“So real it sears my hands, this / drawing, Celtic oak of two minds . . . .”
Kathleen McCoy – Poetry – “Green and Burning (Dar Glas Agus a Dho)” from Kathleen McCoy on Vimeo.
Cookies, candles, cards, and cash . . . with all our running amuck
at the holidays, it’s easy to forget those who have grieved in the past year, or who grieve most at the holidays. 
This year, before you pack up or sit back for your joyful holiday, please remember friends who quietly hunker down in blue corners behind the silver and gold. What can help them? A shoulder, a note, a cup o’ joe or tea . . . and poetry.
More Water Than Words is a chapbook in which “death is considered . . . in the mythical realm of change and possibility” (Marilyn McCabe). Preorders have been extended to Monday, December 26th for this plunge into imagination where an island disappears and reemerges, sheep change color, green trees burst into flame, and “even smudges on glass take on the visage of a lost loved one.” I’m grateful to Finishing Line Press for accepting these poems and publishing them, with one condition: I have to meet a minimum number of preorders, and I’m short. If you can help someone you know in 2017, you’ll also be helping poems enter the world at their appointed time.
Happy holidays to you. May your days be more vibrant, musical, and peaceful than blue, and may you find a poem or two that speak to you.
Hy-Brasil / by Kathleen McCoy
in memory of Carole Dunson Moreau
A big-hearted brainy broad born
to be a teacher went to bed last night
and never rose again, yet the sun
dares shine without her. Chocolate
turns to sand, to salt, to silt and still
the earth is green. Hands must
stroke the open wound to know
what’s real–how Venus burns
brightly because sulphuric acid
reflects the rays of sun. How the isle
of Hy-Brasil knits an Aran mist
whose molecules have passed through
St. Brendan and Molly Brown alike.
How it disappears after five hundred years,
unuttered word at tongue’s moist tip, then
rises from the sea, transmogrified
in fog and crystal skies. In dreams she still
wears streaks of summer in her hair,
inscribes notes of succor with a purple pen
her smile wide as the ocean between us.
The Real McCoy 