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Inspired by last week’s Presidential Inauguration, Paul Marion shares this poem from his book, Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017), available at www.loompress.com CHECKING THE PROPERTY by Paul Marion My nine-year-old son says, “I’m going to read the ‘Gettysburg Address.’” What’s the Lincoln shorthand? Freed the slaves, saved the union.…
Read More »Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell, brings together sixty-five writers from both sides of the Atlantic, featuring a collection of stories, poems, essays, songs, and parts of novels. This January, Trasna features selected writings from this 2020 anthology. Featured this week, the poetry of Alex Hayes. FR8879, 42 (Warsaw…
Read More »Nancy and I have been attending the Moby Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum since 1997, the beginning of a New Bedford tradition. We’ve only missed two over the 25 years since then. I wrote this a few years ago right after the reading of the final chase…
Read More »“Where Now Begins” This week, on January 6th, the United States Capitol was attacked. It houses the meeting chambers of the United States Senate and the Congress. It is one of the most symbolically important buildings in the nation. At the time of the attack, a joint session of Congress was…
Read More »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…
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