If You Knew What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theatre, tearing them giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm or press your fingertips into the life line’s crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too […]
Yearly Archives: 2013
Poetry As Soul-Making – The Poems of Mary Szybist
December 21, 2013 – 7:51 pm
Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle Are you sure this blue is the same as the blue over there? This wall’s like the bottom of a pool, its colour I mean. I need a darker two-piece this summer, the kind with elastic at the waist so it actually fits. I can’t find her hands. Where […]
Sing Me Awake: Listening and The Mysterious Hidden Woman
December 4, 2013 – 3:50 pm
This is what was bequeathed us: This earth the beloved left And, leaving, Left to us. No Other world But this one: Willows and the river And the factory With its black smokestacks. No other shore, only this bank On which the living gather. No meaning but what we find here. No purpose but […]
What?! Another Falling Leaves Poem! Yes – With A Difference
October 12, 2013 – 8:16 pm
Falling Leaves I’ve read about falling leaves in fifty thousand poems novels and so on watched leaves falling in fifty thousand movies seen leaves fall fifty thousand times fall drift and rot felt their dead shush shush fifty thousand times […]
Seamus Heaney’s Kick In The Arse for Writers – Now Strike Your Note
September 12, 2013 – 1:24 pm
As I work away at editing my manuscript The Lucky Season, I am haunted by Seamus Heaney’s directives to writers. Like the one in the title of this post. But the sentence before it is the killer for me. You’ve listened long enough. Only then does Heaney add: Now strike your note. Well I have lots […]
Noli Timere – Be Not Afraid – Heaney’s Work: A Poet’s Work
September 9, 2013 – 11:45 am
from Lightenings viii The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, a crewman shinned and grappled […]
Making “Rejoice” Answer Back – Further Thoughts on Seamus Heaney
September 3, 2013 – 6:02 pm
THE DOOR WAS OPEN AND THE HOUSE WAS DARK In Memory of David Hammond The door was open and the house was dark Wherefore I called his name, although I knew The answer this time would be silence That kept me standing listening while it grew Backwards and down and out into the street Where […]
Poems Humped and Strong – What Seamus Heaney Leaves Behind
August 31, 2013 – 10:39 pm
Postscript And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey […]