A Poem by Eeva Park

When I look there at those clouds
I want to be a cloud painter

When I hear the quiet of the clearing
I want to hum my own tune there

When I dive into the salty sea
I desire to breathe the water like air

When I meet you
I don't know anymore
what I want
but in me are the colors of those clouds
wandering like murmuring in the clearings
and gills so I can dive farther and ever
deeper

(More Poems by Eeva Park)

A Poem by  Nathan Horowitz

Ecuadorian Highlands


Pa
so
cho
a.
Looking down into the valley
at the field of forty black and white cows,
the road where I left my new friend
the big orange and green trumpet-shaped huantuj flower,
the dark furry cleft where trees flank a river
that runs between green fields.
The low roar of a highway.
A visitors' center invisible from up here.
All of a sudden the sun comes out,
and I have a shadow that lies
on the ground next to drops of rain
that are tiny crystal balls
clinging to blades of grass.
The day has millions of eyes.
Songbirds whose language I can't transcribe
chant electric syllables.

Flocks of bamboo stalks line the trail in places.
Up they grow, and over,
straight lines leaning over into semicircles.
One makes a graceful arch over the path,
pure poetry, but who can quote it?
Music of a fly,
music of the wind in forty million leaves of bamboo.

Purple clover flowers stare straight at the sun
with faces that are blind and not blind.
The sun shines in and out of water droplets.
In the heat, water evaporates unseen,
a tide rises into the air.
A cumulus cloud, mountain-made-of-mist,
mocks the shape of a hill.

The infinitely complex bodies of plants.
Green wings and feathers fan the air
without flying anywhere.
Around the joints of these bamboo stalks
grow forty nodes resembling tiny fingers.
Some of these sprout shoots
that shoot up and out to sprout leaves like grass blades.
Like fingers, the leaves feel all that passes,
reading me, and every pulse of wind.

I rest in the lap of a huge slanting tree
with numerous trunks and much carved graffiti
and bromeliads, free riders,
and rain, still, long after the rainfall, falling off leaves
to land on other leaves on the ground.
MORE
demands a graffito inexplicably.

But at a certain point the air turns cold
and the forest abruptly refuses to speak to me.
It shows me heart-shaped leaves wet with rain.
Hummingbird wings inhabit the air above my head.
I pull my leather jacket out of my knapsack.
Second skin, crumpled, beginning to stain,
just like my first skin.
And these hands that have been at the ends of my arms
all these years, they're clearly not a boy's hands anymore,
as they were all those times
I looked at them when I was a boy,
wondering what they'd look like
when I was grown up.
I chant the verses of last year's poem to keep warm:
What makes the crow fly delirious with cunning?
With the catflash of a many-fingered tornado?
Hummingbirds have woven a spell above me,
they're from a species known as the Green Thoughtcatcher.
My ankles are cold
where I rolled up my pantlegs to keep mud off.
My black Converse All-Star tennis shoes
look as if they want to keep walking,
so I'll go too.

Father Sky,
Madre Tierra, Mother of Bamboo,
source of ferns and thornbushes,
hear me.
A tiny weevil hunches on my hand,
the Bic ballpoint pen casts a rainbow on my fingers,
busses honk in the valley below.

1995 AD: Whiteman rules the world.
The world is unruly.
Whiteman walks alone.

Alone
what will I do without you?
In my mind, she answers,
What did you do before you met me?
You'll do that.
Before I met you, I was alone.
I got by with a little help from my friends.
I studied in my room and cut up National Geographics
with an Exacto knife and collaged them into a book
which I called Heroical Sailings
after an article on Sir Francis Drake. In that way
I made sense of my world.
At this moment it's 4:53 PM and I'm alone in South America
crouching on a trail crisscrossed with bamboo.
The sun is hiding and my legs are tired.
The wind rustles and another weevil
climbs up to the summit of my knee and
down the other side, for the life of him
just like a human would have done it. All
alone, mind you. Or was I with him?
A bird hurls by like a flung stone;
a second herd of cows crawls like ants across a hillside;
even the laws of nature sway in the breeze.

A jet roars across the sky
so we're still in that world
in which the sky becomes crisscrossed by jets.
Clouds tumble down,
break open on mountains,
spill across the plain.
As the wind changes direction
the screaming laughter of children
near the visitors' center
changes to the ribbiting of frogs
discussing the availability of water.
A dish antenna atop a bald hill
gathers messages from far away.
Birds babble on.

Cool clouds slide across a blue patch of sky.
It gets cold here at high altitudes near the equator
when the sun goes behind something substantial
like those dense clouds over there or a mountain
or the earth.

I rest here on the hillside in the chill.
The watch she gave me for Christmas still going strong.

Has the wind picked up enough,
has the sun sunk low enough,
has the writer written long enough,
is it time to bring the human indoors?

The strangeness of being "alone" in a foreign country,
always with some bellyache or other.
But the bellyaches you get over,
and you're almost never really alone—
what about Kish, Mark, Pat, Claudia, Maria Paz, and Tony?
Not to mention Michael Longhair, Michael Tall,
and their girlfriends Lourdes and Jo;
Jon Lovejoy and Gavin Moore;
Beto the Israeli, Alison the Irishwoman,
and their little daughter Kayla the Ecuaterranean;
Sixto the language school director
and Segundo the forest ranger;
Sandi at Microsoft
and Miles from Seattle...
not to mention, either,
the whole Piaguaje family back in the jungle.

In late afternoon light
the field below is an alarming shade of green,
and the walking man has an alarmingly good sense of balance.
What the hell is it, anyway,
that makes the crow fly delirious with cunning,
and the hummingbird fly above me like a purring cat?
Picaflor-colibri-minion of the Aztec
tribal god Huitzilopochtli
(whose name means Left-handed Hummingbird)-
what makes him vibrate, willful, determined,
with nothingness?

This bamboo stroked my head when I passed underneath.
Wow, what a gorgeous birdcall.
A brook rushes softly below.
And still, in the background, busses honking.
But here, it's so peaceful.

It's so peaceful here
I quickly write a haiku,
capture the moment.

Thinking intently,
like Jorge Luis Borges
writing a story.

Soak up the rainfall.
Be all that a plant can be.
Photosynthesize.

I walk down the path
counting syllables on my
fingers. They're all gone.

Shelf fungus grows on the posts of this barbed wire fence.
The flash goes off when I take pictures now.
I'm nearly back at the cabin where I'll sleep.
There's a bit of a pale sunset visible.
And another airplane-
"A screaming comes across the sky."
Here on earth,
a stand of trees has leaves with dark patterned
jaggedy magiciany silhouettes.
Leaves like the hands of praying mantises
gesturing, underneath the sky.

Warm in the sweater she gave me
I complete the poem under halogen light
with hands shaped like leaves
shaped like hands shaped like leaves.
Humans and plants shake hands
here at Pasochoa Nature Reserve,
here at
Pa
so
cho
a.
 

(More poems by Nathan Horowitz)

A Poem by Mehri Rahmani

My fingerprint
reminds me of someone,
Someone who had come crying one day
into the laughter of others,
so that he could go by the road not taken
and I lost him in that directionless flow
in such a way that now
I cannot even recall an image of him
in the memory of water.

Mehri Rahmani
Translation from Farsi: Maryam Ala Amjadi


(More Poems by Mehri Rahmani )
 

A Poem by  Granaz Mousav

Sin
While only a little further
the entire world is summarized
into that gift of apple from Eve to Adam
somewhere near here
an absolute sin is
to lie in your arms
and tell you how weary I am
of hearing the forest that dies
 axe
   to
    axe.


Granaz Mousavi

Translation from Persian: Maryam Ala Amjadi


(More poems by Granaz Mousavi)

A Poem by Pradeep Kumar Chaswal

 
Unfinished picture...

A morning in village...
Children going to school
Two bulls fighting with one another
Baby sun struggling to come out of the blanket of clouds
a burnt ambulance parked under an old bunyan tree

An afternoon in city...
Five star hotels with security men
A bagger playing violin in the corner of a street
a group of protestors shouting slogans
a dead dog in front of an art gallery
an alert of terrorist attack in newspapers

An evening in the desert...
oil wells burning like volcanoes
some blind men practicing martial art
with knifes in their hands
a bird in search of a tree
a gypsy playing a flute

A night at city...
Life without rest
Eyes without dreams
A Dragon devouring the moon
A group of wise men studying history in the library
 

(More Poems by Pradeep Kumar Chaswal)

A  Poem  by  Gargi SAha

EAREST PRINCE

Hi, how are you today?
I've seen you since aeons
But never found any spur
To greet, peptalk, ask about your well-being
You shine eternally
Then sleep for the night
Again march ahead with your flash,
To enlighten even the darkest corner of the
scullery
Do you never even wish to have a siesta?
And forget to rise the consecutive day
Or wake the members of your kith and kin?
Explaining your tour routes to them
What's your age?
Are you everyday the same sun?
Or the age old tiresome fellow?
To engage your bones, flesh and burn the
midnight oil
To toil for the next day
You do your duty selflessly and bid a
goodbye at dusk
Darkness that envelops in the mountains
and at husk
Then at next morn again you outshine
To be orange at dawn, a golden plate at
nine.

(more Poems by Gargi SAha)

A poem by  Akshat Pandey


I Do write when I don't speak
My heart seizes, my views speaks
When my eyes are tired, my tears speak
When I am absent, my presence speaks
The brain lacks words, my feeling speaks
Soul certifies when body is ceased
When the war is on, peace speaks
When Soul is tired, God Speaks
Yes I do write when I don't speak
My heart seizes my views speaks
When you are busy time speaks
I hope u know how do I speak
Yes I do write when I don't speak
My heart seizes my views speaks

LEON FELIX BATISTA


infest the extension

sounding the interval
embroidery of hexagrams:
the hinge of the legs
with a conch
incisive in the current of the vortex

her bucolic head, her mouth,
says syrup chords,
rye layer
soluble in phalanges
the fleeting abacus of the braid

surely I am of wax between her crust