Personal Helicon for Michael Longley As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.  One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it. A shallow one under a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch, A white face hovered over the bottom. Others had echoes, […]

Meals of Grief & Happiness 1 I believe in the tears of an elephant. How they stamp the ground and forget they are in musth— panting—and cinnamon shrubs or piles […]

  Instructions on Not Giving Up More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton […]

Blasphemy For Sam Hamill Let the blasphemy be spoken: poetry can save us, not the way a fisherman pulls the drowning swimmer into his boat, not the way Jesus, between […]

RECOVERING WORDS IN ITALY  A Generative Poetry Writing Retreat with Richard Osler – experienced poetry facilitator and author of Hyaena Season “Catching Fire – Writing En Plein Air” I write […]

Grief Trying to remember you is like carrying water in my hands a long distance across sand. Somewhere people are waiting. They have drunk nothing for days. Your name was […]

Human Rights I know God lives in me as in no other house. I am his countryside, His alchemical vessel, and, to his joy, His two eyes. But this handwriting […]

  Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours aware of what they mean, Hawking said. Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos, […]

# 103 I’m afraid the knot in which for years my soul has been bound up now rules: I write from habit, not because I am on fire. I’m afraid […]

Happiness I saw a bee settle on a rose petal. It sipped, and off it flew. All in all, happiness, too, is something little. Trilussa (aka Carlo Alberto Salustri 1871-1950), […]