A modern fairy tale in verse, this story/poem tells of a small, overlooked Christmas tree that longs to be chosen. Passed by until Christmas Eve, it is lifted by an angel to a poor man's home, where it finds its true place: not among treasures, but in the heart of family joy. With simple rhymes and gentle cadence, the piece celebrates kindness, humility, and the miracle of belonging.

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.

This poem is both tribute and elemental portrait, entwining the figure of the poet's father with the landscape of Ireland. Rock, peat, sea, and myth mingle together, evoking heritage, resilience, and warmth. At its heart, the piece honors a man whose presence is as enduring as stone, yet as comforting as the glow of a peat fire. It is a song of memory, ancestry, and belonging, steeped in natural and mythic imagery.

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.

Rooted in memory and civic loss, this poem recalls the fascination of watching Bristol's Quarter Jacks mark the passing of hours with color and sound. Once vibrant figures striking golden hammers, they now lie dormant, casualties of austerity and neglect. The poem mourns not only the silenced clockwork but the fading of heritage, where the rhythm of time itself feels paused, waiting to be reclaimed.

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.

Blending memory with mythic imagery, this poem revisits childhood nights colored by fear, wonder, and the pull of home. The cicada's imagined chorus frames a journey through dusk into darkness, where owls, a hunting dog’s howl, and gathering shadows evoke dread, yet fireflies and a glowing window promise safety. Both lullaby and incantation, it captures the fragile passage from childhood awe to the comfort of return.

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.

James Graham’s Ready to Fly is a moving cycle of memory and inheritance, unfolding across portraits of a father’s life and presence. Each section captures a facet: the dust of mortality set against the endurance of words, the patient labor of walls and hedges, the stern quiet of Sundays, the moral lessons hidden in play, and the elegiac weight of work and loss. At once intimate and universal, the poems draw from a child’s watchful eye and a grown man’s reflection, bridging the ordinary and the mythic. The closing vision of young eagles fledging crystallizes the theme: love, strength, and wisdom carried forward, seen “far away but clear, -- ready to take flight into the world.

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 folds myth and daily life into a single moment of struggle and longing. From the weight of blankets to the heaviness of twilight, Needham summons the restless cycle of waiting for renewal, echoing Persephone’s descent and return. The imagery of duvets, shadows, and bare arms merging with budding trees creates a tension between hibernation and awakening. It is a meditation on time, rhythm, and the yearning for spring -- carried by a torch that promises rebirth.

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

William Greenfield's Why I Love the Wind feels like a hymn to movement and renewal. The wind here is no threat--it is a child perched on the shoulder, a reminder of vitality, an unseen musician coaxing songs from the world. The poem celebrates the elemental force not as destruction, but as memory, song, and blessing.

Artist: William Bradford (1823-1892),
The Kennebec River, Waiting for Wind and Tide, 1860
Style: Romanticism | Genre: Marina | Medium: Oil on Canvas

Bradford depicts ships lying still on the calm waters of Maine’s Kennebec River, their sails reflecting in the glassy surface beneath vast, glowing skies. The scene conveys both maritime grandeur and the quiet anticipation of nature’s forces.

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.

This poem listens inward to the stillness found amid sound and movement. Chandeliers, tulips, idle toys, and even the rumble of trains become part of a larger music, sometimes dissonant, sometimes harmonious, but always alive. It is a meditation on pauses, on fleeting silence that makes rhythm perceptible, and on how everyday spaces,like a waiting room or a hall, can hold both noise and quietude in balance.

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), Seba
Movement: Ukiyo-e | Medium: Woodblock Print | Date: mid-19th century

Hiroshige depicts a quiet riverside scene at Seba, where a boatman poles his craft under a glowing full moon. Graceful willows bend with the breeze, their reflections shimmering on the water, capturing the transience and serenity central to Ukiyo-e landscape art.

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.

With this reflective piece Zelnick introduces Gabriela Mistral’s enduring Christmas vision, contrasting today’s commercialized holiday with the intimate, tender celebrations of children in Latin America. By situating Mistral historically as the first Latin American Nobel laureate and emphasizing her devotion to teaching and poetry, the entry frames A Noel as both literary history and cultural reminder: Christmas, at its core, belongs to childhood wonder and simplicity, not consumer spectacle.

One of the most beloved Christmas poems, Christina Rossetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter blends stark natural imagery with tender devotion. Its opening verse paints a world locked in frost and silence, against which the humility of Christ’s birth shines all the brighter. Moving from cosmic vastness to the intimacy of a mother’s kiss, the poem culminates in the unforgettable final stanza, where the speaker offers not riches or wisdom but the simple, profound gift of the heart.

Kipling's Christmas in India captures the ache of distance and dislocation for those celebrating far from home. Set against the relentless sun and parched tamarisk trees, the poem contrasts the heat, dust, and alien strangeness of India with the imagined frost and festivity of England. Beneath its formal cadence runs a current of exile -- the sense of belonging to neither place, of carrying tradition in memory while enduring estrangement abroad. It is both a colonial-era portrait and a universal meditation on longing, marking Christmas not with comfort, but with yearning for connection and home.