A Canvas for Life

When the Green Forgot Its Name Once, the island hummed in birdsong silk, a cradle spun in fog and fire, where rivers wrote in cursive light and mountains whispered love to sea. Her fields were prayers in bloom, each blade of grass a psalm of place— not wealth, but breath, not gold, but grace. But a ship came, full of forgetting. They arrived with names like fences, iron words that split the sky, and maps that bled the living soil into tidy, foreign lies. They took the hills and called them harvest. They took the woods and named them tax. They drowned the stories in stone books, and taught the wind to speak in cracks. She wore a crown of nettle then, our mother— with roots torn from her mouth, her language buried in furrowed rows where ghosts now plough the famine’s drought. The streams no longer sing in Gaeilge. The cows have silence in their eyes. The hedgerows hold their breath for spring that never truly arrives. Still—somewhere behind the hedges, the old tunes twist in hawthorn lim...

In the quiet unraveling of time, there is a pulse, a slow beat that begins to quicken, as if the earth itself is waking up, stretching under the weight of centuries. It is the pulse of creation, of rebirth, and it beats within the veins of women, hidden for so long beneath the dust of old stories, suffocated by ancient structures. But now, the earth trembles beneath their feet, and the sky cracks open to reveal a new horizon. The world, once ruled by the force of iron and fire, now feels the steady force of a hand that is gentle yet firm, of a mind that knows both the depth of compassion and the sharpness of strategy. The world will be ruled not by the roar of power, but by the quiet strength of women who have known what it is to bend, to break, and to rise again. It will be ruled by those who understand the weight of the unseen—the invisible threads that bind us all, the connections between heart and earth, between body and spirit. These rulers will not need thrones, for they will car...

Beneath the skin, a silent scream—   whispers spill,   unspoken truths curl like smoke,   writhing in the bone’s hollow.   We wear our scars like shadows,   afraid of the fire we refuse to touch.   Love? A fractured pulse,   a bite too deep,   a thing that cracks the air,   splinters it into jagged echoes.   We paint it gold,   but it bleeds red,   a wound that hums its own name. Pain is the void between breaths,   a rhythm without sound,   it wears the skin like thread,   stitching together   the fractured pieces of this fragile self.   We run,   but it is a tide   that pulls us deeper. We mask it—   bury the pulse beneath the weight of others,   as if hiding could soften the sting.   But pain?   It is the only shape we carry   through the collapsing...

A crossroads hums beneath a heavy sky,   where rivers of fire rush by my feet.   One path is paved with the rust of bottles,   the other, a whisper of dust, unspoiled,   stretching like a long breath of morning.   The moon’s wild laughter pulls at my chest,   while the sun’s steady gaze tugs my hands,   and I stand, swaying, between them both—   the dance of chaos or the silence of light.   One road promises freedom in forgotten steps,   the other, truth, wrapped in the quiet,   a road untaken, untouched,   but that siren call… it calls,   heavy and sweet,   like a dream where nothing matters   and everything is lost.   But the night’s edge pulls sharp,   and I wonder, for a moment—   do I drink to forget, or to remember   that the wild road may not lead home?

Torn between the known and the unseen,   Two realms stretch, like shadows on a distant shore,   One whispers with the softness of a memory,   The other, sharp as the edge of forgotten light.   I stand in the space where time bends,   A ghost of who I was,   A stranger to who I've become.   Who am I now, if not the echo of the past,   A fleeting dream caught in the web of change?   The familiar calls me back,   But the unknown sings a song I long to hear.   In the silence, I am lost,   Craving the self I once knew,   Needing space, away from the noise,   To breathe, to heal, to rediscover. Alone in my stillness,   The world fades to a whisper,   And within this quiet, I find the forgotten parts,   The pieces of me scattered in time.

  Great Expectations is a bildungsroman set in nineteenth century England, written by Charles Dickens as his thirteenth novel in 1860 and published in 1861. Dickens initially had his novel published as a serial in his weekly periodical All the Year Round, and his success grew after his fourth publishment from four hundred sales, to forty thousand copies per month. After learning that Dickens had his work published in All the Year Round , I felt an attachment to him. It had come to me that he was not simply a novelist, rather a revolutionist for the poor. His publishing method was inspiring, not only was it of intelligence, through the foreboding nature of the novel to entice mass readers, but more so how he crafted it to be easily accessible to those who may have not usually had the opportunity to enjoy the entertainments of literature. He had his work published in the newspaper through his awareness that it could reach the masses, as well as provide entertainment for the lower cl...