Category: Poetry

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Poetry

Horrific Humour!

Poetry by Rhys Hughes

Courtesy: Creative Commons
KARMA IS A BOOMERANG

Karma is a boomerang,
Kismet is a net.
The vampire jumped out of the dark
and bit me in the neck.
I picked him up and shook him down
and flung him far away
and that was that, or so I thought,
the end of a dismal day.
But I was wrong, just like this song
he wasn’t finished yet.
Into a bat he turned and flapped
and to my dismay in every way
raced back and slapped my face.
How rude it is to stab with fangs
a person you have just met.
Karma is a boomerang,
Kismet is a net.


    A CEILING FAN

         I am
       what I am.
    I am a ceiling fan.

   Round and round I go
      but why I never
           know.

I have a feeling that I can
be either fast or slow
but the sounds
that I make
are sure to break
the patience of any man
who is no
fan of fans, for I am never
motionless.

And
while I twirl
to cool boys and girls
on torrid summer evenings,
the drunken fools
see the room revolve
and assume I’m still at rest.

Is this the best
       I can expect?
 

IN THE FACE

I laugh in the face of danger
but not at the legs, arms or body of danger.
Only an insane stranger would do that.
Occasionally I suppose
I might nervously chuckle or even chortle
at the buckle on the belt
that holds up the trousers of peril
because it is shaped
like an awful portal to the immortal world.

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

I am Forgetting you

By Vandana Kumar

I AM FORGETTING YOU

I am forgetting you 
Not immediately
It’s not like a quick crossing of the road
When the traffic signal is a pedestrian green 

I haven’t crossed over as yet
The process has started
Perhaps the traffic is distracting me


I am driving 
Without visions of you in the rear view mirror
The chances of an accident
Are visibly less

I am listening to new songs
Experimenting with form
There aren’t new scratches 
On my ancient vinyl grooves 

You are being erased
Like a country’s past
For a new generation
I don’t wish the forgetting 
It’s happening, all the same
I am reading new History books

Day is becoming night 
A little more every time

These days 
I address the white flowers of the season
By their botanical name
Their blossoming no longer synonymous
With your smile

Vandana Kumar is a French teacher, recruitment consultant and poet in New Delhi, India. Her poems have been published in several national and international websites, anthologies and journals of repute.

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Categories
Poetry

The Stars and the Clouds

By George Freek

THE STARS AND THE CLOUDS 
(After Du Fu, Tang Dynasty poet)

Like an unthinking machine,
I stare at the moon.
I can’t count the stars,
unimaginably far away.
It doesn’t matter.
They have nothing to say.
Like a clock ticking the hours,
ice drips from my eaves.
Clouds as large as mountains,
appear majestic,
but they’re merely illusions.
Life is like this bleak night,
in which we’re blind.
It can’t be understood.
It’s simply confusion.

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

Fowler’s Revenge

By Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Abstract art by Picasso. Courtesy: Creative Commons
1.

There is this dummy quality about it all.
A sprawling suspension bridge vastness about 
the ambition if not the foresight.
I sit, surrounded by numerous bird-hatched plans.
Drinking down all the man’s beer, 
and none of his ideas.

2.

You are predictable as a subway train.
Eat, sleep, drink, talk the same so that
the sum of your habits make you an easy target.
Just two days ago, you were under surveillance.
From some tired hock shop camera
with a faulty aperture that has seen
better days.


3.

Time casts doubt, that is true,
so that anyone who waits on anything 
becomes less the suspect and more 
the patient opportunist all the time.

4.

I don’t care what you did or didn’t do.
This is Fowler’s revenge.
I hear you’re teaching his own children to hate him
which is utterly deplorable.
Keeping him from seeing them,
but such revelations come second hand.
I am friends with both of you
which makes this all the more difficult.

5.

Distance is another consideration.
No one could have invaded Russia 
from the pleasure-seeking funhouses 
of Coney Island.

6.

I hear you have taken up with your legal counsel now,
please tell me it is not true.
The rumour mill never stops spinning.
I hear it is still on the sly.
He is in it for the favours as much as you are
for the money.  And he is married,
please tell me this is not true.
Perhaps you have already made 
your calculations.

7.

Fowler made good on his threats tonight.
Not against you, but himself.
The one he always hated most 
according to the letter.
I walked in and had to cut him down.
So blue in the face he looked like some dangling 
pathetic Picasso which angered me.

And the smell, let me tell you!
All alone in that sorry basement apartment.
After everyone had left.

8.

I guess you get full custody.
I hope you are happy.
A phone call would be nice.
We used to be friends.

9.

Tell Jimmy happy birthday.
I believe this would be his ninth.
I hope you got the gift I sent.
The mail is sporadic these days.

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 The Oklahoma Review. 

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Categories
Poetry

From Traigh Beach

By Mike Smith

Traigh Beach. Photo Courtesy: Mike Smith
Bone
sinew and hide
articulated 
on the beach at Traigh* 
where this otter
from the lie of it
crawled from the sea to die
sink now
into soft sand
such as we with our small talk
of futures and of pasts
walk.


(ripples waves tides sift the present
pools fill and dry 
winds drift the beach
 earth and sky move
storms pass)

Return one day
the bones will lie
disarticulated now
telling a different tale
of lives lived upon sand.

But however they fall 
those of us who walked and talked here will understand


*
Traigh'(pronounced to rhyme with 'try') is on the West Coast of the Scottish Highlands. It's a place, but also the Scottish Gaelic word for 'shore', though it might be translated to 'beach' too. Traigh Beaches lie on the old coast road from Arisaig to Morar, and face towards the island of Eigg.

Mike Smith lives on the edge of England where he writes occasional plays, poetry, and essays, usually on the short story form in which he writes as Brindley Hallam Dennis. His writing has been published and performed. He blogs at www.Bhdandme.wordpress.com. 

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Poetry

Poetry from Iraq

By Ahmad Al-Khatat 

IMMIGRANT DREAM

My father was once an 
immigrant dream,
he often struggled 
to buy bottled water for us.

He taught me not to be a 
slave to privileged people,
he trained me to be fierce 
and speak about our country.

I attempted to whisper 
through his deafness, 
“O father some people 
are racists in exile.”

“O father some people 
are the reason for the 
misery of immigrants
and ply humans with a curse.”

I closed my eyes and my father 
faded away, went missing, and
absent for a lifetime. After they 
pulled on their trigger mercilessly.


DISTANCE BURNT

After the drab rain, the 
taste of honey dims into 
a midnight cigarette. Like the 
money we earn from distance burnt.

She says that she loves me, yet 
she asks what’s my death date? As 
if my heart is a forsaken bullet, above 
the lifeless flower in the lighthouse.

Let’s face my depression, or whatever 
your noisy educated brain desires to call it. 
I drank because I can't strangle my crying-soul
inside the leaking roofs of mental issues.


SIMPLE ORDER

For me to be confident
I must adopt to my heart’s strength.

For me to admire the blue sky,
I must displace the warplanes from 
the dove’s wings of peace.

For me to smile to your face, 
I must open my lyrical mouth and 
kiss your rhyming lips.

Ahmad Al-Khatat was born in Baghdad, Iraq. His work has appeared in print and online journals globally. He has poems translated into several languages such as Farsi, Chinese, Spanish, Albanian, Romanian. He has published some poetry chapbooks, and a collection of short stories.

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Categories
Poetry

Cogitations by Kirpal Singh

Courtesy: Creative Commons
COGITATIONS

I read some of my old letters-
Friends and lovers and miscellaneous.
I wonder if I should keep any?

How does one preserve privacy 
When one is told to donate
Private stuff to libraries?
Because- they flatter—
One is deemed to be special.

I struggle both for right words 
And also right conduct!

In the end I’d probably succumb.
Do what my betters have done:
Donate but with time-limits
So the immediate won’t hurt.

What a privilege to have —
Choose between now or later!

Kirpal Singh is a poet and a literary critic from Singapore. An internationally recognised scholar,  Singh has won research awards and grants from local and foreign universities. He was one of the founding members of the Centre for Research in New Literatures, Flinders University, Australia in 1977; the first Asian director for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1993 and 1994, and chairman of the Singapore Writers’ Festival in the 1990s. He retired the Director of the Wee Kim Wee Centre.

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Categories
Poetry

Flowers of Love Bloom Everywhere 

Written by and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi

Sunflower, a symbol of Ukrainian resistance
Taegeuk, the national flower of Korea
Courtesy: Creative Commons
Like a flower blooming in the crack of the rock, love blooms everywhere.
The grey metropolis is a big flower garden.
In a bus rattling on the country road,
Where old men die lonely, love revives as a flower.

In the hearts of the wayfarers sitting around the tavern,
Also in our empty hometown, a flower blooms brightly.
In the dark grating of the jail, or, in the complexionless faces of the orphanage,
Love blooms brightly as a bundle of flowers.

Love does not sway only to the rhythm of hymns,
Or,  to the voices raised in prayers.
Like a flower blooming on the veranda or on the office desk,
Near the pale hearts of the street vendors, a blossom flourishes.

Love does not grow only in the hearts of Saints,
But in the whistle of the night guard or in the hearts of the criminals.
The root of love is strong and its flower so beautiful.
The tears of the penitents are all beautiful flowers,
Every agony and grief is a flower bud ready to bloom immediately.

In the hearts of the departed lovers, love grows again before anyone knows.
The flowers are already in full bloom,
In the hearts of the Northern and Southern Koreans,
Also in the hearts of the people of Ukraine and Russia.
The hearts of the peoples are always beautiful flower gardens.
Those are brilliant gardens of May, where so many flowers of love bloom endlessly.

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

Hawk and Sparrow

By John Grey

Hawk
sparrow
Courtesy: Creative Commons
HAWK AND SPARROW
 
The hawk plunges.
I’m on the side
of the majestic, powerful hawk.
 
The sparrow reacts
with sudden panicked flight.
I’m on the side
of the tiny, defenseless sparrow.
 
The tussle in a nearby treetop
could mean the hawk snares the sparrow
or the sparrow eludes the hawk.
 
Whatever happens,
I win, I lose.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. His latest books are Leaves On Pages, Memory Outside The Head and Guest Of Myself, available on Amazon. 

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Categories
Poetry

A Murmur in the Wind

By Pramod Rastogi

DAWN 

There is a murmur in the wind.
The night is on the alert to flee. 
Daybreak is dawning
As shades of soft white mix
To make the darkness light.
 
Trees are barely visible
In the silence of the dawn.
Birds awaken, chirp aloud.
Golden hues paint the sky
To give the dawn a bridal glow.
 
Hung high are the curtains  
Of the dawn, which blow open
On landscapes of hopes anew.
But dawn’s span is short.

A torrent of light let loose
Is set to conquer the world
As dawn awaits in reverence
To breathe in the freshness 
Of its first droplet.
 
Draped in the first rays of light,
Dawn bows out of the stage.

Pramod Rastogi is an Emeritus Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. He is the 2014 recipient of the SPIE Dennis Gabor Award. He is currently a guest Professor at the IIT Gandhinagar, India.

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