Tag: Single Poems

  • “The Surrealist ” by Csilla Toldy

    The Surrealist – honouring Leonora Carrington –   A young lady, treated as merchandise.   Society made no sense for Leonora, and her best friend the hyena.   She fell in love with a surrealist painting and sought out its creator to take him, too, on a free fall.   Life was real in France,…

  • “Killruddery” by Helen Harrison

    Beneath the elders Where bumble bees Lose themselves In flowering thyme; I lie down in dew-soaked ease. And dog-rose is the scent That makes my spirits rise In the kingdom of the low – Flying bird. I take comfort on the mossy soil; Last years leaves sweet; Damp In the wing-tipped breeze, To ease my…

  • “Treatise on Uselessness” by Kevin Higgins

    Treatise on Uselessness after Rosita Boland Throughout my truly enormous life, I’ve never found a use for gypsies. When one decides to spend the night searching online for a worse deal on one’s house insurance, there’s never a gypsy about to help. Or when one advertises a vacancy for Associate Professor of English at Trinity…

  • “Bow Down” at York Literary Review

    Bow Down   A harrowed tree nest-ruined tangled leaf   Its bough down bow down—   A-flowering-tree  (still, it flowers)   Submarine blue is where dawn occurs  (South/South-east of here)   Dawn’s lightbox runs from north blue to south warm   The point between is lit-not-lit   (nor) seamed  a bas-relief.   Bow Down is…

  • “The Middle of April” by Fióna Bolger

    The Middle of April   After Robert Hass   i whan that Aprille with his shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote my grandfather quotes Chaucer from the vinyl   ii he knows more now we will too soon   iii in the spring pelmet of green   in the summer…

  • A Good Question: Anna Akhmatova (1960)

    Could Beatrice write with Dante’s passion, Or Laura have glorified love’s pain? Women poets – I set the fashion . . . Lord, how to shut them up again!   by Anna Akhmatova: 1960 Someday we may understand why the blatant copying of Ted Hughes’ & Heaney’s inspiration is acceptable to the Irish Poetry Editors…

  • An Excerpt from “Delicate” at MarsPoetica (HiRISE), Single Poems

    Delicate A sea snail, most precious egg, as if it had touched the ruby feather of a bluebird. A most precious thing, bird-egg-shattered, dust in my pores.   This excerpt from “Delicate” is © Christine-Elizabeth Murray. When we widen the lens, the bigger picture can be divorced from the reality that we think we may have…

  • “How to Rid Yourself of Election Canvassers” by Kevin Higgins

      Ask them where they stand on the urgent need for a Greater Serbia. Tell them nothing has been right since the Treaty of Versailles, for which you hold each and every one of their kind personally responsible. Tell them the council’s been promising to chop down that tree for the past twenty five years,…

  • Canto 1 of Dante’s Inferno, a transversion by Peter O’Neill

    Canto 1 of Dante’s Inferno   In middle-age I found myself in an obscure wood, for the straight road had long since been lost.   Christ, how hard it is for me now to even contemplate how harsh and savage a place it was, without renewing my old fears!   It is a place so…

  • ‘View’ by Helen Harrison

    View   He wrote a picture postcard to me; A fishing boat on the edge of Lough Currane Close to his home. Beside the window where he writes his news The view of fuchsia beside a stone-wall, Flecked with the sun. His side of the glass; depression, for years Dependent on medications; then the Further…