Day Two

-John Phandal Law

-Gaynor Kane – Abstract Sunset

-Anjum Wasim Dar – Corona Shocks

To Abstract Sunset
(Gaynor Kane2)

River rises
Snares my meadow blooms
Spills orange juice
On my flowered frock
Runs along the banks
Thief! Trickster!
I can’t pursue you
I am Ivy

-Barbara Leonhard

JPL 2
Haiku

Industrial growth.
Is it ease peace or chaos?
War destroys it all.

-Anjum Wasim Dar

GK 2 Abstract Sunset

O Glorious Sunset
illumined, unending, serving eternally the unseen,
and life in all forms manifest, living in a golden palace,
in the River Okeano, till a fixed time.

Nothing survives without you, symbol of the gift of sight
travel across the skies , in a four winged horse chariot
effulgent scathingly warm till a fixed time.

sunset sends a message strong, I cannot stay, all day long
half the job done, half to do, must move on
for other worlds too-be not lonely for you may not see
but I leave behind a shining company, till a fixed time.

and when I see the sunset spreading I know
life is not ending,no loneliness prevailing as flocks fly
slowly by homeward bound, happily silently all have to go,

to safety,to sleep promises to fulfill ,to thank ,not weep
love is Eternal The Lord keeps
,till a fixed time….

-Anjum Wasim Dar

Art work – AWD2 Corona shocks 

Red red red
squadron of sea urchins
overflies a blue blue blue world

planetoid
sharp-spined feats of evolution
they seethe in plasma-pink clouds

dangerous
as man to man but quieter
invasions won without propaganda

-Lesley Curwen

JPL2

the air is heavy on the hill
in the distance forests resist
the chimneystacks smudging the sky
one day the storm will break

-Simon Williams

Smoke and Mirrors (JPL2)

The industrial revolution
humps the mountains,
begets smokestacks
and quarries. Every valley
fills with concrete.
Nowhere and nothing
to breathe—grapevines
scribble an s-o-s
across their hillside,
await the guillotine,
the crane. People
no longer travel
the game board seeking
carbon credits and instead
dream of credit, a visa,
their passport to spending,
to matter, to the rock
quarry of civilization.
Smoke gives the illusion
of purpose. Wild
stakes a new claim.

—Lynne Jensen Lampe

The Lost (GK 2 Abstract Sun)

The air smells of salt
As the icy mist sprays
My face
I roam on the shores
Rocky, meandering
Just like my mind
My life
My eyes move upwards
Brilliant colors make me pause
A bright orb
Hovers where water meets
The sky
I spy a boat that appears to float
Directly ‘neath the
Gold sphere
My mind wanders once more
But to a distant time when
Sailors used the sun
And stars
As their compasses
A revelation hits me as I continue
To stare at the vessel
That’s what I’m missing
A compass!
Something to guide me
To show me
the way I ought to go
But – is this enough?
No, comes the brutal answer
It is not
Not for this lost soul
What I need is a beacon
Like the sun before me
For I’m a bird
Wingless
Broken
In search of something true
Without another thought,
My feet enter the frigid water
Refusing all orders and pleas
By their master
For they aim to lead this soul
home.

-Carrie Ann Golden 

-Lesley Curwen

2. [Corona shocks AWD2]

If you mean to hit me
Hanging over as a bellicose missile
Mini-minions beside you
Expecting similar counter measures
Tit for tat, like for like
Plummeting into
Nothing
Falling into nothing
Aren’t you scared now?
Shining so bright with nothing to land on,
As if you’re not really there.

-Math Jones

JPL 2
If those beehives, honey from fields, mirrored
in hillsides, mirror our lives,
then this is as it should be. Recognise productive smoke
pluming from chimneys, walk as we do between the leisurely aspens,
walk the children to school like parents
and flee as we do. Fight and flee.

-Lesley James

Standing Behind Me In The Gallery

In a voice like tomorrow,
he says ‘over to the left, there
past where the canvas ends,
the sea pinks bank upwards.

Up on the dunes there’s a shack,
nothing special to look at.
But my god, the lobsters –
big as small dogs, and so sweet.’

I realise I’m squinting at the wall to see it.
Up there on the dunes
to the left of the painting.
I feel his smile in my ear. And he turns
with a sound like the cracking of shells.

– Jen Feroze

Wonder

I wonder if the sun
ever wished it could alter course
and bounce along the horizon
or rise in the West
or pop up at midnight?
Whether it resents
the laws of physics
that keep the planets in order
and its motion in check?
As I resent this virus
that has invaded my body.

I watch the sun set once more
and force myself to breathe.

-Tim Fellows

Seeing (Inspired by all three artworks for Day 2)

The universe of repeating shapes
fractals and tessellations,
the infinite spirals of time
mirrored in shells and nebulae,
onion domes, and honeycombs,
circles of fire–

the virus that looks like our sun,
a crown without its golden blaze,
a speck too small for reflection
but with the power to destroy
the colors we see

with our limited vision
we know the glory of our own star
rising and setting–
the reflected color of sky in sea,
timeless, even if we’re not–
yet who else can describe the beauty
of our world,
perceive flowers in clouds
and clouds in rivers?

-Merril D. Smith

Corona Dandelions
(after AWD2 Corona Shocks)

Cochineal dandelion clocks
blow firmly, evenly,
one strong breath to clear the stem.
Airborne in time,
they crown above combusting fields
waiting to cinder.
Spiking through oxygen
tufts grasp to find new hosts
to germinate, infest, infect.

-Jamie Woods

A Sunset

of chimneys is belching out coronas
around the sun when skin gets cold as we
move from familiar to strange borders.
Russia is water, Thunder, our army.

The heavens are trunk and branches made old
by water and wave that floods homes, enshrouds
crops, animals. Thunder battles who stole
Summer till droplets flow into earth from the clouds.

Water cannot be allowed to rot lives.
Thunder is heard in the rattle of stones,
bellow of bull, bleat of billy goat cries
Touch of ax blade lightning bolt blown.

Do water and thunder bleed, or bones break?
Can order be brought, correct a mistake?

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

-John Phandall 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.

-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.

-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. 

-Tim Fellows

is a writer based in Derbyshire. His debut pamphlet, Heritage, was published in 2019 by Glass Head Press.

-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. 

-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. 

-Jamie Woods

is a writer from Swansea. He has had short fiction published by Evergreen Review and The Lonely Crowd, and his poem ‘Ring the Bell’ was commended in the Hippocrates International Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2021. www.jamiewoods77.com

-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 One

-Anjum Wasim Dar – Masks

-Gaynor Kane – Abandoned

-John Phandal Law

The Absence (GK 1 Abandoned)

The empty black chair
once used by someone of great value
claimed through a senseless,
bloody war
robbing her of the only
lifeline
that kept her tethered
to sanity

-Carrie Ann Golden

AWD1   

Civilian corridors

And now you will endure trial by gift-giving he said,

hiding behind flowers. Follow the scent to your destination.

It may not be where you need to go.

-Lesley James

Empty (inspired by AWD1 and GK1, April 1st)

In the unconscious night
the world is in colours,
swirling, melting and folding.
There is joy and laughter,
people surround me
like a child’s blanket.
In the daylight my room is empty.

-Sir Tim Fellows CBE

Continue reading →

A photo of my late mam outside the Rovers Return.

Our Mam’s Potpourri

Our home were spiced up.
When she were well
Mam placed wooden pots
of her favourite fragrances
on the tiled hearth,
strung garlands
on the hallway walls.
She made our home a rich orchard.
Christmas roses wilted in radiated heat.
Poinsettias glowed on the hearth.

Allspice, cedar wood shavings,
cinnamon and cassia bark,
cloves, cypress wood pairings,
fennel seed, incense-cedar
wood shavings, jasmine flowers
and oil, jujube blooms,
juniper wood chips.

I thought it magic,
‘cause it didn’t rot,
lavender leaves,
lemon balm leaves,
lemon peel, marjoram
and mignonette and mint leaves,
mugwort, orange peel.

Sweet citrus infused all rooms.
Whilst out of her French windows snow
gusted barkskin limbs shivered.

Pelargonium leaves, pinyon pine
slices and cones, rose flowers,
hips, rosemary leaves.

Even on gusty winter day Mam died,
and sharp tangs were stench
and pots emptied,
garlands binned,
odours dissipated from rooms but not memory.

-Paul Brookes

-Neal Zetter

Four Daffodils
When: March 1982Hampstead Parish Church Cemetery

Only four Daffodils mark the place we laid you
I bring you
many things I could not bring before
I cannot list them
but suppose they come with growing old.
I can cry now
and do as I watch the flowers in the wind.
Regret’s as cheap as pollen and as fertile
so I bring you —more
The one’s I love to meet you.
One being fed, one feeding,
as I was fed by you.
A month for every flower.
If you can hear me
bless them
bless me
and know that only now I understand
the depth of love
that always finds
and always fills
and never stops or fears.

-Dave Garbutt

The Shrew

It isn’t the one performance I’ve seen,
open air, gender-swapped, abridged,
that comes back to me
as I read it for the first time
in twenty-one years,
well as I remember that,
at Fountains Abbey, the day after
my final exam. Sly was Scottish,
they messed up the ending,
Bianca disappeared as the actress
was playing Petruchio as well.

Nor is it Burton and Taylor,
though I can just picture them now.

Katherina’s voice for me
will always be that of Margaret Leighton
on the Harper Collins recording
I had on two white cassettes
and wish now I had kept,
or got it on CD instead.

Go get thee gone,
thou false deluding slave
was the only line I thought I remembered,
as it’s printed on a postcard
I use as a bookmark
in my book of Brontë poems.

It turns out there are hardly
any lines I have forgotten.

-Peter J. Donnelly

The Reading
Keats House.

There is the poet; exposed on her mountain-top,
no longer sheltered in her lap-top castle
poking fun at a hapless world.

She gabbles the words – her cherished harvest,
fearful eyes alert to the enemy,
each well-fletched arrow zinging dead on target.

Emotion builds behind the hurried monotone
and will she leave us, stranded in the ether,
or take us upward way beyond ourselves?

Ricochets from her philosophical bomb-blasts
mock the tawdry trappings,
the lampshades and the repro chairs,

unexpected artistry and pathos brings relief
and as the final cadence bares some naked truth,
the challenge passes in a wave of clapping.

Was this catharsis, – a physical implosion
in the name of art and womanhood?
Creativity travels lightly, with backward
glance and worn shoes,

and a gold standard placed just out of reach;
as each parent swims the hellespont of guilt,
the poet balances on a tightrope
strung between art and perfection.

 

Strauss Moment

Like a seagull riding a thermal
Jessie Norman takes us
on upwards aboard a melifluous
wave of mystic sound to
a heaven-scape from
Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.

Such sound is not of our world,
splitting levels of perception
weaving harmonies
in a mystical language and
under that intoxicating spell
resistance is futile.

Just as lullabyes reach
deep in the soul to loose
tangled frets to the wind, so
Jessie Norman’s easy hypnosis
caresses until everything stills,
eyes close and a
private smile flickers.

 

Cheers and Tears for the Clown

Tears still prick at Ralph McTell’s clown
“hanging up his smile on a hook by the door”.

“All the world loves a clown”, sings Cole Porter,
but not true, for children sense instinctively
the two emotions, grief and laughter
thinly disguised by the motley
and the garish paint.

When the circus clown car stopped by me in
the front row, the fear was intense as
those heavily daubed eyes met mine
and the whole weirdness of that Vauxhall-gardens,
seedy, commedia dell’arte,
sexless, wild extreme
pierced my nice little world. . .

. . and mockery – the crowd laughing helplessly,
wave upon wave of laughter with each drum roll – why?
As the clowns’ world disintegrates like their car,
we join in with the ridiculing of the
underpants and the sausages
and the centuries of derision at someone else’s sadness,
one step removed from our own.

Through the circus clown, we’ve cloned vulgarity
and learned another laughter;
another weapon in the arsenal of life.
The flop of the custard pie takes something away.
The clown wears our grief in his sad smile – he
can bear it, it’s his job,
while we must laugh,

– laugh outside of the frame, beyond the boundary,
laughs transcending the artifice
of the big top, and,
just as enigmatic Feste steps
outside the comic dream of Twelfth Night,
the circus clown hangs up his smile
and weeps.

-All by Jane Newberry

He: “Actors Are Liars”

It tell him I’ve written
a Christian play.

He says:

It’s not real, you know.
It’s dishonest.

God says don’t lie,
and that’s what actors do.

Try to be something they’re not.

All theatre is lies.
Satan’s work.

All actors are Satanists.
All playwrights their priests.

-Paul Brookes

Emptying my late dad’s house, I find a shoebox labelled “Dad’s Cards” . Among these I discover a letter to him composed when a play of mine called “Still Children” was being staged at Hull University’s Gulbenkian Theatre in 1984. My final year, or so I thought.

I was twenty one. I am shocked by the religiosity of the language.

-Paul Brookes from an unpublished memoir

Bios And Links

-Peter J Donnelly

lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies. He recently won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition.

-Jane Newberry

Jane is a children’s writer yearning to be a grown-up poet. Retirement three years ago brought more time for trying new literary genres. She enjoys a wide range of musical and arts activities and shares her husband’s passion for historic buildings and Celtic Cornwall.

Publications to date:

2008 – A SACKFUL OF SONGS (Cramer Music)

2012 – A SACKFUL OF CHRISTMAS (Cramer Music)

2018 – poem “Hemiola” in anthology “The Possibility of Living”- (Poetryspace)

            poem shortlisted Bridport Poetry Prize

2019 – Poem in anthology “Dragons of the Prime” (The Emma Press)

2019 – Mi-shan shortlisted for Mslexia Novella Prize.

March 2020 – Big Green Crocodile (Otter-Barry Books).

October 2020 – poem in South Magazine

July 2021 – Big Green Crocodile shortlisted for CLIPPA award

September 2021 – two poems in Coronavirus Anthology – RedWolf Editions November 2021 – Paperback edition of Big Green Crocodile