Category: poetry
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2020, Memories
Blinded in a winter’s dread no prophet foresaw.
Spring’s new life erupted into a chaos of fear.
Desolation replaced the warmth of a hug.
Children banished from our everyday lives!Ahh, the blessings — a swift journey home
to the unexpected happiness under one roof.
Chatter, laughter —
a family enduring dark days
come what may….Time, the pickpocket of memories stood still.
Watching, new ways of keeping our spirits alive,
to be remembered, cherished.
Lost moments recaptured before Summer’s end….An invisible killer started a war,
so much pressure on our frontline.
But it would be,
‘Love and Stay at Home’
that had their backs.Death came at a fast pace.
Isolation, the enemy of a treasured last goodbye —
grief mourned in silent lockdown.And now,
the road to healing shattered hearts and souls begins!
Family Love Father. Mother. Daughters. Sons. Grandchildren. Love weaves its magical thread intricately throughout the ages. Forging unbreakable bonds. Out from nowhere, an unnatural enemy wreaked havoc on the close-knit unit. They endured great sadness and turmoil. Separation with no hugs to warm the blood, tested their strength… Generations fought for survival alongside the mightiest warrior of all — Love. And the family stood firm. A force to be reckoned with!
Omen
Common sense flees at the first sign of fear,
hostage to an ever sense of madness.Inception of a foreboding story’s journey!
I see; the one eyed child dancing on her grave — the ruins of mankind.
I hear; the dark one singing an ancient curse — a prayer not heard.
I smell; the rotting of bodies — soul thieves wanton destruction.
I touch; the soiling of a pure heart — unholy spirits grasp hold.
I taste; the drowning miseries in the afterlife — ripen death.Saving the dead or killing the living?
On a night when the full moon is covered by cloud!Words © Fidel Hogan Walsh / Images @ Julie Corcoran
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Amber her halls— by the periphery trees open out sky's lungs. There are small birds below, they sing her boundaries: clay and Blue– this living thing. I touch her skin, it strikes White heart -wood blood runs white with light. She tells her tale, Silver beech, a wren– © C. Murray 2020 Read A Hierarchy of Halls
Imprint by C. Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. -
Window weather
The Icelanders have a word that means just that.
A murky day that you know is better
enjoyed from the comfort of a window seat;
soft mizzle cleansing leaves shiny and bright.When webs become crystal dreamcatchers,
or perfect drops form on the telephone lines
and slide slowly down like the oil
on the wire of the indoor rain lamp,with Venus in pink marble,
her flowing robe revealing perfect curves
against the plastic plants.
Outside the blackbird puffs himself,feathers rippling. He dances on the lawn.
Drizzle doesn’t bring the worms up
but his fancy seven step has the desired effect
and he pecks and pecks and pecks;like the drinking woodpecker did, long ago,
on the dentist’s counter, see-sawing,
a globe of red liquid dancing, as I looked
passed it and through the window,longing to be outside in the rain.
Spring Bank Holiday
We travelled far from city noise
to wide skies, woods, wetland
and a lapping lough-shore.
Lego birds had been the bribe.Leaving Minecraft in the boot
we time-travelled, from plastic blocks
to the kiln, where men had fired
clay bricks. Further back, in the
Crannog’s rustic roundhouse,
we stroked hand-daubed clay walls.Posed for pictures with brick birds
but spent more time feeding the living,
adding new naming words, researching
migration paths, becoming birders.
Pinched your mouth on finding
a yolk-stained shell outside the coop.Drifting off homeward bound
with Shovelers, Shelducks, Redshanks
flying around your head,
Best day out, EVER, you said.Until the next one…
Dreamchild
These Strangford wetlands and fields,
inlets, islets and islands,
one for each day of the year,
are your haven; curlew’s perfect landscape
of mottled wheat and barley
camouflage, speckled pointed eggs.Quaver call carried on the breeze
floats through open sash
as I drift off to dreamland.
Ash thin, plane-grey legs
vapour-trailing a cloudless sky
over a moonlit low-tide lough,transforming into my daughter.
Feathers curl into auburn hair,
down-curved beak becomes a bow
poised to shoot fox mid-flight.
Quiver strapped breast.
She soars towards Scrabo Tower.Dreamchild returns to loughshore.
Wades at water’s edge, where
along Monaghan bank, I’m walking
with a thatched batch of uni stats.
She does not speak, roots under rocks
shyly searching for shellfish.Six Curlews arrive to join her.
She shrinks, cane legs and crescent
beak reform, feathers return
as she outstretches both wings.
Seven whistlers take flight.
Please – please come home.Window weather and other poems © Gaynor Kane
Gaynor Kane lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She came to writing late in life, after finishing her Open University BA(Hons) degree with a creative writing module in 2015. Mainly a writer of poetry, she has had work published in journals and anthologies in the UK, Ireland, and America. In 2018, Hedgehog Poetry Press launched their Stickleback series with her micro-collection Circling the Sun, which is about some of the early women pilots. Gaynor has just released her chapbook Memory Forest, also from Hedgehog Press. That is a thematically tight collection about burial rituals and last wishes. She is currently putting the finishing touches to her debut full collection, after receiving an Arts Council NI grant in 2019, which allowed her writing time and mentoring and editing services.Gaynor is a member of Holywood Writers’ Group, The Irish Writers Centre, and Women Aloud NI. She also volunteers for EastSide Arts during their summer festival and the CS Lewis Festival in November. Gaynor is a keen amateur photographer and has had some of her photography published in journals and anthologies.
Her website is www.gaynorkane.com. -
This film includes a sound adaption of ‘Nocturne for Voices One and Two” by Una Lee, a talk by Salma Ahmad Caller about the art for ‘Gold Friend’ and ‘A Hierarchy of Halls’, and the art that you can see on this site every time you click in. The piece is called ‘Making Den of Sibyl Wren‘ (Salma Ahmad Caller, 2018). Thanks to Lucy Collins who asked the questions, read, and talked about the book. I did some brief readings and talked about the book too. The whole thing was designed, edited, and created by Liz McSkeane, my publisher at Turas Press.
Order ‘Gold Friend’ here if you’d like, but please do watch and enjoy the film which replaced a traditional launch and was filmed in Dublin, Reading, and Belfast over the last two weeks.
Image: Salma Ahmad Caller reading beside the artwork ‘Making Den of Sibyl Wren‘. (2018) You can see some of the details from the piece at this link.
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“Gold Friend” a second Turas Press collection from Chris Murray. This book is currently available for pre-order. The publication date is September 9th, 2020. Image © Anna Murray Gold Friend was launched on September the 8th 2020.
This film includes a sound adaption of ‘Nocturne for Voices One and Two” by Una Lee, a talk by Salma Ahmad Caller about the art for ‘Gold Friend’ and ‘A Hierarchy of Halls’, and the art that you can see on this site every time you click in. The piece is called ‘Making Den of Sibyl Wren‘ (Salma Ahmad Caller, 2018). Thanks to Lucy Collins who asked the questions, read, and talked about the book. I did some brief readings and talked about the book too. The whole thing was designed, edited, and created by Liz McSkeane, my publisher at Turas Press.
Order ‘Gold Friend’ here if you’d like, but please do watch and enjoy the film which replaced a traditional launch and was filmed in Dublin, Reading, and Belfast over the last two weeks.
Image: Salma Ahmad Caller reading beside the artwork ‘Making Den of Sibyl Wren‘. (2018) You can see some of the details from the piece at this link.
07/09/2020 Elegy and Displacement in ‘Gold Friend’ – at Writing.ie
The title of my book is Gold Friend. The phrase or image associated with it is derived from an Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer which is rooted in elegy and in personal displacement. These are the themes of the book, which I will allude to a bit later on in this short essay.
Gold Friend began, as my books do, from a collection of small themed notebooks. In this case, it originally comprised five small books that were loosely thematically related according to how I compose or create the poem image
Read more here
Turas Press
An independent, Dublin-based publisher dedicated to providing a platform for new and innovative writing. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, “turas” means “journey.” Turas Press was founded in May 2017 to support writers of poetry and fiction in launching their work into the world and finding an audience.
On Gold Friend by Chris Murray
Our latest news is that Turas Press is preparing for the publication of our 2020 list. Although the physical launches of our new books won’t take place until some time in 2021 – depending on how the management of COVID 19 evolves – we will continue to publish our books and make them available online and through participating booksellers.
A new collection from Chris Murray, “Gold Friend” will be published in the autumn of 2020. This is Chris’s second collection with Turas Press – her readers will recall her beautiful ‘waking book’ bind which came out in 2018.
Gold Friend Acknowledgments
Chris Murray wishes to thank Billy Mills, Amy Wyatt Rafferty, Müesser Yeniay, Lucy Collins, Eithne Hand, Richard Krawiec, Peter O’Neill, Una Lee, and Soodabeh Saeidnia editor of ‘Persian Sugar in English Tea’. Poems from this book have been published in The Bangor Literary Journal, Levure Litteraire, HiRISE (NASA), One (Jacar Press), Persian Sugar in English Tea, Şiirden, and The Poetry Bus Magazine. A Version of Lament for a Lost Child was originally performed at the Beal Festival of New Music and Literature at the Smock Alley Theatre, with thanks to Elizabeth Hilliard and David Bremner. Nocturne For Voices One and Two was adapted by Una Lee for spoken word project Songs to stay awake to to be released in 2020.
Cover Art by Salma Ahmad Caller
The cover art for Gold Friend is a detail from ‘Making Den Of Sibyl Wren‘ (2018) by artist Salma Ahmad Caller.
Materials: Watercolour, Indian ink, collage, graphite, and gold pigment on Fabriano acid-free paper 57cm x 76.3cm. An essay on the making of the artwork is available here.
Salma Ahmad Caller is an artist and a hybrid of cultures and faiths. She is drawn to hybrid and ornamental forms, and to how the body expresses itself in the mind to create an embodied ‘image’. UK based, she was born in Iraq to an Egyptian father and a British mother and grew up in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. With a background in art history and theory, medicine and pharmacology, and several years teaching cross-cultural ways of seeing via non-Western artefacts at Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, she now works as an independent artist and teacher.
Lucy Collins is Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin. Books include Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 (2012) and a monograph, Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (2015), both from Liverpool University Press. She has published widely on contemporary poets from Ireland, Britain, and America, and is co-founder of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive, a national digital repository.
Lucy Collins on “Gold Friend”
“At a time when we are grappling with multiple, related challenges – living with climate change and pandemic – these poems remind us to celebrate and care for, the natural world. Lucy Collins says this of “Gold Friend”. “As well as bearing witness to the strange beauty of the natural world, these innovative poems testify to the remarkable intensity of human perception. They deserve our closest attention.”
Write to C. Murray here
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womanhood womanhood did not sneak up on me when my thighs were stained with first blood that arrived so unexpected so connecting it didn’t happen when hormones sprouted lumps and bumps that others stared at and touched it was not given to me nor did I grab it in the first instance of fucking or when lovers loved me or advantages were taken or if I shaved or didn’t … spoke softly … drank wine … eased someone’s pain. I felt it swelling, a fierce instinctive roar woven through rivers that cut their way through the innards of the earth, a carved path hewn for us and I took it declared it mine claimed it – this new world I was so certain wouldn’t swallow me up.
under the covers
I know where the monsters in this house dwell
and they’re not under the beds
but rather,
in them.I see them at night’s dawn
with crooked soul
and vile perversions.
as they creep past the creaks in the floor
and into my bed.Previously published in inkspace magazine, Editor Katherine Hopkins. No longer in print
night eyes trust your night eyes, child. there will be no comfort here no fires around which to gather and dance. we are alone. healing cuts and we lavish crimson blood on fresh snow. our tread falls softer, and we fold our bodies down to bow and kiss the earth with the strange tongues of our mothers, wyched words from her womb only our bellies understand. as I wake, I know I am alone. I look up to see the stars have moved and spun the heavens on their backs. winter has killed the leaves and the trees have drawn their spirits in to nest inside their core, leaving the heavens untouched the moonlight stark and uncompromising. the winter hag has stripped me and now I stare back at my own reflection that hangs from every tree, until she rasps that she is done with me, that I have cut away the rags of comfort and my outline. my core is clear, raw. I see those long fingers of the earth stretched toward the stars and head for home, whole, unshadowed, awake in the cold, and terribly, nakedly aware and unafraid of who I am.
(Adapted version first published in She Who Knows magazine, now called Aeva. Editor, Isabella Lazlo)
Amara George Parker is a London-based writer, with work published in literary magazines Spoon Knife, Sufi Journal, i n k s p a c e, Aeva, Voice of Eve, She Who Knows, and Earth Pathways diary. As a queer disabled writer, she hopes her work offers readers an inclusive perspective. Amara’s website is here.
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1 out of 10
There are small pixies
flying around my uterus,
igniting micro-fires in protest
at my womanhood.
The flames fester around
my ovaries too.But that is just the beginning.
Sometimes, the pixies pull elfin daggers
from their belts and stab
the undersides of my ovaries.The blood pours out in
stringy red ribbons, which spiral
and coagulate in my abdomen.
Three years ago the doctors
discovered the pixie colony.
They showed me pictures
of my insides, all flesh
and gloss. They told me that
they ablated the tiny civilization
that had rooted inside me.But sometimes, I still feel
their titchy flames rupture
and burn and destroy and torture
my womb.
Stargazing After a Laparoscopy
I have three small scars
on my abdomen which
form the constellation of my suffering.
Standing in Line on Black Friday
You made Abby look fat,
only her.
We all thought so,
why didn’t you post
the other picture?Hannah bought these
and they made
her butt
look
hot.I stashed my empty
White Claw cans in
my closet before
my grandma went into
my room.Is he gay?
Did you even have to
Ask the question?
Why do you always-?
Do you think that if I ask the question again they will answer me?
Will I be heard, or drowned? My comments are buried under the
words of men. What if we-? How come-? Cut off before I can
realize I am secondary. I give birth to stillborn thoughts.
Lily Foguth is an English graduate student at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She has a concentration on early American literature and hopes to be received into a PhD program upon graduation. Lily writes short stories and poetry in her down-time. She lives in Michigan with her partner and their two cats, Willow and Wallace. -
When the angel came to me
‘The Virgin…’ He smirked, then
‘Virginity is a complex concept, pet’ I said.
‘I’ve been sent by God; He has a job–’
‘So I’ve heard, you’ve got the wrong girl.’
Then, he grabs my wrist,
‘I must insist.’ Kisses my knuckle,
twisted fuck. I imagine it
going through his skull.
‘I’m not your Virgin, okay hun?’
(I have sharper teeth that tend
to bite off more than I can chew.)
I tip my halo to a jaunty angle
and, standing now, tell him to
‘Beat it, Gabe.
Babe, you’re too late,
my body cannot belong to God,
for my heart belongs to another.
I am my own lover,
impregnated daily with my own possibility.
There is no room at this inn,
there is only room in
this womb for one birth,
my monthly rebirth.
The moon fills her spoons from my newness.
Life does not come without sacrifice,
and I have too much of it to live
and not enough of it to give.
Yes, my body is a vessel
for self-love above all else.
forever and ever,
the end.’He didn’t like my cheek,
he aimed to rip it from me
with the back of both hands.
I spat a hot, crimson clot
into the centre of my palm and saw
my future in a little pool of red,
staining my head, heart, and life-line.
I wiped it on his face, and, splayed now,
I prayed for a miracle,
to save me as the struggle
was thrust from me.
Am I to believe this is what
the Father would want for his child?
He gazed at me as if he
had just arranged roses
in a vase: ‘Immaculate.’
With a bat of my lash,
I snapped the wings from his back.
With a grin that dimmed
this wimp’s halo, I cooed:
‘So I’ve been told’ and slowly I watched
the triumph drain from his veins.
No more Angel. Just Gabe.
‘Poor babe.’ I winked
as I limped
away.
Pit
He said cherries were his favourite food.
Wild or sweet or sour,
he craved these fleshy drupes
with that single groove to run his finger through.Gone in one
and when he was done,
he’d spit out the stone
and tie up the stalk with his tongue,
wonder where the next cherry is coming from?I’d never had a cherry–
he’d had many.
He could see the ruby in me:
in my lips, in my cheeks,
down his chin, in his teeth.Ever been a cherry?
Plucked, sucked,
bit,
and turned to pit.
Tattoo of you
Needles in my ribs help me breathe.
Blood spots, drips, and flows.
A secret, for now.
Ebony and currant and crimson.
Not hues of remembrance,
a symbol of strength.
The shades of war,
our war.
A battle that began the night those boots were left on the carpet.
My face in your palm,
wrapped in your scar tissue so I wouldn’t have to form my own.
You absorb shock after shock,
bare blow after blow.
For me,
for us.
And then,
an alliance.
We did not lay down arms when left waiting on doorsteps,
we summoned an esprit de corps.
The sound of sobs into the sound of drums.
Once weeping, now war cries.
Tears cannot sting when you are made of salt.So this is not pinned to a lapel,
This is on my ribs, under my skin, in my blood.
I flow ebony and currant and crimson.
Two:
For me, for us,
For you.
Once upon a winter
Our eyes picked each other
through the falling flakes
that laced our lashes.
Denying the chill in the air
carelessly they went roving
carefully devouring
tempting mittens to misbehave
and mouths to do the same.
We blamed the black ice,
that brought our bodies
slipping and sliding,
and gracelessly colliding.
I’ll never forget the pain
of pins and needles that came
as you held my hand.
My blood tidal waved, hot
to my numb fingertips.
It, like me, wanted to be
As close to you as possible.
I’ll never be cold again,
I thought.And so then, our clothes, lost
like the last autumn leaves,
billowed to the ground as we
welcomed the changing of the seasons
with our bare young bodies.
We were born in the decay,
the early darkness,
the starkness and cold.
It made us hold each other closer
and warm ourselves on the heat
of the other’s blood beneath.
The steam of our souls,
rose like ghosts from our open throats
wafting out into winter
in the springtime of our years
as we lay, bathed by
the greedy moon. Ruling,
coming sooner, lingering longer.
she would not let us sleep
for she loved us too much.
It’ll never be dark again,
I thought.
Danielle Galligan is an aspiring poet born and bred in Dublin. She is an actor, theatre-maker and a graduate of The Lir, Trinity College Dublin. She is very excited about her work being on the Poethead site. She has previously been published in the Qutub Minar Review. -
NIGHT TREE
Along the river bank
street lights are lighting
the darkening waters glow
the sun is low
the mountain crouches low
in shadow
light drops from light
dark creeps back to night …
my mind struggles with a paradox –
gleams from a self-source
and light
falling from a star
love is racked – there
is no owning in the soul
the void is an agitation
fixed habit of a consciousness
unwilling to go into the terror
of going into light of naked night
my tree reaches up winter bare
its star is not yet born.
GOING OUT
Sea fog curls
around the cliff face
the island has no contour
still – and I
I am weeping
amid a conflict
the wish for forgetfulness
yet fear of clinging sorrow
intangible dreams are real
a beatitude…View original post 1,030 more words
Chris Murray 