Elon Musk’s famous motto of Move Fast and Break Things has aged like spilt milk. Who would have imagined six months ago that it would accompany so much blatant entitlement, recklessness and sheer stupidity – not to mention the damage caused to the lives of millions around the world?

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i often dream of people i love
and miss
and long to see again

most visit in guises only i recognise
flickering motions
a wavering scent
a shadow split and spilling out
a spree of sounds on sleeping lips

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This month sees the launch of two new anthologies of poetry  by Fermanagh Writers who have often featured in Corncrake. John D Kelly released his new collection About Blood at the Canal Stores, Clones, on Saturday the 3rd, and Robert Elliot will launch his second poetry collection, It Takes All Kinds, on 13 May in Blakes of The Hollow Enniskillen at 7.30pm.

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Dropping a line into the writhing sea
The receiver bobbing
Slowly along the musical score
Of that bright green, buccaneering dream

In which you always leave the sinking ship
Last, the iceberg a shark’s head,
Country lanes rewinding,
You gasp yourself back to life upon a pillow

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Above the dark forest
The light begins its descent to night

In the trees, the air cools
Quietness proliferates, honing hearing
A bird begins its nightly gossip
Twilight’s blanket spreads
The wind hums and whispers
Through the forest’s canopy

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I was forwarded your email by Phoebe Dick re your magazine. She thought of me because of my Lino print of the corncrake.

The Manorhamilton print group is a wonderful community group of creatives brought together by an interest and love of print. It supports and has supported over the years a huge number of local artists.

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Walking the hall

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My name is Daniel and I’m not sure exactly sure what it means to be me, but my life has been one long rollercoaster of finding meanings. From humanitarian work in Myanmar to end of life care in a nursing home, from being a politician to stacking shelves in a bookshop … we all seem to take on these guises and masks as we move through life.

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Waking up together
Dancing through the night.
What looked like darkness
Now revealed as light.

Myriad halves
Reminding each other of the dream
That we weaved together
Before we split the seams.
Collective creation

Endless waves in motion
Originating from a pin prick
In our imagination.

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Each night before bed
She asks me to brush her hair
She stands with her back to me
I like brushing her hair

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The breed of me walked the high hills that shouldered the stars
My long stepping mountainy men and women who drank
Clear white whiskey that made them mad and rage against
The sallow strangers who grazed our green fields below
While my people wrestled the rushes and the snipe grass
While we sang our anthems of the fallen but not forgotten.

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how to tell you that

you have started

to fade and to disappear

fading and disappearing (more…)

Flying at an altitude of at least three feet
Lycra-streamlined, tight-topped friends go cruising on Hove Beach.
Passers-by can’t help but admire —
not just those outfits, that athletic attire —
but the graceful poise of humans in flight:
“That shouldn’t be possible… something’s not right!”

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In the early 1960s I worked as a male nurse in the now long gone Bethnal Green Hospital when it was a Nurse Training School. I was permanently listed for duty on the intake ward from Casualty and Out-Patients. (more…)