by Helen Ivory | Dec 31, 2015 | 12 days 2015
Unspilled Midnight strikes London’s moon face, the new year cheered in with a sip of sparkling wine, and time’s old friends. Forty years of Auld Lang Syne in our bones, we dance and laugh as our great-grandparents danced and laughed, as our children will...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 30, 2015 | 12 days 2015
Visitation “And Lo! The Angel of the lord came upon them..” It wasn’t like that. Summer stars not winter, the stir and mutter of the flock, some grazing, some asleep. I lay in the warm night, breathing the bruised smell of cropped grass, the dry pepper...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 29, 2015 | 12 days 2015
Rendezvous after Dennis O’Driscoll I am in Stonegate expecting to meet you at 4 You are in The Shambles expecting to meet me at 4 I have shopping bags that lengthen my arms you have Jonathan on your shoulders It’s Christmas and I’m Dreaming blasts out...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 28, 2015 | 12 days 2015
Holy Theotokos Save Us In the cathedral empty of true feeling, the icons are beautifully silent: blue and green hues, golden halos, the choir in perfect harmonies taking us across time, space, to the beginning days when the naming began, where we...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 27, 2015 | 12 days 2015
The Devil Makes Work The bouncing bomb Superball missed the enemy Action Man, the day after Boxing Day, to snap a scarlet leaf from Mum’s poinsettia. Sap bubbled from the break white as PVA adhesive. Hiding the leaf, I wiped away the evidence,...
