The Choral Singers in Uniform

And at the river where we slumber
The crystalline prism’s encumbrance
Where shall we gather remembrances
Horse galloping towards endurance
Not this way, not that way, what ever way
We parse our accomplishments in umbrage

How Did It Go?

A one stanza presentation of the Gwawdodyn Hir poem (a Welsh poetic form, a sestet); It is an interesting form requiring four lines of 9 syllables, two final lines of 10 syllables, and end rhymes on 1-4, and line 6. This lent to me something both formal and mysterious, being a Canadian and growing up inside a colonial-commonwealth society. I took bravado, envisioned the brio of a children’s choir (of which at one point in grade school I was a member of – a most ghastly experience), and imagined the Titanic (as a school/ a sinking deck – slanting down into an ocean, everyone on board still singing) – I really feel that forms are interesting to explore – for just these reasons – opening up old patterns to visions, exploring social-history, and what is embedded in and can be opened up thru language. Any one out there – a Welsh speaker – who would like to take a crack at translating this into a Welsh-language version?

Robert Frede Kenter

Enquiry

The ghosts of thousands line London’s streets
drifting to the house where MPs meet
from rest they come, drawn by pure deceit;
the obfuscation and lies that cheat
them of an answer; they must wait and see
if truth can free us from this mad elite.

How Did It Go?

Took a while to do this one, and I’m still not 100% happy. The same rhyme ending makes it tricky, I think.

Tim Fellows

Bio and Links

Robert Frede Kenter

is a writer and visual artist, the EIC /publisher of Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net), who lives in Toronto with MECFS. Robert is an editor, pushcart nom, finalist in the 2023 DaVinci Eye awards for book design, and a widely published poet, playwright and Vispo practitioner. Work recently in or forthcoming from: Olney, Watch Your Head, Anthropocene, Anti-Heroin Chic, Acropolis Magazine, Erato, Fevers of the Mind, and other venues. Books include EDEN (visual poetry collection, 2021), the micro-chap Office Crime, & contributor in the anthology, The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press, 2022).

Manvers Lake by Paul Brookes

Haibun for a secret pool

I found the pool in the winter, when all the leaves had fallen, the alley of trees that led to it, columns with no vault. The path beneath was thick with leaves and dug and scraped by pig and deer. A heron lifted slow, calling hoarse anger when we came near, the dogs and I.
The pool was deep in winter and still, white with fallen blossom in spring, and the summer trees are thick now all about, the alley of trees a nave again.

The water is ancient, coelacanth-green, dark-scaled reflecting no light, insect-dimpled, a skin that twitches, a stillness in perpetual motion, tail-flicked, bubble-trailed.

In the stillness we watch and listen, dogs silent as carp, as the pool, the trees, the whispering birds absorb our unnatural presence. We watch fish-shadows rise and drift from aeons ago through brown and green and grey, watch ageless mouths open, for an instant, in this world of bright ephemera, and insect skimmers rush out of the light and into prehistoric dark.

Still summer shadows
water dark as the spaces
between the stars.

Jane Dougherty

Bios and Links

Jane Dougherty

lives and works in southwest France. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, the Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, ink sweat and tears, Gleam, Nightingale & Sparrow, Green Ink and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/ Her poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers were published in October and November 2020.

Discreet encounters

When first we came to this house, it was wild. Wilder than now. The old one who had hung on here alone after the old man died was put in a home, and the house had been empty. Always peaceful, the meadows were unvisited by humankind for years, and badgers, deer, martens, hares, owls and foxes with nothing to fear had sidled up to, or sidled into the house. Those first seasons, I don’t know how many times I blundered across animals I didn’t even recognise. Later, they grew wary and once again kept their distance.

The first to leave were the owls in the attic. Then the hare that left her young ones by the house moved them out into the meadow. I trod on one in the long grass under the study window. The scream of a hare is a pitiful sound. A marten hunting by the hedge, I mistook for a cat. The martens knew me though. Evenings, we’d meet badgers using the driveway as an easy route through the meadow. Until I took a torch with me, I thought they must be stray dogs. Who knew badgers had tails? They use another route these days.

But the foxes still come up to the house. They still sit waiting to see if there’ll be food scraps put out, just beyond the light from the windows. Sometimes we hear the squabbles, the chatter of a marten, the high-pitched squeal of a hedgehog, the roar of a badger. It’s enough to know they are still there, and if they keep a discreet distance from us, we have only ourselves to blame.

Jane Dougherty

Bios and Links

Jane Dougherty

lives and works in southwest France. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, the Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, ink sweat and tears, Gleam, Nightingale & Sparrow, Green Ink and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/ Her poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers were published in October and November 2020.