Writing
A new home for Softly Falls The Light on Substack
Hello! Firstly, thank you for still being here with me. My mailing list for this Softly Falls The Light website has shrunk over the last year, and you are now a small but perfectly-formed band of just over thirty! Of course, the number of people receiving notifications of my writing has always fluctuated, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to reach people via an independent website such as [...]
On translation – and why it matters
St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators, waiting for the Internet to be invented so he no longer has to spend most of what he earns on preposterously expensive dictionaries... Not long ago, I consigned my battered bilingual dictionaries to the recycling bin. They had been gathering dust, unopened, for several years. All the reference one could possibly need is now online. Holding onto them was [...]
Kitchen dancing
Where are all the pretty words? They have been abducted by the storm, brittle twigs, snapped, as casually as frail young bones, from their branches, inhaled by the wind, coughed out god knows where. No, I cannot be elegant with my expression, today - at least not in words. Slippery things, leaping past like salmon. Sticky things, raging at the web like flies. No. No pretty words for [...]
Pirate – a poemish past-life imagining
let me tell you our story - you, who are as cool, as distant as the paperthin moon, as close as my crow’s feet - you, who have colonised my boundary layer made it your own, your habitat, your home - life after life… once, twice, upon a time the universe winked its kaleidoscope eye, and into the colours fell you, and I… falling awake to the beat [...]
Crutches
Just over three months ago, I had surgery to correct a deformity of my left tibia and take some pressure off my worn-out, arthritic ankle. This piece is a hotchpotch of jottings from the first few weeks of post-op recovery. In those early days, I found the restricted pace of life unexpectedly satisfying. Soothing, almost. Re-reading these snippets has been a reminder of the soft contentment of surrender [...]
Makebelieve
Just for fun, and because a bit of playfulness is good for the soul, here is a whimsical poemishthing about Makebelieve. The words were spun for me by the spider who briefly resided in the top-right corner of my bedroom window... ;) What fun it would be to ride on the spider's back - wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! – paragliding off the curtain pole, a trail of spun dewdrops in [...]