Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.A Poem from 'Verbum et Verbum' by Micheal FanningLove, Shame and Rage in YugoslaviaI cannot reach you.Snow has fallen .... White canvases.But in this nuclear winterour ordnance drivers still brazenthe crunching ice.But I cannot meet youin this compromised war zone.There is little point to discoursein this flash point of history.My word is ad hoc. The snow driftshave slowed the movements of our front lines.I know that you slept - rats skulked overheadand our love surely mortified. I shouldn't evenbe happy to see you.Ironically on the Feast of The EpiphanyI bring you gifts of nothingness, despairmortal love, shame and rage.Thankfully you have nothing for me.Rays of sunlight beam through on the ice-swollen lake and snow garmented fields.Distasteful smiles light up facesas we sense a doomed spring offensive,fallout and unconditional surrender.Copyright Micheal FanningProduct DescriptionIn the best of these poems Micheal Fanning relives a South Kerry childhood dominated by the sea: 'the great comforter'. Images are simple and memorable: "the horse gallops/into the lungs of the wind." He moves from the subtle colours of this bird-filled landscape to apocalyptic scenes of massacre in Rwanda, famine in Ethiopia, Romanian orphanages, a fox hunt, a body riven with cancer. He depicts the early monk scribes who painted otters and griffins to illuminate their manuscripts, much as he seeks images to make sense of a world torn by violence, hurt, and unspoken feelings. Grappling with issues of suffering and faith, he constructs his own stone wall of understanding, cementing it with a host of Classical and early Christian allusions: "The Maker arranges nouns, verbs, adjectives .. and places stones to structure/the storm strafed wall."