Tag: language
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Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad
Corrie nam Fiadh, Deer Corrie the gentleness ………of browsing deer Allt a’ Mhadaidh, Wolf Burn will never ………dissolve the wolf Some place-names refer to one-off events, like pegs stuck in the ground of memory. Others reckon the catastrophe of species loss over centuries. In his pioneering study of the influence humans have on…
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Were
We have been taught to believe that werewolves only change into their cursed form on full-moon nights, but perhaps – and this is speculation – on nights without full moons, the animal shape, which is the cursed form, still awakens within the werewolf, yet it cannot be seen, only sensed. Maybe werewolves spend any night…
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What is listing?
What is lost when words are wasted? Tomatoes. What is trust when tomatoes are wasted? What is truth? Men, words, hours, waist? When wait women. What is lost when haste is made? That is tossed, is left us that linger, aside. What is lust? What is frost, but sitting on the wooden cutting…
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CO2 Cherries
I Rust thing against rot Thing against resting skin red Cheery parallel Lines the blinds of grey once gold Then wood between me and sand. II I spit into lines Those cherries sum the blossoms I would and they wood Now grow pink and red and brown Above, aground, and around. …
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The New Concrete
The history of concrete poetry charts a path from utopia to dystopia. You could say that there’s a secret history of the second half of the twentieth century embedded in this little movement, one that parallels larger changes across cultural output. By the late 1970s, when concrete poetry collapses into a smouldering heap, few could…
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A Fixed Vocabulary
Is there a word for arriving home after a hot day and finding the place changed, as if everything has been picked up for inspection and put back down in a different spot? What is the word for being surprised by how high the weeds on the train line have grown? What is the word…
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Filth
Covered in filth, a disastrous clumsy brain excavates deep to identify causality. Distrusting and perilous, Broken mirror images echo an unsung nursery rhyme in an incomprehensible language. For unclean, as impure, as spoilt, This one is a crummy little one. She has not made any effort whatsoever, and now has the nerve to…
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She speaks
in a hoar frost, she said: the weather’s made a Miss Havisham’s wedding feast of this wood the dark of bark and leaf is cobwebbed over the hoar has clapped white hands over all those breathing mouths the air nests whitely in the trees and waits like birds like words to be…