I’m excited that the video of this poem has been chosen as an exhibit at the Hadau Arts Exhibition in Cardiff, Wales, with the theme Holding the Future? “Hadau” is a Welsh word meaning “seeds” and I’ve

I’ll be at the exhibition opening this Saturday 7 March at 7pm, and is free with chance to meet many of the artists.

There’s also the upcoming Hadau Arts Conference on Saturday 21 March, with a special Urban Wordsmiths x Hadau spoken word evening the night before on Friday 20 March. More details of those after the poem!

If you’re in reach of Cardiff, it would be great to see you there (sorry international friends!

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As my friend , who will be speaking at the conference, says, “in times of crisis, make art”. And it certainly seems to me a fitting response to our uncertain times.

Scroll on down to read the poem and for more conference details!

Planet Planet Burning Bright

With apologies to William Blake, St John of Patmos, the Met Office
and future generations of the human race

Planet Planet Burning Bright
No forest left in thy dark night
What mortal hand or eye
Dare deface thy fearful glory?

In what distant deeps and skies
Burnt the fires of our desires?
On what shores dared we destroy?
What the hand, dared stoke the flames?

Cloudy with a chance of extinction
Flooding of a few homes and major population centres
is possible

Whose the hammers? whose the chains?
In whose furnace forged the acid rains?
When the sun throws down its rays
And boils oceans with its gaze:

Will we smile our work to see?
Will we who killed the Lamb kill thee?

Danger of substantial disruption to
Travel plans and human civilisation
Forecast of survival: moderate to poor

Is it time? A time for wrath?
For destroying those who destroy the earth?

Mountains fall on us
Hills cover us
The earth and everything done to it will be laid bare

Planet Planet Burning Bright
How can we stand in the Lamb’s sight?

Stormy with a chance of apocalypse
Take action now to keep yourself and others safe.

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Urban Wordsmiths x Hadau, Friday 20 March

Entrance is included with a Hadau conference ticket, or you can book for the evening alone here:

Book on Eventbrite

Hadau Conference, Saturday 21 March

Urban Crofters Church partners with Morphē Arts to host an Exhibition and a Conference to gather and deepen the conversation of arts and faith in Wales. Speakers include Adrienne Chaplin (philosopher of art) and (artist and author of Why Art Matters).

Programme:

Below is a poem in three movements from a time when I was wrestling with a deep sense of uncertainty around my faith — whatever your beliefs, I hope the theme of internal conflict will resonate on some level.

Bigger on the Inside includes a few different strands — written essays, Imaginative Discipleship podcast episodes, and occasional poetry. You can choose which sections you follow, depending on what’s most helpful to you, by updating your choices in your account settings.

Wrestling in the storm

1. Faith

A leap in the dark
A lover’s kiss
Betting my life on eternity’s stakes
Questioning obedience
Seeking understanding
A quest
A pilgrimage
A journey and a gift
Empty hands lifted up

Child-like hope
Adult-like perseverance
Keeping steady in life’s storms
Beyond reason yet reasonable
Where intellect gives way to relationship
Where thinking gives way to trusting
Where wondering gives rise to loving

Some say it’s madness
A delusion — illusion — epistemological confusion
But I find in it sanity
Some say intellectual suicide
I say death and rebirth
Giving up and gaining
A recognition of my limits
A receiving of the divine
The substance of things hoped for
The evidence of things not seen

A mystery
Fragile and unbreakable
Doubtful and certain
Individual and communal
The dark night of the soul
And shining cloud of witnesses

Not of myself
So that no-one can boast
A seed implanted
A signpost heavenward

Life.

2. Doubt

The storms come
And what I thought rock turns to sand
My house crumbles
If the foundations be destroyed
Who can stand?

Hope seems wishful thinking
Community seems confirmation bias
Certainty seems foolishness
Belief seems blindness
Where has my confidence gone,
Faded away like cut grass?

I oscillate — vacillate — hovering
Tossed with every wind
Between belief and despair
Deconstruction and reconstruction
Trusting and doubting

So many questions:
Is this real?
Is this true?
Is this good?

I cry out in the storm:

I believe, help my unbelief!

3. Calm

I think I believe, though I’m not always sure I do.

Two tunes overlap, clashing, competing
If I focus, one resolves
But I still hear the other
Rising to drown out the first.

Living cross-pressured
Caught in the multiverse of meaning
The universes next door
Colliding with my own.

Faith and doubt
Optimism and nihilism
Humanisms secular and sacred
Materialist ‘nothing buttery’
A universe of blind pitiless indifference
Realities objective or constructed.

But the mystery of existence
Seems too great a gift to have no-one to thank for

And the beauty of the Lamb
The self-giving one, dying and rising
Seems too good to be untrue.

So I might be wrong
But for today
I still choose to believe

No AI was used in the writing of this poem.

I’m more settled in my convictions currently, but I know what it’s like to feel tossed and turned between different viewpoints. If you’ve been through similar times of uncertainty and change in your beliefs, what was it like for you? Have you come through the storm yet, and how did you change along the way?

Earlier this year, I took part in the UK Moot creative community’s Pass the Piece, where participants created a piece of art (whether visual art or poetry or prose or music…) to pass it on for someone else to respond to (as well as receiving someone else’s piece for our own creative response).

I came up with a poem that riffs on the title of this newsletter and my love of Narnia and Doctor Who, which the wonderfully-talented author and storyteller Amy Scott Robinson wrote a response to. Here are both poems – I hope you enjoy them, and thanks to Amy for permission to share hers publicly here!

Pass the Piece

Bigger on the Inside

A wardrobe is a snowy kingdom
And a police box is a time machine

A book is an adventure in time and space
A journey to other realms and minds

A story is a cosmos incognito
A view of the universe shared

A word is an open doorway
To wonders and worlds unknown

A poem is thing with dimensions
Hidden and deep beyond

A metaphor is a myth in miniature
An explosion of meaning that blooms

A person is a story that’s living
Containing thoughts and dreams immense

A kindness is an incarnation
Of the love that moves sun and stars

A world is a signpost
To things unseen

A prayer a hinge
On which history turns

A loaf of bread is the body
Broken so we might be unbroken

A cup of wine is the blood is the life
Is the love at the heart of the universe.

by Caleb Woodbridge

A word is a doorway (and a prayer is a hinge)

And he replied, ‘Join me
in this metaphor. It’s a myth in miniature,
a parable’s seed,’

and he pointed to the plate on the table.
Looking, she saw with his eyes:
starving wanderers
manna from heaven
five thousand hungry children
twelve baskets left over
a broken body
two at Emmaus starting to their feet.

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘even the dogs will eat
the crumbs that the children brush off.’

She looked into the eyes of the word,
and he, with the world in his sights
smiled back and opened the door.

by Amy Scott Robinson
(www.amyscottrobinson.com)

Reminder: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at 75 livestream, Thursday 8pm

Join me for a book group style livestream discussing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe! If you’d like to take part in the discussion live on YouTube, register below and I’ll send details of how to join the call:

Register

Prayer letter

I plan to send out my first prayer letter / ministry update this weekend to supporters of my work with the Growing Churches Programme, doing Christian creative cultural engagement in Wales.

If this is of interest to you, please sign up for it separately at newsletter.calebwoodbridge.com.

I am Boy

I am Boy
I am Two
The world is mine
I’m sure it’s true
Daddy sometimes forgets who’s Boss
And Mummy is a total loss

Sometimes she will stop me from
Jumping in muddy puddles
But she is good for snuggly cuddles
And her milk is something special
When she can be prevailed upon
With my cries
And imprecations

I like dinosaurs
OMP OMP OMP
Listen to my might
RAAAR
Hear me from near and far

I am Bold
I am Strong
Except when I meet
A worm that’s long
AAAAAAH!
Why couldn’t my parents see
That thing might have eaten me?

I like Snacks
And beans on toast
Jam and Cookies
And when I’m in the mood
Bits of Mummy and Daddy’s food
And when I want something more
I pick some bits up from the floor
Yum!

Mum and Dad, poor simple fools
Often don’t know what I choose
So I have to point and scream
To demand breakfast ice cream
Sometimes they can be quite thick
Persistence sometimes does the trick
But other times they just don’t get it
So I have no choice
But to reprimand
Their failure
To meet my demand
AAAAAAAH

I am Boy
I am Two
I put stones in your shoe
My experiments empirical
Get spoiled by interference parental

I like Trains
CHOO CHOO CHOO
I love to run and play with you
I must insist you don’t get distracted
By work or friends or phones or chores
By adult conversations or other bores

I am Boy
I am Two
All that I ask of you
My parents
Is your total attention
Focus in every dimension
Your unbounded love and affection

I am Boy
I’m never tired
I am sometimes very wired

I am Boy
I don’t need bed
I’m not sleepy
I’m a dinosaur
Listen to
My mighty…
SNORE

I’ve long dabbled in poetry, but in the last year or so I’ve begun to make more of a habit of it, writing more pieces and beginning to share them at the Parc Arts Open Mic evenings here in Treforest. I enjoy playing with language and juxtapositions, and I find poetry allows me a freer and more immediate exploration of different moments and ideas.

I feel very much a beginner poet, but as G K Chesterton said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly” — at least, at first, I might add, and hopefully I’m beginning to at least occasionally do poetry well!

When I saw that the theme of the Hadau arts exhibition at Urban Crofters in Roath, Cardiff was “Is it finished?”, it immediately put me in mind of a poem I wrote over half my lifetime ago, before I left home for university, called “Unfinished Man”. I still don’t feel “finished”, so wrote a ‘sequel’ to it and submitted the pieces to the exhibition. I was delighted that they were accepted for display, and you can see them up until May along with a variety of other artworks in different mediums and genres.

“Hadau” is the Welsh word for “seeds”, and as well as the exhibition, there is the Hadau day conference on art and faith on Saturday 29th March. I’ll be there and it would be great if you could come too, if you’re in reach of Cardiff!

And now in honour of World Poetry Day, I’m sharing them here with you, two pieces in dialogue over the span of 21 years:

Unfinished Man (2004)

By Caleb Woodbridge (aged 18)

A plant not flowered,
a rock part-hewn.
A man in waiting,
still out of tune.
The steering wonky,
directions vague.
Hopes a-plenty,
decisions not made.

I’m being shaped and being changed,
My life still needs to be arranged,
My character’s under construction,
My mind being moulded,
My heart as yet ungiven.
I must trust to the compass
of the Word of my Lord.

Take me and make me,
break what is hard.
Take out the monster of “me”
that poisons my heart.
Melt all my coldness with your loving blast.
Grow in me love, wisdom, goodness,
Build me into the man I should be,
becoming more like you for all eternity.

Unfinished Man (2025)

By Caleb Woodbridge (aged 39)

I stand now on the cusp of middle age
Am I flowered, tuneful, fully hewn?

I’m still not finished
Though somewhat grown.
My heart’s now given
To the one I love as my wife,
We share our struggles,
Our story, our joys, our life.

An erratic journey,
Blown this way and that.
But love sets a direction
Of provision and protection
And co-creation of our little tribe
Three children now
Life’s present full focus
The locus of hope, joy and exhaustion.

Our path to parenthood
Delayed and diverted
With many fears
But our struggles a greenhouse
Our growth watered by many fears
Planted deep in darkness
Germinating perseverance, hope, character.
Now older, perhaps a touch wiser,
Monstrous ego a little restrained.

Still the path stretches on ahead
The distance left unknown
Heaven’s light now hidden, now seen,
Glimpsed in the gaps of life’s clouds
And yet I press on
Towards the light
To the warmth
Of love’s calling beckoning me on.