Arts Articles
Poem: Barcelona blues
The polar bears have flown to Barcelona for their summer break. Sit sipping sangria on the Ramblas, loll on promenades in hats and shades, tourists like the rest of us.
Words for the end of the day
Before sleep can sweep your face with its cloak, cradle in your heart the passing day: re-run all you did, with whom you spoke: what memories to take away, what lessons learnt? Those you love, go round them, each in turn, friends too and some you know less well, share,...
Prayer
Love letters to what I can’t imagine, letters that shape-change into loops and twists I didn’t mean to write, finding the best words and letting them go.
Fish tank
In an instant, every inch of existence lapsed. Small and infinite, my eyes gasped, sightless, nerves snipped, no sound passed through me. As if some greater one had tapped the glass, my being blinked. My self, more than my element, lacked notion, was a stillness beyond any sense of motion ...
Our ghosts, our machines
The objective was programmed into the machine without preferences: Cross, Skull Hill. Nails. Gethsemane was a divergence under stars, a tinge of unsmelt olive. The weeping friends were surplus. The kiss, unfelt, barely fulfilled its intended direction. The cross was not particularly heavy. Sacrifice seemed an inelegant equation.
Our ghosts, our machines
The objective was programmed into the machine without preferences: Cross, Skull Hill. Nails. Gethsemane was a divergence under stars, a tinge of unsmelt olive. The weeping friends were surplus. The kiss, unfelt, barely fulfilled its intended direction. The cross was not particularly heavy. Sacrifice seemed an inelegant equation.
4am
A pencil of light pokes its way between the curtains. Plays upon your eyelids. You wake. Slowly your mind unscrambles. Your body moves stiffly towards the morning. Time future, past, present assemble. A choreography of space unfolds. A woodpigeon sings on a tree, somewhere. The patterns of yesterday’s fears...
Halewid
In a well slept morning sing senses from the first flush in lush language of birdsong, the choral chorus greeting the hāliġ(1) hour. Follow the sky’s creased curves of sunrise, its night rain pools puddle down the ground.
Chapel statue
Here on a cool, curled, college wall I stand between my fellows and above the world, a still stone figure on a pedestal, with a curved, carved canopy sheltering my head. Though lifted aloft from the earth, I am ...
Bring to book: Alison Leonard takes a prompt
When the author Hilary Mantel died, her many admirers realised there would be no more magical novels, no more of her incisive commentary, or heartbreaking accounts of topics like women’s illness. Six months later, however, it was revealed that Mantel’s next work would have taken quite a departure....