Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Seven
November- December 2025
No Heaven, poems by John Kenny.
No Heaven
No heaven will judge us
for our cruelty to each other
and our fellow creatures,
bred to slaughter,
endless generations burned,
pole-axed and dismembered,
bones piled high, crushed,
powdered, settled to earth,
entrails used, abused, repurposed,
drains clogged with offal,
blood gouting to rivers that
enrich our native clay
with an ancient memory of
all that we have accomplished
since we sprang from
our forgotten Eden.
No heaven, no, but Eden
yes, her splendour buried,
will disinter her savage beauty
and deliver us her answer,
wipe us from this troubled
sphere and leave the air,
as after a brief rainstorm,
sweet and clean.
Brave New World
In the City Garden park, Sofia,
clustered at one end, a
scattering of market stalls
I wander through this
bleak winter day.
Amongst the knick knacks
bundles of photographs,
sepia-toned portraits
of uniformed men
and their families.
1880s, 1890s? some
from the Great War,
no names on their backs,
no dates, no hint of
who they were,
and next to them,
thrown into boxes, heaps
of tarnished medals, awarded
across many wars, most
Russian, some German,
sold generations ago to
feed hungry mouths in the
wake of national fervour,
all glory gone in
harsh new realities,
photos left in abandoned
apartments, medals changing
hands, to be picked over by
anonymous fingers in a
brave new world their
owners never got to see.
Bray Head
Halfway up Bray Head I turn
and cast about to catch the
silent advance of waves
to shoreline, flattened by
distance, hushed by
sun-drenched air,
the pebbled beach dotted
with people, tiny dogs walking
along the promenade, buggies
pushed, toddlers toddling
handheld on its low wall,
kiosks vending ice cream,
couples on green baize grass
by the bandstand, shimmering
in heat’s haze, savouring the
vinegared tang of newspapered
chips, engaged in lives from
which I’m forever barred,
and up in the blue cloudless
vault wheel gulls released
from this earth’s grip,
crying free, unbounded
by our concerns, and
uncaring.
© John Kenny
John Kenny is a writer and editor from Dublin, Ireland. His short fiction has been published in Uncertainties, Revival Literary Journal, The Galway Review, Transtories and many other magazines and anthologies. His poetry has featured in StepAway Magazine, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Smashing Times, Every Day Poets and Poem Alone, and is forthcoming in The High Window and Prole. John is also winner of the NurePoets Corner Award 2025, judged by John F. Deane, and has edited three anthologies of short fiction: Writing4All: The Best of 2009 (2009), Box of Delights (2012), and Decade 1: The Best of Albedo One (2016).