Sigriddaughter, Silver Leaf Monkey
A lively, light filled glimpse of nature, this poem captures the unbridled joy of a young silver leaf monkey at play. Swinging fist over fist, upside down and right side up, the creature tumbles among green leafed twigs with purpose and delight. Its acrobatics are not merely movement but an expression of life itself. a celebration of being. The imagery sparkles with freedom and innocence, leaving the reader with the impression of vitality uncontained, a reminder of how pure and simple happiness can be.

Blanket by Yuxing Xia
Tender and intimate, this piece recalls the layered history of a century-old blanket. Bearing both scars and stains, the fabric becomes a vessel for memory: a shield in childhood games, a comfort in cold nights, and a thread carrying the grandmother's calm voice across generations. The poem is a quiet elegy to resilience, warmth, and the echoes of love that endure through time.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

......... Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Burying the Goldfinch: This poem tenderly mourns the fragile weight of a goldfinch whose life was ended by a collision with glass. With precise, sorrowful detail, it captures the immediacy of loss, the feathers left on the window, the still open eyes, the bird's body cooling in the speaker’s palm. The repeated refrain, “My fault," threads through the piece like an unshakable echo, binding grief with guilt. More than an elegy, it is a meditation on responsibility, fragility, and the way even the smallest life can leave an indelible mark on the heart.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Rooted in memory and the textures of place, this poem returns to Lily Pond as both a landscape of childhood and a reservoir of Christmas spirit. Sheehan entwines skating, laughter, and the turning of seasons with the continuity of friendship and song. The lines move like the skaters themselves, sometimes swift, sometimes lingering, until they resolve in the heartfelt simplicity of “Merry Christmas." It is both nostalgic and enduring, carrying forward the warmth of community and tradition.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.





Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.



Alfred Lord Tennyson
An excerpt taken from In Memorium.

This poem confronts the brutal legacy of the First World War through both history and personal memory. Written for the poet’s grandfather, a survivor of Kut-al-Amara, it weaves together battlefield horrors -- shrapnel, gas, burning oil fields-- with the inherited grief and futility of conflict. The piece bridges 1918 and today, questioning how war is remembered, justified, and repeated, its closing lines an indictment of ongoing violence in the name of empire and resource.

Powerful and unsettling, this poem gives voice to the haunted history of Rottnest Island, once used as a prison for Aboriginal people. The boy’s voice becomes a guide through its layers of violence and erasure -- unmarked graves, starvation, hangings --beneath the surface of today’s tourist idyll. The repetition of “Starved, Hung, Banished" tolls like a bell, reminding readers that beneath leisure and landscape lies memory and mourning. Winnaitch, “the forbidden place," is revealed as a site of both pain and ancestral endurance.

A bilingual poem written in Scots and English, Dark Matter imagines the unseen substance of the universe not as physics describes it, but as the collected dreams, thoughts, and stories of all living beings. With playful yet profound turns, it suggests that memory, imagination, and literature are themselves the hidden fabric binding existence together. The poem moves between Scots’ rooted, musical language and English reflection, inviting the reader to close their eyes and glimpse this vast invisible weave.

This layered poem meditates on the act of lighting a candle, both ordinary and profound. It moves from the pragmatic (hydrocarbons, by-products of the ocean bed) to the personal and ancestral, where flame becomes memory, devotion, and continuity. The candle is at once science and symbol: a way to measure time, to honor the dead, to kindle warmth against winter’s dark. Oonah Joslin captures how ritual survives in the smallest of gestures, glowing with both practicality and longing.

This poem paints winter as if on canvas, its palette borrowed from Degas and Van Gogh. The everyday becomes luminous: swans flying close, sunsets spilling across the sky, old streetlights glowing against snow. At once visual and musical, the poem carries the reader from festive holidays into quiet recall, where even the birds--robins, blackbirds--become strokes of color and character. It celebrates art’s power to suffuse ordinary life with beauty and memory.

This poem wanders across oceans and clouds, meditating on memory, travel, and the riddles left in sand and sky. With playful shifts between Hawaii, the Skeleton Coast, the Copper Coast, and the Caribbean, it blurs boundaries between place and imagination. The closing image, lying down on "speckled pieces of the world" to look at clouds, ties the vast globe to the intimacy of a single vision.

This poem journeys through industrial history into present decay. Once a line of coal, iron, smoke, and muscle, the Penrhos Branch Line is now reclaimed by brambles, ash, hazel, and silence. Bowman contrasts the grit of navvy labor with today’s natural quiet -- woodlice, willowherb, woodpeckers. The poem honors both the human effort that built it and the patient reclamation of nature, showing how history dissolves into landscape, leaving memory in the rustle of weeds and the drone of insects.

Steele’s poem is both elegy and irony: the sculptor denied marble, chisels, and fame, instead carving tunnels through Lanarkshire coal. His body becomes his chisel, his life the material of sacrifice. It is a work of art measured in dust, sweat, and silence -- artistry hidden underground, rarely seen but no less profound

In this quiet entanglement of body, nature, and myth a reclining figure seems suspended between water and air, as if caught in the fine tracery of spider silk threads. The translucent tones of water suggest both fragility and strength -- threads binding yet freeing, tethering yet allowing drift. The imagery of ripples, reeds, and a beached mermaid resonates here, as the script captures that liminal state between movement and stillness, belonging and release.

Art: Beatrix Potter (1866-1943), The Mice at Work. Threading the Needle, 1902
Style: Art Nouveau (Modern) | Series: Illustrations for The Tailor of Gloucester*

Potter illustrates a mouse deftly threading a needle while others tangle with pink thread in the background. Created for The Tailor of Gloucester, the scene blends Art Nouveau detail with whimsical storytelling, capturing the charm and industry of her beloved animal characters.

Epiphany by Oonah Joslin finds light in the act of dismantling festivity. The poem begins with the stripping away of Christmas tinsel, baubles, pastel lights boxed away, yet what might seem like an ending becomes a revelation. Out of discarded brightness rises a new clarity: the natural world resumes its rhythm, trees reclaim their greenery, and birds announce the shift toward spring. It is a meditation on renewal, showing how what is put away in one season gives way to the promise of another.


Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947), Kiss the Earth, 1912
Style: Art Nouveau (Modern) | Genre: Design | Medium: Pastel, Tempera on Cardboard

Roerich depicts a solitary, twisting tree rising against a dramatic sky, set in a luminous landscape of rolling hills. The work reflects his symbolic approach, blending nature, spirituality, and the decorative elegance of Art Nouveau design.

In Vergunst poem the scene itself gathers like music: a square alive with breath and brass, pipers marking midnight as fireworks scatter their colours across the black canvas of the sky. Notes rise like sparks, weaving with laughter and coffee steam, while dawn brings the sound of Vienna's violins. The old year folds into silence as the new one takes the stage, a concert of light and renewal.

Art: Frans Snyders (1579-1657), Study of Birds
Style: Baroque | Genre: Animal Painting | Medium: Oil on Canvas

Snyders assembles a vivid array of exotic and native birds, parrots, eagles, cockatoos, and songbirds, perched in a lively composition. Characteristic of Baroque animal painting, the work emphasizes texture, color, and natural vitality.