OWEN LOWERY Had it always been prone and immense there between barbed wire strands and the cornfield, its roots feathering the wind? Not a leaf on it while it lived and was reborn with each visit. Husk and bark and…
KRYSTYNA LENKOWSKA Fragility You say that the earth we touch is only a landslide. We walk along the ridge of the tongue where homes grew with a hearth in the heart. We don’t know what happened to them later. Maybe…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN For Alastair Reid Finnegan wakes and walks in briny air. Gulls wheel and gannets dive. The cliffs are bare. The coast is clear. And nobody is there. He’d dreamed a corner of his dream again might touch his…
CLAUDIO SOTTOCORNOLA Regarding beauty, care, responsibility… In March 2003, when my mother unexpectedly left us, in part due to some human errors and omissions, I immediately became aware of the contrast between her way of being — generous, giving,…
CEAITÍ NÍ BHEILDIÚIN [CATHI WELDON] Na cúiseanna go nDreapaim Crainn Dreapaim crann is mo bhuataisí orm M’iallacha ceangailte, bivouac im phaca agam. Dreapaim an crann is luascaim ann sa ghaoth. Dreapaim crann d’fhonn úll a stoitheadh D’fhonn radharcanna a fheiscint…
NICK PARKER Dante has been one of those undercurrents, a kind of basso continuo, in my life since I first encountered him forty years ago. When I lived in Alessandria in the late 70s, I was fortunate in having a…
GERMAIN DROOGENBROODT Left in the grey air as unfulfilled desires smoke of cremation * Hankering for dawn but it won’t rise for them corona victims * The blackbirds wonder why the streets are so empty sorrowful their songs * A…
SILVIA PIO If you were to find yourself in a doctor’s waiting room one day, feeling in question, or at sea, feeling anxious, or even just plain bored, might you be glad of a poem displayed there, on the wall?…
VICTOR HUGO You forest trees, how well you know my mind! The envious crowd is raucous and unkind; You know my soul! You’ve seen me as I’ve gone Gazing and musing in your depths alone: You know the outcrop that…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE 13 February It’s snowing again, a lazy tumble hiding not a thing, dropping a delicate web over tree and field, garden and wall. My husband says he’s done with winter, and this half-hearted effort seems to show…
SILVANO GREGOLI Exactly sixty years ago, on the morning of February 15, 1961, a total solar eclipse in Italy affected southern Piedmont, Liguria, part of Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, northern Lazio, Umbria, Marche and Abruzzo. To find another total solar eclipse in…
GEORGE GÖMÖRI In the whole of New York what I liked best was the tree: that tree with its dense foliage spreading its arms up there on the roof, green and abandoned as the everyday miracle that is the created…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE 1 February Here’s a new month in the new year, but I can’t escape a recurring sense of déjà vu, of experience spiralling back upon itself. It feels as if the same full moon has been rising…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE 13 January 2021 We’re having a proper winter, snowy and cold, the kind we haven’t seen for a couple of years. The landscape is just as it should be—snow-covered hills, bare branches—a perfect study in black on…
FRANCES FAHY The procession of events and people that we term History is, in theory, a defined time, winding steadily away from us back to an unidentified, misty curiosity known as Prehistory. How difficult it is to grasp this ‘defined’…
