely, empty people,
Once they had a life like mine.
But outrageous fortune stripped it.
Now to backstreet ways incline.

Pavements hold the dog-end harvests.
Sometimes treasures left behind.
Even tasty scraps of chicken,
Brown sauce on a bacon rind.

This no life for human people -
Hardly human feeling so.
Margined they from eyes averted;
Invisible they quiet go. 

It's not my world, that they're seeing.
Sideways slipped to parallel
Space and time of lifeless concrete.
Stuck in their own private hell.

They don't see me, just a pocket,
Source of some much needed cash.
Don't expect of me a greeting.
Some will dash by, some will bash.

Do I see them sitting, ragged?
See the form but not the man?
True, I do not sense the person,
Firm avoiding if I can.

Seeing past each other only,
How can meeting then arise?
They and I must find a new way,
Each to see with better eyes.

If my eyes could lock with their eyes,
If their eyes could fix on mine,
Then our hearts and souls embracing,
"You and I might jointly shine."

But this call is first upon me,
I who stand and walk on by,
By my care they must see past me,
Up and on into the sky.