Category: Poetry

Categories
Poetry

Poems by Gale Acuff

Gale Acuff
I don't want to die, not any more than                                         

anyone else, but in my Sunday 
School class are ten-year-old girls who say they
can't wait and would can themselves except that
they'd go to Hell and burn forever, what
they want is to die and live with Jesus
and when they asked me if I do as well
I said Well, maybe, if I won't get bored
and one got angry and said You're going
to fry in Hell for that someday and her friend
added in the oil of your own skin yet
you'll never be consumed completely and
I said Well, I'm not afraid and she said
We're more afraid for you than you are so
I said How about a kiss? That killed me.


No one wants to die--well, I take that back:

My Sunday School teacher’s sure keen on death
and talks about it every class, she knows
that we're all getting older and some day
we'll all die though probably not the same
day and same way but make no mistake, death
is unavoidable so prepare ye
now to be good enough at least to go
to Heaven and dwell there for eterni
-ty instead of Hell (ditto for Eter
-nity) and we never know when God will
snatch us from life back to Heaven to be
judged a saint or sinner and I want to
see you all in Heaven with me someday.
I added If you go. She has good teeth.

Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine.

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Categories
Poetry

Poetry by George Freek

Courtesy: Creative Commons
ON SITTING TO WRITE A POEM 

We are the inferior artists.
Life has its own poetry.
Leaves hang in the wind,
just waiting out the weather,
and sparrows cut
tunnels through the night,
finding cracks in
a stony darkness.
A lioness who slaughtered a deer,
drags the carcass miles
to feed her cubs
and in the distance there are
great mountain peaks
which strain 
towards the stars
like stiff unyielding fingers.


NATURE 

Nature attacks us relentlessly.
Leaves squirm as they die.
They have no mind
to wonder why.
The stars seem small to me,
but why they’re here
is an unsolvable mystery.
The moon appears
in a threatening disguise,
then reappears
in funereal guise.
A fierce wind suddenly blows,
so I hurry home.
I’ve wasted a hour,
and still know nothing more
than those dead leaves.

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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Categories
Poetry

Ongoing Catastrophe

By Vaishnavi Saritha

'You are enough'
I told her
For she has stopped going out.
I don't know what went wrong --
A media catastrophe?
Last Sunday I saw her trying to make herself throw up
Because the little Joe told her she wasn't good enough.
I saw her exercising -- it was barely past 2am --
To get those washboard abs and thigh gaps.
I saw her trying on Fair and Lovely…
Well, I heard they were renamed
For she was called ugly by her 'best friend'.
I saw her cloistered inside the room
as she chose to shut out the sun.
I saw tons of weight-loss apps,
All luring her for premium memberships.
I saw her feed full of fitness gurus --
Once again shaming many like her.
Was it the Big Brother Magazines to blame?
All the Vogue and Marie Clare
Or the Gucci and Dior ?
I saw her throwing out all her barbies
For they represented all she envied.
Disgusted by her flabby arms,
I saw her tossing In the wishing well, her entire worth.
For she was the next day’s scholar and poet.
I saw those airbrushed profile pictures
Burned at stake, wish I could hold many like her

Vaishnavi Saritha is a literature student currently pursuing her Master’s degree from NSS College Pandalam.  Her areas of interest are Narratology , Gender Studies and Gothic Fiction.

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Categories
Poetry

‘Does home always refer to the homeland?’

By Isha Sharma

FINDING THE SELF IN ROOTED ROUTES

When I cross any boundary of cartography
New cultures paint my traditional tales.
Why does hybridity then become a cultural conflict
And I the cultural ‘other’?
But with no fixed roots,
Trying to find meaning of the self,
I take different routes. 

When cultures assimilate, diversity is born.
When integration takes place, 
Identities change grounds.
When identities are in a flux
What becomes of our roots?
Are roots always to be found in a place called ‘home?’
And does home always refer to the ‘homeland'?

What about the ones who try to locate themselves
In rootless geographies,
Where do they belong?
In roots or routes?
For their home lies in ambiguity and diversity,
As it remains hidden in the personal history
Of many diasporic experiences that
History refused to notice.

Isha Sharma is a student of Delhi University. She is passionate about translating emotions into verses. Her writings have been published in Kitaab International, The Indian Periodical, The Indian Express, Indus Women Writing Newsletter, The Feminist Times and The Tribune (Student Edition).

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Categories
Poetry

‘Prayer beads, what may come’

By Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Courtesy: Creative Commons
Hand of great age – what you find wrapped 
around you in shawl-like cover, in humble endowment;
prayer beads, what may come,
this mustiness of basement galleries,
the art of Dutch colonials loading ships  
no man can remember sailing 
and the bell in the distance is for dinner 
and never church; breaks in wrinkled skin, now weeping –
a pensioner’s sudden chill and you are laid up for days!
What is gallant is gone and it is these many long
silences that remain.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. 

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Categories
Poetry

Saint Sydney by Asad Latif

Courtesy: Creative Commons
SAINT SYDNEY
For David Fogarty

St Leonards station quite near Sydney Central
sends a Jew on an errand for the eternal.
A bag to deliver food tied firmly behind,   
she steadies her feet, balancing to find,
what her wandering eyes shortly meet,
the daily salvation of an Australian street.
Her cycle is rusting but her pedalling's divine.
Abraham, make a hasid's destination thine.

The rain drives me to destiny and a bus.
The skies like famished guests descend on us
between the ordered feast and the wind-swept dusk.
Ages recede to speed in the rising dust. 
Marist College boys smile. The eternal's outside
but seats blossom into girls inside.
There's nothing to see but the repentance of trees
bowing in hurried homage to me.

The cyclist's gone some other way
in the epiphany of a single day.
Sometimes a short journey's enough
to turn transience to a kind of love
lurking in a Jewish bicycle,
a Christian school bag and the final
words of a Muslim on a bus
passing the sufi jaywalker in all of us.

* a member of Jewish sect in Palestine in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC

Asad Latif is a Singapore-based journalist. He can be contacted at badiarghat@borderlesssg1

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Categories
Poetry

Bonfire by Ihlwha Choi

Translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi

Courtesy: Creative Commons
BONFIRE 

You are the wood,
I am the bonfire,
I embrace you and burn intensely.
You nestle in me
and ignite a brilliant flame.
In the pitch-black darkness,
in the biting cold that burns the flesh,
you disappear in the blaze,
and I, following you, am consumed.
You are the bonfire,
I am the wood,
in this fervent life we share.

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

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Categories
Poetry

Wars and Rumours of Wars

By Ron Pickett

We thought it might be over;
Wars and rumours of wars.
Then Russia invaded.
It was a short incursion,
They said.
Ukraine was their territory 
Anyway, anyway!
They said,
It was too costly to try we thought,
Wars and rumours of wars.
Sanctions! we said.
They couldn’t take the sanctions.
The Russians couldn’t.
But they fought back
The Ukrainians fought back
They weren’t supposed to.
They were supposed to be easy pickins’;
A walk in the park,
A few weeks, an exercise
A year has passed.
60000 Russians are dead. Or 200000
15 thousand Ukrainians or 100000
Ukraine is blackened rubble.
The snow is red with blood.
All is dark
There is no winner.
We were wrong,
We were so wrong!
Wars and rumours of wars 
They are still there.
Peace is not a part of our nature!
China lusts for Taiwan.
Shalom.

Ron Pickett is a retired naval aviator with over 250 combat missions and 500 carrier landings. His 90-plus articles have appeared in numerous publications. He enjoys writing fiction and has published five books: Perfect Crimes – I Got Away with It, Discovering Roots, Getting Published, EMPATHS, and Sixty Odd Short Stories.

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Categories
Poetry

Spring Poems by Michael R Burch

Courtesy: Creative Commons
SPRINGTIME PRAYER
 
They’ll have to grow like crazy,
the springtime baby geese,
if they’re to fly to balmier climes
when autumn dismembers the leaves ...
 
And so I toss them loaves of bread,
then whisper an urgent prayer:
“Watch over these, my Angels,
if there’s anyone kind, up there.”
 
MOON POEM
 
I climb the mountain 
to inquire of the moon ...
the advantages of loftiness, absence, distance.
Is it true that it feels no pain,
or will she contradict me?
 
AH! SUNFLOWER
 
(After William Blake)
 
O little yellow flower
like a star ...
how beautiful,
how wonderful
we are!
 
A POSSIBLE EXPLANATION FOR THE MADNESS OF MARCH HARES

 
March hares,
beware!
Spring’s a tease, a flirt!
This is yet another late freeze alert.
Better comfort your babies;
the weather has rabies.

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

Learning by Soul

By Anannya Dasgupta

AATMASAAR
( for Aparna & Seema) 


 
“Aatmsaar kar lijiye”* she said,
after a poem with a life lesson
had been recited -- “You know,
learn it by heart, memorise it.”
 
How beautiful a way to learn --
to have a saar, a gist, an insight
become a part of who you are, in
your aatma, your self, your soul.
This learning to be whole
in another language becomes a
learning-by-heart. Where words
felt and known are not apart. But
then we move somehow to
memorising – recalling for feat
from the surface of the mind,
heart and soul quite left behind.
 
Now we flog the dead horse of
rote learning, dangling carrots for
parrots, not for the soul’s yearning.

*Hindi phrase meaning 'learn by heart'

Anannya Dasgupta writes both formal and free verse and enjoys writing in rhyme. She has a book of poems Between Sure Places. She has also been published in several print anthologies and online journals, most recently in Soul Spaces, Drifting Sands Haibun, Usawa Literary Review and Hakara Bilingual. She teaches at Krea University.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles