World Poetry Day falls in March — the same month that houses the World Wildlife Day. Our beautiful planets’ flora and fauna, impacted by the changing climate, might have to adapt or alter. Part of the land masses are likely to return to rest under rising tides. And humanity, how will we respond or survive these phenomena?
We have here responses in poetry from our newly-minted section on Environment and Climate. We celebrate with poetry on our home and hearth, the Earth.
From Public Domain
We start with poetry on fires that seems to have razed large parts of our planet recently…
In Cherry Blossom Forecast, Suzanne Kamata brings the Japanese ritual of cherry blossom viewing to our pages with her camera and words. Clickhere to read.
Go as the ghost without shadow Into realms of Iron Man and Achilles To steal their superpowers tonight. What good is just being human anymore? Pluck the force of ages From the secretive cabbala Of Wall Street mystics in hiding; Fill your bounty with their crypto-coins And rule the stock market of dreams. The Gen-Z losers will cringe at your doorstep, Bring you cold elixirs for forgetting foibles Of their obsolete flesh in a time capsule. With gusto swirl your cape into faces Of once doubting infidels Who’ll never know what it’s like coming-out To scrape clouds of silver linings, The taste of greening ambrosia on your lips In the sunlight’s caress arcing Past rainbow arches –
While Gotham mortals dress up for Halloween Waiting for their monstrous selves To replace dead superheroes
Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active as writer, poet, editor, and artist. He has recent poetry in A Too Powerful Word, Trouvaille Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Flashes of Brilliance, dyst, Dreich, and elsewhere. His latest poetry books are The Underground Movie Poems (Horror Sleaze Trash), Night Pictures from the Climate Change (Cyberwit.net), and Particle Acceleration on Judgement Day (Impspired press).
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Ratnottama Sengupta talks to Ruchira Gupta, activist for global fight against human trafficking, about her work and introduces her novel, I Kick and I Fly. Click here to read.
The White Lady by Atta Shad has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Sparrows by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.
Tagore’s Dhoola Mandiror Temple of Dust has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Pandies Corner
Songs of Freedom: What are the Options? is an autobiographical narrative by Jyoti Kaur, translated from Hindustani by Lourdes M Supriya. These narrations highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and pandies’. Click here to read.
Ratnottama Sengupta travels back to her childhood wonderland where she witnessed what we regard as Indian film history being created. Click here to read.
Aditi Yadav explores the universal appeal of the translation of a 1937 Japanese novel that recently came to limelight as it’s rendition on the screen won the Golden Globe Best Animated Feature Film award (2024). Click here to read.
Crabs scuttle there, lonely hearts of purblind pleasure
You yearn to scoop up with a child’s shovel,
Relishing the tingle of sand’s reanimated matter.
In the corkscrewed nexus of a god’s naked palm
You discover butts and unusable flotsam
Blackened by barnacle rust from history’s rime:
The timelessness where you bear witness
To a soggy past with these craggy sentinels
Watching marshmallow clouds slowly morph
Through hazy days of mist-ridden skies.
Rock becomes pillow to your nodding head,
For one cannot sleep under destiny’s rainbow
With scattered rain eclipsing the diurnal wend
Of conflicting elements?
Your lips bear a garlanded surprise, perhaps,
Of entwining seaweed still growing yet,
Into lungs of possibly pandemic rot
Where the airs of your humanity expire
Under the crags of dubious spiritual shelter;
You’re no longer witness to urban banality
Outside where a gross mechanised landscape
Looms in retinal configurations of cold dust.
You won’t have to breathe airborne droplets
Fastening a bleak curtain of acidic rain, either:
The grey confetti choking those homeless ones
Pushing shopping carts filled with dumpster leftovers,
While sparrows with limpid wings descend
To peck at that detritus of rife, decaying flora.
Under the crags the helix of humanity crumbles
As you finally emerge to sit atop one,
Meditating as an outcast Buddha of sorts
On the inevitability of seasons forever
Eroding these basaltic, ocean thrones –
and the secrets beneath left to other sad beachcombers?
****
Under the crags you found an old cell phone
Ringing, and the voice said “under the crags
Hip crabby beachcombers live scuttling there,
And they forage under the littoral’s rocks
Of old volcanic upheaval beneath cloud-ridden skies
Where brave explorers once ruled the sea.
They mapped nearby landscapes, my friend,
As long-billed terns strutted gaily everywhere,
Pecking for food … (Under the crags of eternity,
Or boulders of outsized granite, with gemstone stanchions
Like god pebbles thrown there by Gulliver’s sturdy hand):
Until you’re meditating with the drowning Buddha today
On the inevitability of seasons eroding these ocean thrones
You sit like a beached saviour in silence beneath …”
Then I hung up –
Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he’s been active as writer, poet, editor, and artist. He has recent poetry in A Too Powerful Word, Trouvaille Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Flashes of Brilliance, dyst, Dreich, and elsewhere. His latest poetry books are The Underground Movie Poems (Horror Sleaze Trash), Night Pictures from the Climate Change (Cyberwit.net), and Particle Acceleration on Judgement Day (Impspired press).
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
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