Friday, 29 September 2023

Michael Gambon reading Yeats




A great Soul has passed. Here is a beautiful reading of the Song of Wandering Aengus by W.B Yeats read by Michael Gambon.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN_VPtGfsw0

Thursday, 21 September 2023

Writing resources


Summer over and it's time to get down to submitting material to publishers. It's really hard to know how to go about this at the best of times but I came across a useful resource list which you may find helpful too.

 https://angelatcarr.wordpress.com/


Photos of Lucca

https://www.discovertuscany.com/lucca/



Wednesday, 20 September 2023

Catureglio, Tuscany, Italy


 

It would have been a pity to miss all this:

cypress topping Terracotta roofs,

going astray in a tangle of olive grove

lizard and agrimony underfoot

and hedge parsley and hartwort

butterflies skimming your lens.

And higher up, frescoed on the chapel roof,

the Virgin Mother radiating benevolence as she ascends into Heaven

And, beyond her, a soul sister of our very own Sile Na Gig

spouting blessings from a mossy fountain shrine

And under a hedge, facing forward and head intact,

a Child of Prague and a plea to heaven for a rainless wedding day.



I discover that this carved face in stone presiding over a fountain basin is called a mascaron. They were used symbolically to ward off evil spirits. See links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mascaron_(architecture)


Copyright 2023 Cathy Leonard All rights reserved

Tuesday, 19 September 2023

A Wedding Prayer

 



The Gathering

for Teresa and Rebecca and Sarah

 

On an Italian hillside they gathered

the scent of lemon, the brush of olive branch

the sound of cicada ringing the air.

He had flown over a thousand miles to be there,

to be placed under a laurel hedge

to be petitioned as a century before

at a grandmother’s wedding

and at a mother’s wedding, decades later.

And so they gathered again, this third generation of women,

to ask for fair weather, fair wind and a rainless day

in the shadow of the Apennines, in the dusk, under a Tuscan sky.



Copyright 2017 Cathy Leonard All rights reserved

Background to the tradition of The Child of Prague statue