Take My Hands Take my two hands make eight feet of them give them to the spider I soaked in hot water in my kitchen sink. I will hide my arms in long sleeves, will finish the last painting with…
A. ROBERT LEE Tokyo Sakura Tree Yes, it’s a Japan-icon, the nation’s postcard. Cherry blossoms. Branch-born, bud to flower. Wind-gyres of floating white-pink petal. Imprints upon woodblock, flag, coin, kimono. Even upon street manhole covers. Japan’s colour code. But, at…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE On 1 March I invited four friends for a properly distanced coffee on the terrace, even though it was the first day of another red-zone lockdown, in response to a third wave of COVID-19. Squinting in bright,…
MARGARET MCCARTHY THE SELFISHNESS OF THE TREES I It is the cruelest spectacle, they put on such clouds of white that allow you to believe in some endless generosity; you remember how you looked this time last year and the…
STEPHEN WILSON All year long I’ve been waiting on the promise of a light green cocoon whose size increased in almost imperceptible increments its tepals unable to free themselves yet always on the point of budburst as if something inside…
SILVIA PIO Clouds crowd this instant suspended like a weightless veil wrapping the view while suns flow by in blue cuttings of sky. In the clouds we read stories of an existence floating above ours like a light touch upon…
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…
