A Woman with Heart For Anne, this Valentine’s Day A heart in every room – stone, cloth, glass – Anne, collector of the world’s pulse, your shelves hold tributes, tender and small, while your own heart, the true north in this house, expires quietly beneath hospital lights. You taught me to find heart everywhere:..
A Tale of Two Annes Back in high school about 250 years ago, we studied A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I feel like I’m undergoing a novel experience of a much more intense and baffling sort in my personal life: A Tale of Two Annes. My wife Anne has been stricken..
Ikebana dreams My wife creates decorative arrangements that include miniature dried flowers. Recently, she learned that her art resembles Japanese Ikebana, an aesthetic of which she was previously unaware. Ikebana (literally “giving life to flowers”) is the Japanese art of flower arrangement, in which the arrangement brings nature and humanity closer together. The..
Anne as an indomitable decorator: A feisty artist whom brain cancer can impede but never defeat Everybody who knows Anne knows that she’s a decorator; she calls herself the “Decorating Turkey.” Our sons have dubbed her “couth”; even the house in which we raised our rowdy boys in suburban Quebec City was “couth” and..
Taigu Ryokan was a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk and poet of the Edo period, known for his unconventional lifestyle and unadorned, deeply personal poetry. https://allpoetry.com/Taigu-Ryokan Haiku’s more visual cousin, the haiga, unites a haiku poem, written in calligraphy, with a simple painting. https://poets.org/text/haiga-haiku-calligraphy-and-painting In our new world of shared grief and absurd wonder..
An update on Anne’s suffering from radiation treatments and chemotherapy Like life itself A world of beauty, Ikebana floral art: Fleeting poetry. My wife Anne is afflicted with glioblastoma, an incurable form of brain cancer. Glioblastoma – Wikipedia https://www.braintumour.ca/fr/types_de_tumeurs_cerebrales/glioblastome/ Anne is currently suffering from severe nausea stemming from the intensive radiation treatments..
The tragically hip and the tragical blip: Anne faces glioblastoma, a fatal cancer of the brain My wife Anne has been stricken by an incurable, highly aggressive form of brain cancer known as glioblastoma: Glioblastoma – Wikipedia Voici un lien en français: https://www.braintumour.ca/fr/types_de_tumeurs_cerebrales/glioblastome/ Her life expectancy is about 12 to..
Splendid, resilient birds in freezing rain: a Tanka poem Beauty breaks the ice; The storm within subsides; Ethereal glimpse. Revelation with feathers, Gone… irretrievably lost? Photo credit @Lorne Coughlin Facebook Photo credit @ (20+) Beauty Of The Don (Toronto,DonValley) | Facebook Tanka poems follow a set of rules. They all have five lines and each..
Female or juvenile ruby-throated hummingbird hovering by a dahlia A Haiku poem Fleeting equipoise Hush of regeneration Saved by art alone. How to Write a Haiku, With Examples | Grammarly Blog A haiku is a type of Japanese poem that always uses the same number of syllables in a three-line format: • the first line..
We need beauty because it makes us yearn to be worthy of it. -Mary Oliver Posted here is just one example of the brilliant photography of Lorne Coughlin, the inspiration for this modest poem. Ruby throated hummingbird with dahlia: A Tanka poem A hovering pause, A dazzling floral stopover, Beauty in stasis,..