Absorption
I wish I could tell you more about the man
bent over the drawing of his daughters
Sofi and Sonia, how like Saint Bartholomew
in Rembrandt’s painting, the man becomes so intent
that his pencil is now another finger,
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The Butcher’s Apprentice
First he showed him how to hold the cleaver,
where to make the best cut,
said to keep his eye on the meat’s grain,
hold the blade steady, -
The Cornrow Fire
(Published in Red Rock Review, 2007) The Cornrow Fire The fire took off as though it were a living thing. Hissing, it danced over the dry grasses and up into the resinous pines. As though it were a strange recital, the blaze tangoed onto the boughs where its dance widened in skirts of flame. Snaps…
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Once There Was Light
Once There Was Light, A study on Jane Kenyon ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT https://www.verse-virtual.org/2025/September/henning-dianna-mackinnon-essay-2025-september.html Like Russia’s Anna Akhmatova, whom Jane Kenyon translated in 1985 with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, Jane Kenyon employs images that create emotional pressure, that are told with such accuracy that the reader becomes witness to what Kenyon herself has observed. Jane Kenyon…
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Musical Strings
Musical Strings: Essay on Yeats, By Dianna Henning Published in Psychological Perspectives, issue Thirty-One, 1995, (under a different title of : A Sudden Flaming Word) In an unpublished lecture on “Modern Ireland,” Yeats wrote: “And style, whether of life or literature, comes, I think, from excess, from something over and above utility which…
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The Holiness of Potatoes
While I count my potatoes’ worth,
calculate how much they’ll yield the village,they widen their space against silence.
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