Connecting Through Corona

Amanda van Wallinga Haverkamp Harma de Roo 

  NAMING THE FUTURE       While most of us seek a fresh world, some of us                               Keep an eye on strange weather. In London today, Sun was shining despite the active bite in the air.   It was a new form of shock, a crack in the wind To remind us that if we are to be finally free Of our houses there may yet be borders behind which   We all will need to beware. These may range From the barriers of the heart to those of once familiar Countries, made all the more strange now that Brexit   Spreads its contagion like germ across ground That everyone from Blake to the Beatles sang of, If only to hold onto something. And yet this place   Was never that. Its empiric dream just playacting, With the horrors within less profound. From its Victorian Pomp to the violence inflicted under The Raj and in Kenya,   You will hear all sorts of end in the echo of that bloodstained Green sleeved sound. Of that time Pete Docherty’s drug singed Sprawl mumbled stuff, but only Ray Davies sa

Savitri Pema Inside my armour of disdain I  resist the lure\ of your marshy arms, till like a stealthy thief You crept over mossy banks my heart  too unsheath Like the bent trees on your horizon of whistling winds you pierced my mind with memories of rambles over purple heather over endless hills and gullies dark, to the music of bleating sheep. Like a desert wanderer seeking an oasis, I seek vertical horizons across a desolate terrain,  the mirage behind my  blinded vision,  yearning. In this land of sun soaked beaches and playground of oligarchs, of indolent  lotus eaters, I seek your barren landscape, Listening for Cathy calling to Heathcliff’s ghost.       ‘Nostalgia in The Pandemic’   is about not being able to travel back safely to my home during the pandemic. About missing the wild, windswept Yorkshire moors of my home county in the UK, despite realising how fortunate I am to be on a sunny Greek island in the Mediterranean.                

‘This is My Day’ This is my day, these are my choices These are my actions and my changing voices. Many paths lay ahead and many paths I leave behind, Which way will I go, which way will I find? And you ask me to decide, You ask me to choose one way. But I can’t follow a single path, I am happy to stray. I don’t mean to get lost and I don’t mean to lose sight, I just mean that I’ll wander through the day and the night. And when I say wander I mean that I’ll venture, I mean that I’ll take chances and not live by a censor. For I am confident that opportunities will lead me to great things, I am open to life’s challenges and all that life brings. My heart is wide open to embrace and to share, And my mind is as hungry to learn and to dare.’ by Rachel Mathews-McKay, Dublin, Ireland Biography:  Rachel Mathews-Mckay – mixed race of Irish, Jamaican, Bermudian and Canadian heritage but born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. She has been settled in Dublin, Ireland for the past 21 years where, since 2