This clamoring rapture, this pinprick of suggestion,
These autumn hues with oranges and browns and greens
Flooding the suggestive soul, this beauty.

This life.

Echoed hearts keeping time, like an atomic clock,
Each peg leveled at the quarter hour, this embrace, this completion.

This love.

A distant day, a death knell reeling this stoic stability,
The unimaginable whispering, lurking, envious of our rhythm,
This proportionality with cohorts, these words uttered as if
From transcendent instruments. This music, this truth, this delicate
And precious entity.

This restraint.

A boundary crossed at a distant date, a far off occurrence, a foreignness unforeseen, unwanted, undigested, inert and judgmental, miles and miles between the known and the ideal.

This hope.

Beckoning desire, burning hot as the sun creeps into the day, complete and total, forging, constructing, creating an artifice, a structure of support. This beauty will right the Wrong.
Elemental steps stumbling towards truth, towards forgiveness. This electricity of the promise of morning, the cleansing rains, the growth, the dew, the hint of possibility.

This future.

Clear as a dense damp forest, needled undergrowth snatching sounds from the chasm, the shout to clear the way, the announcement of Gabriel, the words being resisted, rejected and accepted, the denial of all that tortures and pains, the blurred images of life and love on the precipe of reality, the half-truths, the spin, the lies.

The rejection.

The substantial replacing the vacant, the fluid power discreetly leaking towards the good, the embrace of the personal divine, this cosmic intervention, this ground where buried bones give rise to imperial thoughts, actions based on consequence, on the past, on good, on life, on love.

By Michael Gallagher

My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.

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