Category Archives: Uncategorized

Making the Road of Nine Days, Nine Nights
i.m. D.H.

There, beyond the gate
in the deepening cloudy shadows, there –
I am making a road of signs, way-markers

for you to follow, for I am told
there is a labyrinth to negotiate and evening
is fading quickly to blind black.

As the ancestors did five thousand years ago
I’ll bring the stars down to light your road
as white quartz pebbles; you will recognise

these nine small stones
curated from the granite dark, from knowledge
of tumuli and bone. Each names memory.

The first, for an old, trodden field, four-square
and sturdy with winter; the Hunter waits here
more luminous than at home.

The second, silvered with ice, a waterfall
that broke its neck. Three is shaped
by a red kite, wings alight over the blue hills.

Here is a stone to mark a frosted mountain
where even sour turf was glass. Here is another
that kindness has worn to a talisman.

Six is a hollow cup, held in our hands ring
all the stories, wild wine.
No stone for lament, seven sings joy.

The eighth is a far shore, flat and hot,
green rock for bronze; sun burning the sea
so blue it erases our winters.

The last one knows the way back.
It shines faithful as Sirius, on the jetty
where the boat waits with the ebbing tide

and as you row out into the dark, phosphorescence
surrounds you in a nimbus, a radiant blaze
bright as any meteor lighting up the years.

© Rose Flint

 

Rose Flint has worked as a creative writing tutor and was for 10 years Writer in Residence at Salisbury District Hospital, working in all areas of healthcare. She has five collections, including A Prism for the Sun (Oversteps). Awards include the Cardiff Poetry Prize and the Petra Kenney International Prize.

THE WORLD’S YARD

 

Right at the back of the world’s yard I am sitting. Happily watching the young woman on the balcony dangling a cigarette and a pink collar. She’s calling her cat who’s conducting a disloyal reconnaissance near a bunch of birds who’ve put down their shovels to have a smoke. Upright, black, in work hats, they swivel their eyes around, questioning the capacity of the clock. The girl yells that birds are ‘so obnoxious’. Hostile buildings shape the grey.

THE MARK OF GOD

 

What is a doll like? To a three-and-half year old: “A doll is like an old saggy thing or a new thing.” To a six-year old: “A doll is like a mini person but it doesn’t walk or talk.” To a nine-and-half year old: “A doll is like a girl that’s stunned by the image of something.” A doll is the real mark of God. What we make of ourselves.

 

MTC Cronin has published twenty books (poetry, prose poems and essays). Recent collections include in possession of loss (Shearsman Books, 2014) and The Law of Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), the latter of which was written over two decades. Contact: emptyseacronin@gmail.com.

Five Annunciations

ANGELS AND OTHER STRANGERS

Angels are too good to be true, the devil has all the best tunes, although you are more likely to meet a stranger than an angel.

Someone spoke of divine interventions, of redemption, but we are beyond saving. These days there are not many stories left that I have confidence in.

I can tell I am not greatly interested any more, may be speaking just so I can speak: phonetics meet semantics.

Open your mouth and words come out.

 

THE MOST VISIBLE WOMAN IN HISTORY

Models of appropriate female behaviour, doomed to fall short of their goals, madonnas are often glitzed up and a bit sexy, but all have human needs and wants.

Focus on sensuality and postponing parenthood, excluding women from the inevitable phenomena of nature, in order to represent the variety of ways women live today, confronting the conflicting roles they are expected to play.

 

CAMPSITE ANNUNCIATION

Mary’s living in a bunk house in the woods, open to the elements, hung with flowers and lights. She’s a good girl, puts her shoes in the corner, prays each night, is not surprised when an angel wrapped in a red blanket leans through the window and offers her a lily. Light streams around, from and through him. She is suddenly scared and shy, knows summer is at an end. She kneels beside her bed and tries out the words ‘mother, ‘god’ and ‘son’. Feels the small, square rug beneath her knees, then packs her things and goes to look for Joseph. He’ll know what to do.

 

 

 

META-ANNUNCIATION

‘My icon status is that of the mother. Artemis and many others precede me,
no doubt back to the stone age. The difference with me is passivity and sorrow.’

– Mary the Mother of God, Art Review

 

The art critic invents a voice for Mary the Mother of God and interrogates her about contemporary art and her role in the grand scheme of things. A friend of mine is more concerned that the why is missing, that the annunciation is simply a given and that our protagonist is caught up in something there is no reason for.

Perhaps she doesn’t know either, but doubt, confusion, incredulity are not enough. What is God’s motive? Does he have a convincing rationale? Do the angels never question? Perhaps asking questions of ourselves is enough?
Do not forget that these are poems about paintings, not a philosophical or theological debate.

 

ANGELIC DEPARTURE

‘Even on impossible journeys, we are not alone.’

– David Rothenberg, Sudden Music

The angels are leaving, taking a boat across the water, perhaps to find a country where people still believe.

One has already lost his wings, because they said he was an impossible idea, a religious metaphor for messages from heaven.

Neither angels nor heaven exist, of course. Watch the empty boat drift away from shore.

© Rupert M Loydell 2018

 

Rupert Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010).

Song for the Beloved

I remember leaves above my cradle in the April sun.
It took all these years to find again the simple door
inside the light. I don’t expect to be understood.

Like Moses we were entrusted to the current
at an early age. I hope sapphire coffers await
any friend I’ve ever disappointed.

A luthier cuts outside the line, working inward.
A scared armadillo can outrun a man. They’re drilling
in Alaska! I cried and the Buddha kept smiling.

Arjuna the Archer takes aim and answers,
“I see the eye of the bird.” And what color, my son,
are the feathers? I see only the eye of the bird.

Singing your name on my drive home I saw
a doe nosing stubble corn; when I stopped she flashed away.
The grass grows warm where she beds in the grove.

Oh, Thor, why weep at another failed poem?
The Teacher says there’s no way to describe the ocean –
only sighing waves, and this taste of salt.

Shoreline Song

There’s a song the grasses know but never
sing, holding it in the secrecy of silence

on calmer days; it awakens only when
the winds stir up from the distances where

they wait and begin to rehearse again
the promises they keep. The sands know

of this, too, and the gulls, each murmuring
in their way while on and on the stealthy

dunes crawl, moving imperceptibly as they
drift slowly along the edges of the sea.

 

Mark S. Burrows is a theologian, poet, and translator. A longtime resident of New England, he currently teaches religion and literature at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Bochum (Germany). His recent publications include Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart. Meditations for the Restless Soul, with Jon M. Sweeney (2017); a new book of his poems, The Chance of Home, will be published in March, 2018. http://www.msburrows.com

The Car at 3 am

The three o’clock darkness is thick
enough to stir. Interrupted dreams
fly up to roost
in the attics of houses
along the street where a car
feels its way slowly to the point
at which it must turn back
into the land of wakefulness.
The animals who descend

from the mountain after dusk
are threading their way
between our sleeping lives.
They are ancient
in a city edging toward the future
without knowing which god
to follow. There are so many

books, and a different answer
in each one; the driver
cannot know which direction to take
as the headlights burn
holes in the silence. The unsolved

mysteries surround him. He is
undecided. The GPS system
doesn’t apply to Heaven or Hell.
But it’s beautiful here; waiting
for the desert slopes to rise
into the light at dawn; listening for
the first bird to call out
that he is still alive.

 

19. March

This eclipse, I remembered later, reminded me that night
of a jackal I watched skulking at the roadside late evening
in Diu. It fell into my frame with its stiff straight legs and
blurred fur, whispering into a hedgerow. In another place,
on another day, reedbeds played with another light; each
reed bent and bright pulled down Spring sunshine. Made
some trickling of shadows stutter like pale lace in the weft

with straws cross-hatching. There was a haze on the estuary;
no discernible meeting of water and sky, the whole maze
of seascape had become endless. And fine threads of silver
chalked flat lines that the sun caught, lifted them clear from
the mud flats and salt marsh, harsh spears suspended then
laid on their sides. When the moon passed away from the
sun the blackbird in the oak tree lost its darkness; the sun

became what it should be: buttery, freed from the cloak.

John Gimblett lives in Wales, UK, and is primarily a poet and novelist whose work has been published widely. He has read at the Hay Festival (‘The Woodstock of the mind’ – Bill Clinton) and elsewhere. His novels are crime/thrillers set mainly in my home city. #NewportNoir @johngimblett

Sanctuaries

At some point the landscape was not enough,
or it was so necessary that we
were prompted to respond with our own hands:

boundary of stream and pool, frame of mountain
and forest, horizon of lake and plain.
And so, in a place to see it all best,

dig a ditch to enclose and to widen out,
post and wall and a roof over the central pit,
offerings as much to the underground

as to the wide sky and the deep valley.
Hang old weapons from the entrance, from the walls,
shields of rotting wood and leather, and swords

all broken and rusted, bent and dismantled –
even the embalmed heads of enemies,
and even the heads of offered cattle

become corroded skulls up in the corner.
What we erected had to rhyme with the land,
even though our clutter of offerings

and objects could never match the simplest
grove or lakeside, plateau or hollow or
the wordless, most unassembled spread of oak.

But we did our best with gold offerings
and the feast, with wine drunk and ritually spilled,
with every tribal action preceded

by some gift and question about the land,
about another war or more travel.
What we made by ourselves was a reminder

of our own bewilderment and ignorance
but also of the clues left us, the love,
the seasons and their mighty moods, the land

and its inclinations, the animals
and their whims and tempers and emotions.
Knowledge makes none of this any easier,

but meaning is meaning for being hard.

Tim Miller writes about religion, history and poetry at www.wordandsilence.com. This poem is one from a larger collection on (mostly spiritual) life in prehistoric Europe, the entirety of which will appear later this year from The High Window Press. Other poems from this collection have appeared in Crannog, Londongrip, The High Window, Poethead, Cider Press Review, Cumberland River Review, Isacoustic, The Big Windows Review, The Basil O’Flaherty, Albatross, The Journal (Wales), and others.

Where Grace Is

In the gold case.
Behind drapes and gilded gates.
Under feathers and flames.
In the orange-jumpsuit-clad trapped in cages or inside broken minds.
In the swell of milk-drop on a mother’s breast.
In ash and grease and sweat.
In the rise of sun and compassion.
In cafés sipping coffee over dreams.
In the abandon of trust and deceit.
In the brush of whiskered breath or jet engines.
In cloudy film on corneas and lakes.
In the wasting of potential and organic things.
Where technology without faith makes light.
Where metal blades extract or access what is vital.
In music from a string, vibrating, or the night.
In the reach of men in palaces and underhulls of ships.
In soldiers armed with swords or righteousness.
In children, rocked in sleep or naked bottoms squatted over gutters in the street,
In the reflections of you and me as chance and morning traffic pass us by.
In the string of drool or thought from midday nap or hunger.
In the fury of infirmity or flight.
In the fathomless black of pupiled-eyes, the opaque liquid of their cup reflecting.
In the curl of smoke from thurible or cigarette.
In fingers twitching on triggers or lover’s flesh.
In unlit littered alleys and satin-sheeted beds.
In the passion of arms outstretched in lust or rigor mortis.
In the innocence of skin unblemished or shrapnel-shredded.
In temples, framed by hands in prayer or wielding whips, made of matter
Shaped with reverence and built or broken with a purpose.
Where mobs and lonely teem within a space, trapped and held in place
Like tea leaves in a bowl, cupped close and agitated.
In oil thick with musky scent or color painted on a canvas or a newborn baby’s head.
In fields of concrete boxes under stones,
In all we do and do not reap from what is sown.
Where prayer is necessary or forbidden.
Where grain transforms to flesh when fed to beasts
Who seek salvation or to live another day.
In the hammering of rain and sacrifice.
In the too-sweet press of lilies opened and forgiveness.
In the blue of noon and in acceptance.
In tumors or wombs where cells attach and multiply.
In the struggle of first breath and surrender.
In mercy and irreverence.
In words that weave into belief
Nothing.
In denial of randomness.
In the throats of those who thirst for that extracted of what’s fallen
But still blessed, sanctified and pressed to life again.
In the twisted limbs and minds and roots of men.
In kingdoms lit with fires long ago burned out.
In Hope
When we gaze up at this glow,
The place that fills the space of all the things we do not know
But seek.

Carrie Danaher Hoyt is a life-long lover and writer of poetry. Carrie lives in Massachusetts where she is a wife and mother of three school-aged kids. To pay the bills (as her poems don’t yet do this) she works as an estate planning attorney. Carrie has poems at twitterization.wordpress.com and cabinetofheed.wordpress.com