Category: Poetry

Categories
Poetry

Rhys Hughes on Poetry

THE LAST POEM

I wanted the last poem
I ever wrote
to be profound and clever
and I wanted
to write it outdoors.

But the weather was awful
and my coat
was unsuitable,
so like a dutiful idiot
in my wooden hut
I wrote it with a carrot
carved in the form of a pen.

Luckily I was only ‘like’
a dutiful idiot
and not an actual dutiful
idiot, thus the poem that was my last
turned out to be
quite a good one. Thank heavens for
similes as broad as grins.

And the poem in question?
It went like this:
A parrot in a garret drinking claret
and a pen that is a carrot
are disparate.

 
POEMS OF THE FLOATING WORLD

Haiku floats like boat
The middle line does not sink–
Watertight canoe

A shipshape limerick from Iran
was drifting in circles like a fan.
Each line was a hull,
three pecked off by a gull,
and it became just a catamaran.

A bold ode to a seaworthy sight
floating on the estuary,
a schooner
getting ready to leave at night
to take advantage
of the light of the moon,
while the navigator hums
a tune to Luna
because the sooner
they arrive at their destination,
the faster this crooner
will be reunited with the woman
he calls his wife.

This is a four-line poem
about an anchor that was weighed
and brought to the surface
a surprised mermaid.

And this is a rhyming couplet
about a ship sailing into a sunset.


Poems are rowing
Distant islands are closer
Rhyme schemes are drowning
The syllables are counting
We say tanka very much

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

Humanity is an Ocean, Waiting

By Peter Devonald

The sea is a distant relative we all should visit more --
we are all at least sixty percent water, ebb and flow of oceans,
 
so sit and watch the waves awhile, watch them come and go,
chanting miracles, recalling the impressive and the blessed
 
transformations, visions and wonders; then bring them home again.
Waves crash and sing sweet sea-shanty songs, determined just to be,
 
convey such wild optimism, inspiration and belief, the sea endlessly
shifting, shifting, relentless. We have met a thousand times or more --
 
ancient, faithful fury and calm, calm, such passion and resonance.
All things are possible, hold on, hold on, change viewpoints and perspectives,
 
seasons shifting relentless, lovers, yearning, learning, the sea, slowly shifts,
becomes me, impassioned with strong feelings, feel every wave and tide,
 
the gentle tide and time. Did you live a good life? Did a good life live you?
Oceans touch shores, softly, gently, lilting, losing, tenderly into sleep

Peter Devonald is joint winner of FofHCS, Waltham Forest Poetry and Heart Of Heatons Awards. Published extensively, he has been nominated for the Forward Prize and the Best Of the Net. He is a Poet-in-residence in Haus-a-rest. 

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Categories
Poetry

Global Warming in Verse

Poems by Michael Burch

The King of Beasts in the Museum of the Extinct

The king of beasts, my child,
was terrible, and wild.

His roaring shook the earth
till the feeble cursed his birth.

And all things feared his might:
even rhinos fled, in fright.

Now here these bones attest
to what the brute did best

and the pain he caused his prey
when he hunted in his day.

For he slew them just for sport
till his own pride was cut short

with a mushrooming cloud and wild thunder;
Exhibit "B" will reveal his blunder.


After the Poetry Recital

Later there’ll be talk of saving whales
over racks of lamb and flambéed snails. 


Evangelical Fever

Welcome to global warming:
     temperature 109.
You don’t believe in science,
     but isn’t the weather Divine?


God to Man, Contra Bataan

Earth, what-d’ya think of global warming?
Perth is endangered, the high seas storming.
Now all my creatures, from worm to man
Know how it felt on the march to Bataan.

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into fourteen languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers.

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Categories
Poetry

Nature Poems by Jared Carter

Morels. Courtesy: Creative Commons
              MORELS

(In temperate regions of the northern hemisphere,
over seventy species of the highly prized
mushroom, Morchella, may be found)


This is the way, through apple trees
          gone wild – on past
The ruined church, where branches seize
          and catch – at last

An opening in the fence. We
          come every spring
Along a path that gradually
          bends ’round, to bring

Us back to what, still hidden here,
          not far below,       
Occasionally will reappear
          in the patched snow.

             SHORELINE

Then in late winter, after rain
          has swept the sea,
And neither presence can explain
          the mystery

Of sand unblemished, or of waves
          that wander there,
Though nothing follows, nothing saves
          those margins where

Half circles fade. As from a dream,
          a ragged frond
Of seaweed surfaces, and gleams,
          and then is gone.
Courtesy: Creative Commons

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

‘Fragrance of Childhood’

Poetry by Alpana

GULGULA-GULGULE

This is going to be sweet.
Leave behind the sour and savoury.
Come, feel the taste of this Haryanvi delight.
Monsoon special.
Teej* treat.
Take some wheat flour,
Add jaggery,
And a dash of fennel powder,
Leaving your hands and kitchen aromatic.
Give it a good mix with some water.
Keep your hands moving.
We don't want lumps in our gulgule. And in life, in general.
Glad, you noticed, they are called gulgule.
Gulgula in singular.
Gulgule in plural.
Packed with sweetness of dadi's* love and profound memories,
Deep fried in mustard oil and tossed in a huge thali,
Emanating the fragrance of childhood fondly wrapped in our hearts,
So that we may catch a whiff of love once in a while
Only to realise how loved we are.
Frantically moving and crossing various stations,
of remembrance and recollections.
Gulgule.
Embellished with tokens of toil, patience and warmth.
Never in a perfect shape
But evermore fitting for a perfect time.
Try it
For you will relish it.
And taste a flavour from the bylanes and dhaanis* of Haryana!


*Hariyali Teej is a festival of North India celebrated in the month of monsoon.
*Dadi -- grandmother
*Dhaanis are small conglomeration of houses located mostly in Punjab and Haryana
Gulgule. Courtesy: Creative Commons

Alpana teaches in a government college of Gurugram, Haryana. When not working on her laptop, she can be spotted making lists of her essentials, her husband’s sloth hours and her toddler’s tantrums.

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Categories
Poetry

Autumnal Musings by George Freek

Courtesy: Creative Commons
A POEM ON THE NEW MOON

Fall is as cold as the moon.
Fierce clouds tell me
snow is coming.
Monks, seeking comfort,
mutter incantations
in their self-absorbed occupations,
but in their trance,
they ignore the signs
in the sky. I watch the moon
as it dies.
Where does heaven lie?
I stare at that dimensionless sky.
If life is a mistake,
to whom should we apologise?

George Freek’s poetry has recently appeared in The Ottawa Arts Review, Acumen, The Lake, The Whimsical Poet, Triggerfish and Torrid Literature.

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Poetry

The Time for the Janitor to Pass By



Poetry and translation from Korean by Ihlwha Choi

THE TIME FOR THE JANITOR TO PASS BY 

Birds colliding with the glass window and falling,
The janitor sweeps them away with familiarity.
Birds that once lived in the square of the sky,
On Ukraine's transparent glass window,
On Myanmar's ruthless glass window, they plummet.

The time for the janitor to pass by again.

Flowers we see are like a fleeting paradise,
The way we viewed America once.
Glass windows erected over America, horrible barriers.
The time for the janitor to pass by again.
The mother bird becomes a glass wall of death,
Time and time again, a baby bird falls beneath the glass wall.
From the glass window of the sea,
To the soundproof walls of the land, colliding silver wings,
Many things plummet daily onto the blue star.

Ihlwha Choi is a South Korean poet. He has published multiple poetry collections, such as Until the Time When Our Love will Flourish, The Color of Time, His Song and The Last Rehearsal.

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Categories
Poetry

Unmask Me

By Nirmala Pillai

Time leaves footprints on my body,
Wrinkles my skin, greys my hair.
Makes me tell a lie with Dyes and Botox;
But my neck and fingers refuse to lie: 
Lying still, won’t cooperate with me,
Whisper the ageing lie, the mirror is a referee.
Every time I face my reflection,
It only stares back,
A nirvana-detached yogi,
Doing its duty.
Every time I face the glass -- 
Silvered true with oxides,
I fall into despair: 
The mirror only makes it worse.

Beauty lies in the eyes
Of the beholder;
Naked truth lies, in my image.
The dead truth lies,
On the crinkled parchments
Of my neck and hands.
The veins like old banyan roots,
Strangle the fleshless bones.
Muscles are only memories --
Of a shape I used to be.
No scalpel changes me.
No pills, No creams, No chants:
Only muffler, stoles and gloves.
To play hide and seek.
Some sad emojis left to laugh,
With me, with me.

Nirmala Pillai is a writer, painter, and an Ex-Civil Service Officer, who has published three collections of poems and one of short stories. Her published works have appeared in PEN, The Asian Age, Indian Literature, Bare Root review from Minnesota University, Poetry Can, UK [Poetry Southwest], The Telegraph, The Little Magazine, Cha; An Asian literary journal.

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Categories
Poetry

Ahilya Park

By Prof. Sagar Mal Gupta

AHILYA PARK 

Three monkeys
with their babies
romped merrily in the park,
gambolled and jumped from one branch to another.
Twice, the group of monkeys crossed my path,
Preventing me from walking forward.
Three children swung on the swings.
On the adjoining the pillar,
squirrels, sparrows and sandpipers
shared food together with glee. 
All this added to my joy of
walking in the park.
The park is not just an assemblage of trees,
plants and creepers,
but a rendezvous for
men, animals, birds and trees
and together they exist,
happily and blithely.

Sagar Mal Gupta, educated at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Hawaii, earned his Ph. D. in Linguistics from the University of Hawaii USA. He has fifty-six years of teaching experience of English language and Literature in India and abroad. He has published four books of poetry in English and his poems have been published in a number of national and international journals of repute.

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Categories
Poetry

History in the Making

By Pramod Rastogi

Clio, Muse of History, Painting by
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1656). Courtesy: Creative Commons
History has a long past, shrouded
In layers of the mist of Time,
Most of which is unseen in a museum. 
History has a future vast as an ocean.

Of times whose tides are frontline,
We are in the middle of the flow
Between a past catching up on us
And a future we are catching up to.  

We must dig deep in the gaping ruins 
To perceive all that remains cloaked 
In the halls of maligned controversies, 
In tune with ruling elites of the times.  

Painted dark might be the white,
And painted white might be the black,
This is how history is entrenched
And has seen snowflakes fall in the Sahara.

The past is in the jaws of the present
Which is incessant in its slither
Into the jaws of a future, rather nebulous, 
To drag it into the past sliding behind.

A lava of tears flows down the cheeks  
Of history as we wield its resolute truth 
Until it remains a shadow of itself.
It sheds one last tear and sails on.

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 has published over ninety poems in international literary journals.

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