Category: Poetry

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Poetry

Winter’s Score

By Jenny Middleton

WINTER’S  SCORE

It’s easy to admire
the skater’s bladed boot resting on her partner’s thigh,
his hands firm on her waist hoisting
her above the rink into glitzy, gaping lights
carving the ice together with the arced geometry of dance

few think of
scientists, at the poles, drilling metal cylinders
in to glaciers collecting the traces fallen things --
pollen’s sweat, snow compressed by mammoths
a deluge of poisoned rain – racked with signs

of change and how this shifts particles
flaying memories like the swan – trapped that winter
in ice and fishing nets
its feathers beating sound from still air
in flightless desperation

or how a body aches long after
the surgeon’s slice through skin
blurring its dead, rutted scar
amongst live veins

no – it is easier to love what doesn’t scream -- 
a world that winks sequins and whispers
soft, snowy songs to a tired audience
sitting in the arena’s dark.

Jenny Middleton has written poetry throughout her life. Some of this is published in printed anthologies or on online poetry sites. Jenny is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. She lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats.  You can read more of her poems at her website  https://www.jmiddletonpoems.com  

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Poetry

What stories might Mother Elephant tell…

By Devangshu Dutta

Courtesy: Creative Commons
WEAVING THE LONG NOW TOGETHER

What stories might Mother Elephant tell
    to guide her herd through the dark eclipse?

What songs might the whales exchange
   of bygone currents and plenty krill?

Do gods send sighs over centuries,
   as we waste seconds and breath,
   barely seeing what is with us still?

Devangshu Dutta is a student of life.

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Poetry

Hunger

By Raja Chakraborty

Courtesy: Creative Commons
a caged dove waits--
fluttering wings in captivity, 
waiting for another war 
to end
 
so it can fly to freedom 
 
cold, lonely, scared -- it pecks
the last grain, saved 
for uneasy days like these
 
peace is a crafty word--
it thinks, silently 
 
head hung low, in a sad
prayer, it longs for the blueness 
of an autumn sky
 
do birds cry? I don’t know
do they cry tears? I don’t know 
 
but what I know now is
war’s a game adults play
and peace, its abused cousin
 
there is a liquid fire
in the dove’s soft eyes speaking 
of a revolution that
only hunger can ignite

Raja Chakraborty is a bilingual poet, writing in English and Bengali. He has penned four books in English: The Soup Bowl and Other Poems, Whispers in the Wind, Broken Lines and Rainbows and About Maya and Other Poems. He is also a regular contributor to magazines and anthologies.

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Poetry

Utopia

By Supatra Sen

Courtesy: Creative Commons
UTOPIA

Fire…smoke…death…horror
Lurking fear
Gruesome reality

Yet
The sunflowers bloom
 
In the throes of death
Shadows of dread
Trace the path of light
Undying
Bright…glorious…eternal
 
That sparkling flame
Must survive 
A dark tunnel
Flooded with loss…
 
Till
One day
The strife ends

A flock of white doves
Will soar the cloudless blue heights
Fearless
Millions of sunflowers
Will bloom in perpetual spring

Dr. Supatra Sen, Associate Professor, with over a hundred academic publications in Botany and Environment, is also the founder and Chief Editor of an ISSN peer-reviewed multi-disciplinary journal ‘Harvest’ since 2016. Her tryst with poetry writing and publishing began in 2020 during the global pandemic and in October 2021 her poetry anthology My Autumn Sonata was published.

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Poetry

A Painter’s Despair

By Pramod Rastogi

Montmartre: Courtesy: Creative Commons
A PAINTER’S DESPAIR
 
A painter fancies Nature and spends days to paint the dawn
In its rising and its shadows before it disappears
Into the surge of village life.
 
Nature watches life on the move, as does the day
It peeps at the painter's work posed on a large wooden easel, 
While the painter keeps pouring his heart,
 
Brushes and paints in hand, to create a vibrant palette. 
The painter gazes at his artwork. In his eyes, the dawn he beholds
Is not the same as on his canvas.
 
Nature, gracious and humble, bows to the artist's dawn.
Paints fuse to give the dawn a glow, the like of which Nature 
Could never have composed.
 
In despair is the artist – he has failed to ornament Dawn’s
Natural smile for the day. Two perspectives of the same
Dawn, so distant, yet united in one.

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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Poetry

Poetry from Tuzla

By Maid Corbic

LOVE LIVES
 
I am aware
that love lives
in my genes.
I look forward to life.
 
I live every day --
it's a new day
for victories,
new
 
reality.
Reality is blinding
but I know I love
you
 
and my love
for you shows
my love is endless
and alive.

Maid Corbic is from Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina). In his spare time he writes poetry.

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Poetry

Before the Sun Sets…

By Candice Louisa Daquin

Courtesy: Creative Commons
CONSCIENCE

We may depend upon nothing
except the strength of not laying down
our conscience, there in forked roadway
with the languid grace of a woman rising from steam
one direction will be covered over with water
you’ll have to learn to find your inner amphibian
and if you are successful at shucking off your humanity
retreating primordial beneath turbine waves
give a thought to those who toil above you in spirit houses
burning their feet on tar sprayed land
it reeks of our short-lived desperation
like stalks of young corn, we blaze from green to gold
the sand of our time, trickling ever faster through thin glass
thinking in a fleeting lifetime we behold true wisdom
while rivers and seas we pollute, in short-lived wake
remain behind as we turn to dust, then clay
it is not our nature to care what comes after we are gone
our footprints would not singe the serenity of nature so vividly
if gathering mercy outside our own existence, were our way
yet, imagine the unfolding beauty of caring for something outside ourselves
and softly we atoned our fits of rage, in wanting to have it all
before the sun sets for always and another day is born.

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Candice Louisa Daquin is a Psychotherapist and Editor, having worked in Europe, Canada and the USA. Daquins own work is also published widely, she has written five books of poetry, the last published by Finishing Line Press called Pinch the Lock. Her website is www thefeatheredsleep.com

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Poetry

‘I hear your heart, forget to breathe, and glow’

Poetry by Michael R Burch

Painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir( 1841-1919)
Courtesy: Creative Commons
THE HEDGEROW ROSE

I lead you here to pluck this florid rose
still tethered to its post, a dreary mass	
propped up to stiff attention, winsome-thorned
(what hand was ever daunted less to touch
such flame, in blatant disregard of all
but atavistic beauty)? Does this rose
not symbolise our love? But as I place
its emblem to your breast, how can this poem,
long centuries deflowered, not debase
all art, if merely genuine, but not
“original”? Love, how can reused words
though frailer than all petals, bent by air
to lovelier contortions, still persist,
defying even gravity? For here
beat Monarch’s wings: they rise on emptiness!


MINGLED AIR

for Beth

Ephemeral as breath, still words consume
the substance of our hearts; the very air
that fuels us is subsumed; sometimes the hair
that veils your eyes is lifted and the room

seems hackles-raised: a spring all tension wound
upon a word. At night I feel the care
evaporate—a vapour everywhere
more enervate than sighs: a mournful sound

grown blissful. In the silences between
I hear your heart, forget to breathe, and glow
somehow. And though the words subside, we know
the hearth light and the comfort embers gleam

upon our dreaming consciousness. We share
so much so common: sighs, breath, mingled air.


ROUNDS
 
Solitude surrounds me
though nearby laughter sounds;
around me mingle men who think
to drink their demons down,
in rounds.
 
Now agony still hounds me
though elsewhere mirth abounds;
hidebound I stand and try to think,
not sink still further down,
spellbound.
 
Their ecstasy astounds me,
though drunkenness compounds
resounding laughter into joy;
alloy such glee with beer and see
bliss found.

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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Poetry

Poetry by David Francis

Courtesy: Creative Commons
THE CROP-DUSTER, ALABAMA


It’s evening; the windows are tinted:
I’ve seldom seen such landscape from a bus,
enchanting shades of green, without a gloss;
so leafy, “leafy” is what I’ve printed
in my letter—that was the adjective
with which I conveyed this peculiar state’s
fullness, a cornucopia of traits
flowing through this leafiness like a sieve.

Two radios play, one of them is heard;
not bothering with headphones in front
of me, a man as if to anoint
has his head down, like a sea-alighting bird.

In back, the reflections merged in the glass,
both of us watching the crop-duster pass.


EXPEDITION


Walking in fisherman’s boots
all the way to the fence,
deer hindquarters flash and thrash
through the thorns, and gluey spider webs
break against my innocent face;
crows maul the sky with their cries
and then, silent as pine needles snapping underfoot,
the give-way of a rotten trunk next to
those towers of those who live in the mud
and my own subsidence, rubbery, sodden;
scraping off on a root, nailed boards
reveal a blue canopied treehouse—
not the first in my sunny youth;
at the fence I rest in the sundown,
enervated in the cacophony of gloom
and transfixed by the motes floating
in the high-vaulted clearing.

David Francis has produced seven music albums, Always/Far: a chapbook of lyrics and drawings, and Poems from Argentina (Kelsay Books).  He has written and directed the films, Village Folksinger
(2013) and Memory Journey (2018).  He lives in New York City. 

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Categories
Poetry

My Mantra

By Ashok Suri

MY MANTRA

In the mesmerising twilight, 
I see untapped sources of delight.
There are no regrets,
But a new awareness, a new insight.

My prayers are now warm,
Not mere words uttered in haste.
My enthusiasm never fades
Even if I’m not ideally placed.

I cannot remain unmoved,
If I see the poverty-stricken in plight.
In the world torn by wrongdoings,
Clashes and mutual distrust,
My jivan mantra* is simple:
‘Trust in God and do the right.’


* Jivan Mantra: Guiding principle of life

Ashok Suri is a retiree and is settled with his family in Mumbai. He tries to convey in simple words what he wants to say.

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