The Revolutionary Andrée Blouin, 1921-1986 A hungry child can never truly sleep. In the orphanage for sinful offspring – our fathers white, our mothers African – the nuns were merciless, severe. I shook by night inside a narrow, iron cot, aware only of my body’s hunger, a heavy shadow shuttering my limbs. I prayed for … 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
Dutch Masters An age away, the scented evergreens are still, a lucent wave commits to hush, the sun emits a breath, as the noon-deep labourings commence: the slender, severed necks are tossed, the throttled mouths are mounted in the heat, and inch by inch the fragrant earth is stripped of human foliage, an evacuated island … Read more