And To Dust You Shall Return
My class has a test on Thursday, but today is Wednesday, and I am sitting in the Lady Chapel, and thinking sinful thoughts, and listening to a man who is brought in twice a term to say Mass (apparently God isn’t keen on women speaking in His house), and I am quietly memorising my index […]
God Pities the Nursery Children
A Translation of Yehudah Amichai’s ‘God Pities the Nursery Children’ [אלוהים מרחם על ילדי הגן ] from Hebrew. God pities the nursery children, He pities school children even less As for the גדולים [big ones], He will pity no more – He’ll let them fend for the
A Concert in the Ante-Inferno
[Inspired by Inferno, Canto III, where Dante and Virgil travel through the Ante-Inferno and cross the river Acheron with the help of the ferryman, Charon. The performer, called ‘Nick’, is loosely named after the singer Nick Cave, the frontman of the Australian Rock Band ‘Nick Cave and the Bad
The Stripping of the Altars
They from London came and armed with pages: scrolls proclaiming you a wolf in wool. Father, it seems you have misled us. We went picking fruit and ploughing, strapping boots to furrow sunrise after sunrise into penance. But you did nothing sacred with the tithe. All the sundry charms you hall
Amen
Amen tastes like church cookies: crumbly, stale, hauled out of cardboard boxes, old man’s fingers with popping blue veins beat her to the chocolate ones. She is always surprised when she remembers Sundays in this golden haze, edged in maroon, the smell of mahogany – She breaks off the memory li
Iphigenia in Jaywick / The Aftermath
I grew up under stained-glass windows, learnt their blues and pomegranate-reds before my mouth figured out how to form words – I was never good with names, but the faces stuck. One stood looking over the pew our family always sat in, Eve and Adam, her hair the same russet-gold as the apple she hel
Ditch Lilies
All across the yard, false peach. Elm trees spitting shadow on their heads. Like an ocean, he says, thumbing the brim of his cap, like lilies. The golden in them. We’re far away from ourselves, her ashes dusted in a field, your voice still scattering my dreams. The pastor bles
because my mother’s best friend is catholic
today it seems the missionaries are bound to send their best-disguised recruit – the tickle of hair on your top lip better found at the wheel of a Ford F-150, camo drying on the boot, but filters the word of G-d to a tinny sound a frequency between carrie underwood and orchestral flute, cou
Sri Lanka Needs a Prayer – But it Also Needs a Revolution
Ten years after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, terror has returned to plague our country once more. Police reported 250 deaths and over 500 people injured during a series of eight bomb blasts on Easter Sunday. The attacks took place across a number of locations, including three churches and thr
