Torcello

Catherine Sasanov

Offshore, the Apocalypse stays contained to one island and its church.

Venice's ruler's out wedding himself to the ocean

while I'm ankle deep in the Adriatic, eyes raised to a book

unencumbered by words: A Bible that reads from East to West. Guidebooks want only

to see it as ceiling—the Basilica San Marco,

where Christ's hands open on wounds embedded with rubies, and priests

hold back the sea with brooms. I'm taking on incense,

bowing at altars dragged out of Constantinople, sloshing across marble sacked from Jerusalem.

Offshore, the sea's a bride bought with a fist full of diamonds the Doge throws into the deep—

a sign of his true and perpetual dominion.

Then why does walking into this church mean stepping into the ocean? The sea is a dog— Priests throw in bones just to placate it.

The year's nearly 2000, but the millennium already hit once

on the island Torcello, a kind of plague the Venetians contained. 999 years,

and the dead still crawl from dirt towards their radiant bodies, they still gather up

missing limbs: arms, legs, hands sharks and beasts keep regurgitating.

We do what we know— But Christ never wanted to manage resurrections in Venice.

Underdressed in the flesh from dead civilizations, he moves among us in Byzantine skin.

I'm getting close to this God worshiped only by tourists.

He picks at the wounds on his crucified body, the injury scabbed over with jewels.

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: the south windows in the basilica of San Fosca, Torcello, Venice.

In a Library

Emily Dickinson

A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think,

His venerable hand to take, And warming in our own, A passage back, or two, to make To times when he was young.

His quaint opinions to inspect, His knowledge to unfold On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old;

What interested scholars most, What competitions ran When Plato was a certainty. And Sophocles a man;

When Sappho was a living girl, And Beatrice wore The gown that Dante deified. Facts, centuries before,

He traverses familiar, As one should come to town And tell you all your dreams were true; He lived where dreams were sown.

His presence is enchantment, You beg him not to go; Old volumes shake their vellum heads And tantalize, just so.

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: the Winter Garden of the Harold Washington Library, Chicago.

The Same Old Story

Oz Hardwick

The prodigal son outstayed his welcome, lording it over his sibling and, frankly, taking the piss. He'd sleep till midday, then slob in front of the TV with a beer and his phone, calling out for fatted calf and over-tipping the delivery driver on his father's card. Dad had words but, this being the Bible and the moral having been done and dusted, they had no effect. They fell on stony ground, you might say. Forty days and forty nights stretched until a day was like a thousand years and strict doctrine slipped into superstition and fairy tale. Once upon a time, the father married a wicked stepmother, who stamped her foot and said Lazy Jack – which the Bible doesn't mention was the parasitic sack o' shite's name – had to go. So, she called the cook and they made him into a pie, and when Dad came home from a day of being a cypher for divine forgiveness – or maybe he was a woodcutter – he plonked himself like Desperate Dan at the head of the laden table. Mmmmmm, he said, wiping his chinny chin chin, Smells like fatted calf.

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits - Hardwick Hall: the long gallery.

Seurat

Ira Sadoff

It is a Sunday afternoon on the Grand Canal. We are watching the sailboats trying to sail along without wind. Small rowboats are making their incisions on the water, only to have the wounds seal up again soon after they pass. In the background, smoke from the factories and smoke from the steamboats merges into tiny clouds above us then disappears. Our mothers and fathers walk arm in arm along the shore clutching tightly their umbrellas and canes. We are sitting on a blanket in the foreground, but even if someone were to take a photograph, only our closest relatives would recognize us: we seem to be burying our heads between our knees.

I remember thinking you were one of the most delicate women I had ever seen. Your bones seemed small and fragile as a rabbit's. Even so, beads of perspiration begin to form on your wrist and forehead — if we were to live long enough we'd have been amazed at how many clothes we forced ourselves to wear. At this time I had never seen you without your petticoats, and if I ever gave thought to such a possibility I'd chastise myself for not offering you sufficient respect.

The sun is very hot. Why is it no one complains of the heat in France? There are women doing their needlework, men reading, a man in a bowler hat smoking a pipe. The noise of the children is absorbed by the trees. The air is full of idleness, there is the faint aroma of lilies coming from somewhere. We discuss what we want for ourselves, abstractly, it seems only right on a day like this. I have ambitions to be a painter, and you want a small family and a cottage in the country. We make everything sound so simple because we believe everything is still possible. The small tragedies of our parents have not yet made an impression on us. We should be grateful, but we're too awkward to think hard about very much.

I throw a scaling rock into the water; I have strong arms and before the rock sinks it seems to have nearly reached the other side. When we get up we have a sense of our own importance. We could not know, taking a step back, looking at the total picture, that we would occupy such a small corner of the canvas, and that even then we are no more than tiny clusters of dots, carefully placed together without touching.

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits was taken in the Art Institute, in Chicago. It shows Seurat's pointilliste masterpiece, 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte', with admirers.

The Sighs of St Helena (11)

Bhusana Nanda Bidhu

Today I remember the feelings what my hands painted for you.

I am waiting for you; * I am wholly filled with you; Your picture and the intoxicating evening leave my senses no peace.

Sweet, incomparable Josephine, What have you done to my heart? Are you angry with me? Do you look sad? Are you ill at ease? But I find calm when I give myself up to my passion, that on your lips, at your heart, I may fan the flames which burn me.

How plain it was to me last night that your picture can never replace the real you. At noon you will start; in three hours I shall see you; till then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses! But you must not give me kisses, for they burn my blood! *

Since I left you, * I have been sad, I can only be happy when I am near you. I spend my whole time thinking of your kisses, your tears, your bewitching jealousy.

The charm of the incomparable Josephine is perpetually rekindling the flames of my heart and my senses. When shall I be free, at length, free from cares and duties, free to devote all my time to you, with nothing in the world but to you…

Since I have known you, I have come to respect you more day by day, which shows how wrong La Bruyere was when he said that loves come suddenly.

Everything in nature runs its course, and increases by degrees…

Be less beautiful, less tender, and above all less jealous. Your tears inflame my blood…

Join me quickly, so that, before we die, we may be able to say: We have had so many happy days! A million kisses, even for your horrid fortune. *

*The words of Napoleon

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: this hearse carriage - which transported Napoleon's body on St Helena.

At the Mid Hour of Night

Thomas Moore

At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye; And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air, To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there, And tell me our love is remembered, even in the sky.

Then I sing the wild song ’twas once such pleasure to hear! When our voices commingling breathed, like one, on the ear; And, as Echo far off through the vale my sad orison rolls, I think, oh my love! ’tis thy voice from the Kingdom of Souls, Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear.

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits was taken in Valletta, Fort St Elmo, beneath the ramparts; view to Fort Ricasoli.

I am the daughter my mother raised to confront them

Margo Tamez

with grievance’s command.

I am the daughter she trains to translate lightning.

I am the half-deaf child she assigned to tone-deaf judges.

I am the girl riding shot-gun to iron.

I am birthing feet first with no mid-wife to catch.

I sprint, high-jump, and fist-fight in her defence. 

I am a dialect born inside her quietude.

I susurrate incantations transcribing her rivered idioms.

She is rivered remembering, and I am her subpoenas.

Today's photo with the most hits: Grant's zebra, camel, and blue wildebeest at South Lakes Zoo.

From “The Uncured World”

Elisabeth Frost

I decide to name my body. Jane. Jean. Janet. I’ve never liked names that begin with that uncertain sound, wobbling between consonant options like a bowling pin on the fritz. But I need to embrace a thing I have never cared for. As a kid I loved the game of telephone, one mishearing after another, the transformation, the delight at the end when the secret of the final whisperer was unveiled. Incense, insect, instant. Drench, trench, wrenched. Language, languish, anguish. We played at the margins of the senses, pretended loss where there was none, made the privilege of hearing into a game. One erasure, another erasure. Janet—unfixed, unmoored, unwell—time to mobilize.

Today's Flickr photo with the most hits:

Birgu - Malta at War Museum - a street speaker for public broadcasts, Rediffusion.

When I was a boy in Nelson, Lancashire (1960's), our TV was brought to the house by Rediffusion.

The Steps of Montmartre

Alex Grant

      – after Brassai’s 1936 photograph

On the steps of Sacre Coeur    Cathedral, in that same winter       when junge leute filled Bavarian

beer-gardens, ten years before    Adorno proclaimed that there       could be no art after Auschwitz,

Brassai captured his flawless    image. Through the tunnel       formed by the parting trees,

battalions of lamp-posts advance    and retreat in the morning mizzle,       clamp chain-link handrails hard into sunwashed cobbles. In less    than a year, the corpseless heads       on Nanking’s walls will coalesce

with Guernica’s ruined heart, mal    du siècle will become Weltschmerz,       and the irresistible symmetry of a million clacking bootheels    will deafen half a continent.       The red brush never dries - adagio leads finally to fugue,    haiku to satori, and the image       fixed in silver to remembering.