Fragments of a Litany Gaza, 2023-24 Grieve with the butchered gods of love for Layan al-Baz, the young, the strong, her soft arms cut by shrapnel, her wounded leg a stump. May the world record unquietly the wordless eyes of Abdul, of Kenza, and Karam – who buried their mothers in a barren yard. And … Read more
Psalm The light and the wind on the water these wild winter days are breath of it The cardinal sun below cumulus flaring up skybeams a pulse Gathers the gloom but high in the east celestial moon unhides behind heart-racing clouds All in the arms of physics and this is heaven we are blessed to … Read more
A Poem for Refaat Alareer In the poem your butchers fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries are clean, the brimming table-top restored – your every room aflush with idleness again, a bowl of flying spices near to hand, the oven-bread uplifted through the haze: a feast the windy air will sing from the open-hearted balcony … Read more
No Record of Wrongs Love does keep a record of some things— your solitary walks in Coln Saint Aldwyn’s, a precise curl of Virginia Creeper tendrils, vermillion in autumn, the way you carefully smelled horses’ necks beneath the mane back home, velveteen crushes of cornhusks lashed to lampposts Love notes you’ve yet to find a … Read more
Bliain an Áir ‘The Year of Slaughter’, 1740-41 Around the earth, a warring, wooden sea of brigs was bristling, a-flame; volcanic ash descending on the vacillating map. The weathered world began to shift – a tiny alteration sowing ice across the land. The shining-bellied geese no longer wintered by the lough. The turf-blue river waters … Read more
Waking Up He had thousands of kodachromes when he died. Nowadays they’d be snaps stored on the cloud, given back tritely as memories by some iphone. Anyway, they went in the bin, regardless of what they meant to him. I have chameleon words, collections of notes, playing the same role: tie it down — capture … Read more
How I Remember Her I glared that first night as she vaunted perks And spoke in winding roads; uncouth she pried About my grade and cut. Around her stride, I feel as though I’m drunk. I miss her quirks. The nights we stargaze drag on. I should work. I see her down the bar, then … Read more
A Partial Epitaph My friend, with many an article and book saved in the Cloud, would censure Robert Emmet for attitudinising in the dock. We’re most of us the beneficiaries of ordered states; opinion-formers wanting Emmet stopped is something that one sees. But this rant? Picture him in middle age, pardoned, respectable, like Thomas Moore … Read more
Belshazzar I never knew myself to have a Persian beard, now, This is odd, this will need some explanation So too the crown and concubines and all these Half-drunk vessels from the house of God Isn’t it 2023 or 2022—was I not, just now, Pulling up in a Subaru or whatever it is I Get … Read more
April Light I’ve let the world of people go in favour of growing spring evenings, what all the buds know, the jonquils and the willow, the prattling birds, water chasing water to river, fold of showers. What sage said April is the cruellest month, the year’s promise in its tall shadows? Let the world of … Read more