SILVIA PIO If you were to find yourself in a doctor’s waiting room one day, feeling in question, or at sea, feeling anxious, or even just plain bored, might you be glad of a poem displayed there, on the wall?…
VICTOR HUGO You forest trees, how well you know my mind! The envious crowd is raucous and unkind; You know my soul! You’ve seen me as I’ve gone Gazing and musing in your depths alone: You know the outcrop that…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE 13 February It’s snowing again, a lazy tumble hiding not a thing, dropping a delicate web over tree and field, garden and wall. My husband says he’s done with winter, and this half-hearted effort seems to show…
SILVANO GREGOLI Exactly sixty years ago, on the morning of February 15, 1961, a total solar eclipse in Italy affected southern Piedmont, Liguria, part of Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, northern Lazio, Umbria, Marche and Abruzzo. To find another total solar eclipse in…
GEORGE GÖMÖRI In the whole of New York what I liked best was the tree: that tree with its dense foliage spreading its arms up there on the roof, green and abandoned as the everyday miracle that is the created…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE 1 February Here’s a new month in the new year, but I can’t escape a recurring sense of déjà vu, of experience spiralling back upon itself. It feels as if the same full moon has been rising…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE 13 January 2021 We’re having a proper winter, snowy and cold, the kind we haven’t seen for a couple of years. The landscape is just as it should be—snow-covered hills, bare branches—a perfect study in black on…
FRANCES FAHY The procession of events and people that we term History is, in theory, a defined time, winding steadily away from us back to an unidentified, misty curiosity known as Prehistory. How difficult it is to grasp this ‘defined’…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE I could quote Sweet Baby James to tell you about the first of December, go on to describe the hush and sweep of falling snow, how it dropped a curtain between house and valley and filled our…
BILL LEWIS Green Men Green Men grin and gurn From blackened beams, That creak and groan as Ancient houses dream; Swayed by wind in Branches long since snapped. Foliate faces flower in the Memory of an antique hour, Unwinding beneath…
MADDALENA POLEGGI I met Olive at the library, she was strange but familiar. At the time I couldn’t know that we were going to spend a few months together, sharing our deepest thoughts and so many intimate details of our…
Today Emily Dickinson turns 190. EMILY DICKINSON 1488 Birthday of but a single pang That there are less to come – Afflictive is the Adjective But affluent the doom – *** 903 I hide myself – within my flower, That…
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE With November comes la nebbia, the fog that rises from Piemontese valleys and blankets the plain of Lombardia. On the day before the United States presidential election I watched it form above our prato, the damp air of a chilly afternoon…
YUAN CHANGMING Raging against the Crow in the Park Disguised as a pigeon, you’ve just had Enough food From my palm (& heart); then, you flap high up Beginning to circle above me, ready To flee away only after Shitting…
GERMAIN DROOGENBROODT How Celan’s Poems inspired me Although born in the Flemish part of Belgium where Dutch is the official language, as a youngster it was not the Flemish nor the Dutch poetry that fascinated me, but the French, Baudelaire,…
