Category: Poetry

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Poetry

Meteorology Without Apologies

By Rhys Hughes

From Public Domain 
1: A Cloud Like You

In the sky there is
a cloud that looks
exactly like you.
What should I do?

Climb a tall ladder
to the highest rung
and plant a kiss on
your cumulus lips?

Or just wait below
for you to snow,
then collect your
love in a bucket?

The second option
resists adoption
because cumulus clouds
generally produce
little or no precipitation.

I will choose the ladder
before you pass over
and make me a sadder
meteorologist than
my forecast predicted.

 
2: Thunder in the Fountains

I have heard thunder
in the mountains many times
but never before in the fountains
of this elegant city.

What a terrible pity
you aren’t here with me
to share the sonic anomaly
and stare at the lightning
under the bubbles.

Together we would jump
into the booming water
and splash among
the fashionable flashes
of implausible weather.

But you are in trouble,
caught in a whirlpool far away,
spinning faster every day
and poking out your tongue
at my unseen concern.

You make me feel like a worm
that never learned
how to keep my sighs inside
instead of a highly qualified
climate researcher.

 
3: Fog in my Throat

The river fog is thick today
but come what may
I intend to check the barometer
as I do every morning
and scribble down the readings
on potato peelings
because I have run out of paper.

The atmospheric pressure is high,
compressing the air and inhibiting
cloud dispersal: a reversal
of the conditions appertaining
when we resembled kittens:
playful, fluffy and meek,
so long ago, maybe even last week.

It is slowly dawning on me
that you don’t really want romance
with a needy meteorology professor
who can’t afford to buy pants.
I will cover my legs in dough instead
and bake them into bread.
I might never be able to forget
but every step will involve a baguette.
From Public Domain

Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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Categories
Poetry

Poetry by Annette Gagliardi

Annette Gagliardi
Mute Poets
  
Seniors sit in mute repose
our minds gone to sleep -
no poems today.


Shining Insects

living secret lives,
sung in ancient tongues
of empty places, 
silent and mysterious.


Does Life Imitate Art?

 Or is it merely 
a wish to fulfil

one wants to be the subject 
of a Rockwell or Renior

would we be the hung hero or the
oft – slung political satire?


Sometimes 

your actions  — create 
more disturbance 
for others than
they do for you 


ice caps melting

water rising,
seaside cities 

submerged,
Atlantians say, 

welcome  
to the neighbourhood!


An Artist

Double vision 
helped Van Gogh 

create
heat waves

Poet Laureate for the League of MN Poets, Annette Gagliardi is published in numerous journals in Canada, Sweden, England and the USA. Gagliardi’s chapbook: Caffeinated, won the Literary Titan Gold Book Award for 2024 and an International Impact Award, 2025. She has just won the John C. Rezmerski manuscript award, for her book,  Benevolence.

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Categories
Poetry

Poems on Seasons by Snehaprava Das

From Public Domain 
SEASONS 

Seasons gently fold into one another
Silently,
Not making too much noise but
Leaving no space for 
A signature smell of each till finally they could not be told apart.

The secret summer koel sits stiff hidden in the wet boughs
Flapping rain off its drenched feathers,
Its song gone hoarse in the thunder storm.

Monsoon paper-boats lie cramped in parched puddles 
Amidst dead dragonflies littered around in a mess.

A sedate autumn, heavy in its
Yellow bounteousness,
Waits behind the frost-draped trees,
Scorched by the day 
And soaked by the night.

Winter kites struggle
Through the smoky warmth
Of a sweating sky.
Their long curvy tails,
Caught in the crisscrossing strips of clouds,
Wriggle and writhe and roll clumsily
Like flying serpents in many hues.

This is yet another world 
That experiences terrible mood swings.
Seasons blend into one another
In obscure irregularity,
And the century old pattern of living
Goes haywire.
Mankind's mood changes too --
Is really life falling apart 
In this absurd mess?

I wouldn't know, 
I just sit fixing my aching gaze
On the path of another time,
For the return of a tomorrow of a foregone age that has shifted from 
Its course in the anomalous days.
But is sure to find its way one day 
To my waiting window!


LET US MOVE OUT IN TO THE UNKNOWN

Let us move out into the unknown 
In the smoke of sunlight,
Breathing the hollow whispers in the wind,
Straining our ears for the morning music 
That struggles to 
Wriggle out of the frosty boughs.

When the dwarf days reflect on the
Parchment of streets,
When the afternoons slant grim on the terrace 
And hibiscus buds blur on the
Misty splotches of glass, 
It is the time to move into the unknown,
Brushing off the patina on the bones
And fingers of ice tracing out a 
Warm tomorrow
On the shivering edge of the 
Season’s map.

Let us move out into the unknown.
Who knows, we might discover 
The stolen moon in some other sky
Before a star skewered night
Descends in a crumpled heap 
On the stiff shoulders of time...

Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.

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Categories
Poetry

A Poet in Exile: Ukranian Poetry in Translation

Poetry by Dmitry Blizniuk, translated from Ukranian by Sergey Gerasimov

Dmitry Blizniuk

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Five Points, Rattle, Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine and many others.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize and his folio had been selected as a runner-up in the Gregory O’Donoghue Competition and the 2025 Gabo Prize finalist.

Directory:   http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk

A POET IN EXILE 

The sky above the highway is low
like a cunning dog's muzzle above a steaming saucepan.
A one-winged angel of advertising
stands by the roadside:
Aquafresh, perfect water of gods.
And I'm an imperfect verb, just someone in a windbreaker,
with pieces of canvas on my head that flap like a pterodactyl.
Here's my garden,
set back some distance from history,
a prehistoric place for ancient bugs,
and one of them stands on its hind legs
in depression,
while the gloomy autumn stares from above.

We've run away from the simmering house
like milk that is boiling over. Now I'm single again.
The sun hangs behind a ruffled up shed,
like a bloody yolk on a cold frying pan
until the nightfall dumps it in the garbage,
while I'm looking for clean socks, sniffing noisily 
like a dog with a mallard in its jaws.
I've had to leave the city and women behind,
make friends with the blissful world of sticks,
Like Lorca, I managed to avoid a firing squad.
He's grown old, he looks like a grey parrot with an earring,
keeps a rapier in his summer kitchen,
grows grapes and cucumbers, and something sparkles in his eyes
when blood pressure squeezes him
like a tube of Aquafresh.
If not for the Internet, I wouldn't exist.

A cat called Nostalgia
licks his balls on the windowsill.
The lampshade is a temple of flies, priestesses of summer schizophrenia.
I'm still destined to return,
I feel the power of a boomerang within me.
It's going to bend my way and carry me back to my youth,
otherwise, I don't care where.
An eyelid with long lashes has fallen away from the face of a garden doll.
The blue eye is unprotected now,
and the rubber body under the rain feels so at home in the garden.
For how many years will I decompose in the humus
in the garden of gods,
lie in the ground and see the black earth,
black caviar in the eyes of dawn,
then stretch up to the sky as a green needle of grass?
The smell of the rain that has just stopped is like spilled glue.
It's so fresh that I want to run up to the sky, but I can't.
A poet in exile is more than just a poet.
And a man? -- There is no man anymore.

Sergey Gerasimov is a Ukraine-based writer, poet, and translator of poetry. Among other things, he has studied psychology. He is the author of several academic articles on cognitive activity. His stories and poems written in English have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, J Journal, The Bitter Oleander, and Acumen, among many others. The poetry he translated has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. His books include Feuerpanorama: Ein ukrainisches Kriegstagebuch (dtv Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2022) and Oasis (Gypsy Shadow, 2018).

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Poetry

Poetry by Rich Murphy

Rich Murphy
THE SHIFTER PLACE 

In a mobile home, where the commute
to and from jobs idles at any curb,
the resident resides in a bucket seat
addressing a dashboard between shifts.

Lucky to have somewhere to go,
lucky to have shelter, the citizen
without a mailbox steers away
from parking meters until nightfall.

The drive-thru diner stretches out
adjustables and then legs to perform
safety checks around the rusted
and plastic vehicle after supper.

Each tire gets kicked again
because sidewalls bounce back.

Bathroom breaks behind bushes,
clean ups for face, pits, and crotch
alternate among public libraries,
grocery stores, and fast-food joints.

The sacred space with a windshield
and wipers that rarely work, lets in
the light each morning on the room
housing every belonging owned.
 

GAMP CAMP

Under a social umbrella, 
the momentary refugees
shelter from a heavy reign
where connections take
advantage for a team effort.

Daytime tenting under stars 
and stipes while canvassing 
and with evening prayers 
that soldiers join forces 
at the center post powder dry, 
tender-foot-citizens reach 
out into a continental climate.

A thunderhead seams the sky 
and plains in the Southwest.

Sharing insights and vision
with a runner and trusting
the resources stretching,
the cooperation canopy
counts on ribs, heads,
and feet to go the distance
for democracy in a country.


Rich Murphy’s latest collections, Elephant by Bass Clef Books, Storage Shed and Inside Stories by Resource Publications and Mind of Europe: A Genealogy to The Fat Man and Susan Constant by Cyberwit were published 2024-2025, following First Aid and Footholds (2023). His poetry won The Poetry Prize at Press Americana twice for Americana (2013), The Left Behind (2021), and Gival Press Poetry Prize for Voyeur (2008).  

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Categories
Poetry

More Poems by Jim Murdoch

Composition by Piet Mondrain (1872-1944)
 
 
UTILITY
 
Having a right to the truth
is one thing.
 
Having a use for the truth
is something else.
 
Food and shelter make things right—
they’re useful—
 
truths are takers not givers and ask
way more of you
 
than they ever cough up in exchange.
So, a bit like cats.
 

POETRY, ONE POSSIBLE DEFINITION 
 
Intent and Expectation—
           both masochists—
meet up,
find they have nothing to say to each other
and struggle to hide their disappointment.

Jim Murdoch has been writing poetry for fifty years for which he blames Larkin, who probably blamed Hardy. He has published two books of poetry, a short story collection and four novels.

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Poetry

Off the Charts by Ron Pickett

OFF THE CHARTS

I look at an aging chart –
It ends at 80 –
I’m off the charts.
I think of my parents,
They didn’t make it this far.
I’m off their charts, too.
I have aged ancestors.
Well over 90 –
I’m not off their charts! Yet.
I feel more comfortable.
I see another chart –
It ends at 85 –
I’m off the charts again!
Where does it go?
Straight up?
Horizontal? Off the cliff!
I go for a walk.
I feel wonderful,
The sun is shining.
It’s cool and damp.
I love it.
Health-span! Joy span!
Finally, a chart that I’m on!
I’ll keep it!

From Public Domain

Ron Pickett is a retired naval aviator. His 90-plus articles have appeared in various publications. He has published five books: Perfect Crimes – I Got Away With It, Discovering Roots, Getting Published, 60 Odd Short Stories, and Empaths. Ron has had his poems published in Scarlet Leaf, Borderless Journal, and other periodicals. 

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Poetry

Night Falling by SR Inciardi

SR Inciardi
NIGHT FALLING 

Now the changes have stopped and what it’s come to 
has settled in     a curtain masking as it spreads 
so what was at one time discernible is painted 
in thicker darkness.     At this point I see it will not reverse     
another day weathered     another string of moments 
shaded by insistence—soundless sketches of how real objects 
appear bloodless     stripped of their depth     blended 
with their variances. 

It’s not the daylight I miss     but the touch 
of what once stood before me     the comfort seeing it     
knowing it was there in the light     now both unreachable.
It’s the darkness that seems to hold the more natural light 
among the new air that’s turned cold shifting 
between two selves: one that knows 
what the daylight once gave and the other that knows 
when the light returns     each day will be different.

SR (Salvatore Richard) Inciardi was born in New York City and attended Brooklyn College and New York University. His poetry has appeared in USA and Europe in various online and print magazines including Green Ink Poetry, Harrow House Journal, Grey-Sparrow Journal, Written Tales,among others. He was a contributor to Green Ink Poetry’s Kennings: Equinox Collections: Autumn (2024, Amazon)

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Poetry

My Stillborn Dreams by Pramod Rastogi

The Dream of Venus by Salvador Dali (1904-1989). From Public Domain 
MY STILLBORN DREAMS 
 
Clouds have hovered above me
For as long as I can recall.
Perhaps it was their destiny
To shadow me upon every path.
 
Of all the dreams I once beheld,
None became a rallying call
For those that came thereafter —
So many, yet their hymns elude me.
 
Beneath the ceaseless drought of light,
None could bloom or bear my name,
None to endure through centuries,
None to crown me with esteem.
 
A poet haunted by tavern walls,
I have spent a lifetime digging graves
For my stillborn, fleeting dreams,
Lined like bottles along the bar.
 
A fervent poet I remain, though still
My hands fall short of the desire
To etch a metaphor for each tomb.
Yet those I buried, I cherish as my own.

Pramod Rastogi is an Emeritus Professor at the EPFL, Switzerland. He is a poet, academician, researcher, author of nine scientific books, and a former Editor-in-chief (1999-2019) of the international scientific journal, Optics and Lasers in Engineering. He was an honorary Professor at the IIT Delhi between 2000 and 2004. He was a guest Professor at the IIT Gandhinagar between 2019 and 2023. He is presently an honorary adjunct Professor at the IIT Jammu.

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Categories
Poetry

The Meadow by Joy Anne O’Donnell

Joy Anne O’Donnell
THE MEADOW 

The meadow opens nature’s wings
To the morning 
When the soft birds sing
Grass grows brave in sight
Each flower a small prayer
Sunlight gleams with a big heart
Across the sky the air holds me
A meadow of nature’s glamour
And the raindrops silver shimmer

JoyAnne O’Donnell is author of five poetry books. Her latest poetry is in Live Encounters and The Galway Review.

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