Glimpses

By William M Rumball

Glimpses is a collection of poems arising from the author’s life-experiences, ranging from early life in a Blitzed Coventry slum, through work in heavy industry, university life and academia, together with musings on family life, bereavement and pastoral care of many as an Anglican priest. It is a collection about doubt and the compensations of faith, family and friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528920711

William M Rumball

Dr Rumball is married to Pamela with two children: an artist son with a German family and a GP daughter in the UK. Formerly a research physical scientist, he spent time in university teaching and served as a Royal Navy officer during the Cold War. Latterly for some forty years, he has been an Anglican priest. In younger days a keen athlete and marathon runner, he now enjoys painting and sketching, woodworking, bookbinding, writing and weather-watching.

Book preview

Winter Sky

A homely oak stands stockily forked,

With outstretched angular arms to embrace,

And protect the soon shrinking December day;

An akimbo kindly clown spread-eagled across,

The deepening pall of navy sky,

Holding forth above a bare,

Frost-sheet expanse of fallow field,

Puppeteer-like above the hedge’s lacy-black.

And soon now the frost-field becomes a moonlit white,

Under the inkly flooding sky,

And the sturdy tree melts into nothing,

At this final thawing of the day,

Into the deep ice-hardening grip of the unyielding black.

Mind’s Art

Pictures properly placed, landscapes, seascapes level,

straight and square cover the tidy

walls of the bright meticulous mind.

Then beyond,

jarring, juddering juggernauts close,

and the chemical neatness of the mind’s eye splinters

like the fragile glass,

and the idyll disintegrates by thunder’s