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The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

• Prose (noun) written language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure. From the Latin prosus meaning ‘direct’ and prosa oratio ‘straightforward discourse’.

By Jeannine Corcoran

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An early drafts collection of finished and half finished stories or reflections on everything and nothing in particular.

Vernal Equinox, March, 2025

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Today, the equinox- birds at my window, more than just a month ago. Spring, by some inexplicable accident. They call it an elbow season- a time between times- but it’s the beginning of every little change.

New leaves on trees- softest green, as if unsure they were really meant to come out that color at all. Buds in half bloom, flowers, pink and white. Bluebells and cherry blossoms- here just in time, and somehow, worryingly, weeks before they’re due.

In this liminal wonder, nothing is certain of itself, or set too firmly in its ways. The new growth braces for snow. Even the wind gets lost. Stops. Turns around and hopes no one’s noticed. And there’s the sun with its head up, up, up above the clouds, then down again in the skirts of a rainstorm the weatherman could’ve never predicted.

See now? Spring is not a breath hold! It is the gasp of air after lifetimes underwater. A drink for thirsty masses. Exposed, new. Vernal like vulnerable. Not a slow walk to the devil’s season, but an amble. A wander through a woodland, reborn, growing into itself again, also, for the first time.

(last edit: 30/o3/2025)

It Rains Twice in the Forest, December 2024

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–and after the rain passed, the streets were rivers of mercury; their puddles reflecting, imperfectly, every terraced house and tree on the lane.  I wandered along the pavement, beneath the branches of these trees, and listened as the world came alive again.

The birds were the first to appear, the stray cats shortly after. Then there came the sound of cars and the distant laughter of men and women who, having taken cover from the storm, now emerged triumphant and dry.

All was as it was before– only the air smelled of oak trees and pine. The clouds were shades of mourning doves, and the sky was dotted with a business of warm winter butterflies. As I reached the end of the lane, the branches shivered dew drops on my unprotected head and a breeze came up to whisper me a secret. A truth that brought me right back to the wood beside my childhood home, and to a knowledge forgotten in my strivings toward adulthood.

It rains twice in the forest–

(last edited: 01/01/2025)