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 A Poem by
Claudia Posadas
FEAR
An action taking place in silence,
deep in the blood,
biting through the seed of forms' gestation.
Intimate tremor,
rumor cracking calm acceptance open:
this is fear.
To evoke it, some raise prideful temples,
wretched dictatorships of faith or reason,
lifting a cup which brims with anticipated eternity.
Whoever compels another into lustful machineries,
tiny lethal tortures capsizing tenderness,
pure certainties which immolate the blood,
demolition of the house of exile.
Nevertheless in the dregs fear writhes like a snake.
Some will never be abandoned by fear,
having discovered the source of its nourishment.
Whoever, renouncing or unable to face the world's imperium,
takes extirpation as her only word,
a weak torch for the descent into self-anguish,
the abyss where quarks of consciousness
lie nakedly open.
Nauseous at dawn
when daily memory's restrung,
wandering desperate in tiny dimensions,
grandiose or arming catastrophe to petty circumstance.
Whoever betrays inhabited nature
to die in the sad incarnation of what she abhors.
Nevertheless fear transfixes us all like an artery linking us to
the same nutrition.
Impossible to escape its custody,
sleeplessly ordering thought's explosion,
dark bird of insomnia spreading her wings.
Impossible to avoid its snares,
the slant gaze with which it sees and is seen,
the secret in whose name we are surrounded,
evoking,
inadvertently,
self-concealed
or dizzied daily,
the barbarity oppressing us.
Impossible to erase its tracks.
From time to time,
when sudden blows orphan us,
every objection’s cast away and we reveal
in certain breaking words or gestures,
the scars nerving the masks which hide our fear.
True face of the wound:
music,
intermezzo distantly unfolding parallel to our footsteps,
perversely mistaken.
Orders of the self written in stone
to signify before vastness.
Piling up absurdities to delay defeat,
matter dissolved where fear awaits us in hostile time,
fear which cannot be exorcised because it chants its own perfect
spell,
its definitive ancient root,
our only refuge
in the abandonment of existence.
Translated by John Oliver Simon.
(Claudia Posadas)
A poem by
Mark A.
Murphy
Stoic
As a young man, before the fall of the Berlin Wall,
I thought I knew suffering
and so I read Seneca's letters instead of Christ or Buddha...
I was young enough to think of Seneca
as a humanist, arrogant enough to imagine
I could take another's pain away,
join it to my own and in so doing, relieve the other of their
suffering.
Here both self-restraint and history become treacherous...
Smite my womb, Nero's mother cries at her assassin,
whilst my one time beliefs put me in the asylum
and so the Berlin Wall comes down and my friend, Georges,
not unlike the old Seneca
had chewed into his own wrists in the police cell to escape
the devil who had demanded another bloodbath.
( More
poems by Mark A. Murphy)
A Poem by
Junaith
Rahman
Earth
Glowing on the
Tip of a green leaf
Where
A sparkle of due drop
Dangle
The halo of wet soil
On a frozen
Moment
(
More poems by Junaith Rahman )
A Poem by
Michael H.
Brownstein
CLOTHES DO NOT BREATHE
When he woke, he entered his closet to try on a new life.
Monday, the white shirt held the scent of wool and hummed an
irritating tune when it rubbed against his am. Tuesday, his suit
coat brought on a drowsiness so intense he visualized himself a
wave falling onto a stone beach. Wednesday, his tie made him
squirm forced him into semantics. Thursday was no better. Friday
he hung his prayer shawl under his clothing and did not leave
the house. The weekend did not liberate him. Saturday, his jeans
kept him waiting. Sunday his shorts hurried him along.
On and on and on.
Years later he nailed the closet door shut, but every morning
found himself in front of it, hammer and crowbar in hand,
gouging great holes in his life.
(More poems by
Michael H. Brownstein)
A Poem by Shoumika Ganguli
STILL DREAMING
Warmth of a mother's hand
Swings of a cradle.
Dreams does certainly land
In the form of riddles.
Do dreams certainly turn to reality?
Or is it questioning our own morality.
To decipher this fable,
Truth slowly unravels.
Are dreams those we see while sleeping?
Or are dreams those which don't allow us to sleep?
Some unfulfilled and some still shaping,
Dreams are desires too deep.
Dreams are diversified debit
Rather denouement of desperate desires
This gives us the credit
To fight and answer our inside fires.
(More Poems by Shoumika Ganguli)
A Poem by Anurag Rudra
MY GRANDMOTHER
My grandmother
Eighty-springs and half-a-monsoon old
Is the strongest woman
With eyes like tender, dew
Wet grass on winter morns
Like a dark overcast sky
Eyes, liquid and placid
With untold tales
She herself knew
Her long, flowing hair
Now washed on alternate days
With shampoo and later doused
In Cantheridine
Is not as old as her
It was cut, forcibly
When two and a half summers ago
The doctor, with a constipated face
Had clicked his tongue, and predicted
The unimaginable
Her mind, once a treasure to be mined
From where she had recounted
Age old wisdom to her grandson
Of things interesting, of things unknown
Now lies looted and empty, widowed
Like her
Like the middle
Of her forehead
Which she’d once adorn
With a big, red bindi
Perhaps she'd consigned
Her indulgent self, all of it
Into grandpa’s pyre
My grandma, who now sits
In a permanent stupor
Is still the strongest woman
Who cannot be shaken out of her rut
Like six springs back
When she had to watch
Her younger son
Consecrated to flames
My grandma
Eighty summers and half a monsoon old
Is the strongest woman
Who is not afraid
Of the holocaust wind
That howls in deep bellied taunts
And all petty matters
Which worry, and make
Her progeny sweat
Their foreheads, dotted
With beads of sweat
As they discuss strategies
And counter strategies
To fulfill
Their petty lives
While all the while
My grandma
Eighty-summers-and-half-a-monsoon-old
Sits there, in no hurry
And contemplates
The glass of water
On the table
Believe me, my grandma
Eight-summers-and-half-a-monsoon old
Is indeed the strongest woman
On earth
She is
My hero
(More
poems by Anurag Rudra)
A poem
by
Uma Anil
Circus
Somersaults are for real.
At that precise moment
when head's
just an inch off ground,
You realise
You're not two,
 But
one.
Flipping back,
pretentions arise
(More poems by
Uma Anil )
A Poem by
Michael Lee Johnson
Skinny Indiana Boy
With a heart once as big as Texas
or Alberta where he came from,
the draft resister tries to erase
the memory of his sordid past;
coming out of the Rockies,
down over the slate, out of self-imposed exile,
he leaves the northland shaking his bandaged fists at the
prairie sky.
He was robbed of his own conviction
by a war that ended, others forgot,
there was nothing left to die for, to wait for,
no more signs to carry in the dark -*
*only the chill of the northern winter left
to remind him of what he once felt,
once talked about.
The night looked long in his deep green eyes
robbing his faint life away.
The scream of loneliness has turned
his innards inside out to pity.
Non-religious accept for those
weakened moments, empty nights,
vacant lots, he leaves behind lightless
ten years of those silent wars
without refuge.
He no longer speaks with bullets bleeding
from his mouth, he no longer searches
the quiet whispers that echo in the pines.
Now he is at home near the land of Indiana lakes
where in his childhood he created the vision for his now dead
dream,
content to say nothing radical anymore-
just glad to be alive.
-1981-
( More Poems by
Michael Lee Johnson)
A Poem by Prem Sahil
Join Me
To relish
and cause to relish
the mangoes before they ripen.
Join me
outside the village
to talk while treading
along the embankment of the river.
Gathering the sun
from the lap of the dusk
to hide it stealthily
behind the mound.
Join me again at day break
to fly the kite concealed,
behind that mound.
(More Poems by
Prem Sahil) >
A Poem by Mohan Kishor Diwan
Poems within poems
Whenever I see flowers
Somewhere
A hummingbird appears and dances.
For a long time I watch that dance
Not knowing what moves me so.
Today I see
In a hummingbird’s dance
There is no bird
only movement.
The dancer
danced without "I"
is the dance with a heart.
( More
of the Poems within poems)
A Poem by
Hossein Panahi
A Rainy Night
And this shall be my mission:
To carry safely
two steaming cups of tea
across two hundred battlefields,
so I may drink it
on a rainy night,
face to face with my God.
Translation: Maryam Ala Amjadi
( More
Poems by
Hossein Panahi )
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