Blogs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002f2ry/saint-omer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Omer_(film) Saint Omer is about infanticide. Not a promising premise for a film. But it won a stack of awards. Writer and director Alice Diop comes from a documentary background. Saint Omer, the film’s title is also a place name. Based on the real-life trial of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted in 2016 of drowning her 15-month-old daughter in the...

Thank you very much for the amazing poems and stories this week. Sometimes poems strike you with a strong emotional punch, sometimes they draw you back again and again with their layers of meaning. Such is Ralph's Black Vinyl; it is Poem of the Week: https://www.abctales.com/story/ralph/black-vinyl Story of the Week is this brilliant piece of flash fiction from Drew, part of his Tom Cruise series: https://www.abctales.com/story/drewgummerson/...

I remember seeing the car sticker in the 1970s, 'Jesus Saves.' I hadn't the faintest idea what it meant or what Jesus saved people from. All the time Christians talk about being saved. What does it mean? Saved from what? We are saved from sin. In order to fully understand the meaning of this we need to appreciate how sinful we are and why it really matters. Nobody's perfect. We have all broken God's laws. Our sin has taken away the close...

September in Reflection Crystalline memories ripple cognitive waves. Fracture, long-term whispering thoughts colliding with A short-term fragment. Another cycle completes midnight, departure; to trace distant harmonies, twilight tones unfurling like smoke on a still lake. Amid lifeless noise, we seek our mind-vessels, Always returning to the broken pieces of ourselves. How can one escape this echo of misery? In the texture of the unknown, the...

When The Sun Went Down A lake of mirrors reflects an alchemical nature of silent ink. Always watching, with the eyes of the scorpion, the zodiac’s watchers. Nearby, the medicine wheel turns the snake dance, coiling wisdom, With a Marco Polo mind that seeks the unknown path. The Ayahuasca Elders, stone warriors of the Buffalo brigade. Now summon the drums, ancient voices in the rhythm of the mirrors Lake. Echoes of those who once danced with...

Just before I got married, 35 years ago, I was at my bride-to-be's house, pre-Christmas, in a rather nice village between Burton upon Trent (my hometown) and Lichfield. Some Christmas Cards were pushed through the door and I went to collect them. A few minutes later, there was an insistent ringing of the doorbell and I found a rather grand lady standing on the doorstep. "Mea culpa!" She said, in a dramatic tone, one hand pressed against her...

Phantom of Remains The light we lost fades into oblivion. Slips beyond reach, swallowed by A wasteland of abandoned hope. Lies unburied, in silence, are louder than, grief: should we not have known this? By now? In twilight’s enigma in murky waters, flows from here to there; father from God. With a hidden conflict, smoldering in obsession, blooms like a dark rose, a catacomb of the unsealed burrows. Its thorns are scraping the marrow of being in...