They are a stand of bitter wisdom trees eyes revolving inwards like moons beguiling faces smiling down upon us. They don’t mention (or only in passing) the ways the world is slipping from them: the deft departure of the boyhood friend, the driver’s license routinely revoked, the inability to leave the bath without resting —shamefully—on … Continue reading
for Germaine Greer after the Festival of Dangerous Ideas In the cut lip of the coliseum within its raised arches of white I came, in twenty-twelve, to see you fight. For every man who loves to loathe is a woman who loves to love: my mother made you our household god. And I believed she … Continue reading
In the abandoned hours, I can hear The boorish sibilance of garbage trucks On their rounds. The shy, nocturnal air Builds a brittle nest with strands of fear. Insomniac crickets tick, like manic clocks, In the unmown expanse of the vacant lot Where, last week, on the razor grass, A young woman was raped And … Continue reading
Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets we wear at the edges of burial plots. I’ve read stories of the storms you portend; how you are a cipher to an inch of rain. For weeks, I’ve watched you plane the sky’s bayberry vellum, seen falling light transpose your silhouettes into a straight-cut … Continue reading
There is no Poet of the Month for December. This month we shall indulge in new poems, for some of the wonderful poets that I featured as Poet of the Month in 2014. It has been an absolute pleasure for me to get to read and of course to share their poetry. You can find … Continue reading
She looked so pretty in her blue jacket and shoes. Colours make me happy, she said. And you make me happy, I said. Or I wish that’s what I had said. All the colours have passed out of her now, like blue leaves drifting down from the trees. © Richard James Allen “Explosively powerful … Continue reading
For Chee and Stephen Who I was in the past, Who I will be in the future – What distractions these are From who I am now. Who I am now, Here, with you. In this moment, You have rewritten my past. You are rewriting my future. What I don’t understand about Who I was … Continue reading
of course the trees are my friends they are like me ~ busy busy bees growing in slow motion they embrace me when I enter the garden they remember that I water them they teach me how to be still they teach me how to be busy busy busy only very very slowly they teach … Continue reading
“I think that human beings lock birds in cages because they themselves are incapable of flying” – Unknown Mirella Salame is a young Lebanese artist whom I met last Sunday at MACAM, Modern and Contemporary Art Museum. She is a participant in the Age of Wood sculpting competition. Her performative installation is titled freedom and … Continue reading
for Karen Your beauty cannot be translated, but I would fail not to try. It generates a weather no meteorology can describe. It is most like a flower, a flower with moods. An unstill life, in no need of arranging, it arranges itself. It is not fixed, so how can I fix it? It doesn’t … Continue reading
Richard James Allen was born in the New South Wales country town of Kempsey. He spent the first ten years of his life in Vietnam and Japan. Upon his return to Australia, he began writing diaries. Gradually the entries became less and less literal and more and more imaginative as he moved from recording to … Continue reading
Last Letter That night, your final night alive, I turned from your locked red door still holding your letter, a thunderbolt that could not earth itself. Shock remade my brains, and the prevalent devils of ill-love added to the huddle of riddles that failed to divulge their unhappy import— was that your plan? Dellarobbia, my … Continue reading
Michele Seminara is a poet and yoga teacher from Sydney. She studied English Literature at The University of Sydney and then spent many years travelling, studying and teaching yoga and meditation, and raising her family. In the last few years she has returned to her writing and discovered that, much to her surprise, she is … Continue reading
Enjoying summer to the full in Lebanon is all about the beach and the night life. As the sun sets in Beirut, the madness of its streets subsides and the city’s eccentricity moves across to the bars and the nightclubs. Beirut offers some of the hottest roof-top bars in the world, but other places offer some … Continue reading
So why is it when I wake beside this Cornish sea, my tongue Is as tired as it only gets to be, lost in deep, Prolonged and riotous discourse with thee? My sleep Has been as eloquent, it seems, as the breeze that trafficked my window all night, As busy as the sea at her … Continue reading
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. —Jack Gilbert, “Failing and Flying” Like some nocturnal Icarus, I dream too close to heaven— I fly too close to morning— and I wake in pieces. And so I woke this Wednesday, a child disarmed in sleep and felled By the gravity of the ancient light he dawns in. … Continue reading
“Enemies— Part of a world Nobody seemed able to explain But that had to be Put up with.” —Seamus Heaney, “A Herbal” Continue reading
A visit to a shoe repair shop in a nearby town followed by a couple of questions lead to a story experienced by the cobbler at the age of seventeen. After examining my shoe, he told me I could take a seat and he will mend it on the spot, sparing me another trip back. The … Continue reading
Two halters of rope around your neck, and two bodies jammed hard against your sides, is all it takes to hold you while he slips his blade beneath your eye. You hear the wet slide and suck as he scoops the eye out. He does the other, they roll together in the dirt. Does it … Continue reading
My father knew stone. He’d sit cross-legged at the hearth, felt cloth on knee, bent over with hammerstone, wooden punch, and bone tine, knapping at flint or chert, knapping it to knife point, sickle blade, arrowhead. I’d watch the stone give way beneath his deft blows: fine flakes splintering from face or rim. The curved … Continue reading
Poem and Dish 