two birds feed; one eats, and one wonders about the other
Two Birds [Haiku]
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Category Archives: poem
BOOK REVIEW: A Very Irish Christmas by Various
A Very Irish Christmas: The Greatest Irish Holiday Stories of All Time by VariousMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Amazon.in Page
Out: September 14, 2021
This anthology contains fourteen previously published pieces by prominent Irish authors, including: Joyce, Yeats, and Colm Tóibín. It’s mostly short fiction, but there are a few poems as well as a couple of excerpts from longer works. All the pieces are set around (or reference) Christmas, but the degree to which that plays into the story varies a great deal. The anthology is very Irish, but not always very Christmassy. Meaning, if you’re expecting a collection of pieces like Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” where the joy or melancholy of the season is front-and-center throughout and the holiday, itself, is a pivotal story element, you won’t find that in a number of these selections. Often, the season is just an element of ambiance or of short-lived emotional resonance.
That said, the selections are all artfully written and each is intriguing in its own way. In the case of Joyce’s “The Dead” the appeal is the evocative language and creation of setting (though the piece does have more explicit story than, say, “Ulysses.”) Whereas, for pieces like Keegan’s “Men and Women” or Trevor’s “Christmas Eve” the point of interest might be the story, itself. Besides the Irish author / Christmas reference nexus, the included works cover a wide territory including contemporary works (keeping in mind the authors are mostly from the 20th century) and those that hearken back to days of yore. Some are secular; while others are explicitly Catholic.
I enjoyed this anthology, finding it to be a fine selection of masterfully composed writings.
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Yellow Cosmos [Haiku]
March of the Myna [Common Meter]
A Myna bird comes marching in; it'll soon rule the roost. It seldom fails to have its way anyplace it's introduced. The goggle shapes around its eyes make its stare more intense, but compare it to a raven; you'll see it's pure pretense. Like kudzu and cockroaches, they can't help but run amok. Should they come to your neighborhood - well, that's just your luck.
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Golden Bamboo [Haiku]
golden bamboo creaks & clacks in the wind, and then is silent
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A Model Tree [Tanka]
the shade tree offers not just shade, but a good example for enlightenment seekers and lazy folk, alike
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Agents of Sanctification [Free Verse]
Some love attributing sacredness -- places beyond place, times beyond time, the infinite & the infinitesimal. But anything elevated to the sacred becomes a thing for which people will kill or die. Often, people don't make this reckoning until the dying 's done: -death for a sign -death for a symbol -death for a chunk of dead earth -death for a vaguely evaluated idea The agents of sanctification will kill us all.
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That Last Lost Generation [Free Verse]
Only too eager to have the machine installed in their brains, they did what they could, and, instead, installed their brains into the machine. Data sparkled in the mind void, bouncing about and careening into other bytes and clusters. But the crash cascades always came, a cannibalistic consumption of fact, transmogrifying it into a shabby soup of quasi-reality. Brain-pans paining, densely packed with alternate realities that could never be rectified. By the time they realized the virtue of going out to play, they were no longer sure what "outside" meant -- Outside of what? Where's the exit? Where is there something else? -something simple? How's one get off this speeding bus? It became the pain that ruled that last lost generation.
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Calming Chaos [Haiku]
Flame Mind [Common Meter]
His eyes take in the dancing flame until his mind is flame. He anticipates its flutter, its flareups, just the same. There's nothing in his mind or eye that is not set ablaze. He knows not whether it's been like this for hours, weeks, or days. Others think it will devour him, leaving a pile of ash, taking him from this world at once, in one big, blinding flash.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 