Category: Poetry

  • Holy Isle Retreat: Maeve O’Sullivan

    this wee island birthed from Lamlash Bay * * * mandala garden – a pair of chaffinches over the daffodil beds * * * Good Friday: a blackbird moves the earth by the Buddha’s thigh * * * fragrant rosemary in the wish-fulfilment garden mother’s roast lamb * * * mistle thrush the birding website…

  • Lecture du poeme le chant de la DAKINI par Yumma Mudra

    Lecture du poeme le chant de la DAKINI par Yumma Mudra

  • Holiday and Postcard from Bodhicittaland

    Holiday and Postcard from Bodhicittaland

            Holiday  I’ve booked my holiday to an exotic place, the cost is priceless, the journey endless, the signposts glisten, the way is near, not far away   I need to pack some precious jewels I make my choice:   Kindness and Generosity Compassion and Gratitude Patience and Tolerance   Respect and…

  • Helen Sherlock-Jones: Holy Isle Poetry

    Helen Sherlock-Jones: Holy Isle Poetry

      HOLY ISLE DORMITORY… Quiet, Peaceful, Comfort for me, Time to reflect on what I see. All my buttons are already being pushed, I want it to be over now but this can’t be rushed! Time to go inward and see what is there, I can be Quiet, Peaceful and find Comfort anywhere… It is…

  • 3 Haiku by Monica Kakkar

    3 Haiku by Monica Kakkar

    infinite echoes of primordial waters cadence of a conch ***** haiku 2 freshwater cradle Mansarovar on my mind circumambulate ***** haiku 3 dandelion orb flowers in where nothing is cloudy cup of tea ***** Biography Monica Kakkar is savoring her freedom, peace, silence, and solitude. She is learning to explore, express, connect, and celebrate through…

  • CHILDHOOD

    CHILDHOOD

    CHILDHOOD Long time he lay upon the sunny hill,       To his father’s house below securely bound. Far off the silent, changing sound was still,      With the black islands lying thick around. He saw each separate height, each vaguer hue,      Where the massed islands rolled in mist away, And though all run together…

  • THE CHARCOAL SELLER

    THE CHARCOAL SELLER

    (A Satire against “Kommandatur”) An old charcoal-seller Cutting wood and burning charcoal in the forests of the              Southern Mountain. His face, stained with dust and ashes, has turned to the colour of smoke. The hair on his temples is streaked with gray: his ten fingers are black. The money…

  • Wasp on the Prayer Flag

    Maeve O’Sullivan is a Dublin-based member of Bodhicharya Ireland. In Wasp on the Prayer Flag, O’Sullivan’s fifth collection with Alba Publishing, the years 2018-2021 are chroniced in the forms of haiku and senryu verse.  The three sections, Seasons, Sequences and Senryu, bring to the reader Maeve’s lucid observations of life in Ireland and abroad.  This latest edition…

  • The world is a beautiful place to be born into

    The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don’t sing all the time The world is a beautiful place to…

  • The White Man’s Burden

    The white man’s burden Rang loud and clear Trumpeted by church and state alike. Exercise dominion over the colored savages. Cleanse them of their heathen ways.

  • Chinese poems

    Po Chü-i was born at T’ai-yüan in Shansi. Most of his childhood was spent at Jung-yang in Honan. His father was a second-class Assistant Department Magistrate. He tells us that his family was poor and often in difficulties.  (772-846)

  • March 1st 2020 St David’s Day

    Prelude to poem ‘March 1st, 2020, St David’s Day’ This poem was written last year, just before the World Pandemic 2020 exploded in the UK, during a time, when all we had to worry about was ‘differences of opinion’! That still remains, of course, and for me, my ongoing ‘fight’ is over ‘styles of gardening’…

  • CONTEMPLATIONS

    Contemplations on no coming, no-going This body is not me, I am not limited by this body. I am life without boundaries. I have never been born, and I have never died. Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars, Manifestations from my wondrous true mind. Since before time, I have been free.…

  • MULTIPLE MORBIDITIES

    Multiple morbidities: the term they use to capture all the ways that nature fashions for us how to die: The cancer didn’t get him,                                                                                            but the diabetes did; that unpredicted stroke; the virus lying dormant; and infection in the throat; Or perhaps some unattributable malaise accumulated down the years – the persistent aching emptiness of…

  • Times of Tribulation – April 1st – All Fools’ Day, 2020    

    Spring’s stance hung, chilled; grim sky surged, grey, ‘Fool’ ventured down to the Prom that day Took chosen, odd path, chanced route, least trod, Vain trampling, awry, o’er matted green sod, Clambered high bluff, breathless; traversed bleak tops, Below, vast-spreading river…above, lean lonely copse, ‘Tis “Thirty-two days syn March began”, Familiar, stark words for a…

  • THE WAY OF THESE TIMES

    Reunion in a guest house in Kabul. Four years later you give me an Afghan carpet. Hand made in Herat. Roll it out by the fern frost window and sip green tea and tell me of your daughters the Way These Times have foiled their paths to school. And now the year splutters through Buhare…

  • Coronahaiku Sequence

        wiping handles & surfaces to protect myself from myself * * * a pair of magpies a pair of collared doves in separate trees * * * empty city street they walk hand in gloved hand two young men * * * daffodils pulled up by kids in the local park – I…