London.
Photo credit: By LYDIA and her SALAD DAYS (Flickr: BANKSY : LONDON) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
All posts by Eric Robert Nolan
It’s a windy, rainswept morning in Roanoke, Virginia.
So how about a poem about a windy, rainswept morning?
“This Windy Morning,” by Eric Robert Nolan
The gales cry,
their sounds rise,
so strangely like
the wailing of children.
The gales
have ripped a rift in purgatory.
Along the low hill’s haze
and indistinct palette of grays,
the thinning slate shapes
are either columns of rain,
or a quorum of waifish wraiths.
Condemned but inculpable
are those little figures —
long ago natives maybe — in an ironic,
insufficient sacrament:
this obscuring rain’s
parody of baptism.
If that faultless chorus
should never see heaven,
they will ever be wind without end
their lamentations ever
shrill within rare
arriving spring downpours.
Always will the squall
imprison their calls.
You and I should refrain
any temptation to breach
these palisades of rain —
lest we be greeted by each
iron-colored countenance:
the sorrowing slim nickel
of an infant’s visage,
little boys’ graying faces,
the silvering eyes of the girls.
© 2017 Eric Robert Nolan
Photo credit: By Rodrigo Paredes from Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina (Raindrops on the window) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Cover to “The New Yorker,” Edna Eicke, October 27th, 1945
Tis’ the season.
You know which one I mean. Halloween 2018 is advancing on us like a creeping black cat. I hope you guys are getting into the spirit. I know a lot of you are already way ahead of me.
I know Emily E. James is. She spends most of her time being a first-class editor (you can find her website right here), but she also finds time for her own unique brand of truly macabre handmade Halloween decorations. As you can see, she is a sublimely talented woman (albeit one who is quite mad).
Emily has an Etsy store for her creations in the works. I’ll post it here when it becomes available — lest the little infernal monsters find and haunt me.
“The Wounded Man,” Gustave Courbet, 1850
to be close – A Poem by Sam Rose
Cover to “The X-Files: Season 10” #3, Carlos Valenzuela, 2013
IDW Publishing.
It’s pumpkin season in Roanoke, Virginia.
October 2018.
“Athenais,” John William Godward, circa 1908
Oil on canvas.
Throwback Thursday: Bush’s “Machinehead” (1994)
This is the 90’s-est song that ever 90’s-ed. Sure, a song by Ace of Base, Oasis or Right Said Fred will take you right back as well, but none of them had the staying power of Bush’s “Machinehead.”
The song is from the band’s “Sixteen Stone” album in December 1994, about seven months after I graduated from Mary Washington College. It it was all over the airwaves. I played the radio a lot, because buying a lot of CD’s was a pricey proposition for somebody just out of school. And, man, did I blast this.
