Free Online Poetry and Music Events

 

You might like to check out a series of events being hosted by Tally Koren over the next few weeks entitled ‘Changing The Face Of Poetry’. Each event will focus on a different theme: 

Sun 21stMarch 8pm GMT	Sun 4thApril 8pm BST	Sun 18thApril 8 pm BST
Survival Feeling trapped Loneliness	Hope Spring Vision of the future	Freedom Reflection New beginnings

You can find more information about the events and submission deadlines if you'd like to be involved at: https://www.tallykoren.com/events

During the course of the events she will look at how poetry can be turned into songs and demonstrate how one line of a poem can become a catchy chorus as she did with ‘Beauty of the Duty’ a song playlisted by BBC Radio 2 and other radio stations over the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWIOE7w_hlw

Yellow Canoe

 

Daniel, sitting in his yellow canoe

on an afternoon sky of wedgewood blue

and pillowy white clouds, is

without paddle and, it appears,

the remotest notion of where he is.

Faraway, but behind him, an island

of claustrophobic greenness may be

a destination, but it is doubtful he’ll

look that way, and if he did, it’s

doubtful that he’d choose to go there.

At the moment, it seems more likely

he will step from the canoe onto the

marble-still surface,

then he'll be something like a flint arrow 

in vertical descent.

From a lit fuse

 

Sunlight lit the fuse; the trees,

fires in the fields, blazed

silver in the black plates

of their leaves,

out of control;

the wind made their arms sway,

spill their light;

I gathered as much

as I could into my eyes,

so that I, too, might catch their fire.

The Deserted Village

 

Stone boxes; ruined, roofless cottages empty as looted coffins

at the foot of Slievemore.

How time scoured the ruins: Atlantic squalls dousing the walls

to their sterile stones,

silencing ghost whisperings from ancient hearths; no presences

lingering beneath doorway lintels

but skittles and jack stones played between the huddled houses;

the voices of children reverberating

between the walls; women laughing, gossiping, cajoling down by

the stream

carried, like rain on the wind, down  the years, in from ocean, over 

the grassy wave.

Lost spirits laughing, complaining, shouting, teasing, arguing, joking;

the deserted houses with their mouths agape,

tongues missing, and the dream light of day passing over them like

some ancient prankster.

Inequality

 

And faraway, someone saying ‘sounds good.’

will make entertainment from this bloodshed;

live sumptuously on the profits;

manufacture heroes on the bodies of our dead;

make villains of us in our own land

for the concoction of stories for foreign ears.

And faraway they’ll live in unimaginable mansions

above the lapping of waves on golden beaches

with the choice of Lamborghini or Ferrari in their garages.

They’ll die in beds feathered with our hardships many stories on;

live longer than the span of whole families

who would have survived on a fraction of their box-office.

Wild

He can’t experience anything above

the city racket, his head’s a bag of

loose spanners. Never being able to

find a place inside to be himself

driving him to violence, he pushes

the volume up further to drown out

the noise, sending himself spiralling

towards craziness, his only way with

people, and, in truth, crazy youths have

their admirers. Having no other mode

of being, he considers himself wild and

often is, and when he is not he’s often

cradling his head in his hands.

From Knockma

 

Green fields,

green the colour of water;

an ocean locked in place

beneath a grid of stone walls.

Lens, curvature of the planet,

green out of sight;

water

pinioned for grazing.

On Oxford Street

 

On Oxford Street a woman, falls straight as a Christmas tree

onto the pavement, suddenly dead in pink coat and hat, handbag

firmly clenched and eyes wide, staring at the sky.

Walking behind her, part of the morning throng, I had noticed

her purposeful walk, her style; a country-woman I concluded;

and then she was quite obviously dead.

The crowds flow past, she’s a boulder in their stream.

I consider in an instant what must be done, what is right,

and consider it long enough for it to be someone else’s consideration.

Barnesmore

 

Barnesmore

An Bearna Mór

A river runs through,

a road runs through,

the wires run through,

the wind runs through,

the rain runs through,

the snow runs through.

The moon stops,

its chin in its hand;

its mesmerising stare,

its silver gaze filling the pass;

nothing stirs

but ever so stealthily, the river

stealing the light away.

Travel.

 

To the farthest reaches of your skull:

a universe.

But, away, never;

you are always travelling within you.

From memory,

 

from within the wreath of that life,

from within the nest of your arms,

from within the blanket of your care,

from within the fire-glow of love,

I have grown from us then to us now,

I have taken you, in coexistence, onward,

we are as one as we have always been.

Voice

 Listening to Árbakkinn by Olafur Arnalds featuring the voice of Einar Georg I am struck by beauty of the voice, the ability of an older voice to stir the heart. And not lessened, maybe enhanced, by not understanding the words, this is one of what could be a number of responses. 

Voice

His voice was a thirsty stream

picking its way down among the rocks,

troubled slightly by the coins

that once cheered its passing.

It must have been a poem,

it wasn't my language; he spoke

as though watching his parents fade,

as though they were now reduced to a hand waving.

Salmon, All Gunbarrel

Salmon, all gunbarrel,

swim like weed,

watch like water,

dream like the moon.

Loneliness

 

She stands in her kitchen, turns, sits,

and feels there should be something,

there must be something.

But there is no other voice in that house

only the incessant radio gabble; she has tired

of it long ago; the repetition,

her brain on its spit; fatuous conversations,

contrived controversies, feigned remorse.

Or daytime television with its seeping mildew of cheap

dramas, old westerns and World War II;

a hundred channels, she can flick through a hundred

channels before throwing the useless remote away from her.

How can life have reduced to this nothingness;

she addresses the question to brain inside her head,

and it as voiceless as the house.

A Tale For The Times That Are In It

 

Drab, his room, like a prison cell, north-facing,

swill coloured; depressed outhouses crowded

into his window, a man-made fungal growth;

tea-coloured light oozed from the bare bulb

into his soul, till it too was of the same paint.

One day, he broke some daffodils in the park,

picked them up and brought them home;

left them lying, a rag of sunshine on the table.

Sunlight at last; he went back for more:

crocuses, tulips, ivy, grasses, bluebells, lilies.

Now a flower- bed larcenist, his room an explosion

in a paint factory bedecked from ceiling to floor

with all the flowers of the season, and his soul

blooming in colours that were, once, no more to him

than litter strewn across unkempt suburban lawns.

But as seasons passed and flowers died, unsatisfied

he learned to grow beauty; bulbs, slips, seeds.

That magic took him from his room to the library

where the tendrils of his research spread to faraway

places, and he travelled with them.

Books littered his table; a scatter of ripe, fallen fruits.

Sunlight poured upward from their pages, exploded

in firework blossoms all the way up to the ceiling,

all day, as though he had turned the house around;

and, in a way, I think you could say, he had.