A night of ghazals comes to an end to fill with birds.
As the sky blues, their calls braid in New Jersey.
In the Serengeti four elephants rest without heads,
bodies rising like boulders from the plain…
You stood, small and mute,
on the stoop where she’d left you
with a tiny, plastic suitcase,
like a bad joke, beside you.
An amputated leg, they say, tingles,
an ear long deaf still jangles the brain:
the body asserts the integrity of its parts…
On Friday, we caught up with poet, blogger, editor and activist Michael Simms at his kitchen table where he was preparing his Saturday morning post for Vox Populi.
And now only his voice remains
as it cries through the needle scratch.
Across decades, that voice has entered
our voices: our style, our common despair.
“Adlestrop” is a poem which, though written in a time of war, takes place during that last, long, beautiful Edwardian summer. The speaker is describing a prewar train journey in full consciousness of the disruption that is soon to follow.
From the new year, dolphins began dying
by the thousands, and those were the ones we saw,
their bodies washed up on the beaches…
“Remove your yellow star.
Head for Switzerland or try
for Nice. Don’t write your will
Don’t imagine what the Germans feel.”
Liz thinks we ought to have a day
devoted to apostrophes
In which we add or rub them out
in bands of roving grammar louts.
The number of vaquitas left was around 30 in early 2019. — . Today, news about small dolphins: Only sixty vaquitas left. Two years back, they numbered some one hundred “individuals,” living … Continue reading →
Inside my friends’ house (in the 18thcentury, a shop), I wake to the clank, clank, clank of the blacksmith’s hammer hard against iron, yellow orange, I imagine, from the forge. . … Continue reading →
21-year-old Scholl, with her older brother Hans, was guillotined on 22 February 1943 for being part of the White Rose, a group of students arrested for distributing anti-Nazi flyers. — … Continue reading →
The red-faced guard, his scant hair pressed like a wish against his boney pate, sat uniformed at the library gate sternly blocking the un-elect like me. After just a … Continue reading →