Yesnaby:

Not one of us will live forever --
the world is far too beautiful for that.

When my children ask about the War, I'll say:
'I once watched as columns of retreating cloud

burned in a haar of gulls and dust, off Yesnaby;
and I survived.'

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Epitaph:

Father, forgive this man.
He never listened to your song
till it was all but done
then found he couldn't sing the words
so he spoke the tune.

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For Lucie:

born 5 December 2005

How apt it was we named you
for the light: no more than a small light, mind

-- a spunk; a spill; a stub of tallow
cradled against the draft

while our stooped shadows lengthen
and fall away behind.

Here's to you, then, and to us,
to your world and to ours.

We raise you towards the dark.
May you make of it something else.

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Grain:

What was his name again -- that fisher lad
dragged under with his fankled nets --
him that the fishes hooked and filleted?
I often wonder if the irony of it all amused him
as he left off from kicking against the dark, and drowned:
not, (as his Mother always feared) to be lost at sea, but found.

Tell me you've never seen a hangman hung,
nor laughed at the dying tenor, topped by his own song;
nor stumbled across a baker's corpse, rising like dough;
nor wept with the weeping ferryman while Charon
gummed his coin. Friends, we're all done for by the things we do.
If I were a farmer, I'd shrink from the ripening grain.

- John Glenday

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Academic papers get poetic - in University Affairs, by Anita Lahey; on lyric scholarship, influenced by Jan Zwicky.

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Friedrich Nietzsche (1906) by Edvard Munch.

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Vivaldi's Bassoon Concerto in E minor, I mov. - live, Milan Turkovic, 1994 Jerusalem

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