shot glass
title
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Brian Kirk is a poet and short story writer from Dublin. He was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2014 and 2015. His first poetry collection After The Fall was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poem "Birthday" won the Listowel Writers' Week Irish Poem of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. His short fiction chapbook It's Not Me, It's You won the inaugural Southword Fiction Chapbook Competition and will be published in autumn 2019. He blogs at www.briankirkwriter.com.


Brian Kirk


 

Komorebi*

Think of a place where you might escape from the world.
There are trees, ferns, hyacinth, alium, moss carpets underfoot,
sprung, fungal, safe should you trip on old roots. Now imagine
walking through a storybook wood that holds only danger
and threat? How hard it would be to go on with so much
at stake. The mind needs a retreat as much as the body
to hide from the world, a space to escape itself. The mind
is the body's liberator and gaoler. Think of a place where
light flickers through a translucent canopy, dancing,
where silence is broken only by birdsong, where colour is dappled,
the sun's rays sometimes green, sometimes gold. There is a word
for a place such as this, but we do not know it. Not yet.



*Komorebi - A Japanese word describing the effect of sunlight filtered through the leaves of trees