I am sitting at a window overlooking
the mouth cut into the earth
that opens up and reveals
City of exiles.
An emerald river flows from me to the south
and a bohemian river flows back.
Each light a carful of hopes and dreams
and fears.
Memories of better times.
Prayers for better times.
Trapped here with me despite their desperate froth.
Sydneyrella is silver and orange.
Golden sky over silver concrete.
Eucalyptus hills under golden ruby clouds.
Like the life in my chest
the color has surged from my fugitive world.
Destiny made me that rarest of Employee of the Crown (koruna)
From Bottom of the Harbour to taxing airfield of Wickenby ...
The deadly Marco Polo sharing the same sky
"What's happening is that countries are becoming companies. And that's what the British Council is already, just a company cooperating with the Chinese company," Mirsky quotes one leading Chinese poet, Yang Lian, as saying. Real writers
Gillian Tindall is a tapestry maker. She finds patterns in history – woven from close research into people and places – that no one else would have the persistence and insight to pursue. Sometimes, her starting-point is a person, as in Célestine, evoking peasant life in deepest France. Sometimes, she starts from a place – as in her delightful history of the Bankside house which tour guides always say, inaccurately, Wren inhabited while he was designing St Paul's (The House by the Thames). Three Houses, Many Lives
What mercy guides me
Down this river
This ribbon cut
Into the snow,.
That flows incessantly and slow
Into the mouth of darkness?
It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians are flattened by safes falling from rooftops mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body’s rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens — the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.