‘Ill-fated Associations’ - James Metcalf writes about a life shattered by war
Rachael Parker shares three of her poems with The Yorker
The Yorker talks to three student playwrights premiering their work in the Drama Barn next term.
Photosoc's theme for this fortnight's competition was 'Christmas'. Its winner, Oliver Wood, discusses his work.
Today I sent myself meandering down some sunlit path
Yesterday’s raindrops still glistening on the wallowing emerald canopies
While the weeping beech shed her toffee-apple tears, I glanced at the clean white sleeves beneath my tired overcoat and the symmetry pleased me
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From the heavens came a strange woman
Wielding a syrupy basket of light, beckoning me forth from my imagined split-second of existence into a place she called ‘belonging’.
She had with her a young boy, who embraced me without hesitation
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I’d taken a job in the continuity department, you see
Day after day I would watch as my superiors pieced together my ambitions
One, two, and three
Wheeling them from assembly into the sanitised world of the office cubicle; I never quite forgave them for that…
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I spent the next four eternities picking grapes in some lonely old vineyard
Everyday I would walk with the young boy, buying groceries from a vagabond going by the name of ‘Sal Paradise’
He showed me how to shell peas
The boy watched beaming as I ran my thumbnail down the centre, splitting the atom as five glorious orbs fell into the wooden pale below
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Later,
The night air tinkled with the copper-wound clatter of acoustic guitars as she fell asleep on my shoulder, the dewy melon hills rose like Olympus beneath the bursting crush of the sky
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I felt happy with my new life, and while I longed to run once more through that infernal railway station to the embrace of my mother and father
For all which now rests in fading memory
I’d never felt elation either
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Tonight I find myself sat again
In the big, old, leather chair on her veranda
Gazing in wonderment
Beneath the candle-lit ceiling of stars
In this instance I remember thinking
‘this is but some borrowed occurrence in a feature-length episode of one well-worn tale of otherness’
Reclining idle I recalled something Jack once said to me: ‘all beings are dream beings. Dreaming is that which ties all mankind together’
And as my troubles exploded like fireflies towards the centrelight
Removing all traces of that which is cynically called reality
I looked slightly out of focus as I gazed at the man I had become
beautiful
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