A bee poem for the 30DaysWild challenge. Also posted to @TopTweetTuesday.
Bechbretha
Bee
bumbled and brass-banded
buzz-bombasting the borders
humming humble bee hymns
to the honeysuckle
hollyhocking the sun
fuzzed fighter
pollinator
bee-bandit zorro of the zinnias
I have searched
with Aengus and Fintan
for that bee-loud glade of yours
where I might live
but some truths are only dreams
and Brigid’s honey
has a taste of the otherworld.
For yesterday’s 30DaysWild prompt. Late.
Footprints
We tread this earth
too heavy
with careless steps
denying our feet of clay.
And in our wake
we leave a trail
of broken stalks
petals crushed and bleeding
a trail of used discarded things
carcases of unnecessary whims
a trail of microscopic death
pathogens carcinogens
a blackberry trail
sweet and dark
though who sees more
than briar thorns?
Are the sounds between trees a kind of conversation? The wind? Or silence? Or is it an abstraction, even at times a personification, ‘to save us from / what is formless’? Peter Larkin’s new book, a beautifully produced volume by Guillemot, evidences an arboreal religiosity, ‘a thud of spirit’, rooted in a landscape of prayer and seeking.
The hundred small poems here (each two or three short lines) are small-scale devotions-come-observations, verbal snapshots of a world of verticals, ‘[t]rees above trees’, shelter, storms and ‘noises in rain’. Within the ‘[t]ree chaos’, it seems that nature itself prays, perhaps to itself, in a self-contained cycle of erosion, displacement and ecology.
The final line asks ‘is this how the wild calls?’ I truly do not know; the words – pared back to a minimum – are more ‘a stumble into the uncondition’ that Larkin seeks, a hoped-for escape from human formlessness into…
View original post 121 more words
-Jane Dougherty
For the last day of Paul Brookes’ Insect Week, and coincidentally today’s 30DaysWild challenge.
Odyssey of the Hine’s emerald Dragonfly
A mother roams nemoral bounds, where river rims encase
The malleable solace of a sunken ark’s embrace
As dips and oscillations from a dragon’s tail foretell
Of a latent dormancy within a leafy citadel.
A new-born is denied repose and famished pores collect
The layers of a shell as a falling cradle feigns neglect.
It braves a bed of swaddling swings, that brings an abyssal brink:
The nascence of a nymph amid the liquid lanes to slink.
Along a luminescent roulette of planted palisades,
Where droves of small amalgams mass as aqua masquerades
And dainty strides belie the plunders of a vital script,
When carcasses are catalysts for stratums to be stripped.
From gulfs of gills and guillotines that guard the beds and banks,
To navigating chancy streams, while spurred by sprouting flanks.
A final shed at shallow depths, and then a sudden ascent
Of paper pillars on a pressing urge to reinvent.
A brace of motes, to break the mould, as quaking seams unearth
A base of beats awaiting wands of wander from rebirth.
When coated peaks embolden leaps, a lustrous span combines
And reaches to the heights, to leave behind the leaves as Hine’s.
-Daniel Moreschi
-Jane Dougherty
-Christina Chin
Bios And Links
-Daniel Moreschi
is a poet from Neath, South Wales, UK. After life was turned upside down by his ongoing battle with severe M.E., he rediscovered his passion for poetry that had been dormant since his teenage years. Writing has served as a distraction from his struggles ever since. Daniel has been acclaimed by numerous poetry competitions, including The Oliver Goldsmith Literature Festival, the Westmoreland Arts & Heritage Festival, Utah State Poetry Society’s Annual Spring Contest, the Jurica-Suchy Nature Museum’s Nature Poetry Contest, and the Hugo Dock Snow Maze Poetry Contest. Daniel has also had poetry published by The Society of Classical Poets, and The Black Cat Poetry Press.
Previously publications for the piece:
Anthology: A Bin Night in November, published by Black Cat Poetry Press in 2022
Anthology: Querencia Press Summer 2022, published by Querencia Press in 2022
Lydia Tomkiw is probably better known as half of Algebra Suicide, an inventive and eclectic post-punk duo which found Tomkiw declaiming her lyrics over drum machines and electric guitar. If you’re lucky you might find their albums secondhand, otherwise some of this music is still available on a couple of Bandcamp compilations.
Tomkiw was also an accomplished poet – although many poems were used as lyrics – and was championed in the UK by Martin Stannard and Geoff Hattersley, who both undertook a reading tour with her, whilst the latter published her book The Dreadful Swimmers through his imprint The Wide Skirt. Otherwise, Tomkiw’s publications were pamphlets and chapbooks, some self-produced, all now impossible to find. Until, that is, the publication of this 409 page book, which I have only just come across, although it bears a 2020 copyright date.
The band and poet both came out of Chicago in…
View original post 793 more words
My poem for Paul Brookes’ 30DaysWild challenge.
Plastic orphans
I toss a bottle in the sea,
watch until it’s lost to sight.
Like Lir’s children, tossed from sea to loch
through storm and crashing waves,
it drifts unchanged and undiminished.
Not in pure white feathers clad,
its coloured label fading with the sun,
but smeared and greened with algae,
for three hundred years it sails,
condemned to never let its atoms free.
Three hundred years again before it finds
a different sea, an ocean broad as half the world,
and carried in the currents,
jostled by a million lost semblables,
it joins the continent of plastic trash.
Perhaps in three hundred years again,
when time has put an end to our earthly reign,
the sorry debris, our eternal badge of shame,
will sink like human bones, to rest
among the corals and the last of all the pearls.
Today I have the absolute pleasure on inviting Giovanna MacKenna to reflect on her stunning debut collection How the Heart Can Falter (The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing, 2022).
Thank you for the invitation, Nigel. What author can resist an opportunity to talk about their book?! I’m delighted to be given this space to offer some insights into my collection How the Heart can Falter, and one poem in particular. As I see it, we all have our stories to tell; they are the mirrors of our lives. With this book I hold up mine in the hope that the readers may also see themselves.
Although I’ve been writing in one way or another for a long time, poetry really came to me in the months after my mother’s death. My father died many years before but there seemed to be some sort of permission that arrived with…
View original post 561 more words
The Wombwell Rainbow 