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Virtual Foliage Tour
A friend from Western Massachusetts with access to outstanding scenery shared a series of photos that capture the changing of the colors in the Berkshires this fall.
Read More »Cartoons by Nicholas Whitmore
“Woodbines and Tall Tales” and “A Christmas Wake” by BERNIE CONDON
October 30, 2020
by
Chris O'Connor
Posted in Poetry, Literature, Trasna, Ireland, Uncategorized, History
8
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Throughout October, Trasna will focus on the Celtic festival of Samhain, better known to Americans as Halloween. The holiday originated in Ireland and celebrates that time of year when the veil between this world and the next grows thin, and life seems more mysterious. This week we feature two poems by Bernie Condon, as…
Read More »The 1975 World Series remembered
When I saw some “Why can’t we get guys like that?” comments on my Twitter feed when I awoke yesterday morning, I assumed it was Pats’ fans talking about Tom Brady. But no, it was baseball fans tweeting about former Lowell Spinner Mookie Betts who had led his Los Angeles…
Read More »Mass Poetry Festival in Lowell: 2009
The Massachusetts Poetry Festival came to Lowell in 2008 and again in 2009. It was a great success but a venture of that scale requires prodigious money and effort, so after two years a break was needed and the Festival moved on to Salem where it has found a long…
Read More »Paul Marion: A Prose Poem
Although I was born in Lowell (est. 1826), in the Centralville section, I grew up in Dracut (est. 1701) from the age of two through my college years. My neighborhood’s colonial-era name was New Boston Village, but that wasn’t used when I was there. We didn’t have a name for…
Read More »Who’s really packing the Court? by Marjorie Arons-Barron
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Somewhere Robert Bork is chortling. In 1987, his honest articulation of his extremist originalist philosophy was deemed so frighteningly outrageous that, despite his excellent paper qualifications, he was deemed unfit to serve on the United States Supreme Court.…
Read More »Dave Robinson: New Poem
The New Old New England Halloween Blues by Dave Robinson Their quiet root hairs floss the rocky soil, these paper birches slouching in brownfield sun. Industrial dyes reduce to dregs of lead and mercury to be swept up to sway in pent-up buds. An unofficial flag of urban areas—the shredded,…
Read More »Poet Louise Glück, Nobel Prize Winner
Today, we have two posts about recent Nobel Prize-recipient Louise Glück of Cambridge, Mass., who won the award in literature for her poetry. There has been a flurry of reporting about her success by media outlets in Boston, the nation, and the world. We’ve got a more personal angle. I…
Read More »Debate winner, Kristen Welker; runner up,the mute button by Marjorie Arons-Barron
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Donald Trump apparently listened to his advisers not to be the rabid beast he was in the previous debate. This may have firmed up some Trump voters who had been wavering. But the fact that he was reined…
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