The Luitpold Bridge in Munich is closed. Climate activists have glued themselves to the road disrupting traffic. They are not afraid of a jail sentence, they say. Part of me yearns to be there with them. Making statements, taking action. Instead, I follow signs for an alternative route, like so many ahead of me, and so many behind. Our long, slow-moving queue snakes around our principles.

on the radio…
instructions for instant
gratification

Stella Pierides

Martin was sitting in an ante-room waiting to be called for interview for summer work with the rail and road transport system in Ireland. It was easy to get temporary work there.
– Come in, groaned a voice from the interview room.
Martin went in. A lowly official was putting his socks back on, having cut his toe nails.
– So you’re looking for summer work?
– Yes, I’m in my third year in college.
– Third year. How many years have you to do?
– Four.
– Four? And what are you studying?
– English, Philosophy and Psychology.
– I don’t know what kind of a job you’ll get out of that?
Neither did Martin.

tea bags
stuck to the ceiling
like bats

Gerry McDonnell

No one immune. Floods. Wildfires. So what would she do  if …? Motheaten teddy bear? Priceless vase? She glances again at the middle distance. Light to carry. Something she will always take with her.

flat concrete surface
of the disused office block
gulls in the sunrise

Note: title taken from Shakespeare’s sonnet 10

.
Diana Webb

Democracy is dying.  The sky is not falling. Democracy, I said, is falling. Does anyone remember civics? The rights and duties of citizens? Do you know your rights? Your duties? This is a form of torture. Death by a thousand turned heads. Turned downward as if in mourning but no, not sorrow. Oblivion. Most folks are on their phones while Democracy is dying. Calling out to be saved. But we were taught not to answer calls we don’t recognize. Democracy. The freedoms we call our own. Individualism. Does any of this ring a bell? Hello? Time is running out. Democracy is dying and all we do is watch? Remember, it is the poet, the artist and the intellectual who are among the first to be rounded up under authoritarian regimes?

after killing it
the skin wings
of a bat

Peter Newton

To tell you the truth I never realised the little paper device we produced as kids to tease each other was from Japan. Origami. To tell you the truth – it was meant to do that. So now I’ll tell you the truth of what I’m seeing now.

rooftop aerial
the space between starlings
never the same

Diana Webb

Poet. Composer. Funambulist of a myriad invisible threads. Inheritor of every snowglobe where gleam after gleam rises and falls rises and falls. Here he lies.

watercolour
in fading stipples
notes of a skylark

Diana Webb

after the Brothers Grimm’s “Twelve Dancing Princesses”

Our true loves await us under avenues of trees where silver, gold and diamonds drip down believably as leaves. Twelve of us princesses, twirling, pretty things, slink out of the castle after proper primp and prink, slide down to the festivities once the monarch falls asleep. No enchanted steps left, no clues for the king’s men. Netherworld tucked safely under elder sister’s bed.

We arrive each night to supper, twenty-four feet finely shod, yet by sunrise Father finds those same slippers full of holes, a mystery, he decides, a human prince must solve. He offers bride and kingdom to create the quest’s allure—a daughter bargained off, though without a word from her. The catch? No ever after for those who can’t be sure. Untie this shoestring riddle in three nights’ time or die before claiming one of us as prize.

In spite of these traps and spies, we waltz on—twelve dancing princesses, refusing to be seen, caught. Not a would-be-wife among us (or a conscience it would seem) we watch, granite-faced as their royal heads fall, drop like rocks before our feet, first, from the bride-to-be’s hidden draughts of sleep, then finally, from Father’s strike

not a prince
to be spared—charming
or otherwise

Jill Michelle