Category: The Arts

  • Leaving Vigo

    With sad and friendly eyes she answers yes when I ask if Santiago trains are on. Seventy-five fatalities, or more: un accidente horrible – she nods. A message wishes us a pleasant trip, the carriage has an eerie muffled mood, its notice says 130 km per hour, we read our newspapers and phones, subdued. I see Camino pilgrims…

  • PRAYER FOR NEPAL

      Bhaktapur. Kathmandu. Lamjung. Shermatang. Lean closer. Can you hear the soul of Nepal? It whispers. Cries. Prays: Our heart lies buried in the rubble, in stones turned to sand. Oh, humanity, come to our time of fire! Lift every stone. Lay your hands upon our valley. Dig with us. Dig as we retrieve our…

  • Letting Go of Ávila

    I could have travelled there today, could have walked its medieval walls and lit a candle for the vulnerables in the Basilica de San Vincente. I am letting go of the eagle caves, the cathedral, and the Monasterio de Santo Tómas, but most of all, the Convento de Santa Teresa, housing her ring finger, and…

  • Splenomegaly

        The body has a lump.   The lump is growing.   Just under the rib cage on the left side reaching down.   A torn muscle; too many sit-ups rippling my abdomen.   And yet no pain. No pain at all.   And weight loss too. Yes.   But no surprise after all…

  • LAYMAN P’ANG, LINJI YIXUAN, HAKUIN EKAKU

    Well versed in the Buddha way, I go the non-Way Without abandoning my Ordinary person’s affairs. The conditioned and Name-and-form, All are flowers in the sky. Nameless and formless, I leave birth-and-death. Layman P’ang (740-808) Layman P’ang    If you want to be free, Get to know your real self. It has no form, no…

  • The Story So Far

  • The Combat

    It was not meant for human eyes, That combat on the shabby patch Of clods and trampled turf that lies Somewhere beneath the sodden skies For eye of toad or adder to catch. And having seen it I accuse The crested animal in his pride, Arrayed in all the royal hues Which hide the claws…

  • Reunion

    Cornelian, brown; Columban, blue; Marian, red; Patrician, green; these four houses we walked through in uniforms of gaberdine. This new experiment, co-ed, had bad boys twanging our bra straps; ’70s posters showed sunsets from glorious Technicolour snaps, and told us to make lemonade when life served up that bitter fruit. But her drink’s stronger, our…

  • Pride

    Pride waits, in ambush – Poised, ready to sabotage All my attempts to open Into something more ordinary. Adorned, with lipstick And polished nails, Eyelids fluttering, It pounces without warning-   Shattering all illusions Of equanimity, As self deception Is exposed, in the holy show.   But then the other side, The underbelly, Crawls away…

  • The Retired Miner

          Arms hold the paper now that once tattooed and blue cut coal, fifty years a mole. Not tall, stubborn and strong and trusted by the men who worked his stall. Sound below ground.   In 1926, first out, last back. Shot rabbits for the pot.   Here he sits, spits in the…

  • Perspective

    PERSPECTIVE Beneath this topography she sees: sandstones shaped by wind and wave, azurites blue and malachites green; fossils, remnants of another age, present her with an insight to a record no longer extant: the dinosaur, the trilobite some footprints, an exotic plant. These granites primordial – crystalline intrusions – now weathered to reveal our igneous…

  • The Horses by Edwin Muir

    The Horses   Barely a twelvemonth after The seven days war that put the world to sleep, Late in the evening the strange horses came. By then we had made our covenant with silence, But in the first few days it was so still We listened to our breathing and were afraid. On the second…

  • NON-HATRED

    “He abused me, he struck me, he defeated me, he robbed me” – in those who harbour thoughts like these hatred will never be allayed. For in this world hatred is never allayed by further acts of hate. It is allayed by non-hatred: that is the fixed and ageless law. Those others do not recognize…

  • A Cure for Insomnia

    A Cure for Insomnia Everyone should have a garden in the mind that they can tend when sleep evades them and the slow hours stick in the night. You have only to close your eyes to see, waiting for you, a green lawn, daisy-flecked; a corner where pink clover sends its scent to the bees.…

  • POETRY BY MAEVE O’SULLIVAN

    White Star the majestic steamer slips into the sea- first voyage spinning his top… the child who survived to die three years later she goes back in for the hat from her mother- makes the lifeboat the pills in her pocket eventually identifying the lost Irishwoman anchor, propeller side-scuttle… these rusticles a hundred years in…

  • GOING FOR WATER by ROBERT FROST

    Going for Water By Robert Frost The well was dry beside the door,  And so we went with pail and can Across the fields behind the house  To seek the brook if it still ran; Not loth to have excuse to go,  Because the autumn eve was fair (Though chill) because the fields were ours,…

  • JOY’S CUP

    JOY’S CUP   by Jaiya John    THERE IS A CHALICE from which all souls may freely drink. It is called Joy. It is filled with Love and Compassion, yes, and also with those subtler tonics of Laughter, Humor, Levity. It brims with Hope and Faith, Truth and Honesty, Nakedness and Humility. It is rich with…