Category: Poetry

Categories
Poetry

Seasonal Whispers

Poetry by Jared Carter

  
 Visitant
 
 What is that calling on the wind
           that never seems a moment still?
 That moves in darkness like a hand
           of many fingers taken chill?
 
 What is it seeking when it flows
           about my head, and seems to wrest
 All motion from my heart, as though
           I still had something to confess?
 
 How can it be it knows my crime –
           this troubled whistling in the air?
 'Tis true, I left her long behind,
           but this is dark, and she was fair.
 
 (First published in The New Formalist)
  
 Snow
 
 At every hand there are moments we
 cannot quite grasp or understand. Free
 
 to decide, to interpret, we watch rain
 streaking down the window, the drain
 
 emptying, leaves blown by a cold wind.
 At least we sense a continuity in
 
 such falling away. But not with snow.
 It is forgetfulness, what does not know,
 
 has nothing to remember in the first place.
 Its purpose is to cover, to leave no trace
 
 of anything. Whatever was there before – 
 the worn broom leaned against the door
 
 and almost buried now, the pile of brick,
 the bushel basket filling up with thick,
 
 gathering whiteness, half sunk in a drift – 
 all these things are lost in the slow sift
 
 of the snow's falling. Now someone asks
 if you can remember – such a simple task –
 
 the time before you were born. Of course
 you cannot, nor can I. Snow is the horse
 
 that would never dream of running away,
 that plods on, pulling the empty sleigh
 
 while the tracks behind it fill, and soon
 everything is smooth again. No moon,
 
 no stars, to guide your way. No light.
 Climb up, get in. Be drawn into the night.
 
 (First published in A Dance in the Street)
 
 
 School of Ragtime, Exercise No. 6
 
 Saw you first one April day
           king, queen, sun, moon
 Whistled you outside to play
           right, left, fork, spoon
 
 Took you down to the river’s edge
           penny candy, paper doll
 Showed you bullheads under the ledge
           butterfingers, jackstone ball
 
 Say goodbye to your last dime
           up, down, cat, dog
 Gonna rag that tune this time
           leaf, tree, axe, log
 
 (First published in The Devil's Millhopper)


Jared Carter’s most recent collection, The Land Itself, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia. His Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by Ted Kooser, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2014. A recipient of several literary awards and fellowships, Carter is from the state of Indiana in the U.S.

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Categories
Poetry

Poetry from Nepal

Written by Krishna Bajgai, translated from Nepalese by Dr. Rupak Shrestha          

             

Krishna Bajgai
Alphabet Adoration

Since the thirst of alphabets 
Was witnessed in his young eyes,
The illiterate parents made him 
Swallow all the alphabets,
Forcing him to memorise.

As soon as he was strong enough
To carry on his back 
A bag of alphabets,
His teachers forcefully fed him 
Tough words from books.

As he grew, 
He started to learn by rote 
History and politics,
Finally, philosophy,
From the professors' antiquated notes. 

He grew up with alphabets,
Learned to play with them,
Understood layered
Meanings of words and sentences,
By days and by nights.

He stuck on his routine life,
Made books his pillow at night,
Surrounded himself with the alphabets 
In classrooms and libraries 
For hours and hours, days and nights.

One day, 
All of a sudden,
A gigantic price was put on his head,
Charged for playing with 
Weapons made of alphabets.

The next day,
An arrest warrant was issued in words.
Soon he was freed 
by the rallying of sentences.

Again, he wrote 
More and more with alphabets
While he continued to live,
Till the last sentence he wrote was –
‘’I adore alphabets.’’

Krishna Bajgai leads the Samakalin Sahitya Pratisthan that he founded in 2014. He publishes and edits www.samakalinsahitya.com. He has thirteen published books, three of his which are taught at the Universities in Nepal for Bachelors’ in Arts degree. Two have been part of research for the Master’s degree curriculum at Tribhuvan University. Decorated by seven prestigious awards in his literary career, he is also affiliated with many literary institutions.

Rupak Shrestha, a renowned figure in the Nepalese Diaspora in the United Kingdom writes free verse, ghazals, songs, muktaks (quatrains), and haiku, does literary criticism and translates. He has been felicitated by different literary institutions for his contribution. He has authored Big Ben ra Samay (Poetry Collection) 2011, Pokhtak (Muktak Collection) 2014, Butte Kimono (Haiku Collection) 2017, and Rupak (Songs’ Album) 2018.

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Categories
Poetry

The Time Traveler’s Love Letter

By Vijayalakshmi Harish

 
 
 
 The Time Traveler’s Love Letter

  
 the rain plays games with me.
 it whispers to the eager earth
 about my broken heart.
 the fragrance that rises, reminds me
 that on this map, we are worlds separated
 by many boundaries, and a void.
 bridges break, flight is forbidden, directions dissolve.
 the wind returns to me every breath I take
 in your name. 
 the understanding that i am the one
 who sailed too soon, got lost, stranded
 in this parallel world
 is its own special ache. 
 i feast on my apologies;
 pretend that my letters
 still find you.
 your colours are all i see
 in the disappearing autumn
 and the unfurling winter.
 i wonder if your seasons 
 are the same.
 how do i heal?
 how do i find my way back?
  

Vijayalakshmi Harish is a writer, poet, and the author of Strangely Familiar Tales, a self-published collection of short stories. Her work has previously been published in various online journals.

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Categories
Poetry

Ides of March

Poetry by Michael R. Burch

 
 Hearthside
  
 “When you are old and grey and full of sleep...”  — W.  B.  Yeats
  
 For all that we professed of love, we knew
 this night would come, that we would bend alone
 to tend wan fires’ dimming bars—the moan
 of wind cruel as the Trumpet, gelid dew
 an eerie presence on encrusted logs
 we hoard like jewels, embrittled so ourselves.
  
 The books that line these close, familiar shelves
 loom down like dreary chaperones. Wild dogs,
 too old for mates, cringe furtive in the park,
 as, toothless now, I frame this parchment kiss.
  
 I do not know the words for easy bliss
 and so my shrivelled fingers clutch this stark,
 long-unenamoured pen and will it: Move.
 I loved you more than words, so let words prove.

(Originally published by Sonnet Writers)
  
 Love Has a Southern Flavour
  
 Love has a Southern flavour: honeydew,
 ripe cantaloupe, the honeysuckle’s spout
 we tilt to basking faces to breathe out
 the ordinary, and inhale perfume ...
  
 Love’s Dixieland-rambunctious: tangled vines,
 wild clematis, the gold-brocaded leaves
 that will not keep their order in the trees,
 unmentionables that peek from dancing lines ...
  
 Love cannot be contained, like Southern nights:
 the constellations’ dying mysteries,
 the fireflies that hum to light, each tree’s
 resplendent autumn cape, a genteel sight ...
  
 Love also is as wild, as sprawling-sweet,
 as decadent as the wet leaves at our feet.

(Published by The Lyric, Contemporary Sonnet, The Eclectic Muse (Canada), Better Than Starbucks, The Chained Muse, Setu (India), Victorian Violet Press, A Long Story Short, Glass Facets of Poetry, Docster, Trinacria, PS: It’s Poetry (anthology), Borderless Journal (India), and in a Czech translation by Vaclav ZJ Pinkava)

 Infinity
  
 for Beth
  
 Have you tasted the bitterness of tears of despair?
 Have you watched the sun sink through such pale, balmless air
 that your soul sought its shell like a crab on a beach,
 then scuttled inside to be safe, out of reach?
  
 Might I lift you tonight from earth’s wreckage and damage
 on these waves gently rising to pay the moon homage?
 Or better, perhaps, let me say that I, too,
 have dreamed of infinity . . . windswept and blue.

(Originally published in broadsheets by TC Broadsheet Verses then subsequently published by Piedmont Literary Review, Penny Dreadful, the Net Poetry and Art Competition, Songs of Innocence, Poetry Life & Times, Better Than Starbucks and The Chained Muse)
  
 Autumn Conundrum
  
 It’s not that every leaf must finally fall,
 it’s just that Spring can never catch them all.

(Published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Deronda Review, Jewish Letter (Russia), Verse Weekly, Brief Poems, Deviant Art, Setu (India), Stremez (Macedonia), and translated into Russian, Macedonian, Turkish, Arabic and Romanian)
 
 Piercing the Shell
  
 If we strip away all the accoutrements of war,
 perhaps we’ll discover what the heart is for.
  
(Published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Deronda Review, Art in Society (Germany), Jewish Letter (Russia), Brief Poems, Poem Today, Complete Classics, Deviant Art, Setu (India), Stremez (Macedonia), Fullosia Press, and translated into Russian, Macedonian, Turkish, Arabic and Romanian)

 Not Elves, Exactly
  
 (after Robert Frost's "Mending Wall")
  
 Something there is that likes a wall,
 that likes it spiked and likes it tall,
  
 that likes its pikes’ sharp rows of teeth
 and doesn’t mind its victims’ grief
  
 (wherever they come from, far or wide)
 as long as they fall on the other side.


   (Originally published by The HyperTexts)

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Michael R. Burch has over 6,000 publications, including poems that have gone viral. His poems have been translated into fourteen languages and set to music by eleven composers. He also edits The HyperTexts (online at www.thehypertexts.com).

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Categories
Poetry

Iranian Poetry: Our Children

By Bijan Najdi, translated from Persian by Davood Jalili

The world does not become bitter with the sword.

It does not become bitter with shooting, cries and fists.

The bitterness of the world

Is not the deer’s necks

And leopard’s tooth

And the death of a fish.

In the throat of a heron, there is not a disaster.

Bitterness lies in

The dolls with bellies full of TNT

Which fell on Vietnam

And on the country lanes of Palestine.

Disaster.

The joy of our children is

That they have seen a doll on the ground

And run with cheers and smiles (towards it).

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Republished with Permission: Our Children was first published in Reality is My Dream brought out by the publisher, Nashr e Markaz.

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Bijan Najdi (Persian: بیژن نجدی‎, pronounced [biːʒæn nædʒdiː]; (15 November 1941 in Khash, Iran – 25 August 1997 in Lahijan, Iran) was an Iranian writer and poet. Najdi is most famous for his 1994 short story collection The Cheetahs who ran with me (Persian: یوزپلنگانی که با من دویده‌اند‎)).

Davood Jalili (1956, Iran) is an Iranian writer, translator and poet. He has published many articles on Iranian websites and magazines and has three published books.

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Categories
Poetry

In Memoriam

These poems by Michael R Burch are dedicated to his mother, Christine Ena Hurt (1936-2020)

 Mother’s Smile
 (for my mother, Christine Ena Burch)
 
 There never was a fonder smile
 than mother’s smile, no softer touch
 than mother’s touch. So sleep awhile
 and know she loves you more than “much.”
 
 So more than “much,” much more than “all.”
 Though tender words, these do not speak
 of love at all, nor how we fall
 and mother’s there, nor how we reach
 from nightmares in the ticking night
 and she is there to hold us tight.
 
 There never was a stronger back
 than father’s back, that held our weight
 and lifted us, when we were small,
 and bore us till we reached the gate,
 then held our hands that first bright mile
 till we could run, and did, and flew.
 But, oh, a mother’s tender smile
 will leap and follow after you!

  
 Deliver Us ...
 (for my mother, Christine Ena Burch)
  
 The night is dark and scary—
 under your bed, or upon it.
  
 That blazing light might be a star ...
 or maybe the Final Comet. 
  
 But two things are sure: your mother’s love
 and your puppy’s kisses, doggonit!

  
 Such Tenderness
  (for all good mothers)
  
 There was, in your touch, such tenderness—as
 only the dove on her mildest day has,
 when she shelters downed fledglings beneath a warm wing
 and coos to them softly, unable to sing.
  
 What songs long forgotten occur to you now—
 a babe at each breast? What terrible vow
 ripped from your throat like the thunder that day
 can never hold severing lightnings at bay?
  
 Time taught you tenderness—time, oh, and love.
 But love in the end is seldom enough ...
 and time?—insufficient to life’s brief task.
 I can only admire, unable to ask—
  
 what is the source, whence comes the desire
 of a woman to love as no God may require?
  
 
 The Poet's Condition
(for my mother, Christine Ena Burch)
  
 The poet's condition
 (bother tradition)
 is whining contrition.
 Supposedly sage,
  
 his editor knows
 his brain's in his toes
 though he would suppose
 to soon be the rage.
  
 His readers are sure
 his work's premature
 or merely manure,
 insipidly trite.
  
 His mother alone
 will answer the phone
 (perhaps with a moan)
 to hear him recite.

 
 Delicacy 
(for my mother, Christine Ena Burch, and all good mothers)
  
 Your love is as delicate
 as a butterfly cleaning its wings,
 as soft as the predicate
 the hummingbird sings
 to itself, gently murmuring—
 “Fly!  Fly!  Fly!”
 Your love is the string
 soaring kites untie.   


 Final Lullaby
 (for my mother, Christine Ena Burch)
  
 Sleep peacefully—for now your suffering’s over.
  
 Sleep peacefully—immune to all distress,
 like pebbles unaware of raging waves.
  
 Sleep peacefully—like fields of fragrant clover
 unmoved by any motion of the wind.
  
 Sleep peacefully—like clouds untouched by earthquakes.
  
 Sleep peacefully—like stars that never blink
 and have no thoughts at all, nor need to think.
  
 Sleep peacefully—in your eternal vault,
 immaculate, past perfect, without fault.
  

First published in The Hypertexts 

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Michael R. Burch has over 6,000 publications, including poems that have gone viral. His poems have been translated into fourteen languages and set to music by eleven composers. He also edits The HyperTexts (online at www.thehypertexts.com).

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Categories
Poetry

Swirling Blues

Painting and poetry by Vatsala Radhakeesoon

Painting by Vatsala Radhakeesoon
Endless Expanse

An endless expanse swirls
over the tropical island.
At the foot of the Meditative Mountain,
birds, bees and butterflies wonder --
who is this mystic blue?

Sometimes it sings
the songs of poised mermaids.
Sometimes it churns
a divine warning
to humankind tempted to swim
in the baseless pit of darkness.

As the rain, wind and sun
harmonize with it,
seeds of security open
the Earth’s eyes
and the light of blessings shelters
the wise eternal soul
of solitary inspiration.

Vatsala Radhakeesoon is an author/poet and artist from Mauritius. She has had numerous poetry books published and she is currently working on her flash fiction/short stories book. She considers poetry as her first love and visual art as a healer in all circumstances. Vatsala Radhakeesoon currently lives at Rose-Hill, Mauritius and is a freelance literary translator and an interview editor of Asian Signature journal.

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Categories
Poetry

Poems by Jared Carter

Jared Carter
 
            After the Rain
 
 After the rain, it’s time to walk the field
 again, near where the river bends. Each year
 I come to look for what this place will yield—
 lost things still rising here.
 
 The farmer’s plow turns over, without fail,
 a crop of arrowheads, but where or why
 they fall is hard to say. They seem, like hail,
 dropped from an empty sky,
 
 Yet for an hour or two, after the rain
 has washed away the dusty afterbirth
 of their return, a few will show up plain
 on the reopened earth.
 
 Still, even these are hard to see—
 at first they look like any other stone.
 The trick to finding them is not to be
 too sure about what’s known;
 
 Conviction’s liable to say straight off
 this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay,
 and miss the point: after the rain, soft
 furrows show one way
 
 Across the field, but what is hidden here
 requires a different view—the glance of one
 not looking straight ahead, who in the clear
 light of the morning sun
 
 Simply keeps wandering across the rows,
 letting his own perspective change.
 After the rain, perhaps, something will show,
 glittering and strange.
 
 (Reprinted from Darkened Rooms of Summer.)
 
 
             Wanderer
 
 Where all the hills are silent now,
           and through the trees
 The wind, that once shook every bough
           and blossom, leaves
 
 Only the slightest breath. Here, birds,
           now half asleep,
 Content with songs that have no words,
           find shelter deep
 
 Within the forest. Here, release
           from constant quest,
 From endless pathways. Soon, like these,
           you too shall rest.
 
 (First published in Clementine Unbound.)

Jared Carter‘s most recent collection, The Land Itself, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia. His Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems, with an introduction by Ted Kooser, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2014. A recipient of several literary awards and fellowships, Carter is from the state of Indiana in the U.S.

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Categories
Poetry

Dust

By Devangshu Dutta

 
 

 Dust 
 Dust in the mouth
 Do you taste the victory whose reason 
      you have long forgotten,
 Or the defeat whose arrival terrorises your nights?
 Does it matter?
 Whether it is the romantic reminder 
       of stardust beginnings,
 Or the foreteller of its entropic end?

Devangshu Dutta is an entrepreneur, business advisor and a student of life. His published writing in recent years has largely been restricted to business analyses, but he’s exploring publishing in other spaces.

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Categories
Poetry

Song for Continued Drifting

By Glen Armstrong

 
 In my youth I walked the midlands.
 Oh how I walked, hi-lili. 
  
 A bird that purrs is a cat.
 A shadow that fails
  
 to shade is just 
 for show like my threadbare rain
  
 poncho. 
 I’ll have more on that 
  
 in a moment.
 Hi-lili, hi-lo.
  
 In my youth I wore Doc Martens
 bought at the outlet mall
  
 in Ohio, hi-lili, hi-lili, 
 hi-lo. 
  
 What I wanted most
 was to lower myself
  
 to just about anyone’s level.

Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has three current books of poems: Invisible Histories, The New Vaudeville, and Midsummer. His work has appeared in Inverse Journal, Ræd Leaf Poetry India, and Sonic Boom.

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