A co-op of online writing
adrianpfox8@gmail.com

Maura Mc Keag

LOST

She couldn’t see her face

Hard though as she looked

It wasn’t there

Smells

Touch

Knowing facts

All were there

But no face

She knew her love

But had lost that too

With her face gone

So was he

Staring at a mirror

Nothing stared back

Willing it

Wanting it

Crying with frustrated hopelessness

Screams of anguish from the pit

Only known by her

Gone was her face

Gone was her love

Vanished

Unexplained

Unresolved.

BETRAYED

Love becomes, not the passionate,

interlocking of body and soul

In sublime, blissful, emotional bonding

But

The hungry clasping of love lost

In a fierce instant gratification of lust.

Adrian Rice

IMAGE

In the darkened room

He lies underwater –

An image negative

Dipped by unseen hands –

And holds his breath.

He emerges, steps out,

            And dries himself off,

A fully developed man.

- Adrian Rice

blackwater poems

Luke Heffernan

Fr maw

You beat me till i fell

On the floor but i got 

Up but you beat me 

Back flat on the floor.

You caned my skin 

Till it was numb with

Pain. No tears shown

To your hurt and pain..

You served god with

The devil inside. Bullying,

Beating children till your

Rage subside. Your soul 

Rotten to the core.

That child hid inside the

Man for years till the child 

Was comforted and its 

ghostly soul released.

From à man to à boy 

And back again never

To bear beatings ever

again..

© Luke heffernan 2014

Gene Barry

Sunday's 'Healing' poem.

Remembering

Throughout the dark days, days 
After you had pulled life’s blinds
Tightly shut, I lit my life with
Memories of you sitting by our
Kitchen fire, the worries of the baby
You were carrying hidden
Between the lines of your stories.

Above our mantle the flaming
Torment looked down on us,
At a mother whose sacred heart
Would one day deny me and
Leave our world Dead Right.
We knew you to be the only God.

Who did you need to please so
Much that you circled the wagons,
Emptied the wells and taught your
Harvesters to reap and leave the
Sowing to the fraught-filled drones?

Now when I walk with you
I set our pace to the
Timing of your clicking needles,
And although I find your love
I still feel the stinging of the pricks.

©Gene Barry

I walk, sometimes thinking for myself, 
sometimes listening to the Passenger. 
The grass moves stealthily away beneath my feet,
pretending to be a lizard.
It rustles surreptitiously 
like the pages of those old calendars you find
wrapped in cobwebs
and nailed to cowshed walls.
Those old calendars
that have lost all interest in time.

Mike Absalom

WHEN I FALL

Why is it that the path

Has to mist before

We see ourselves,

Cracks and roots exposed

To an empty ditch

To reveal a broken stem;

Vulnerable, collapsing

Covered in isolation

And open to pain.

Maybe it is necessary for us

To suffer occasionally -

For compassion to remain;

Like a stunted tree, a trapped

Fly, before we can see

Through another’s eye.

My path has been mostly clear

Or as far as I can see

Alone, but never lonely.

Not intentionally

Do I fail to notice

A troubled mind,

If you fail to see me

When my mist approaches.

I won’t think you unkind.

                                          HELEN HARRISON 2013

WORDS

It was really aggression

When it came to it

You burnt anger as fuel

And blamed the excess

On me.

I tried to oil your mood

But it caught fire,

The road I watched,

Willing it to clear -

Was my splitting head

Afraid to block my ears,

I held a barrier that bounced

Off the steering wheel

The dash, the roof

Through windows

And gaps.

I shuddered but it didn’t

Stop, it kept rolling

And rallying, raging;

my inner world. 

                                            HELEN HARRISON 2013

Deirdre Cartmill

Katey

I think of the guerilla gardeners, straining

to dig deep, camouflaged by night,

spreading seed pellets that dissolve in the rain,

flowering concrete, setting road islands alight,

never worrying if the smog blocks the sun

or if that slash of colour lasts,

because that poppy jutting through paving stones

is a declaration that life will out.   

And so with you; what does it matter

if you faded before you could grow,

if they glanced your way momentarily

before moving on, because what’s been sown  

never truly dies. There’s that latent spark,

those roots digging in, aerating the dark.

                                                           

                                                                                    Deirdre Cartmill

                                                           

                                                                                    

www.deirdrecartmill.com

Deirdre Cartmill is a Belfast based poet who has published two poetry collections The Return of the Buffalo (Lagan Press, 2013) which will be published on 24^th September and Midnight Solo (Lagan Press, 2004).

The Return of the Buffalo deals with grief and loss, and attempts to make sense of the seemingly meaningless, but this is always weighted with how suddenly, unexpectedly joyous life can be. Midnight Solo is written from the perspective of a generation who grew up through the conflict in the north of Ireland and their struggle to envision a new normality in a post-conflict society. Love, loss and a restless search for identity are recurring themes in her poems but her work is ultimately about hope and the possibility of redemption.

She received an Artists' Career Enhancement Scheme Award from the Arts Council in 2011 and spent a year affiliated with the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University. She received Literature Awards from the Arts Council in 2012, 2008, 2003 and 2000. She’s previously been shortlisted for a Hennessy Literary Award and been a finalist in the Scottish International Open Poetry Competition.

Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and have also been widely published in magazines and journals. She has given many poetry readings at events and festivals, such as at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, the Belfast Festival at Queen’s and the Belfast Book Festival. She was a Writer-in-Residence at the Belfast Book Festival 2011 and this autumn she will take up residencies at An Creagan, Omagh and MacNeice House, Belfast.

She holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Queen’s University.

She is also an award winning screenwriter and has written for film, television and radio. Her short film Two Little Boys was selected for The Belfast Film Festival 2013.

Ail na Searrach; 
The Leap of the Foals 
(AN EXTRACT)

Seven of the Tuatha de Danaan, sought retreat in a cave near the Cliffs of Moher in Co. Clare. When they emerged they had become horses. They were seen to gallop off a cliff within sight of Doolin, to gather again in the 5th province; the province of the imagination. This cliff is Ail na Searrach; the Leap of the Foals.’

I

This is it.

Bones.

The order of muscle, of limbs and bones. Conformation.

A pelt. Colours –

Bay, Black, Steel Grey,

Dun, and the roans  - a Blue Roan, and a Red-Strawberry Roan,

And finally, rare and thrown-back, as if Lahinch –

the liver-chestnut.

Bone, I keep returning to a vision of bone and flanks.

We have no expectation of wings,

That belongs to another time, and to some other island.

II

I am trying to recover night vision

I have done as you advised; I have made time

We are gathered in the holding place that is this cave,

In need of rest, in need of the dark

In need of concession, giving-in, permission,

To be allowed.

Half-light is bearable,

The day is something to retreat from.

I wonder how I might create a self that ‘disappears’ me – 

And one that will go on stage in my place, sweeping the back yard if necessary –

A walking talking ‘sunny’ one – one

For the light, one who will buy me time – a worker,

So that all along, or for a while, I can stay in the dark,

Close to the cool earth, out of the light,

In communion, for however long  is necessary.

III

I discover what I am become

When I see for new the other.

I look into your eyes and notice

After stillness and close examination

How far my neck will reach

What has become of my limbs

How I have shifted shape

In the cool, in the dark.

How I am now ready

Rest-less.

OLIVE BRODERICK


Deux Ex Machina

On the horns of a dilemna,

Tantalus is standing on his hindlegs

surveying the situation.

A length between his mouth and 

the leaves of the lowest branches.

Not long after, taking shelter 

from a rain-shower, Tantalus 

keeps a look out from the barn.

Is it possible that the weight of 

falling water will offer a solution?

AINE MACAODHA

OMAGH, NORTH IRELAND, IRELAND

Writer/poet,avid photographer with a great interest in Celtic Myths, the beauty in the Irish landscape and a proud mother of three grown up children. I live in Omagh North of Ireland where the Sperrin Mountains are my inspiration in any season. I have two poetry books published titled 'Where the Three Rivers Meet' and 'Guth An Anam ~Voice of The Soul~ You can find my links at top of my blog.

I wrote this in 2007 inspired by Seamus Heaney's poem 'The Tollund Man. I was glad to have met the poet a few years ago and hear him read his work with great back story to them, I was in awe. he will be missed.

Old Croghan Man *

This island is a living carpet,

worn by clans of cousins who

weaved into the land

a pattern not for the

the untrained eye.

Old Croghan man,

baked in this oven of peat,

symbolizes our spent lineage

of boundaries and fields.

Beheaded and tortured,

he stood tall as a pine tree.

Who was this nameless lad?

A high king, killed in ritual,

or killed in a jealous rage?

Was it a warning to other youths

who may yearn for the new,

denouncing the old?

I wear a leather twang like his,

woven with love on May Day.

The hands of Croghan man

hold no labourers welts,

but groomed nails; ideally

cleaned.

He joins others that came before:

Meeybradden Woman and

Gallagh man.

They come to remind us to read

the bog

chapter by chapter; learn from

ghosts of the past.

Seekers of truth

Truths like crystals lie buried under earth
beneath ancient oaks and long forgotten pathways
leading to the ocean.
In the songs of yesterday adrift on the spring mist
as I gaze out over the hills.
In layers of prayers petitioned
to the universal spirit.
In cosmic shifts of a soul’s migration
from way before birth
to beyond the end of life.
We seek it in books
in passing thoughts that nudge us
towards a face in the crowd.
In the faces of the old.
With others on the journey
truth emerges out of the dark
returning as the light
within.

phoetry

Malachi O' Doherty

It makes no difference, your title, your name,
In the sacred circle, we are all the same,
Healing voices, a healing beat,
To take the anger off the street.

Centres of energy, North and South,
Remove fear and remove doubt,
Centres of energy, East and West,
Unite us all in living zest.

It makes no difference, your money, your fame,
In the sacred circle, we are all the same,
Bang your drum to a healing beat,
Put life and love, back on the street.

©Maggie McD 2013.

GEORGE WEIR

Selected Poems 

Published by Liberties Press

Moyra Donaldson has assimilated the powerful 
influences of Yeats, Hewitt, Hughes, Longley 
and Heaney, together with 
Plath and Liz Lochhead, to present a 
hard-won distinctive self…’

- Medbh McGuckian

http://annaliviareview.blogspot.co.uk

Anybody from any genre can send me writing, even before my stroke I had the vision of creating an anthology I still have that vision and that passion for writing.  I’m lucky ina sense that my stroke wasn’t a severe head injury that didn’t reach my brain ha ha I think.   Writers I think need a little madness, any age group can send me writing and any form of writing as this is not a poetry or prose workshop it’s a

             

                writing of the moment workshop.

THE WAY HOME

for ASM

I chose to walk rather than hitch a ride,

and no sooner had we parted on the street outside

the Moon, not more than a minute from your

gentle parting jibe – ack sure,

you’ll probably find a wee poem

on your dander home –

I strode into a firefly guard of honour.

Those matchless passers of the flame

lit my Oakwood stroll with their

royal relay the whole way back,

and stayed outside the door

until I got myself slippered-up

and seated on the dusky porch.

Then, one by one, as if on cue,

they each turned off their golden torch.

Adrian Rice  .....................................BIOGRAPHY BELOW

PHOETRY 

                GEORGE WEIR

RHYMED TIME



'loving them all the way back to the source

loving everything that increases me'
                                          Raymond Carver

The current of literature flows
And I stream the stream. 

I don’t know what kind of fish

This is until I land it, I’m writing
This for me, to find the current
Flow and to know that it’s
A big bastard. You have to know
Where the current flows
And when to let it go. The scales
Are black and silver and it swim’s
Every colour in between. It me-
Anders through the water as if
It knows it can’t be caught.

It’s big and bold and beautiful
It’s been hooked a thousand
Times but this isn’t about
The hooking its about its
About the killing time. Time
Is a big fish landed in this

                               ADRIAN FOX

     'IF YOU CANNOT BE A POET 
              BE THE POEM'

Spring Wildflowers in a 

Woodland Garden

(TINA'S TITLES)

A melting pot of Glory-Bluebells bobbing-Fern unfurling-Sorrel smiling-Horse Chestnut fingers waving-Lavender Blooming-Viola hiding-Daisy dancing-Ladies Mantle beauty dew-Montbrethia stretching-Lady's smock the Cuckoo calls-

Marsh Marigold bathing-A Frog hopping-

Trowel resting-Plantain nesting in a wall -

Moss in pretty pink-Rhododendron rising-

I hear the gossip of their Bloom.


These were only Tina's titles 

so maybe that should be in the title.

                
                    TINA ROCK





JAX LECK




Nightdreams

Dreams are my bolthole
I close out the world
become my alter ego

The writer of wrongs

The chaos of reality dim
As solutions are found
To the insurmountable hurdles
Of my daily life

Empowerment surges
the burnt kittens
the butchered dolphins
never happened

Religion reads its scriptures
And understands the words

Politically masked self interest
is not de rigeur
becomes non sequiteur

I can feel the contentment
well-being and joy
I breathe deep and long
For morning when...

the dreaming stops
reality kicks in
the cloak of invincibility drops
I am left, vulnerable





POARTRY