By Nell Regan Shanganagh Cliffs The last great melt is scored through each layer of these cliffs – these shelly drifts below our home, cut clean by the knife of the sea. I scan for sun bleached stone, delivered from a desert long gone, find a speckled piece of the Firth of Clyde but my […]
Month: November 2021
REED BUNTING Emberiza schoeniclus
By Mary Montague REED BUNTING Emberiza schoeniclus: from a sequence after the species’ singing styles (2) I Sing Me To More Myself I begin in the dark / as I began in My / own dark unformedness / making a syllable / after a syllable / after a syllable / which is the kind of faith / […]
Red Camellias
By Seán Lysaght I saw you this morning when a shaft of light shone on the red camellias just after sunrise. I recognised the lipstick and a kind of shy emergence from the hedge-depths where they sheltered. The poplars were already applauding the main parts of the day to come, wind and sun, and a […]
Light is what days are made of
by Moya Cannon Light is what days are made of –it pulls the daffodil up out of dark earth,prompts the eagle and the stub-tailed wren to nestand draws the humpback whale north with its song. Stones, warm on the morning sea-shore, know it.Our sun is so much older than them –such tempests of grief it […]
Dormitory
By Nell Regan The rooks that rise above the serried ranks of homes augur unease as though soil itself has not settled, knows not what memory knows (or what the body recalls and expects) except come spring: when a nudge of weed and wild flower show through, a ghosted version from below. At each roundabout […]
Notes From India
By Sujata Bhatt for Pearse Hutchinson, February 2012 2:00 am in Mumbai and the crows are still loud. They circle the trees – hundreds of them around our house. A crow has died and all the others keep cawing, cawing through the night into the morning – endlessly they keep on calling for days. I […]
Grey Heron Is Not A Hood Ornament
By John Kinsella The twelve-footer outboards in from the bay, its ingress watched by gulls and the odd jogger. The sea’s a glasstop, so the chevrons from the boat’s passage tamp the harbour’s walls. On its prow, a grey heron, still as sculpture, staring down the man tillering the motor. His haul under wraps. The […]