My dear friend Phillip Hall has, with Jillian Hall, just published the first issue of the e-journal burrow.
I’ve been fortunate enough for them to publish a pandemic poem of mine ‘Unleavened: Easter 2020.’ What do we hang on to in such a time of loss and dislocation? And yet there is a persistence, a desire to continue; Easter is one way of telling that story.
Have a read: https://oldwaterratpublishing.com/unleavened-easter-2020/
This season of easter and of passover comes in the middle of the corona virus pandemic. Apart from the sad fact that, as in Narnia, all holidays are cancelled, it’s not a bad time to think about these narratives and traditions which concern the human relation to death and our persistent desire to somehow overcome it. It is a relationship certainly characterised by anxiety and grief; yet, at our best, we can glimpse the possibilities of change and acceptance, those small transformations of shift and slip.
Broken
like an egg into a pan
its yellow eye & spill
of visceral white
this seasonal story of catharsis
hurricane of catastrophe beating
on this bowed back
one human body
cracked
& hammered until it is
a vanishing point of fall & grief of where
the splintered edges can never be made
whole
no going back only
ahead where Lazarus slides without reprieve
into inexorable death the heavy curtain
of descending quiet –
a first morning unspeakable &
then a second
at last a third & life creaks on
jolting us forward
awkward scarred
into the only world possible
its narrow frame
its flickers of meaning
our persistent hearts
