Nicholas of Bari Another night fifth in a row unsettled but unfrozen thinking I get it I get it (I don’t, but I have skin and nerves): Whatever sustains someone doing what you do, I mean never mind the privations! that unseen hand, Shoulder cupped, steering towards the leper colony – the Big Bewk saints, the Seenitalls, … Read more
THE MAN WITH A MICRO-CHIP IN HIS RIGHT HAND Stopping wantless under cherry blossoms He hears a girl singing from the sewer, then harmonizes voices with some hums, then sings the final chorus like he knows her, their voices shaking red chrysanthemums – but now the crowds of fading stars are fewer and his voice … Read more
Ownership You come into your own While words give hue and cry In the stillness that you own When you are on your own With solitude to pacify You come into your own And the silence is your own Though melodies will reply To the stillness that you own With the calm that you have … Read more
Note From The Organisers Feel free to turn up (or not) wearing a full suit of armour, or a hat with a big feather in it and transparent trousers; or to come dressed as a future Bishop of Cork and Ross, or as the prophet Isaiah’s discredited older brother. But this march is no wild … Read more
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) reshaped the trajectory of modern literature. In acknowledgement T.S. Eliot famously called him ‘the Father of Modernism.’ Many monolingual English speakers might be unaware that, along with Shakespeare and Dante, Baudelaire has been instrumental to how we in the West perceive the world. As an example, I think back to the early … Read more
My Approach to Literary Networking after Francois Villon Most days I’d rather be bundled into the courthouse between two hairy policemen, with a highly debatable anorak dragged over my face, and blamed for killing Kirov – the crowd lobbing big thick spits and battering the van as I’m carted off – or be stopped at … Read more
The Happy Song of Us Okay to buy your grandchild an ice-cream. Illegal for them to lick it. Fine to bake granny a gleaming fruit cake, as long as you only email her a high resolution photo of it. Okay to give your son or daughter a bright new football. Illegal for them to kick … Read more
Fisheye I, smudge in the eyescape of others, As my trowel lodges in mulch, Palm-sore, snuggle the quiet bulbs Into the trickling earth which inhumes us, While these, artfully coned, only swoon To consecrate a humble bloom. The sun paints everslant shadows all day In this great sphere of transition Centring nowhere, where I witness … Read more
Christmas Snow Never came that year, and yet It came in other ways, remembering the Light; As suds frothing in the Garavogue Around bridge arches, a scuttled trolley; It fell from lamps in Henry Street Illuminating tracer-lines of sleet And shoppers gripping rods of sleek umbrellas As if playing giant straining fish; It fell as … Read more
Assembly One morning during the first week of Advent, _ When I was possessed, After a birthday’s dark exhilarations, _ By a terrible kind of nervousness, We saw, on stage, the judgement of our son, Before his class, the Egyptian pantheon. I was chosen, he said, to be mummified today: _ My life was cut … Read more