by Helen Ivory | Dec 25, 2025 | Featured, Haibun, Tanka, Haiku & Haiga, Twelve Days of Christmas
Parable For thirty years, O Lord, we have lived in a house without foundations. And now it is Christmas again, we drape lights from the living apple tree to the dead one, haul o come o come from the piano, set the innumerable specials, the host of...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 24, 2025 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
Madonna del Parto A fresco by Piero della Francesca, c.1460 Piero painted her in a week, after his mother died, her azure gown split open like a ripe plum, her posh girl fingers resting on the mystery, all swollen belly and haloed radiance. She...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 23, 2025 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
Interference This tree, unlike others we have used, is shorter than we are and grows in a glazed ceramic pot. What we might choose to call branches, in truth are no more than twigs. Still, we festoon them with coloured lights and glittery...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 22, 2025 | Featured, Twelve Days of Christmas
Mother of Pearl It was when your hair fell like snow I found it again. No longer moon blonde, time had coppered the hair auburn. The garage is where your roots grow. I found the plait of hair in a small blue suitcase with silvered clasps, two feet...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 21, 2025 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Ten weeks to Christmas Store leaf fire in your eyes against the dark. Steep the brightness of berries in syrup and wine. Trade green for gold, steadily, like the silver birch. Look across the valley to the other side where March waves to you....
by Sairah Ahsan | Dec 20, 2025 | Featured, Poetry
Old Empress Inside, in the half-light, the iron rot took hold. Forgotten service–obsolete. Salt-coin neglect. The money flowed inland, Moored on an hourglass choke. No one told the sea. Orange hull still bright, Empress her name- cracked white...
