G&R's 2022 Retrospective: Poetry

Today is the last day of the year 2022, in this abstract calendar that serves bookkeeping more than the flourishing of people. Here at G&R we prefer a different kind of bookkeeping, though. Our books and articles are songs to nature, a reverence to the real things of the universe which are not our creation, but of which we are the creations — the earth, water, fire, sky, suns, moons, and beings that are reflections of the life of these elements. We discuss politics and crises, analyze and ideologize to cope with the sheer absurdity of it all, but there are some deep corners of consciousness which only poetry can touch. Through poems, the perpetual uncertainty of life in this world is given meaning, and for that we want to venerate our poets. Thank you so much for soothing, and sometimes provoking, the turmoil in our hearts.

–Mirna Wabi-Sabi (Site-editor of G&R)

Below you will find a retrospective of the poetry we published this year. Enjoy.

Speaking of Moss

by LORNA SMITHERS

A Bed of Feathers

Common Feathermoss (Kindbergia praelonga)

I want to lie down
In your bed of feathers,
the feathers that the fair folk
make eiderdowns from,
build their houses,

that the trees
pull up to their knees
when it is cold.

—Continue reading it here.


Sun, Gull, and Jellyfish

by RUNE KJÆR RASMUSSEN

Evening sun 

The last evening sun

gathers itself to become a drop,

more drops, many, many.

A storing and a charging takes place.

The cocoons are being shaped by the drops

out by the coast, and they can be seen

just by

squinting.

—Continue reading it here.


Non-place

by JESSICA HENDERSON

You drive down a street

named for a long-leveled hill

it meanders in superstitious curves.

You pass the new condos

stone facades glued to plywood

form cloisters of anonymous neighbors.

The road pierces a thrombotic turnpike

and housing and shopping circuits

iterate to the horizon.

—Continue reading it here.


Driving Through the Desert

Years ago, I went on an extended road-trip through the desert Southwest, including the Painted Desert, the Mojave Desert, and the Great Salt Desert. I was riding in a small RV driven by my boss at the Celtic Music import company I worked for at the time. We were driving from Oklahoma City to Sacramento, CA to Estes Park, CO and back to Oklahoma City, selling imported CDs of everything from Cape Breton fiddle music to Gaelic singing.

I tend to drift off on long drives, but every time I did fall asleep, my boss would say something, or the RV would hit a bump in the road, and I’d be jolted back into full wakefulness again. This ended up functioning like a lucid dreaming technique, in which I would sometimes be awake and sometimes in REM sleep, and sometimes in-between the two.

This poem is a record of the things I saw and heard on that long drive through the desert.

—Continue reading it here.


1

You cast a heavy shadow. Years will pass

Yet none who knew will ever lose the sight

Of one bright, piercing eye. You walked the world

In such a wild and vivid way, your mark

As potent as a rune on all you touched.

—Continue reading it here.


1

The long horizon was a dark rose

From the city’s light on the low fog.

Too many times, I had seen the blue

Falling-away of the bright dawn. I

Went with you, and you looked in my eyes

And dipped your fingers in the red stream

Where dreams floated on broken shells like

Lizards birthing.

—Continue reading it here.


We walked along the ridge, and didn’t speak

But something followed, or the mountain stirred,

Disturbed in dreaming. On the empty peak

Bare branches rustled, and a hunting bird

Looked down at us. The air was cool and thin

And something stirred and shuddered on my skin.

—Continue reading it here.


The House of Silence

Slumbers by the pit

From which the waking world

Once had its start.

Its windows glitter

Like the distant stars,

But silence,

Always silence

Is its heart.

—Continue reading it here.


1

At the edge of the water, the mist comes in.

Sorrow brushes my neck, just as light as a dream.

There is a distant horn across the deep, flat bay -

It is only a warning to keep the boats away,

But I shudder, regardless, at the ebb and the flow,

For the things that must come

And the things that must go

For the things that dwell deep, on the ocean’s floor,

And the hint of a message from the farthest shore.

—Continue reading it here.


The Whale

by TWM GWYNNE

My mind jumped to killing rather than refloating not because of the impossibility of dragging a whale hundreds of meters to the sea, but because of the ragged, gaping bullet wound between the eye and the blowhole. I had heard that the whales who couldn’t be refloated had been euthanised, but hadn’t considered what that meant in practical terms. I assumed the whale had survived a botched mercy killing and was in agony. I looked again, and realised that their eye had actually shattered – what I had thought was their eye was a bloody bubble dancing perversely in the wind.

We stood there like wraiths above the one real thing in the world.

—Read it in full here.


COURTING THE WILD QUEEN

by SEÁN PÁDRAIG O'DONOGHUE

Courting The Wild Queen is a deeply poetic exploration of the ancient and modern world through the mythic and the ecological. Mycelium networks spreading their tangled threads of meaning beneath the forest floor reveal to the reader our own tapestries of meaning, while the ancient lore of Irish Kings and Queens of Land unveil the lost—but recoverable—centres of human existence.

—Continue reading about it and place your order here.


May 2023 be paved with even more artful words of justice and love.

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