Monthly Archives: March 2023

If I’d Known You Were There

We would have walked across thick moorland, you and I. Damp heather softening under our boots; a quivering autumn sunset, golden red feathers fraying at the edges and brushing across the sky. You were too young to see, but I would have described it all to you. How the sheep paid us no mind, how they were beginning to huddle into clumps of shadow by the stone walls. How the crows gathered and disappeared into the valley ahead. I would have held your hand, the darkness drawing us closer together. Would you have lifted your face too, and sniffed the air? Peat, woodsmoke, cold. I don’t think so. You were too young to smell, and there are some things that can’t be described. 

We would have stopped here, you and I. Our boots crushing grass instead of heather, and moonlight blossoming like lichen on the stones. I would have told you how some of them stood taller than me, how their perfect circle aligned to the rhythms of the sun and moon; that there were eleven stones and we made thirteen; how the Goddess wound a milk-white thread around us and bound us together, giving you what my body and heart never could. I would have asked you if you could feel it, the faint heartbeat that echoed in the stones. If it echoed in you too. 

I would have held onto your hand. I wouldn’t have let go when the clouds drifted across the moon, inking us into blackness. I wouldn’t have let you melt into stone, into earth, into the sighing song that lingers above these hills even now. I hear it sometimes, and I think it sings forgiveness even though that’s not possible. Only love can forgive, and you were too young. 

Elodie Barnes is a writer and editor living in the UK. Her short fiction and poetry has been widely published online, and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, where she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women and non-binary writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories. Find her online at elodierosebarnes.weebly.com, or on Instagram @elodierosebarnes. 

Psalms  

Her hymn was the calm
broadcast, slow 

dancing on the same frequency 
as nature’s wild eye. 

Mary blue-eye, a hum to
iron out weathers’ wrinkles.

His boomed. Slow beat—
war drums, leading harvests 

through dark root and worm.
Compelling sea life to gift.

Hallowed in our child eyes. 
The graveyard is fat now,
 
we recall their songs,
chant them in the family home—

a sacred keep for old gods.

Jason Brightwell lives in a tiny coastal village tucked along the Chesapeake Bay where he finds himself routinely haunted by one thing or another. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including: Gravel Magazine, East Coast Literary Review, Phantom Kangaroo, and The Tower, among others.

Sheep Watching St Cuthbert’s Procession


Hefted to the Cheviot hills
We nibble on grass, sweet near the root
A distant sound afears us
with swelling beat, of voices, feet.
My left ear turns, hones in, a-tunes.
Humans bode no good to sheep.

Yet sound-joy abounds, no room for fright
sun-warmth shines through new-shorn fleece.
Ground aware, we feel the grass vibrate
I hear my stomach relax, feel my jaw gyrate
Stretch out my neck, smell sweetness,
touch, bite into spine-tingling flowering gorse. 

Barbara Usher practises animal theology on her 4 acre animal sanctuary, Noah’s Arcs. Her poetry has been published in Borderlands:  an Anthology,Dreich, Last Leaves, and in Liennekjournal. Her work appears on the Resilience soundscape for Live Borders, and she has contributed to a local project with Historic Environment Scotland. 

St Cuthbert’s Procession


‘He was invited by my master Sibba….. who lived near the river called the Tweed, and came to his village with a company of people piously singing psalms and hymns.’ Anon. Life of St Cuthbert


Sing praise 
wholehearted words
to the bright blessed graceful 
salmon that is as wise as Himself
the salmon at the well of mercy 
We meet on the joyful path. Created
word-wise, we delight to praise Him 
in our own tongue, oft with joy-craft. 
Bless our swine, kine, sheep 
may they rest 
grass-sated in leaf-shade of rowan.

Blithe 
No boundary steppers we,
mindful of our covenant with the Rune Man
we bless you otter, gliding, mud wrestling,
wild goats skipping on the hills 
Be healthy Walker-weaver,
Be healthy Leaf-worm
As day’s eye petals bloom, open to the peace candle
we offer Sib-love, truth love of friends and un-friends alike
Let all unfriended people come, we will share.   
Heart love, bee bread, meat.

Endnote:  In Old English, joy-craft = music, boundary stepper = those who transgress, Rune Man =  decipher-er of mysteries, here with capitals applied to God.  Walker-weaver = spider, day’s eye = daisy,  peace candle = sun, bee bread =  honeycomb , meat = food. 

Barbara Usher practises animal theology on her 4 acre animal sanctuary, Noah’s Arcs. Her poetry has been published in Borderlands:  an Anthology,Dreich, Last Leaves, and in Liennekjournal. Her work appears on the Resilience soundscape for Live Borders, and she has contributed to a local project with Historic Environment Scotland. 

The Green Glass Swan

I find her forgotten
on an old thrift shop shelf, lit

like a lantern in the late Texas sun—
a small swan of green glass, etched

in elegance, baptized in dust.
The cool bowl of her body

is made for my palm. The curved cup
of my hand her safe harbor. Her green

is my green, my longing, my undying,
her hollowed out center my own.

She lives with me now in these woods
in this new town, is shy with my husband,

speaks only to me. Come spring I will fill her
with pine forest & wild aster, wood rose & thistle,

buds gathered at dusk, rainwater brimming 
green sorrow, green song.

Robin Turner has recent work in The Fourth River, Bracken Magazine, One Art, and Ethel, and in the Haunted anthology (Porkbelly Press). A longtime community teaching artist in Dallas, she is now living in the Pineywoods of rural East Texas for a spell. She works with teen writers online.

Writing and the Sacred

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ~ Maya Angelou

I think that all writers are artists, the way painters, woodworks, and stonemasons are artists carving visible, palpable artworks. For a writer, and by the same token as it is for an artist, the desire, the urge to create, to write, comes from within, from the heart and the mind. Or is there a different, higher source?

Writing, as a word, originates in the Proto-Indo-European to tear, to rip, that further evolved into carving, then engraving, and finally, it became writing. No wonder writing feels like pouring out our soul, our heart, on paper. We spill ourselves; we tear bits of ourselves, of our life, and build something else that further lays out in the open. 

But writing is also energising and enriching, it is giving and receiving (like any other form of art), and maybe through writing wordsmiths do accomplish both because through this kind of carving we do connect ourselves with a higher power. 

When I write, I look for this inspiration in the silence within me, and the silence around me. That is the place, the moment when, for me, the cacophony of noises fades away and I find my inspiration, I hear that hum of ideas, like distant echoes. I try to harvest them, to catch them the way one would grab at the string of a kite, and I begin a creative dialog that will later pour onto paper. Yet I listen to these echoes and, at the same time, I contemplate the images forming in my mind. What starts it all for me, the writing process, it is an echo as much as it is an impulse, a tingling in my fingertips as much as an impulse. 

Yet what could its source be?

Inspiration, the muse, the idea (call it as you wish) – it comes to us, I think, through a ray of energy, or a simple thought, that was born, formed, at a higher (atmospheric) level before it reached us. If you wish, the way water circulates in nature, rivers evaporating in mist, forming serene clouds, then raining and snowing, thoughts could follow a similar pattern. What we imagine, what we dream, is escaping us as we exhale, as we wish; but the energy of that thought is never lost, yet it floats until it reaches the pen (and mind) of an artist.

In this way, I believe, writing and the sacred are connected. Like the trunk of a tree connects its roots with its branches and leaves. None could live without the other. None could survive if the other is not sound. In the same way, “What you think you create. What you feel you attract. What you imagine you become” – and writing connects our souls with the energy surrounding us, with the same energy that fuels us. We are, and become, this energy and soon we discover ourselves in everything that surrounds us. Now, looking past the religious perspective, connecting ourselves with a higher power does offer a drop of hope, that after bad some good will come, that life is worth fighting for, and that after each storm the sun will shine again.  

Writing is looking for the sunshine at the end of each sentence that feels complete; at the end of each chapter carved after the thought and the feeling that ignited it; at the end of each poem or book.

Writing, as a creation, must be that invisible thread that connects us with the sacred. Creating with words is as much an intellectual venture as a physical one. It is taking the life, labouring on it with our hands, pouring our heart into it, setting it alight with our minds, but the result would still be nothing without this sacred thread that came to us through a thought, or a pocket of silence. And I am grateful for it.

With a medical degree behind her, writer and poet Patricia Furstenberg authored 18 books imbued with history, folklore, legends. The recurrent motives in her writing are unconditional love and war. Her essays and poetry appeared in various online literary magazines. Romanian born, she resides with her family in South Africa.

Misty Fjord, Alaska							

We’re in a boat watching a cormorant skim
aquamarine water. It circles and circles,
flies close to sheer granite cliffs,
where its nest hides among green plants.
Do eggs wait for warmth or nestlings for food?
No one speaks, the boat bobs quietly,
but this lone bird continues to fly in ever-widening loops
with its long neck and tiring wings.
Perhaps it sees we are danger, some unknown barrier,
yet doesn’t give up, flies off, returns,

and I think this must be devotion, love
in its simplest form, a willingness to try again and again
to reach its nest, to overcome exhaustion,
find its way home.

Valerie Bacharach’s writing has appeared or will appear in:Vox Populi, Blue Mountain Review, EcoTheo Review, Ilanot Review, Minyon Magazine, and One Art, among others. Her chapbook Fireweed was published by Main Street Rag. Her chapbook Ghost-Mother was published by Finishing Line Press. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Jerusalem


It was Good Friday; I was at the bar
(Although it’s not a drinking holiday),
And there I met a real Centurion.
Real in the sense that cosplay is for real,
He made his arms and armor for himself:
(But you can find them on the Internet).
His pilum and his shield, his segmentata,
His pugio and gladius, all made,
He said, the Roman way, from wood and iron.
I wondered if it was against the law
To have a sword and carry it around,
But no one called the cops or kicked him out
So if they didn’t care, then why should I?
I wouldn’t want to spoil someone’s fun.
And it was fun; it was like Halloween,
Or Christmas, even, what with Santa-con,
With him in costume, and us getting drunk.
We lived it up, my Roman friend and I,
To drink away that solemn afternoon
Like we had seen the light only to find
We were the bad guys in a passion play,
And if that day was like its precedence
Then we, the soldiery and rabblement,
Would do as we had done; time’s miracle,
From then to now, was changing wine to beer.

I’m not religious, but this hasn’t stopped
Religious things from happening to me
And as our talking gradually progressed
He would admit to penance of a kind:
While he was still in uniform he swept
The parking lot of a convenience store
And he performed this ritual each year
When evening came, after his early binge.
As he confessed to this strange deed to me
I felt, from my poor stock of sacred power,
What I would lay upon him was a curse,
And sweeping up a crummy parking lot
As he was costumed like a Roman solider,
For all eternity, seemed justice done,
And what we had been up to at the bar
Was like the backhand of a holiday,
Where outrage can be made a commonplace
With nothing but the hope of small rewards;
Where should he be but in a parking lot
Of a convenience store, a broom in hand,
And sweeping up until the crack of doom?
A curse on him, but Good Lord, not on me!

Robert Donohue‘s poetry has appeared in Better Than Starbucks, Freeze Ray Poetry, Pulsebeat, among others. He lives on Long Island, NY.

Viśvakarmān

Who was there when Viśvakarmān
whittled out the landscape, laid
out the earth and took the one tree
and carved the rounded sky from it?
Who watched him sweating and sawing
as he hewed words and rituals
and molded time, thought, sacrifice?
Covered in mouths, eyes, feet and arms,
father to the sun, that great eye,
who saw him separate the sky
and the earth, churning names and shapes?
What piety or pretension
can reach back to that pristine forge,
to that bench and smoky bellows
where questions, syllables and flesh,
where elements, worlds and wet soil
were not separate accomplishments
but one god, one affinity?

Tim Miller‘s books include the poetry collection Bone Antler Stone (High Window Press), and the long narrative poem, To the House of the Sun (S4N Books). He is online at wordandsilence.com, and can be heard on the poetry and mythology podcast Human Voices Wake Us.

Memento Mori

We must have talked about an hour or so.
I hadn’t heard from him in several weeks,
And something in his voice at times would creak,
Would falter, stop, not quite sure where to go.
He talked about his body now as though
It were no longer his, a thing oblique
Determined only by its pains and bleak
Forebodings based on what the doctors know.
Then suddenly my own death hovered near
(Appalling, how it seems to lie in wait
And pounces at the faintest whiff of fear…).
My dead in memory did congregate
To point my halting soul toward that austere
Horizon I’m so loath to contemplate.

Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, America Magazine, U.S. Catholic, Pensive, Grand Little Things, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.