-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…
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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…
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These sentences are isolated outgrowths on the page, declamatory black islands on the sea of white page.
These sentences are accompanied by, perhaps arise out of or derive from, drawings. These sentences are unsure if they are words or images, are what arises from asemic writing, from figures, plans and imaginary architecture. These sentences ‘inscribe their own topography; make their shape with their shape’ (fig. 23).
These sentences ‘both fog and chart the rising structure’ (fig. 45) as they gesture, dome, tower and broadcast. These sentences are active participants in the construction of a shelter for the reader, built in their own individual way.
These sentences ‘balance the question of movement against that of enclosure’ (fig. 7). These sentences take risks, do some pretty heavy semantic lifting, and sometimes collapse under the weight of their own intentions and possible interpretations.
These sentences are carefully built temporary shelters, and can be…
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The 30DaysWild challenge today is an ode to trees. A sonnet in my case.
On the beauty of poplars
Without the poplar trees there’d be no song,
no fluting call of orioles, no wild
and wanton dancing by the stream, no wreaths
of black and yellow through the leafy green.
Without the poplar trees, how would we know
the wind was pouring, rolling from the west?
The oaks stand firm, immobile, poplars sigh,
their topmost branches trembling silver sea.
And when the trembling grows, a rising tide
of waving boughs and hissing with the foam
of unseen water-wind, cold ocean-born,
the poplars raise their slender boughs to show
the wind take form, we see it in the sky,
an ocean, weed-strewn, flotsam flying by.
A gentle hug
The midday sun
pours lava.
The tree
with its baby-arms
embraces
the immigrant,
a few feet away
from
the bald
bus stand,
enjoying the cool
wind
and the green circle
on that piece of asphalt.
-Sunil Sharma
On the beauty of poplars
Without the poplar trees there’d be no song,
no fluting call of orioles, no wild
and wanton dancing by the stream, no wreaths
of black and yellow through the leafy green.
Without the poplar trees, how would we know
the wind was pouring, rolling from the west?
The oaks stand firm, immobile, poplars sigh,
their topmost branches trembling silver sea.
And when the trembling grows, a rising tide
of waving boughs and hissing with the foam
of unseen water-wind, cold ocean-born,
the poplars raise their slender boughs to show
the wind take form, we see it in the sky,
an ocean, weed-strewn, flotsam flying by.
-Jane Dougherty
We grow as
Nature ordains
never complain and bear the pains
from black to grey, green to brown
one by one we fall to the ground
Our duty done with full obedience
spreading freshness and fragrance
with peaceful quietude we surrender
making space for others in elegance.
This is The Truth This is The Call
This is The Providence of The Fall
Be it Oak, Pine Fir or Kowhai
Sown ‘n Grown, This is The Final Cry’.
-Anjum Wasim Dar
Bios And Links
-Sunil Sharma
Toronto-based author-academic-editor, Sunil Sharma has published 23 creative and critical books— joint and solo.
He edits the Setu journal: https://www.setumag.com/p/setu-home.html
For details, please visit the website: https://sunil-sharma.com
The Wombwell Rainbow 