Author Archives: Sarah

Ringing the bell at St Pancras

Quamvis sum parva tamen audior ampla per arva – 
motto engraved on the mediaeval bell of St Pancras’ Church, Exeter


Although I am small, I am heard over the wide fields
Although I am small, I am heard
I am heard

Come and pause
Come and weep
Come and see
Come and pray
Come and praise

We’re heard
Although we’re small, we’re heard
Although we’re small, we’re heard over the wide fields


Helen Evans facilitates Inner Room, a pioneer lay ministry that creates space for people to be creative, and is piloting a new project, Poems for the Path Ahead, which in 2023 included poetry workshops held in a cathedral in England and in a consecrated cave in Scotland. Her debut pamphlet, Only by Flying, was published by HappenStance Press. Her poems have appeared in The Rialto, The North, Magma, Wild Court, The Friday Poem and Ink, Sweat & Tears. ‘That Angel Hovering’ was a joint winner of the Manchester Cathedral 600 Poetry Competition. She has a master’s degree with distinction in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews.

www.helenevans.co.uk

The Heart Centre

See if you can connect to your heart centre, 
the nun says, and I’m not sure what she means. 
Is it the same thing as my heart? I think.
I tune in to the feeling of my heart pumping in my chest
and I’m not sure whether to feel steadied
or worn out by its relentless rhythm.
Or is it my heart chakra? I wonder—but I haven’t learned about chakras. 
I keep prodding around in my torso for it,
like a medical student dissecting a cadaver.
Here are my lungs, my stomach, my sex organs, my intestines.
I think they all know something about love.
—Then I find it—and it’s as though someone
looked over my shoulder and said, what do you mean 
you can’t find the heart centre? It’s in your hands. 
I find it just above my sternum, to the right of my physical heart, 
in the middle of my chest. At first,
I think it’s the size of a grape but incredibly dense. 
Then I see clearly it could grow to fill a larger space.
Here I am, cupping it in my palms.

You don’t have to earn love, the nun says now. You just have to breathe it in. 
My heart centre seems to inflate with my next breath 
and I can see it’s even older than I am. 
I look at all the love I’ve ever known, 
all the love that has ever known me:
still here inside my chest. I know for sure now,
no one who’s ever been in my heart centre has ever left.
All that love is still in there, transformed by pain, 
betrayal, fear, anger, grief. 
I breathe in the love the whole world has for me, 
and it flows through my heart centre, 
and I breathe out the love I have for the whole world.

 

Thea Ayres is a poet from West Yorkshire, and a graduate of The Writing Squad. Her work has been commissioned by the Dead [Women] Poets Society. It has been published in The Scribe, Strix, Ink Sweat and Tears, The North and Poetry Wales. She was highly commended in the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Competition 2023.

                                                 REFIGURING                                         

I was about to join the bustling motorway when the warning light came on. Miraculously, here was a tyre-changing outfit, and it was open, on a Sunday, in Winter … Again I approached the motorway. The warning light came on again… and a message: a further fault… I’d have to take the car home slowly, ask at the specialist garage in the morning.

Meanwhile, I figured, I’d make the most of the day. The remains of an ancient abbey beckoned. The church was open … Warm air drew me in … The crypt was even warmer. The books were welcoming, too … and that was where I saw that weird tale of an ancient stone cross.

Apparently, the stone cross had been here for half a millennium, but, then, lost at the Dissolution, half a millennium ago. Where had it stood? I climbed the stair, back into the church. 

As if I’d spoken my thoughts aloud, a white-haired warden with sky blue eyes appeared, smiling. He pointed up to a small high window. “See those remains of stone steps? They lead nowhere now but we think that there was once a turret there, where the cross was worshipped by pilgrims.” He nodded towards the walls of the chapel at the foot of the turret. “Perhaps these vivid illustrations of Hell encouraged penitents to make the most of their time here!”  

I had to figure this out further. Back in the crypt was this translation of an old account of the journey of the stone cross to this place and the power it had held for a Harold Godwinson, when it had stood at the heart of his abbey church.  

 Apparently, the cross had appeared as mysteriously as it had vanished. It had been carved during the ‘Age of Saints’ and buried at Montacute to protect it from Viking raiders; but why would the angel in the blacksmith’s dream want it raised up in Harold’s time? 

The writer was convincing and insisted that the dreamer was honest, and as stunned as anyone when the treasure was unearthed exactly as the angel had predicted. Or was this just a storyteller’s device? Was it a lie – encouraged by Harold, to promote his abbey church … or to attract pilgrim trade? Even so, it felt strange that we dismiss it now. 

When faith was a part of everyday life, did no-one fear that the smaller cross under the figure’s right arm might warn of a future sacrifice to come? Did the bell under his left arm not portend a warning knell? Was the book of the gospels – amazingly preserved – not seen as a key to answers?

The figure on the cross was carved skilfully from black flint. Did no-one see this as a warning to the church against treasuring bright metals such as gold, though church treasures had previously tempted Viking invaders? Rather, they tried to honour it with jewelled ornaments, removed only when blood gushed from the stone as they tried to nail them in … Well, of course it would: the black flint of Montacute was rich in iron, a suitable base for a carving of the sacrificial figure. 

Attention turned to miracles, to bring in pilgrims, and their money. Yet, if the figure on the cross was who they said he was, what would he have thought of this?

Harold, cured of paralysis at this cross, planned to build a college for priests to be sent out to preach to the world… a trade empire or empire of military control? For, despite his claim to faith, he saw no reason to stop attacking the people of Wales. No. He’d dedicate treasures to the abbey, come by from booty and from taxes and labour imposed upon the poor. Had he never considered what that figure represented on the cross would think of how he converted the cross to his own purposes? 

Huge outdoor hearths had been excavated, evidence of rich feasts, heavy drinking and worldwide trade.  One family owned one church and its dues, including tithes and fees for funerals. Attendance was enforced. Dissenters were tortured, executed and buried where devils were believed to dwell, to ensure that they went to hell. Could the figure represented on the cross condone this?     

What good could come of his gilded statues of twelve apostles and two lions, of silver vessels for the altar, gold for feast days, of gold and silver crosses, reliquaries and candlesticks? What good the gold-embellished gospels, while the Word within those gospels was unheeded? He’d meant this treasure to adorn his burial place; instead it helped to incite the Norman king to cause his death, to steal his treasures.    

Even Tovi, friend and advisor to the Viking King Cnut, had allowed his wife to dress the cross as a doll – as if the figure on the cross was a plaything for those in power. Had they forgotten the warning of Cnut’s predecessor, Svein Forkbeard, struck down, at the summit of his power, supposedly miraculously, at the sight of the risen saint, Edmund?^[1]

I read the writing on the wall: Harold, son of then powerful Earl Godwin, brother of King Edward the Confessor’s wife, Edith, had been a hero to his people. He was “broad-shouldered, tall, handsome, enormously strong, wise and a fine commander of soldiers”. He was “the king’s right-hand man, supreme in the land, by far the most outstanding man in England,” after King Edward died, “elected by unanimous consent, for even his enemies could think of no-one to propose in his place.” ^[2]

Yet he was displaced, by the Conqueror. Apparently, Harold’s father, Earl Godwin, had brutally, arrogantly, betrayed the king and his kin. Far from repentant, after the torture and murder of Edward’s brother, his stream of deceit and treachery had continued to undermine the king’s reign, and his marriage to Godwin’s sister. ^[3]

So, in a sense, Harold had been sacrificed on account of his father’s sins – and the land had suffered with him. Did these ‘Christian’ writers not figure that, had Harold’s people heard the message at the heart of those gospels, the Conquest might have been avoided? 

Harold showered the figure on the cross with gifts, processions and prostration. He was answered with the miracle of the figure’s sudden, sad, downwards look – surely, a warning?     

Harold’s customary military wisdom left him, men said, when he failed to await further troops before defending his land against the Norman invaders. Yet had he been wise when he had fought his people in the West? Had he been wise to attempt to appease church and kin by taking a Norman wife in addition to Edith Swan-neck, mother of his children, the only person able to identify his remains, though about to bear their last son?

So the Conqueror could claim the need to impose new order on church and country – and his son, too, plundering this church to enrich his church at Caen. Even so, the figure on the cross seemed still to show his way. It was as if he had not failed them, though people had failed to follow him. 

The original narrator of the miracles had been in service here since the age of five. He seemed scrupulous in his attempt to record precise truths. And truths were conveyed by his tales, even should details be doubted. It was claimed that the figure on the cross caused confusion to robbers, so that they became lost in the marshes, and then caused a traveller to send them into the arms of the maker of the vessels taken – so that the vessels were returned. Yet, then, three men were put to death, the fourth branded, instead, his life spared because he had pleaded benefit of clergy. What would the figure on the cross have made of this? 

Surely, the priest should have been more culpable, not less! When the figure on the cross appeared to offer healing, it was on the understanding that men would turn to him, following his ways. So lives were spared and witnesses filled with joy. So the writer said.

Intervening to prevent a theft during a time of civil war, the figure on the cross blinded and confused the Flemish thieves. The thieves were flogged, but then, their sight was restored and they were set free. Intervening to stop sacrilege of a party of drunkards, led by Humphry de Barcetose, on his horse, the figure on the cross made him insane until he should repent. Other thieves, too, were struck blind until they repented. Miracles like these made more sense, but how far were such tales developed to encourage the pilgrim trade? 

Something here had deterred even Henry VIII, who, five hundred years later, resolved to destroy the entire economy of the land; for, when he dissolved the abbeys, this was the last to go. Even at their last service here, the monks had sung a prayer of hope that the mother of their lord would surely continue to redeem the lost.

The figure on the cross is strangely forgotten now, but an inspiring statue of the handsome, hapless Harold hangs from the outside wall of the church. Few gather by his grave, though – perhaps deterred by too many alternative tales of his burial place – perhaps because it does not matter anymore. There is little to mark the place. Once it had been near the altar of a magnificent medieval abbey. Now it is outside the church and cars roar past.

The church stands, but, of that abbey, little but the fairy-tale remnant of its quaint gateway, of unevenly shaped, still bright scarlet bricks… and the river, once “fishful”, once engineered to be part of the pattern of the trade of the medieval town, is but a passing place for walkers. 

Ancient forests and palaces are being resurrected now but it is inconceivable that a cracked stone, with a dark flint figure on a cross, could re-appear. Yet what would people make of it now, if it did?

And what would they make of that spectacle of red and white cows, refusing to pull the cart carrying it, till the place was named where they were to go – to the then humble church that was to become so special to Harold, the soon to be doomed last of the Anglo Saxon kings? 

How striking that sight – even the story of that sight … but had this been just a narrative device, added to impress listeners? 

It could hardly be seen as significant, today, that a warning light on a red car on a white, misty, wet winter day, could lead here. 

And yet, had I asked all who stopped by that day, why they were here, would they have said?  

Clouds had hung heavy in the sky all day; now they darkened. The air hissed bitter cold. The church shut its doors. One place remained open – an ancient inn, overlooking the churchyard – the Welsh Harp – reminding me of Harold’s battles against the Welsh. 

The inn was warm and welcoming … But I figured that I could say nothing about what I’d seen and thought – nor about the blind spots this age might have, even while seeing blind spots of ages gone before – nor even of the prospect of the journey home.

---

^[1] Robin Fleming, Britain After Rome, Penguin 2010, pp.304-338.

^[2] Waltham Abbey, Essex. Here, Hannah reads from the outside wall of the church. Other information is from leaflets in the crypt and in the church at Montacute, Somerset, origin of the cross. Particular reference is made to Dean, Dinah – The legend of the Miraculous Cross of Waltham – Waltham Abbey Historical Society – 2002. See, too, their leaflet, The Burial of Harold at Waltham – 2008.

^[3] Garmondway, G.N. (tr) – Anglo Saxon Chronicle – Dent – 1982. See Earl Godwine 1034-1052. See Edward and Harold 1066. See, too, Schauma, S. – A History of Britain – BBC – 2000. Ch.2 Also Humble, R. – The Saxon Kings – ed. Fraser A. – Book Club – 1986. Ch.8 eg p.174 re “atrocities” of Earl Godwine.

M. Anne Alexander came to writing as an outcome of counselling and flourished as an active member of the award-winning Enfield Poets and Stanza Groups. She generally explores places with personal, historical and contemporary significance. Her background is as a lecturer in English and teacher of Music. Her poetry is now widely published, including in two anthologies and a pamphlet, Wildflowers, (Poetry Space, 2021). She is also author of fiction and non-fiction and of Thomas Hardy: the “dream-country” of his fiction – a study of the creative process (Vision Press/Barnes & Noble).  

www.poeticvoices.live /portfolio/alexander-anne.

The Journey Inwards

The sculptor’s rock looms in the white studio light.

She knows what to do.
The form has long been in her
echoing her need to express.

The stone’s heart is resistant,
resentful maybe.

It yearns for its ancient place,
thrown up in the seethe that formed the planet,
cooled and split by the seismic rolling of the oceans.
Then frozen to its core.

It has no fear.
Integrated, complete:
it views the puny soul that knows so little,
as she readies on a ladder with hammer and chisel to scribble on its surface.

The granite boulder squats,
menacing,
very much alert.

Alive
and waiting.


Viv Longley has been writing for her own pleasure since she was a child. Later in life she undertook an MA in Creative Writing at The Open University, specialising in poetry. As well as having one collection (Tally Sheet, Currock Press, 2021) she is undertaking a number of collaborative publications, notably, Daughters of Thyme. She is also preparing a second collection of her own and a number of essays – the latter to be called I am in a Hurry. ‘Now nearing my 80’s, you just never know how much time you have left!’

The Meaning of Life is to See								



So said Hui-Neng
in the seventh century.

And what are we to contemplate
with the other-worldly third eye
we are urged to open wide?

Shall we regard
the dandelion
defying Round-Up and rusted blade
thrusting forth its flower, yellow
against fissured cement,
the decaying fence,
sun-powered, indomitable?

Shall we keep watch
for constellations, the Southern Cross 
forming, in its ordered, linear course,
a celestial four-way stop?

And what of the cold-stunned carp
suspended below the thin, cracked ice
of a backyard pond,
the sheen of scales weak
as winter dawn, but tomorrow,
when it’s warmer,
a brighter orange?

Shall we notice
how the eyes of a newborn
mirror those of her great-grandmother?
Behind the same soft, misted veils,
do they glimpse
forgotten realms?

What, with our awakened vision
should we commit to memory?

Ten thousand things, said Neng,
but especially
leaves,
the progeny of trees,
wheeling at the whim of light,
greening and browning and greening again,
now brittle and broken,
then whole and succulent.					

Since 2019, Claire Massey has been a selection editor for the biennial print journal, The Emerald Coast Review. She is poetry editor for The Pen Woman magazine. Her work appears in numerous journals of the literary arts, including POEM, Snapdragon Journal of Art and Healing, Panoply, Wilderness House Literary Review, The Avalon Literary Review, Literally Stories, and The Listening Anthology. Recently nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize, her work has twice won awards from the National Soul-Making Keats Competition, and was longlisted for a 2023 Letter Review prize. Read more of her aesthetic in her debut collection, Driver Side Window: Poems & Prose. 

Image by Luke Wallin, author, visual artist and professor emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA.

Semi-solid Light


We are both prayerful.

She, with the commanding worship of her evensong,
and I, with Isha’s joyful submission,
“Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim.”

Both beckoning, sightless, in Owl
and Arabic, to mysteries
beyond understanding.

Like this belligerent mist, toiling to drown
even the glow of the street lamp.
Embroiling it within an unfolding
of semi-solid light.

A mischievous haze
dazzling, rising, lightly blazing,
to swirl over stoops, and under eaves.

Ponderously striving to deny
the very forms of her forest, our heavens,
and these man-made structures.

But it too, eventually,
rises from prayer,
and submits with grace, to Grace.

And with new clarity, our vision
of a darkly clouded sky, returns,
crowded, with gratitude.

Chris Wardle (Hamza) works at being happy and grateful, while writing with an eye for wonder, a taste for questions, and a sense of proximity to the Sacred. A relative newcomer to sharing his poetry, he has been published in: Blue Minaret, Pandemonium (2022); and Green Ink Poetry (2023).

God considers Her creation 


Well before dawn I sprinkled sunflower hearts 
across the frosted planks of the decking
for the sparrows and blackbirds and dunnocks
right next to the hedge they hang out in.
They haven’t been near the place since.
Is it because I’m here, watching? Instead,
they flit, and cling to shining twigs, and preen.
The winter sunrise, streaming from behind,
illuminates their feathers when they fly.
Fluttering light surrounds each silhouette:
hard-edged bodies with translucent wings.

Perhaps they’re not hungry. Perhaps hunger 
means less to them than preening in the sun.
What more can I do? Why don’t they come?

Helen Evans facilitates Inner Room, a pioneer lay ministry that creates space for people to be creative, and is piloting a new project, Poems for the Path Ahead, which in 2023 included poetry workshops held in a cathedral in England and in a consecrated cave in Scotland. Her debut pamphlet, Only by Flying, was published by HappenStance Press. Her poems have appeared in The Rialto, The North, Magma, Wild Court, The Friday Poem and Ink, Sweat & Tears. ‘That Angel Hovering’ was a joint winner of the Manchester Cathedral 600 Poetry Competition. She has a master’s degree with distinction in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. www.helenevans.co.uk

Psyanka


The Ukrainian tradition of intricately patterned, multi-colored eggs is older than Christianity.  Originally a spring ritual in honor of the sun god Dazboh, when Ukraine accepted Christianity in 988, the custom was adapted as an Easter ritual.  Under Soviet rule, in the twentieth century, the custom was banned.  Around the world the custom was kept alive by the Ukranian diaspora and has once again been revived in the homeland.  Pysanka refers to one decorated egg; the plural is pysanky.     

Image credit: Lubap, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons


All year they gather materials for the dyes:
flowers of woadwaxen for yellow, 
onion skins for gold. 
Crimson is derived from logwood 
and the crushed bodies of conchineal beetles; 
dark green and violet from the husks of sunflower seeds; 
black from walnut husks. 
Berries, bark, madder root, cow urine, sprouts—
all gathered to yield the richly colored dyes.  

After Yordan on January 19  
(Epiphany by the Julian calendar),
they begin to set aside eggs.
The eggs must be fertilized   
and only the smoothest, 
most symmetrical, and lightest 
in color are kept.   

When Lent arrives, 
it is time to begin the pysanky. 
Grandmothers, mothers, daughters 
work at night in secret,  
using family dye recipes
and design patterns 
passed down for generations. 

The designs are written (not drawn) on the eggs
in hot beeswax with a pysachok (stylus).
After each inscription, the egg is dyed,
working from light to dark:
yellow to orange to red to purple, brown, black.
Always light to dark. 
Alum helps the natural dyes adhere to the eggshells. 
After the final dye, the eggs are warmed
and the wax is wiped off with a cloth. 

A large family might make sixty eggs each year.   
On Easter Sunday, they are brought to church 
to be blessed by the priest. 

And then they are given away; 
lighter colors to children, darker colors to elders.  
Everyone receives an egg. 


     			
			A List in Celebration of the Giving of Pysanky


1 or 2 to the priest, who has blessed the eggs, who brings news of the Risen Savior
3 or 4 to the cemetery, in honor of those who have gone to their Maker
10 to 20 to the children and grandchildren; each child gets an egg
10 or 12 to unmarried girls, who give them to single men 
3 or 4 are set aside to be placed in coffins of persons who might die in the next year
3 or 4 are kept in the home—in the cupboard, on the windowsill, on the mantel 
		to protect the home from fire, storms, lightning
3 or 4 are placed in the mangers of cows for plentiful milk
3 or 4 placed in the mangers of sheep for safe lambing 
1 beneath the beehive to bless the honey and the bees
1 for each grazing animal sent to pasture in the spring 
1 in each hen’s nest for good egg laying  
Today it is Easter.  Everyone receives an egg. 

Rita Moe’s poetry has appeared in Water~Stone, Poet Lore, Mad Swirl, Slipstream, and other literary journals. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Sins & Disciplines and Findley Place; A Street, a Ballpark, a Neighborhood.  She has two grown sons and lives with her husband in Roseville, Minnesota.  

Medinat Habu, outside Luxor, Egypt

This, a temple at the site of the origin of creation, a primordial swamp, from which the god Amun rose. Known as the god of deities, he later merged with the sun god, Ra. 


Before, before, before humans broke
through the slime, before pharaohs
were formed, before temples built
for belief were set, the great god 
Amun appeared on this spot, mark
it now. Feel how energy rises 
from your soles, which is why 
stones are stacked in stately ways, 
why columns once held roofs,  
led paths into mystery,
because what can’t be spoken, 
can be prayer nonetheless. 

Kathleen Calby lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains and hosts writer events for the North Carolina Writers Network. Her work appears in San Pedro River Review, New Plains Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal. Named a 2022 Rash Award Poetry Finalist, Kathleen published Flirting with Owls (Kelsay Books) in 2023. Her Sufi background and other mystical associations contributed to a recent full-length manuscript she is completing about ancient and contemporary Egypt and the Pharaonic Era landmarks she was privileged to experience. Back home, Kathleen enjoys fried chicken and biscuits a bit too much and long, strenuous walks not enough.

Markings

What markings, then, on the path have I left?
What inkling prints or spoor displayed
for others to follow – that tireless rabble
of curious scientists, disciples,
and ankle-sniffing catchers of prey, adopting
those difficult ways and defiles I have trod.

I wish and need to know and so, retreating
from the storm-lashed summit I almost reached,
through filth and floods obscuring tracks,
I find one such and bind and shake him
till his teeth rattle, demanding, who are you?
I am you, says he.

I am the one you dropped, my friend,
as excess baggage long ago. And the others?
Stopping also, they have strayed to fresh obsessions.
It is only you and me remaining.
Return and hold to your ascension
and I shall write about your subtle signs.

Clive Donovan is the author of two poetry collections, The Taste of Glass [Cinnamon Press 2021] and Wound Up With Love [Lapwing 2022] and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Amethyst Review, Crannog, Popshot, Prole and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He was a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual poems. 

defiles, n. a steep-sided narrow gorge or passage