Category: Letters

“Writing with Light” and other poems by Gerry Stewart

March 26th, 2020

Writing with Light

Finnish Photography Notes

Guided by imaginary intersections,
fumbling our heavy DSLRs,
we learned the rules
for rhythm and repetition,
aperture and cropping.

My notebook sketched
the tutor’s words in haste.
They resurface beyond the lens.

Organise your space.
I carve out this new home
without maps, using rough translations
and neighbourly advice.

Exaggerate the angles.
Each experience becomes bigger,
more muddled.
I focus along sightlines
to the extremes
until I can make sense
of the finer details.

Never cut away the long shadows.
If I cannot embrace
the long Finnish winter,
I can view its sharp oblique light,
from skis or over a hot cup of glöggi.*

Leave the house,
explore the parts of the world
where you don’t belong.
Blend in with the locals,
find what attracts you to strangers
in their silence, in their open faces.

Travel light.
My unnecessary luggage
and expectations are abandoned.

Arrive early, leave late.
Wait for the decisive moment
to speak those hesitant first Sanaa.

Don’t put the subject in the centre.
Yet even out of shot
I am always fully exposed.

*warmed mulled alcohol or fruit juice served in winter

Slow City Unwind

The Hidden Gardens, Pollokshields

Unseeing strangers blur,
heads down, rushing off.
The rain-mirrored street
a reminding nudge.

Signs offer no way out.
Brick walls. Cigarettes stubbed.
A black bag afternoon caught
in the branches of a stunted tree.

I enter through the sandstone gates.
Grasses bow below a horizon
of hazy tenements.
Stones scarred by workers long forgotten
hold the warmth of my hand.

Whiplash leaves rise
into a painted sky
the colour of seagulls’ wings.

Stake a claim, slow down.
My voice buries itself
among the pine needles
after a day of borrowed words.

I soak up through open pores
the unruffled sunset and rill song,
ease myself away from the current.
Rake away the debris of a hectic life.

Carved wood and soaring trees
rest the spirit, a sanctuary
to keep impulsive winds at bay.

Sap rush.
I translate the garden’s poems
and expand my roots.

From Scratch

A tangle of tree roots, moss
and clay-bound shade,
a gift of apple trees and berry bushes.
All day sun and space to roam.

I dreamt of this new garden more than the house.

The first year’s fruit exceeded
our ability to cope.
I simmered pot after pot
with a newborn in my arms,
every morning let my eldest
eat all the raspberries.

Before the ground has defrosted
our window is full of little pots,
dirt trailing everywhere.

My daughter sprinkles her seeds
with haphazard joy
while I painstakingly transplant seedlings.
Hers will flourish,
blessed with whim and wishes
while mine struggle to adapt.

We cut back thirty-year-old trees:
koivu, kuusi, tammi, pihlaja, punaherukka*:
logs for the fire, mulch,
sticks for childhood games.
Our patch feeds our Finnish life.

The sun traces the arteries of roots
across the unmown lawn,
awaiting autumn’s gift of leaves
to rake and rake and rake again.

A parcel of land:
fit for hide and seek,
treasure hunts and first steps,
cups of tea and doing nothing.
Our home.

*birch, spruce, oak, rowan, red currant

Moon of Winds

February / March

A thawing crack in spring’s resolve,
frost gathers along our ridges,
tight as white-knuckled lichen.

Uprooting gales
no longer push through us,
still we search for a finger-hold,
a bolt hole in the lull
of the rain-scrubbed city.

A thin shaving of new moon
blown into bent oak branches,
taunts us with a Cheshire cat smile,
hunger in its whiskers.

You can ease out your breath
among old brick, foundations
and familiar ground
but I struggle to release
my bone-serious grip.

Thunder Moon

July / August

The piebald moon darts
between our flashes
of galloping inspiration
and the rumbles of routine.

My comfort is found rewriting
and weeding plotlines,
the slow trust of my work
growing word by word,
seeding clouds with potential.

At the first signs of heavy,
threatening skies
your dark twin pulls you
out of alignment
slipping a knife-edge
between tight shoulder blades.

I sieve fragile strands of sunlight
into your open doubts
to recharge your reserves.

Counting on the preceding calm,
we test the air, anticipating
the next adventure or upheaval.
A welcomed foreboding.

Writing with Light and other poems © Gerry Stewart

Gerry Stewart was born in the US, but has lived in Europe for over 25 years in Norway, Greece, Scotland and now Finland. She is a poet, creative writing tutor, and editor. Her poetry has been widely published in the UK, Europe, and United States since 1997, including Black Mountain Review, Crannog, From Glasgow to Saturn, Hanging Loose, Hidden City Anthology, Island, Orbis, Poetry Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg Review, Pushing Out the Boat, Scrittura, Skylight 47, Southlight, and The London Magazine. Her collection Post-Holiday Blues was published by Flambard Press, UK in 2008. In 2005 she received a Scottish Arts Council New Writer’s Bursary for her unpublished novel Talking Italian in my Sleep which has been long-listed for several competitions.

Her writing blog can be found at http:/thistlewren.blogspot.fi/

“Needlepoint” and other poems by Erin Vance

October 18th, 2019


Hiraeth 

In the turpentine afternoon
I wanted to beat my wings— hollow

so       hollow.
  
And in the rectal evening  I wanted to be a hummingbird.
A hum   
    m      
     ing
        bird.

In the frost-swept night 
I wished you a Lamb.

Soft like cotton balls and languid 
                              with musk.

Turn me into a violent fresco,      Lamb,
and touch me like hot bricks

in the wet dawn.

I wanted to be a leaf lodged in amber.
               — — An insulin needle.
  
And at the musk-soaked August’s end 
I wanted to be hollow
                    t r a n s l u c e n        t
a hum
    mingbird 

with — — insulin — — needle— — 
                legs
lodged in amber.

My hollow wings snap
                   ping 
In your lamb’s mouth,
                  turn me into a violet fresco,           Lamb, 
                      
                    touch me like 
                       hot 
                     bricks.

Confession

After Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, photographers of The Cottingley Fairies

When Frances followed the little thing
into the shallow beck
I stayed back, watching her stockings
sag in the water, flapping at her ankles
like bloated second skins.

Frances batted her eyelashes
and the imp trusted her.
Confession: I wished to catch it
and place it in a box
like a little pet in a spider-silk dress,
pull it out at parties to flutter and tease
and spit.

When Frances giggled as its wings
tickled her rosebud cheek—
I confess; I wanted to hold
its gossamer body in my palm,
knowing that I could practically crush it
with my breath.

The waters of the beck leaked into my shoe
the cold water like tiny, elfin teeth
biting my toes. A gasp and— oh!
the thing is dead.
caught under Frances’ fat palm;
she slipped on a patch of moss like an oil slick.

The photos may be fake, but the fairies—
They were real.

Weren’t they, Frances?

Sister, Speak

I wonder where you are
where our home is
now that the skeletons of our earliness
belong to the birds

I wonder if the ground where we placed you
is infected with your dreaming

I sit in your closet
empty now, but the ghosts of your
dresses hang around me
like rainbows dripping lifeless from the gallows

I used to lay in your bed
wanted to feel everything you’d touched
for our skin cells to feed the same microorganisms

I’d lay in the dirt and imagine I was you
but when ants started up my neck I couldn’t help
but twitch awake and run back inside

Mirrors

Mother, can I have the velvet box of milk teeth
that you keep in your nightstand?
Every night I dream my teeth are falling out.
I think they miss me.

Mother, what is the combination to my middle school locker?
I rescued a bird fourteen years ago
and hid it with my gym clothes
I think it’s getting hungry.

Mother, can you braid my hair one last time before I cut it off?
Will you keep a lock of it for a day
when I am not picking up my phone
and you have bad news?

Mother, will you help me down?
This tree is much taller than I expected and this branch
is much thinner and I am much older
than I’d planned.

Mother, will you remind me
to wash between my toes and to take my glasses off
before I fall asleep
even when you don’t remember
who I am?

Needlepoint

When we were young,
Still slippery and mosslike,
Our father embroidered sparrows
Onto the backs of our necks
He held the whiskey bottle in his free hand
And like a mean waterfall the
Blue threads cut through our skin.

For our tenth birthday
Our father bought us stallions,
And after an afternoon of riding,
He added to the hieroglyphs on our necks;
Pomegranates that made our throats
Look like bloody gaps with yellow teeth.

We were fourteen when we stopped dreaming
One morning we woke up together
Our minds empty, our hands steady,
And we clutched the bone-handles of our
Hairbrushes, counting to one hundred
In each others’ hair
Careful not to pull a single stitch.

We worked like machinery and every five years
Father took the needle and we took turns sitting
At the oak table while he stitched
His memories into our skins.

Hatching

For Stacey Walyuchow

When I was six years old,
I played Odette in a Kindergarten production
of swan lake.

My movements were decidedly more
like that of a magpie
and my understudy was called in

after I broke my ankle tripping
over a gold watch.
I cried and watched the birds outside my room.

They played and threw acorns
danced and drew shapes in the dirt
I opened the window and called to them

in my best outside voice.
One by one they jumped onto the sill
and teetered on the threshold

of my world and theirs, their heads
cocked their eyes shifting their feet
twitching until they jumped hopped skipped

into my bed.

Needlepoint and other poems © Erin Vance

Erin Emily Ann Vance holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Calgary and studies Irish Folklore and Ethnology at University College Dublin. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, including The Sorceress Who Left too Soon: Poems After Remedios Varo (Coven Editions) and Unsuitable (APEP Publications). Her writing has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, EVENT Magazine, Augur Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, and more. Her first novel, Advice for Taxidermists and Amateur Beekeepers will be published in Fall 2019 by Stonehouse Gothic.

Learn more at erinvance.ca.

Erin’s social profiles

website www.erinvance.ca
@erinemilyann

“Chattel” and other poems by Kushal Poddar

September 1st, 2019

Panther Unbound

My blind uncle asks if it is a fountain.
“Ah, a fountain!” he says.
“No, a dog licking!” I smile.
We both know we fool around a lot.

I turn the shower off and rub his back.

My mother broke my air-gun against my spine
when I failed to sum up success
with the correlatives given.
I walk with my eyes cast downwards
unless your eyes are shut blind.

I towel my uncle to sun.
“Tell me a story” he says, and I retort,
“So this one by Louis De Bernieres…”

We both know I lie.
I make this tale on my life as a panther unbound.

The Wise Rusts

Meanwhile in Texas,
a callidus gun takes us
to a street led hoodwinked
towards its end –
bricks over bricks, more bricks
opaque and thick.

They report – five demised
last night.
One rebirths as a shepherd,
one as a notorious skirt chaser,
one a sheep, one a chef.
One never returns.

A gun buried, rusts its way back
to the nidus, a reason still stuck
in its bullet-tiny hole boring for
an end of all rationale.

The shepherd is required to sing,
the beau needs to hum,
the sheep intones grass,
the chef croons a requiem.
The one not recurred holds the rust
to his heart. To oblivion.

Chattel

Even your boy street sweeper who writes you by a pet name
on a secluded corner with his warm piss and, believe me,
love smells like an empty bladder
has no inkling why you appear no more in your corroded balcony,
cannot imagine you on the same plane with a melancholic eagle.

In the pane of an airplane
sun bursts, mushrooms, implodes in orange bloom clouds.

You fear for a moment-
You are a land and the man
who promised you steady earnings in the middle east
will colonize your territories soon.

Somewhere below and behind
the sweeper boy imagines you in a well-thumbed magazine
and then not there,
not in the things he can touch or experience.

Chattel was recently published at International Times

Nothing Political About This

While we cross the jungle moon rises-
our country’s election over,
the paths all swept for the mines.

Our car screeches to a sudden motionlessness.
in a limbo, time and space both shaping into
twin headlights’ lit cones.

Someone or some gang has laid
some enormous logs on the road
to block the veins and choke the hearts.

A rabbit leaps from existence
to nothingness. Our driver lights a joint.
We wait and wait. Nothing happens

as if we are a mistake; we are insignificant;
we are cursed to survive
while the violence licks the village past this darkness.

Chattel and other poems are © Kushal Poddar

Kushal Poddar edited the online magazine Words Surfacing. Authored, The Circus Came To My Island (Spare Change Press, Ohio), A Place For Your Ghost Animals (Ripple Effect Publishing, Colorado Springs), Understanding The Neighborhood (BRP, Australia), Scratches Within (Barbara Maat, Florida), Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems (BRP, Australia) and Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems (Hawakal Publishers, India)

Kushal’s Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe

‘Glendalough Sonnet’ and other poems by Angela Patten

July 23rd, 2018

Glendalough Sonnet

Rain and relatives, relatives and rain.
In Glendalough’s monastic town
a jackdaw baby thrusts his downy head
out of a round tower putlock and raises
an ungodly yellow beak to squawk
at gawking tourists snapping cellphones,
the spines of their umbrellas dripping
on the ancient bullaun stones
where monks once mixed their potions
and the holywell was rich in lithium
which turned out to be a great cure
for the occasional pilgrim who, like me,
suffered from the watery weather
or a sodden slough of Celtic despond.

Angela Patten © The Cumberland Review 2015

Inchigeelagh Getaway

Gaeilge, Inse Geimhleach, meaning “Island of the Hostages”
The land is a sponge sodden
with salt water and rain,
the mossed path a tangle
of Herb Robert and buttercup.
Giant leaves of gunnera
and the green spears of rushes
stand guard around the pond.
Laburnum hangs its head
like a girl drying her yellow hair.

Water gushes under culverts
over rocks, tap-tapping on the roof
of the sunroom like a timid visitor.

Through rain-streaked windows
I can see our hosts raise their heads
to look upward as the tempo
intensifies to an irascible hammering;
almost hear the ebb and flow
of their soft voices
from where I stand hidden
under a canopy of dripping roses
and dangling fuschia blossoms.

A clattering sound as three
runaway sheep hoof it down the lane
like boys going over the wall
to mitch from school.
Tomorrow they will have to return,
tails between their legs.

But for now they are part
of a thrilling spectacle as they trundle
three abreast into the green gap
between the high ditches.

The other sheep graze the wet grass,
their plaintive bawling
from the nearby field
like the call-and-response
of a gospel choir
singing the praises of
another doomed rebellion.

Angela Patten © Saint Katherine Review 2018

Ravens

In Norse mythology the twin ravens,
Thought and Memory, flew about
the world, collecting news for Odin
who had given them the gift of speech.

Did they work together as a team—
one forward-thinking, looking out
for bloody rumor, thin whisper,
foul-smelling allegation, while the other
mouthed words and phrases,
recited names, reiterated everything?

Did they return together, grigged
with gossip for the dinner table?
Or did Thought sometimes muddle
Memory with unanswerable questions—
Can Memory be trusted?
Does Thought delude itself?
Do we only live as long as Memory
wraps us in its wings?

Odin feared they might not return,
knowing their taste for decomposing flesh,
what that vertiginous perspective
might reveal—a new god with a dove
that whispers in his ear, some new
dark truth delivered from the air.

Angela Patten © Sequestrum Journal of Literature and the Arts 2017

Crowtime

“It is said that crows, like other corvids, recognize themselves in mirrors
and this is thought to show intelligence.” (Scientific American)

The last light of a winter’s day—
thousands of winged forms
flap past my windows—pins
pulled by a powerful magnet.

The sky is black with crows
crying in cracked voices of their plans
to steal what is left of the light,
to gather their feathered shapes
into a solid-color jigsaw puzzle
of land and lake and sky
that will click into place
only when the last bird
flies into its jagged aperture
and darkness falls.

Like the crows, my father
showed up night after night
to take his place in an ancient ritual.
To play his fiddle, not by standing out
but by fitting in with the other men,
those dark-suited bus-drivers and conductors
who brought to the session
all their quirks and oddities—
Mr. Ward with his head thrown back,
the accordion at rest on his round belly—
Mr. Keogh with his albino eyes,
long fingers sawing the fiddle—
and young Tony in short trousers
tootling away on the tin whistle.

Now my father too is part of that
collective darkness, the puzzle
that the crows remake each night.
That dawn, like a wayward child,
scatters joyfully each morning.

Angela Patten © Sequestrum Journal of Literature and the Arts 2017

The Pancake Artist

She only cooked them once a year
on Shrove Tuesday so we didn’t dwell
on the looming Lenten fast
as we raced home after school
to see her lift down the big black frying-pan
and heat it over the blue gas burner
until the fat spat and sizzled.

She’d hoist the milk jug full of batter,
pour a creamy stream into the pan,
tilting and tipping it to a seamless circle.
We hovered famished at her elbow
as the humps and craters formed—
brown sienna over khaki, burnt
umber over buttermilk. It was all

in the timing. One flick of her gifted wrist
and she’d landed it like a fish
on your plate. You rolled it with sugar,
a squeeze of lemon, scarfed it down.

Then it was back to the end of the queue
until your turn returned again.
No rest for her aching shoulders
until we were all contented sinners,
licking our lips, as full as eggs.

Angela Patten © LiveEncounters 2017

Tracks

After surgery the stitch-marks
look like bird-feet walking up my arm.
But what strange bird has left
its bone-white prints
embedded in my wrist like needle-tracks?
Perhaps it was the raven,
that faux-sorrowful funeral director,
walking beak-forward, gloved hands
folded behind his back, who walks the
twin trajectories of a railway line
that leads to a long-defunct station
where I might meet myself returning
from the beach with two scabbed knees,
embossed inoculations against disease,
the weals of ancient injuries like medals
from the battlefields of childhood,
and my mother’s crowsfeet
inching toward my eyes.

Angela Patten © Cultural Center of Cape Cod 2016 Poetry Prize

Glendalough Sonnet and other poems © Angela Patten

Angela Patten is author of three poetry collections, In Praise of Usefulness (Wind Ridge Books), Reliquaries and Still Listening, both from Salmon Poetry, Ireland, and a prose memoir, High Tea at a Low Table (Wind Ridge Books). She was winner of the 2016 National Poetry Prize from the Cape Cod Cultural Center and her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, she now lives in Burlington, Vermont, where she is a Senior Lecturer in the University of Vermont English Department.

Three poems inspired by Ric Carfagna, Rus Khomutoff

February 10th, 2018

Vintage ghosts of
joy and sadness
a saccharine statement
the highest expression of the autopoetic force
the incarnation and withdrawal of a God
declaration of hither swarms
accretion of the torrential becoming
instances emancipated from
all anxieties and frustrations
in the anagogic phase
made dizzy by the hybris
a regular pulsating
metre of recurrence

This is not a method

O blacklist of preeminence
louder than life itself
countdown sequence
of aired mysterious booms
natural coction
the shadow of a shadow of an
obtainable new order
to bathe in the splendor
of lathe and labyrinth
as momentum grows
that bold and legitimate certainty
of endlessly repeating variations
and recollections that
erect their desire to exist
like a new sensation
articulating lifelong repeal

In this mode and vague notion
of a stay in your placeism
event horizon
a derangement of senses
dragging the echo
from the culvert
from the book of common prayer
eschewing the copula
almost like the pace of a dream
ordered fragments of a
disordered devotion
a space we can enter
the bareness of time’s passing

This is not a method and other poems are © Rus Khomutoff

Rus Khomutoff is a neo surrealist poet in Brooklyn, NY. My poetry has been featured in Erbacce, Fifth Day journal and Burning House Press. In 2017 he published an ebook called Immaculate Days.

‘Briar Notes’ and other poems by Marian Kilcoyne

January 9th, 2018

Spectre

When I saw you, the earth went silent
and the chattering birds sawed off their
beaks. The breeze hushed and gulped into
itself. If there was a cicada, it choked on a
stone. The trees donned black tie and
straightened up while the mouse, mole, and hedgehog
died in their sleep. The fox darted further into the
amaranthine garden, nose quivering, inhaling fright.
When I saw you, the moon strangled the sun, then
spat upon the stars. Now, see what you have done.

First published in The Frogmore Papers (ed. Jeremy Page).

Girl

Since I saw the girl who does not eat,
or trade in food currency, to keep the
breath even, or the gaze straight. Since
then. Since then ago to now, I cannot
bear to watch a robin hopping nervously
on skinny legs, or jaunting around the
patio, perilously balanced.
Averting my eyes from the bird, I think
of her. No part of her was right. I wondered
if when she crossed her clanking legs, she felt
her skeletal reality, but there was no room in
her for thoughts. None. Her spider web being
flushed all joy from me that day. How heavy her
head must be, I thought.

First published in Cyphers (ed. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Macdara Woods).

Briar Notes

Faster than light or sound
the night star slinked, arced
and shot to a spot in the
clayground, festooned with
spiky plant.
When my time comes, I want
to slink, arc and shoot to bog
and botanist paradise. My only
witness, the white line of the
shore and the visitor fox holding
his breath.

First published in Prelude, NY (ed. Robert C.L. Crawford,
Stu Watson).

Liebeslied *

Marsh brown fields clutch bog cotton
in fairy clusters, while the Heron lands.
Its harsh ‘kaark’ a battle cry, shaving
peace from a hazy afternoon. In a moment, you
are born over and over again to this Atlantic
refuge with its teeming silver hues; safe place & padlock.
Close the eyes now to sounds of breaking waves
on the shore. The smell of it, the teasing umami taste
of it on lips forming words. The commotion.

*Love song. From the German
First published in Prelude, NY (ed. Robert C.L. Crawford,
Stu Watson)

The Heart Uncut

It’s strange how you sleep well now,
twice removed from land and self.
Strange how the prairie of your face
eludes me. Lately I wish you well, or
as well as mint beetles are liked by
many. With detached regard.
Stranger still, the way time holds you
and carries you alive through owlish
afternoons, your breath a lattice flung
upon a thousand vistas. Strange how a
fearful ego can remain intact, the
heart uncut. But listen, I want to know
if your spirit has healed? Have you
aligned peace with being, and have
I made myself clear? Finally.

First published in Right Hand Pointing, US (ed. Dale Wisely).

Briar Notes and other poems © Marian Kilcoyne

Marian Kilcoyne is an Irish writer based on the west coast of Ireland. She has, in the past, been a teacher at senior level, worked professionally in education and management for an Aids Organization, and reviewed fiction and non-fiction for the Sunday Business Post, Ireland. She attended the Seamus Heaney Centre summer school at Queens University Belfast in 2013. She has been published or is forthcoming at Prelude (US), The Louisville Review (US), Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria), Crannog (IRL), Ofi Press (Mexico), Frogmore Papers (UK), Cyphers( IRL), Apalachee Review (US), Foliate Oak Literary Magazine (US,) New Contrast (Cape Town), Quiddity (US), Right Hand Pointing (US), Grey Sparrow Journal (US), Off The Coast (US), The Galway Review (IRL), The Liner (US), Into The Void (IRL), Roanoke Literary Journal (US), The Rockhurst Review (US), Banshee Literature (IRL), The Catamaran Literary Reader (US), The Worcester Review (US), The Stonecoast review (US), The Main St Rag, (US), Brushfire Literature & Arts Journal, (US), and others. She was short listed for the 2017 Dermot Healy International prize for poetry.

Marian Kilcoyne’s website

‘Magnificat’ (1917) by Geraldine Plunkett Dillon

October 14th, 2017

MAGNIFICAT

by Geraldine Plunkett Dillon (1891 – 1986)

1 (Untitled)

While you are in Kilkenny town,
I see your grace in every tree;
Your hair is as the branches brown,
The birches have your bravery.

Your strength in mountain oaks I find,
Eagles in this have built their nest;
With supple sally twigs you bind
My willing heart unto your breast.

Cypress and cedar spreading wide
Under your peace my heart will sleep;
O rowan tree that grows beside
My pool of love, your roots drink deep.

2 June

I fill my heart with stores of memories,
Lest I should ever leave these loved shores;
Of lime trees humming with slow drones of bees,
And honey dripping sweet from sycamores.

Of how a fir tree set upon a hill,
Lifts up its seven branches to the stars;
Of the grey summer heats when all is still,
And even grasshoppers cease their little wars.

Of how a chestnut drops its great green sleeve,
Down to the grass that nestles in the sod;
Of how a blackbird in a bush at eve,
Sings to me suddenly the praise of God.

3 The North Wind

O rare North Wind whose cutting edge is keen,
Joyfully brushing up the countryside,
Tossing aloft the yellow buds and green,
A little southward eddie creeps around
When all the West is blushing like a bride,
Sweet is the southward eddie near the ground.

The heavy tide rolls in the billows blue,
Save in the purple depth where seaweed lies;
The seagulls out against the clouds are few,
But O, the sea is white among the rocks;
The whipped foam white in the North Wind flies,
High in the sky are flung the North Wind’s locks.

4 To Saint Francis

O Francis, I have listened at your feet
And tried to catch your quick humility,
I caught the meaning of your counsels sweet
And found the peace that is within your words;
I’ve loved with you the fishes of the sea,
I’ve been the little sister to the birds.

I am in fellowship with all the world
The rivers singing to me as they run,
The flowers spoke to me as they unfurled
The dumb earth sobs to me in earthquake jars;
As you were little brother to the sun,
I am the little sister of the stars.

5 Gan Ainm

Your gracious joy distils my heart, as dew
Which your great love will gather to a whole
And bind the waters to a stream anew,
To wind among the gardens of your soul;

The unthinkable sweetness of your kiss
Has made my soul a flame, and up it goes,
Finding its way among the stars in bliss
To hide itself in the eternal rose.

6 Magnificat

A fold of Heaven’s curtain swung aside
Splitting the blackness of the winter’s night,
Blown by the breath of God it opens wide;
I saw the holy ones in companies
Led by archangels armoured for the fight;
I heard the shrill eternal symphonies.

I did not thrust my sorrow-twisted face
Amongst the splendours of the heavenly town
Nor walk misshapen with the forms of grace
Girded for battle in celestial wars;
And yet, my God, an angel has come down
And crowned me with the glory of the stars.

7 Si Quis Amat

In my dream of peace,
One sound breaks silence
The sweetness of increase
As honey downward drips
Through the bars of sense
Down to my soul’s lips.

For whose joyous choice
My heart sings of it
Shouts with a loud voice
No fear or regret
Si quis amat novit
Quid haec vox clamet

[If a man loves, he will know the sound of this voice.]

8 Before Her Judge

In all my life, there happened things just three
First I was born;
Marriage came next to one who seemed like Thee
I died this morn.

My man, my babes, my life, I loved too well,
To walk Thy ways.
Must I now hate eternally in Hell
Unending days?

There is one plea beneath which I can hide,
O Beauteous One!
Your Father, Christ, forsook you; but I died
To save my son.

Magnificat is courtesy of and © Geraldine Plunkett Dillon’s great-granddaughter Isolde Carmody

Image: Top of the wave by Geraldine Plunkett Dillon

The text of Magnificat and images associated with Geraldine Plunkett’s Dillon’s historical and cultural work were kindly sent to me by her great-granddaughter Isolde Carmody and I am very grateful for them. I am delighted to add Geraldine to my indices at Poethead. I hope that this page will increase interest in her work. Excerpts from the Preface to the 2nd edition of All In The Blood, memoirs of Geraldine Plunkett Dillon, edited by Honor ÓBrolcháin,

“My greatest regret throughout the process has been how little credit she gives herself, for example she does not mention a paper she gave in the Royal Irish Academy in 1916 or her contribution to the article on dyes in Encyclopedia Britannica or her volume of poetry, Magnificat, or contributing to the Book of St Ultan, or being a founder member of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe (the masks of Tragedy and Comedy she made for the Gate theatre are now on a wall in the Taibhdhearc) and the Galway Art Club, where she exhibited for years, or making costumes for Micheál Mac Liammóir in 1928, or being responsible for Oisín Kelly deciding to become a sculptor – he was one of very many who said that she enabled them to do the right thing for their own fulfillment. When she wrote it was in order to provide a history of her times and an insight into what made her family so strange. Like many of her generation she did not write much about her own feelings and her humourous and optimistic nature does not really come through in her writing. I would like to have been able to put that in but could not in all faith do so. “ It is also worth noting that Joe (Joseph Plunkett) named her as literary executor, and she edited his Collected Poems in 1916

Other sources for Geraldine Plunkett Dillon’s work (online)

The following brief biographical source for Geraldine Plunkett Dillon’s work is courtesy of Billy Mills at Elliptical Movements: Geraldine Plunkett Dillon (1891 – 1986) was born in Dublin. She published a single pamphlet of poems, Magnificat, from The Candle Press in Rathgar in 1917, which sold for sixpence. Her brother Joseph Mary was executed for his part in the 1916 rising. She was the mother of Eilís Dillon and grandmother of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.

100 Irish Women Poets at Elliptical Movements

Magnifact at the Internet Archive

‘All The Worlds Between’; a collaborative poetry project between India and Ireland

September 16th, 2017

All the Worlds Between is a collaborative poetry project bringing together poets from India, Ireland and in between. Their writing partnerships resulted in four strands—poems as conversations, poems at angles to one another, poems which speak out of turn to other poems in the group and, not surprisingly, stories of friendship.

The poets looked at questions of home, belonging, identity, exclusion and homogenisation. From conversations about shoes and what they evoke to exchanges about parents, poems responding to the transgender experience, to inward angled poems and even chain poems created stanza by stanza over email and WhatsApp, through all of these the poets found themselves eavesdropping on the collective consciousness, ears to the ground listening for the beat of life.

Contributing poets

Adil Jussawalla, Aditi Rao, Áine Ní Ghlinn, Alvy Carragher, Anne Tannam, Arundhathi Subramaniam, BeRn, Christine Murray, Claus Ankersen, Daniel Ryan, Fióna Bolger, Maurice Devitt, Menka Shivdasani, Nandini Sahu, Nita Mishra, Ӧzgecan Kesici, Rizio Yahannan Raj, Sampurna Chattarji, Shobhana Kumar, K. Srilata, Sue Butler, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, R. Vatsala.

Edited by Srilata Krishan and Fióna Bolger

Published by Yoda Press www.yodapress.co.in

Read more at Ó Bhéal

All the Worlds Between is a collaborative poetry project bringing together poets from India, Ireland and in between. Their writing partnerships resulted in four strands — poems as conversations, poems at angles to one another, poems which speak out of turn to other poems in the group and, not surprisingly, stories of friendship.

The poets looked at questions of home, belonging, identity, exclusion and homogenisation. From conversations about shoes and what they evoke to exchanges about parents, poems responding to the transgender experience, to inward angled poems and even chain poems created stanza by stanza over email and WhatsApp, through all of these the poets found themselves eavesdropping on a collective consciousness, ears to the ground listening for the beat of life. (read more here)

‘Sequence after Celan’ by Gillian Prew

August 19th, 2017

Sequence after Celan

1

Spring: trees flying up to their birds 

where the sun is the seeds are freed
their small sound a wound
like death watercoloured and open
           each foliated lung with its breathing understory
                the climb of springtime into the loud light
sky filled with dove-coloured words

2

the climbed evening
is thick with lung-scrub

a nocturne of oxygen    of spring sillage   the raising of the dead 
and their flowers
the night deer with hooves of heather    the precision of an owl in 
*rooted darkness
                              in the tangled bramble
                              a knot of blood

3

water needles
stitch up the split
shadow-he fights his way
deeper down, free 

rain wholly itself
a breathing torrent
hitting the half-lit
a million microdazzles     a mouse
    mud-buried 
    a blinking scut
the fluency of a softer death
a spring nothingness
    a heart-smoke

4

in the air, there your root remains, there, in the air 

                up
the sky bitten open
the sun exhumed
        clouds bud and bloom
        with roots of rain


5

All things,
even the heaviest, were
fledged, nothing,
held back.

weeds like wicks ending
             long-edged 
weighted by a bursting yellow
re-bloom and climb
    a white tufted voile
like breath solidifying
    the hung lungs letting go
everything uprooted

*

after

The green gardens are gone. What is left is a grief-bulb. 
It has no smell or sound, just a dormant red. 
So is the air with its salt and silence. 
So is the hunter with his glacial ethics.

Born Stirling, Scotland in 1966, Gillian Prew studied Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1984 to 1988. Her chapbook, Disconnections, can be purchased from erbacce-press (2011) and another chapbook, In the Broken Things, published by Virgogray Press (2011). Her collection, Throats Full of Graves, has been published in 2013 by Lapwing Publications. A further collection, A Wound’s Sound, was released from Oneiros Books in April 2014.

Her latest chapbook, Three Colours Grief, was published by erbacce-press in June 2016. She is online at https://gprew.wordpress.com/

She has been twice short-listed for the erbacce-prize and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Patterns of Sensation – the bodies of dolls by Salma Caller

July 20th, 2017

Silk Velvet Purse Doll

Tiny invisible stitches hold rivets that hold rivulets
Of silk ending in the darkness
Where dreaming continues
The sleeping and dreaming of her invisible body

Silk Velvet Purse Doll

A mille-feuille
A body of a thousand layers
A thousand gauze tissues
A thousand substances
Concealing a darkened chamber
Entombing
A heavy velvet pouch
Profligate sensual reclining body feeling inwardly
Reaching caressing touching exploring the textures of the inside of a dark and empty space
Where nothing is also everything
A costly ornate body of sensation
Silk velvet skin silk thread silk tassel nerve endings
Silent silken hair spreading
A dense and tactile embroidery surrounds her slits tips lips edges and borders
Wires closely over-sewn create
Her ribs
Brushing stroking heating and burnishing
Made a body that is close textured lustrous gleaming and smooth
Intricate and laborious twisting and twirling of twines
Tiny invisible stitches hold rivets that hold rivulets
Of silk ending in the darkness
Where dreaming continues
The sleeping and dreaming of her invisible body
That dreaming heavy velvet body
Held in the darkness by a skin of sound
Pearl fastenings fasten her breast
Silk velvet velvet silk
Threads pulled tightly holding her in holding her inwards
Net gauze tissue
Lace wire mesh
Feathers
Locks of glossy hair
Fine shimmering strands of metal thread
Seeds metal beads sequins
A weaving of delicate traps that subdue mesmerise and enclose
Hiding her in intricacy and leading to labyrinths of the eternal

Chinking of bells
Clicking of shells

Tiny invisible stitches hold rivets that hold rivulets
Of silk ending in the darkness
Where dreaming continues
The sleeping and dreaming of her invisible body

Where nothing is also everything
A costly ornate body of sensation

Seeds metal beads sequins
A weaving of delicate traps that subdue mesmerise and enclose
Hiding her in intricacy

The Shell Bell Shaking Doll

(Aluminium silver wax fur hair beads glass twine carved wooden body musk leather lace shells bells)

She was a multi-purpose object
And made a variety of textural sounds
Chinking of bells
Clicking of shells
The dull thud of organs suspended within a hollow
Their deep and heavy percussion
Reverberating
Tasselling around her
Prickling
Metallic fragments
Sound out from pale bells
And whitish shells
A chalky body
Carved and curved
Arching over
Her painfully embroidered beaded fabric heart
Lungs of lace rustling
Under a dome
Her shells and her bells
Rang out in another realm
Skeins of silvered twine
Slivers of shivering glass
Pelts of soft fur that cannot warm her
Hand strokes of paint are
Memories of a gentle touch
An aura of sound and movement
Are shaking out of her still

She was a multi-purpose object
And made a variety of textural sounds

Chinking of bells
Clicking of shells

The dull thud of organs suspended within a hollow

The Unravelling Glassfire Doll

Her painfully embroidered beaded fabric heart
Lungs of lace rustling
Under a dome
Her shells and her bells
Rang out in another realm
Skeins of silvered twine
Slivers of shivering glass

Myriad

Myriad of the hollows
With an eye in every cell
Splitting and spitting
Seeds and jewels
Saint of the hollows
Myriad of the Sorrows
The vessel of the body curves about a sacred hollow of emptiness
Out of which a carved voice unfolds

That dark pod concealed with a shimmering Membrane

Infinitely embracing each pip

Myriad Miriam Maryam Madonna of the Pomegranate
Resurrection of shadows.

Net gauze tissue
Lace wire mesh
Feathers
Locks of glossy hair
Fine shimmering strands of metal thread

About Patterns of Sensation – the bodies of dolls

This series of works on paper by artist Salma Ahmad Caller, explores the notion of the female body as an idea that is constructed, made like a folk doll’s body, from materials both real and imagined. The folk doll or fashion model is patterned and marked by how a society thinks about femininity. Each material used to make ‘her’ carries it’s own set of cultural notions, sensations and associations. ‘She’ is often ornamented with patterned textiles, jewels, silk, velvet, embroidery, pearls, shells, tassels, bells, or associated with flowers, fruits and fertility, or with lace, nets, knots and webs, creating textures that carve ‘her’ body into zones of social and sexual importance.

Forces of cultural and social expectations mark and carve our bodies but also the things we touch and feel are etched onto us, mapping zones and patterns of our experiences, our traumas and losses, our sensuality and feeling.
Bringing the biological and the ornamental together to subvert the usual imagery of the female body, Salma uses decorative and ornamental forms, arabesques, whiplash and sinuous lines, and curvilinear shapes in her work, as a language of the biological sensational body, to try and capture the body we feel not the body we think we see.

The shape of the bodies of the ‘dolls’ in this series is based on the paisley tear drop shape or Boteh. An ‘Eastern’ ornamental form that has travelled and transformed across time. It has complex origins in many cultures, mainly from Iran, Azerbaijan and India and now has many connotations, of colonial trade, and a feminised and orientalised idea about ornament. Yet it had a previous changing life of meaning across cultures, symbolising or embodying concepts of eternity, life, of humility, of being bent under the weight of conquest, a fruit, a seed, a pine, a flower, a tear, that were not reserved for the feminine only.

These works on paper have been made using graphite, Indian Ink, collage, watercolour, acrylic and gold pigment.

Category: Letters

Writing with Light

Slow City Unwind

From Scratch

Moon of Winds

Thunder Moon

Confession

Sister, Speak

Mirrors

Needlepoint

Hatching

Erin’s social profiles

Panther Unbound

The Wise Rusts

Chattel

Nothing Political About This

Glendalough Sonnet

Inchigeelagh Getaway

Ravens

Crowtime

The Pancake Artist

Tracks

This is not a method

Spectre

Girl

Briar Notes

Liebeslied *

The Heart Uncut

MAGNIFICAT

by Geraldine Plunkett Dillon (1891 – 1986)

1 (Untitled)

2 June

3 The North Wind

4 To Saint Francis

5 Gan Ainm

6 Magnificat

7 Si Quis Amat

8 Before Her Judge

Other sources for Geraldine Plunkett Dillon’s work (online)

Contributing poets

Read more at Ó Bhéal

Silk Velvet Purse Doll

Silk Velvet Purse Doll

The Shell Bell Shaking Doll

The Unravelling Glassfire Doll

Myriad

About Patterns of Sensation – the bodies of dolls