Studies of Lichen and Church Windows

I posted the above photographs at the Yo Liverpool forum with the following message:

Considering that you guys can post pictures of Arizona wildcats and Fazakerley kestrels, and so on, these photographs of Baltimore lichen might seem a bit tame. The lichen were on photographed on a rotten branch that came down either in the recent storms or conceivably with the East Coast earthquake we had last week.

And who says things aren't exciting round here?



Ballet for 9/11

Like Cirque du Soleil acrobats
flourescent yellow hardhats balance
on scaffolding by the big rose
window of the National Cathedral,
safety net flying above them
to catch the bits and pieces
dislodged by the earthquake,
in this nation battered by
hurricanes, economic despair,
readying for 9/11 remembrance,
sprucing for the beauteous eternal.

Christopher T. George

*********************

Finding the Lost Liverbird

For Jonathan Wild

You emerge from the soot-dark crypt,
from the dust of centuries,
into the Liverpool daylight --

powdered brick, shattered glass
in traceried windows,
in bombed old St. Luke's.

Yet hark: high above,
in a cracked pane
still flies the Liverbird!

Christopher T. George

You can access the thread "Liverpool's Lost Liver Bird - Unseen till now......." at Yo Liverpool started by Cadfael (Jonathan Wild) through the title to this blog posting. Jonathan is responsible for the website on Liverpool's St. Luke's Church which was bombed in 1941 and has been kept in its bombed out state as a war memorial to those killed in the city during the Blitz. As Jonathan explains, after taking a recent tour of the crypt he happened to notice a hitherto unnoticed small pane of remaining stained glass high up in a usually inaccessible part of the church, that contained an image of Liverpool's famous Liverbird.