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Epiphany Marie Louise St.Onge It’s time to remove what has grown into an overstatement despite its simple beginnings when you mindfully, with each in-breath, placed each white light on the intended branch just before the snow fell and the temperature dove to a lower more chafing number. When you consciously…
Read More »From: “A Christmas Childhood,” Patrick Kavanagh (1943) “Outside the cow-house my mother Made the music of milking; The light of her stable-lamp was a star And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle. A water-hen screeched in the bog, Mass-going feet Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes, Somebody wistfully…
Read More »Mexicali Angels By Jim Provencher A chorus of angels soars through the dusty streets of a Mexicali morning. It could be anywhere along the Line—cartel-torn, half-deserted, furtive, uneasy. Still, children are singing— It’s Christmastime after all, and I follow the sound into a white-washed adobe chapel where small…
Read More »Former Alaskan poet Laureate Tom Sexton’s latest volume of poetry is “Cummiskey Alley.” The collection is named after Lowell’s first Irishman, Hugh Cummiskey, who walked from Boston to Lowell with a group of Irish laborers. Cummiskey and many other Irish labors dug miles of canals in Lowell, and helped birth…
Read More »November 22, 1963 By Mike McCormick Silent prayers poured from my heart as I trudged through lifeless leaves, walking directly home from St. James School. After dinner, Dad suggested we drive to the River. He downshifted the jeep into the blackness of a vacant lot, killed the engine, lit a…
Read More »Two Kids and Their Dad Attending High School Football By Mike McCormick Even as we stepped out the front door into the welcoming late morning sun to climb into the jeep for the drive to the high school game, Dad, my brother, and I anticipated the hours when we would…
Read More »Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems by Tom Sexton, a Literary Son of the City A Review by Chath PierSath I am not a native son of Lowell like Tom Sexton had been, but Lowell and I crossed paths serendipitously in 1996. I was looking for a job after…
Read More »The month of November, with its decreasing hours of daylight and lengthening nights, offers an opportunity to turn inwards. It is traditionally a month in Ireland when we remember those who have passed on, indeed the 1st and 2nd of November are known respectively as All Saints and All Souls…
Read More »A review by Richard Howe of Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems by Tom Sexton At the end of the bottom shelf of my big bookcase, after all the histories, memoirs, and biographies that are my usual literary diet, sit two books about poetry: Can Poetry Matter? by Dana…
Read More »Dog Walk at Harold Parker By Doug Sparks We walk in the woods when I should be at work. Walk — that’s a word easily defined — Unlike work — of the hours and the days. Shadowed by Diogenes (I’ll spare your looking him up — an Ancient Greek, He…
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