Day Ten

-John Phandal Law

-Anjum Wasim Dar- Harvest

-Gaynor Kane – Double Rainbow Over The Palm House Botanic Park Belfast 2017.

Someone Expected A Pot Of Gold

But they said it hit like a meteor
as the sun came out.
Turned the wedding feast into a prism –
everything refracted,
colours and kisses and histories
rewritten. And raindrops
stubbornly jewelling
the many panes of glass.

-Jen Feroze

Harvest

Breadbasket of the world.
Wheat stands tall and proud
Like soldiers

-Caroline Johnstone

JPL10

Damaged
Beyond repair
There’s no turning back
The clock
Time waits for no one
From birth to childhood
Confidence, dreams
abound
Adulthood to old age
Reality, reflection
Overload
What began as whole
Broken to pieces
Only to reform
Into new shapes
Of hope
For a better tomorrow

-Carrie Ann Golden

Don’t Stop
(after Double rainbow over the Palm House, GK10)
Buried behind the glass
Spectral searchlights
Point the way
To two pots of gold.
I tell you I don’t believe in magic
But here I am
Spade in hand
Forever digging.
– Jamie Woods

Somewhere
(inspired by all three images)

Somewhere there are grain fields
that will never grow green,
grow gold beneath a summer sun.

Somewhere there are broken dwellings,
bars, schools that will never ring again
with laughter nor even tears.

Yet somewhere, steely safe and far,
perhaps in stories, perhaps for real,
they tell me there are still rainbows.

-Jane Dougherty

I Knit the Sky –
To GK 10 Double Rainbow over Palm House, Botanic Park, in Belfast
2017

I cast on the double rainbow
To braid a bluebird sky,
One free of storm and ash, free
Of bombs labeled ‘For the Children”.
I thread hope from sun to earth,
Blanket the wanderers, the abandoned,
The slain.
Variegated strands entwine body and soul.
The ends of the rainbows knot
Into a full fight for healing, wholeness,
Gold.

-Barbara Leonhard

Rainbows

The magic of rainbows never left him.
Even after he learnt it was pure light
dispersed to different frequencies.

Even though he knew the Northern Lights
came from solar bursts, dancing
on the Earth’s magnetic field, he gazed

upwards like a child in wonder. When lightning
crackled in the skies, when thunder groaned.
When the moon blocked the sun and darkened

the day, when comets seared through the night.

-Tim Fellows

 

Wonders (Inspired by AWD10, “Harvest,” and GK10, “Double Rainbow over the Palm House, Botanic Park, Belfast”)

A harvest field
turned van Gogh gold in autumn’s slant-light,
a gloomy sky
lightened with chromatic arcing—
reflection, refraction, the clarification by science,
but felt—felt!—
in a tickle, a taste, an expansion of the mind—
heart-touched in mystical reaction,
a response to the stardust we hold within?

-Merril D Smith

Closing Time (JPL10)

Wind church-keys the licorería
windows, sun parches pine planks.
No chance left
to drink your wallet dry.

—Lynne Jensen Lampe

AWD10

Harvest
We stand tall
as we were seeded
faces forward towards the sun
the wind picks up as the rabbits flee
the end is nigh
we return to the sky

-Simon Williams

-Lesley James

The Golden Thread (Day 10 (AWD10 – Harvest)

gold threads up
warp and weft of life
exhaling from good earth
and my breath
– a golden thread –
rises

-Vicky Allen

JPL10

It is, to put it gently,
a haunting experience
to return to a place
so familiar from the past,
a place that used to be so alive
but is now nothing more than a
rackle of bones —
a spectre of what it used to be

And I have to declare
how deep the chasm is,
the remnant sadness
so unavoidably ingrained
in the building materials, in the
brick and the plaster, the wood
and the panes —
those fractured panels of glass

What may we make
of this? Are we asked
to reflect upon how
we spend our time? Is
there a lesson to be learned
from random occurrence as
this surely is —
or are we still superstitious?

-Peter A.

Bios And Links

-John Phandal Law

is 68. Lives in Mexborough. Retired teacher. Artist; musician; poet. Recently included in ‘Viral Verses‘ poetry volume. Married. 2 kids; 3 grandkids

-Gaynor Kane

Gaynor Kane lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she is a part-time creative, involved in the local arts scene. She writes poetry and is an amateur artist and photographer. In all her creative activities she is looking to capture moments that might otherwise be missed. Discover more at gaynorkane.com

Twitter @gaynorkane

Facebook @gaynorkanepoet

Instagram @gaynorkanepoet

-Anjum Wasim Dar

started drawing at St Anne’s Presentation Convent High School, Rawalpindi.
Drawing was taught as a Core subject from  Kindergarten.
Anjum learnt the  skill of  Still Life, Sketching,  Landscape Drawing, Coloring  and Shading  She recalled the scented wax crayons and black  paper sketch books vividly.

Subject of Fine Arts at Intermediate level at Govt.College for Women Rawalpindi,   was stopped by the Indo Pak War of 1965. Anjum continued her passion for art privately.
Her job as a Teacher Instructor allowed her to pursue Art work designing and preparing  Thematic Bulletin Boards and Low cost teaching Aids with the Fauji Foundation Teacher’s Training Institute Rawalpindi. www.faujifoundation.org.
This won her the National Education Award 1998.
 
Completing  a Course in Graphic Designing  at NICON Academy Rawalpindi , Anjum began working as a Digital Artist, On Line, registered her Own Firm CER Creative Education Resources 2004 and is a Member of DRN Drawing Research Network UK  and www.bigdraw.org.uk
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/tracey/drn/
 https://sites.google.com/site/cerprofessionaldevelopment/
With her artistic skills she plans and conducts “Environment Awareness Workshops for Children” and is a member of www.unep.org and www.earthday.org
CER Participated in World Environment Day and Earth Day Programs 2011-2013
“Face of Climate Change”
Anjum  loves Nature, landscapes and abstract imagery. Works with pencils, crayons and  the Software ArtRage 2.0  and MyPaint.

Anjum Wasim Dar’s Art Portfolio  can be accessed  here:

https://www.artwanted.com/anjuartwriter/gallery/

-Merril D. Smith

lives in southern New Jersey near the Delaware River. Her poetry has been published in several poetry journals and anthologies, including Black Bough Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic,  Fevers of the Mind, and Nightingale and Sparrow. Her first full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts, is forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow Press.  Twitter: @merril_mds  Instagram: mdsmithnj  Website/blog: merrildsmith.com

-Lesley James(she/her)

is a teacher and writer. She was shortlisted for Love Reading UK’s 2022 Very Short Story Award. Featured flash can be found in The Broken Spine, FullHouseLitMag and RoiFaineant. Kathryn O’Driscoll selected her poem Empty for Full House’s 2021 mental health live reading and forthcoming podcast. Brian Moses, The Dirigible Balloon and Parakeet Magazine have published some of her writing for children.

-Lynne Jensen Lampe

has poems in or forthcoming from Figure 1, Olney Magazine, Yemassee, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Also to come is her chapbook Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022) about mothers, daughters, and mental illness. She was a 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize finalist. Born in Newfoundland and raised in the Deep South, she lives in mid-Missouri where she edits academic books and journals. Visit her at https://lynnejensenlampe.com. Twitter: @LJensenLampe.

-Math Jones

is London-born, but is now based in Oxford. He has two books published: Sabrina Bridge, a poetry collection, from Black Pear Press (2017), and The Knotsman, a collection of verse, rhyme, prose and poetic monologue, which tell of the life and times of a C17th cunning-man. Much of his verse comes out of mythology and folklore: encounters with the uncanny and unseen. Also, as words written for Pagan ritual or as praise poems for a multitude of goddesses and gods. He is a trained actor and performs his poems widely.

-Caroline Johnstone

is an author and poet from Northern Ireland now living in Scotland. She has been published widely including Poetry Scotland, The Blue Nib and Marble Poetry. She loves spending time with her grandchildren, curling up with a good book and champagne or cocktails in no particular order. 

-Lesley Curwen

is a poet and sailor living in Plymouth. She often writes about loss, rescues and the sea.

Her work has been published in anthologies from Arachne Press, Nine Pens, Quay Words, Slate, snakeskin, and soon by BrokenSpine and Broken Sleep.  

Her poetic relationship with sound has been helped by her work as a BBC broadcaster, editing words on screen.

-Carrie Ann Golden

is from the mystical Adirondack Mountains now living on a farmstead in the Red River Valley of North Dakota (USA). She writes dark fiction and poetry. A Deafblind, her work has been published in places such as GFT Press, Doll Hospital Journal, The Hungry Chimera, Asylum Ink, Piker Press, Edify Fiction and others. You can find her on her writing blog as well as Medium and Twitter.  

-Jen Feroze

lives by the sea in Essex with her husband and two small children. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of publications including Ink Sweat & Tears, Chestnut Review, Atrium and The Madrigal. Her first collection, The Colour of Hope, was published in 2020 and she’s currently working on a chapbook of poems about early motherhood. 

-Paul Brookes

is a shop asst in a supermarket. Lives in a cat house full of teddy bears. First play performed at The Gulbenkian Theatre, Hull.  His chapbooks include The Fabulous Invention Of Barnsley, (Dearne Community Arts, 1993). A World Where and She Needs That Edge (Nixes Mate Press, 2017, 2018) The Spermbot Blues (OpPRESS, 2017), Please Take Change (Cyberwit.net, 2018), As Folk Over Yonder ( Afterworld Books, 2019). He is a contributing writer of Literati Magazine and Editor of Wombwell Rainbow Interviews, book reviews and  challenges. Had work broadcast on BBC Radio 3 The Verb and, videos of his Self Isolation sonnet sequence featured by Barnsley Museums and Hear My Voice Barnsley. He also does photography commissions. Most recent is a poetry collaboration with artworker Jane Cornwell: “Wonderland in Alice, plus other ways of seeing”, (JCStudio Press, 2021)

Day Nine

-John Phandal Law

-Anjum Wasim Dar

-Gaynor Kane – Docks And Titanic Visitor Centre

Fake
(inspired by Gaynor Kane’s Belfast docks and JPL’s smoke stacks)

There are stars deep the sky,
deep the grass beneath the hedge,
sun dapples on water,
glinting in wild eyes.

Green spreads without begging,
trees, climbing vines,
rivers run.

Light pours from sunsets, sunrises,
lies cradled in the petals of a rose.

We spread grey and grim,
smeared with smoky fingers,
leave rims of plastic filth, our tidemarks,

and at night we create our own stars,
cranked up and humming,
like aircraft aping birds.

-Jane Dougherty

9. [Table AWD9]

Lovely how the light of our lamp
Throws an image of our feast
On our glad picture window.

Makes it seem we’ve twice what we have,
Though we haven’t really.
Makes it seem the outside has it too.

-Math Jones

 

Table turned (JPL9)

open mouths crying out for steam
galaxy of rivets tinged with rust
no carriages to pull, no coal
no horsepower left

when I was four a monster of this sort
whistled, spat out scrolling clouds
made me scream & hide
in mother’s winter coat

-Lesley Curwen

Thanks Grieving Dinner
To AWD 9 Table

Miseria serves up wounds,
Hers and Dad’s history of harm,
A heavy meal nightly,
Fed to the chicks, our mouths open wide
To the legacy of raw organs.
Tongue is tough on the teeth.
Their suffering. Heaps of
Angry meat. We taste the slaughter.
        Food is love. Eat!
Soups made from tears.
Crumbs of lumpy cakes, breads
That never rose. Casseroles tossed out
By the ungrateful.
       This is my body. Take. Eat.
Remember us.
Love served with wincing knives.
       Let us pray.

-Barbara Leonhard

History
I look out on history; lights flicker
in the harbour as an old newsreel
clatters – ships breaking the water,
nervous soldiers crawling the streets,
hooded figures in the shadows.

-Tim Fellows

Day 9 (GK9 – Docks)

Ribboning reflections
hold a rainbow
in the night

and I think of
all the small redemptions
that have come
like light

the water keeps a record
of all it has seen
but there are no words
for what hope has done here

-Vicky Allen

GK9 Docks and Titanic Visitor Center

Water and cement
Filled the void
I can’t breathe

-Carrie Ann Golden

AWD9 Table

Is it simply an issue
of image, when one
is tempted to reflect
the ideal, or what is
considered perfect?
How does one show
that a family is close
and happy? Surely
should be gathered –
faces around a dining
table – but they have
taken their food away
to eat from their laps
facing a flat screen tv

-Peter A.

At the Museum Where Tombstones Name Only the Paints (JPL9)

The small cards offer few facts.
Why does the mind always
go to the worst? I stand before

Terra Rosa and Ivory Black
swashed across paper,
images of disks and cylinders,

what might be smokestacks,
and I think Auschwitz, Birkenau.
Burned bodies in Bucha.

El Mozote. Tulsa. This poem is too
small to contain all the places,
the names. The shame.

My mind denies I see steam
trains. I chant yartzheit at these
rusty tombs ringing of bones.

—Lynne Jensen Lampe

-Jamie Woods

Harbors and Tables (Inspired by all three works: AWD9, Table, JPL9, and GK9 Docks and Titanic Visitor Centre)

The pistons hop and engines throb,
the business of business never stops,
and the busyness of jobs
and people-flow

to the harbor where
machines whirl, and spin, and drum
the daytime hums and hustles
the nighttime bustles,
lights in rainbow colors
call

to windows above–
the young girls sees
only the dazzle and gaiety.
When she’s told to come to the table,
she gentles her doll into a cradle–
all the color and light now reflected in a
a meal prepared and shared—

in the hustle and bustle of a dinner table,
find love as bright as harbor lights.

-Merril D Smith

Bios And Links

-John Phandal Law

is 68. Lives in Mexborough. Retired teacher. Artist; musician; poet. Recently included in ‘Viral Verses‘ poetry volume. Married. 2 kids; 3 grandkids

-Gaynor Kane

Gaynor Kane lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she is a part-time creative, involved in the local arts scene. She writes poetry and is an amateur artist and photographer. In all her creative activities she is looking to capture moments that might otherwise be missed. Discover more at gaynorkane.com

Twitter @gaynorkane

Facebook @gaynorkanepoet

Instagram @gaynorkanepoet

-Anjum Wasim Dar

started drawing at St Anne’s Presentation Convent High School, Rawalpindi.
Drawing was taught as a Core subject from  Kindergarten.
Anjum learnt the  skill of  Still Life, Sketching,  Landscape Drawing, Coloring  and Shading  She recalled the scented wax crayons and black  paper sketch books vividly.

Subject of Fine Arts at Intermediate level at Govt.College for Women Rawalpindi,   was stopped by the Indo Pak War of 1965. Anjum continued her passion for art privately.
Her job as a Teacher Instructor allowed her to pursue Art work designing and preparing  Thematic Bulletin Boards and Low cost teaching Aids with the Fauji Foundation Teacher’s Training Institute Rawalpindi. www.faujifoundation.org.
This won her the National Education Award 1998.
 
Completing  a Course in Graphic Designing  at NICON Academy Rawalpindi , Anjum began working as a Digital Artist, On Line, registered her Own Firm CER Creative Education Resources 2004 and is a Member of DRN Drawing Research Network UK  and www.bigdraw.org.uk
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/tracey/drn/
 https://sites.google.com/site/cerprofessionaldevelopment/
With her artistic skills she plans and conducts “Environment Awareness Workshops for Children” and is a member of www.unep.org and www.earthday.org
CER Participated in World Environment Day and Earth Day Programs 2011-2013
“Face of Climate Change”
Anjum  loves Nature, landscapes and abstract imagery. Works with pencils, crayons and  the Software ArtRage 2.0  and MyPaint.

Anjum Wasim Dar’s Art Portfolio  can be accessed  here:

https://www.artwanted.com/anjuartwriter/gallery/

-Merril D. Smith

lives in southern New Jersey near the Delaware River. Her poetry has been published in several poetry journals and anthologies, including Black Bough Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic,  Fevers of the Mind, and Nightingale and Sparrow. Her first full-length poetry collection, River Ghosts, is forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow Press.  Twitter: @merril_mds  Instagram: mdsmithnj  Website/blog: merrildsmith.com

-Lesley James(she/her)

is a teacher and writer. She was shortlisted for Love Reading UK’s 2022 Very Short Story Award. Featured flash can be found in The Broken Spine, FullHouseLitMag and RoiFaineant. Kathryn O’Driscoll selected her poem Empty for Full House’s 2021 mental health live reading and forthcoming podcast. Brian Moses, The Dirigible Balloon and Parakeet Magazine have published some of her writing for children.

-Lynne Jensen Lampe

has poems in or forthcoming from Figure 1, Olney Magazine, Yemassee, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Also to come is her chapbook Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022) about mothers, daughters, and mental illness. She was a 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize finalist. Born in Newfoundland and raised in the Deep South, she lives in mid-Missouri where she edits academic books and journals. Visit her at https://lynnejensenlampe.com. Twitter: @LJensenLampe.

-Math Jones

is London-born, but is now based in Oxford. He has two books published: Sabrina Bridge, a poetry collection, from Black Pear Press (2017), and The Knotsman, a collection of verse, rhyme, prose and poetic monologue, which tell of the life and times of a C17th cunning-man. Much of his verse comes out of mythology and folklore: encounters with the uncanny and unseen. Also, as words written for Pagan ritual or as praise poems for a multitude of goddesses and gods. He is a trained actor and performs his poems widely.

-Caroline Johnstone

is an author and poet from Northern Ireland now living in Scotland. She has been published widely including Poetry Scotland, The Blue Nib and Marble Poetry. She loves spending time with her grandchildren, curling up with a good book and champagne or cocktails in no particular order. 

-Lesley Curwen

is a poet and sailor living in Plymouth. She often writes about loss, rescues and the sea.

Her work has been published in anthologies from Arachne Press, Nine Pens, Quay Words, Slate, snakeskin, and soon by BrokenSpine and Broken Sleep.  

Her poetic relationship with sound has been helped by her work as a BBC broadcaster, editing words on screen.

-Carrie Ann Golden

is from the mystical Adirondack Mountains now living on a farmstead in the Red River Valley of North Dakota (USA). She writes dark fiction and poetry. A Deafblind, her work has been published in places such as GFT Press, Doll Hospital Journal, The Hungry Chimera, Asylum Ink, Piker Press, Edify Fiction and others. You can find her on her writing blog as well as Medium and Twitter.  

-Jen Feroze

lives by the sea in Essex with her husband and two small children. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of publications including Ink Sweat & Tears, Chestnut Review, Atrium and The Madrigal. Her first collection, The Colour of Hope, was published in 2020 and she’s currently working on a chapbook of poems about early motherhood. 

-Paul Brookes

is a shop asst in a supermarket. Lives in a cat house full of teddy bears. First play performed at The Gulbenkian Theatre, Hull.  His chapbooks include The Fabulous Invention Of Barnsley, (Dearne Community Arts, 1993). A World Where and She Needs That Edge (Nixes Mate Press, 2017, 2018) The Spermbot Blues (OpPRESS, 2017), Please Take Change (Cyberwit.net, 2018), As Folk Over Yonder ( Afterworld Books, 2019). He is a contributing writer of Literati Magazine and Editor of Wombwell Rainbow Interviews, book reviews and  challenges. Had work broadcast on BBC Radio 3 The Verb and, videos of his Self Isolation sonnet sequence featured by Barnsley Museums and Hear My Voice Barnsley. He also does photography commissions. Most recent is a poetry collaboration with artworker Jane Cornwell: “Wonderland in Alice, plus other ways of seeing”, (JCStudio Press, 2021)