Category Elegies

(in memoriam Rowan Malcom) ‘Be thou my vision’ must have been your prayer. We sang the lorica to the sweet tune of Slane. You patterned stones as a wheel on a beach and took a picture of the sea washing…

(in memoriam Elizabeth Coare) From the valley you watched the silent notes of sheep on a green sheet, their paths the lines of the stave. From the beach you collected pebbles and polished and varnished them into landscapes; you gave…

The crooked oak is dead, now blind to the colours of lichen, deaf to the striking wood pecker, doesn’t feel the stir of starlings’ wings twisting and turning before roosting, nor sense the inclination of pines towards her. After words…

After being forced to give birth prematurely, did you lie on a bed of railway sleepers, drawn there by a train rushing towards you? After hard labour that did not give birth to freedom, you were murdered. Your ash still…

The building is new, not yet consecrated by long memories. It has studies, an atrium to receive light from heaven, and a quiet room apart, a beadhouse in the woods of a place. Under the red leaves of a cherry…

Red LandThe red earth of Herefordshire makes me long to relive my last year’s journey to see a man who was dying slowly.(Through floods, rivers, red lakes which turned to wet slate, through darkness and tears the driver pressed on.)From…

(for Elissa R. Henken) The withered leaf of a holly tree delineates your life – the prickles of circumstances remain but the flesh has decayed to a gossamer of poems, a fine beauty, curves which toss and turn languages; the…