by Helen Ivory | Dec 29, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Nativity ‘Lullay, lullay.’ Can you hear her sing, so far from here, crouched on bloodied straw, beside the phlegmatic ox? ‘Lullay, lullay, my little child, may we know peace tonight.’ She sings, and learns, against her weary heart, the peace he...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 28, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Elbow Room We travel home (ignoring that we lost it years ago) in time for turkey, mistletoe, for ear-worms to re-cast the brain. We check out the reindeer hanging on the third branch up, its always spot, now single antlered and rubbed free of...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 27, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
mid-winter ice storm Lake Mendota photos of Joni Mitchell by Joel Bernstein no river but this lake and not getting carried away she tested if it would hold her across the whole iced breadth of it etched ever widening circles arms stretched out...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 26, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
The Twelvey Night Mummers I must have been nearly nine when the Green Man and good Saint George deranged our winter parish. A gilded Turk and terrifying horse, the doctor with his bottle and bag, coaxed something very old to curl around the...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 25, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
Christmas Magic The moths have got to Jesus, chewed holes in his swaddling robes. Mary as ever is trying to stay calm though Joseph is showing the strain. Children adore the cloud-soft lambs, the sparkly angels my Mum crafted. Each year...
by Helen Ivory | Dec 24, 2021 | Featured, Poetry, Twelve Days of Christmas
24th December Late Shift, Christmas Eve Twelve reindeer wander among these lean trees. Muffled light, seeping through layers of conifer, is reaching them as snowflakes, floating gently to settle on backs and over their dappled grazing. Above them,...
