{"id":20526,"date":"2019-12-12T09:00:06","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T09:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=20526"},"modified":"2020-12-14T16:02:40","modified_gmt":"2020-12-14T16:02:40","slug":"paul-connolly-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/paul-connolly-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Connolly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Tree<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Past foil-wrapped dark liqueurs, cough-mixture sick,<br \/>\nhe shins up the tinsel-twisted plastic boughs,<br \/>\ndust musted, under chocolate snowmen, to browse<br \/>\nthe halls of elongating sideshow-trick<br \/>\nglass, shaped like upturned teardrops, bells, a pear,<br \/>\nand snake vines of lights, amber, rose, cornflower.<\/p>\n<p>He forages within and finds, wrapped up,<br \/>\na big brown saltbox cabin, fifties dream<br \/>\nof hung stockings, log fire, chestnuts, huge tree.<br \/>\nHe scales that, hails Bob Cratchit, sits at sup<br \/>\non boar\u2019s head with a king whose festive trunk<br \/>\nis oak. Too soon their calls will spoil things, bunk<\/p>\n<p>like the bunk of desolating January,<br \/>\nthe Epiphany\u2019s epiphany: to bear<br \/>\nthe year till hope returns. A bursting air,<br \/>\nall filled with Spring\u2019s dilated agonies,<br \/>\nwill come, Easter\u2019s neutered, carcass re-birthed<br \/>\nclimacteric, final and hopeless, earthed<\/p>\n<p>in the gravid corpus of ritual,<br \/>\ndead summer\u2019s sere incumbent forms,<br \/>\nyet fire in snow is warmth, and snow is warm,<br \/>\nfor pure born myth makes winter parable<br \/>\nwith warmth, torch-lit tales, bleeding berry-reds<br \/>\non snow, a swaddled cold, quickening death<\/p>\n<p>like flares through fog, lamps on bare-treed lands,<br \/>\nbright birth, with possibility aflame:<br \/>\na year away, a year he\u2019ll choke on, fade<br \/>\nthroughout and die again. Now, he\u2019ll withstand<br \/>\nwithin, inside his tree, until he\u2019s called,<br \/>\ntheir summons into day, and now they haul<\/p>\n<p>him into day, and set him tasks, you mind<br \/>\nthe kids, go the shops, get cigs and the paper.<br \/>\nReluctantly he turns from lights whose caper<br \/>\nhe\u2019d controlled and stretched with squints. Half-blind<br \/>\nhe stumbles into now, adventive stray:<br \/>\nDecember twelfth, so warm it could be May.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>As well as in <em>Ink Sweat &amp; Tears<\/em>, <strong>Paul Connolly<\/strong>\u2019s poems have appeared in <em>Agenda, The Reader, Sarasvati, Envoi, Poetry Salzburg,<\/em> and<em> Scintilla<\/em>. Third in the Magna Carta Competition, he was shortlisted for the Bridport and Charles Causley Prizes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tree Past foil-wrapped dark liqueurs, cough-mixture sick, he shins up the tinsel-twisted plastic boughs, dust musted, under chocolate snowmen, to browse the halls of elongating sideshow-trick glass, shaped like upturned teardrops, bells, a pear, and snake vines of lights, amber, rose, cornflower. He forages within and finds, wrapped up, a big brown saltbox cabin, fifties [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20526"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24200,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20526\/revisions\/24200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}