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for Enniskillen and all . . .
My grandfather died a decade before the Enniskillen bombing. Had he been alive on November 8, 1987, he would have been wearing his pressed dark suit with his medals and a poppy attached to the lapels – not for show or to make a political statement – but as a way to honor his dead pals. My grandfather, who fought…
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For my Father on his Birthday: A Harvest Bow
One winter Sunday in Phoenix, I woke to the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel, my father in the kitchen sharpening my dull bread knife because “for God’s sake, it wouldn’t cut butter.” I stayed in bed. A widow for 25 days and stuck in the past because I knew my way around it, I allowed the familiar sound of…
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Banking on breast cancer? Stop it.
It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but you already knew that. Some of you are beyond aware, fatigued by the reiterated reassurances that early detection is the next best thing to curing breast cancer. You might even be quietly resigned to accepting “No Evidence of Disease” (NED) as good as it’s going to get, but you might not say so out…
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a poem for ireland, a poem for the world . . .
Where I have been living since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no mailman, but I still check the letterbox in the front door every day. To send or receive a letter, I drive about a mile to a shop on the carraterra between here and the lovely little village which has begun to return to a kind…
