Maybe it's time

Maybe it's time to wrap them up - he said -
these demons yelling in my head
these crazy bitches clasping my veins shut

And the heart pumps dry.

Three angels. Salt wings.
Many revolutions that went by
bad girl moods
hazel eyed peters.
Getting stuck . Falling in love.

Move slowly on - he said.
Another is waiting. In line.

Happines with you was a cry of despair

Panic within
your cubicled heart
just naked white
walls naked skin
I hurl curse scream 
obscured cubicle walls
pushed in

 Excerpt from the 3:15 Experiment  (August 21 )

innocent

You were caramel cloud

before they laid you under the ground.


Wedding songs pass over the virgin grave.

                                   Fireworks blast.

Your body in pieces innocent.



Somebody’s daughter, you were

a girl in the market in a city at war.

somebody’s sister, you were

a girl in a city at war in the market.



So lost you were

                             Innocent.

How many of those who

                                you once knew,

                                                        innocent
blown-up by the embrace of a hate hug

before your body could no longer contain

their deeds, germinating anger seeds?



Your rage blasting body is stopped

before                          you can enter the market

but, there is no turning point for you.

Clung to your sister                 innocent.

Two bodies crumbled in pieces.


This is the edit of an older poem inspired by Gautami's "Undead for Eternity" -- More on the train.

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14141454

just happened.

I am to blame too...

I am to blame too -

for my worriless smile always inviting

even as my eyes warn

"we shall get hurt"

- tho'our touching skin is light

                             as feathers.

Shouldn't we guilt-trip my over-arching

overly dramatic way (the impulsive-neurotic)

                                of giving it away?

If we are to fault one for wanting it together

and simple, using time up as currency

to wane hurt , drive away anger

then why don't you fault me?

to read more poems take the  monday poetry train 127

The closed eye -Ana Blandiana

Today, I would like to present to you the poetry of Ana Blandiana.


Her poetry was censored and its publishing banished during the communist years due to political reasons. She continued to be an active presence in the political environment after the fall of the Eastern regimes in 1989, and she took over the presidency of P.E.N. Romania in 1990.

Yet what I like most of her poetry is the melancholic voice and feminine gracefulness of her language. Here is a poem I recently found online (in Romanian ) and translated for you.[1]

The Closed Eye

Not for a moment did I dream to close my eyes

for fear that

I will crush the world between my eyelids,

I will hear it crumble with a loud crunch

a peanut between my teeth.

How long can I steal my sleep?

How long could I

keep it alive?

I watch gaze with despair,

work up my pity for

this defenseless universe

that will perish in my closed eye.

1. The original "Ochiul inchis" can be found here.

Hope

I had faith that always.
hoped that always
beauty &love will flow free
never, but NEVER accept
to be encaged by paradigms,
stereotypes…patterns.


A happy new year from to you out there, you who are reading our stories, you who follow this blog

  from me (the author) and also from

Anaïs , Annamari, Nim , Yuri and Mona !

Suburbanite -big poetry tent for 12/24

Suburbanite

Stalled performance & she notices
the hoarse noise that ropes around
the engine. Slight vibration’ n the stillness
between soundproof windows & oversized lawns.
Fretful fingertips drumming her hand reaching in
 the glove compartment. Smartphone. - overdue oil change
that kind of stuff that troubles the Suburbanite.

Swift rounding moves and she’s turning the wheels.
Into traffic, fluorescent lights & humming.
Glittering clouds immerse the highways, the city;
into the space hungry vehicles’ surroundings
you vanish ’n alikeness– a car among million other
amorphous outfits figureless  beyond tinted windows
the kind of stuff that doesn't trouble the Suburbanite.

Pedestrian silhouettes, urban coquettes’re forgotten
like those obsolete costumed parades with cape
& panache from college.
Your children grow unaware of 
the compactness of cities  the overwhelming presence of people every street corner
the unity of farmers as contrast to the vastness of crop-fields
Does this even trouble your kind Suburbanite?

For you built on a base-ment dis-loyal to the concept
beyond the social artifact. You did topple ancient topologies
in an attempt to squeeze out those you labeled as untouchables
and it did not seem to trouble you much Suburbanite.


the wordle prompt :

Lunar Eclipse - A Christmas Fable

Above frost like reason the atmosphere revolved

clearer: yet ‘twas the darkest night of the year

lunar eclipse during winter solstice

happens once in five hundred years.            (Aren’t

                      we smart to predict such a rare occurrence

                        to un- whirl the human genome to create

                                                      mice that tweet?)

What wonderous knowledge, indeed.





Below your desk a high-school quiz on STDs:

no cure for AIDS, 33 million HIV + worldwide gives

a country for people with a death sentence in a medical file.

Newspaper picture: a girl too young to be bride fading

bliss beams in a seat her beloved (never husband

to be ) gives her a ring. Then she went gentle

into that good night, yet ‘twas

no raging against the fading of the light.



For all our knowledge and our human might is

just awareness of the moonless night.

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three;
but the greatest of these is love.

Eco-Friday: Memories of a house sketch (2)

I shall gaze at the buildings ahead

and still see trees beyond the hill’s edge

like once when Fall touched them, waning

the leafs that weren’t rusty yet & hiding them
 
yellow beneath the sunlight patches.

And I shall think : it feels like pain

should feel in an artificial limb, like this static buzz

hurting your ear - the noise from your e-reader device

substitutes memories held by a book's pages

 as yellow as tobacco’s smell

 Like once his  fingers touched them.

Farewell summer

Fly-by the naked
stump once tree. Hit by lighting.
Say ‘farewell summer'

goodwill shopping

Browsing for recyclable picture frames

@ Goodwill-

my luminous friend and I were dazzled

by choices:

Knickknacks, games& (even designer)

clothes.



So, is she asking, did u took

note

how cheap can u buy everything here

except

that which we cannot label with

a price tag.



How much do u think it is fair

to be paid

-give me a number in a definite

currency-

for love, education and health?

about renewal

The first dawn - year 5771

"En medio del camino de nuestra vida"

Dante Alighieri -La Divina Comedia

El Infierno: Canto I

So spoke the poet: I found myself lurching in darkness because the right path was forgotten.



They call it midlife crisis nowadays.
What's a midlife crisis? It's the stuff of jokes and stereotypes –
The time of life when you fall for a much younger woman
or man. He buys a red sports car or
walks out the door to buy cigarettes and to never return.
Or they just walk out of their lives .(Three years in the row.
It happened three years in the row, from what she knows)



What's a midlife crisis?

these days, the old midlife crisis

more likely to be called a midlife transition

--  it's not all bad.


So spoke the woman as
she unlocked herself from the earthliness
of her goals and asked  from him
no more, no less  but to create the world.



Also used text from :"Midlife Crisis: Transition or Depression?" by Kathleen Doheny , retreived from:http://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/guide/midlife-crisis-opportunity

Confession Tuesday:

I must confess that the reason beyond my absence from blogging is mainly due to distraction. It is a kind of positive distraction, though the stress of job hunting in today’s market gets me on my downbeat ”I fell again in a melancholy-full barrel” mood at times.
First, I hadn’t been able to put together more than a few drafty poetic lines after exhausting my inspiration on business letters, friendly letters asking for favors and LinkedIn invitation type letters.
Second, I had not been able to bring myself to the state in which I can read poetry: neither on the web, nor at home though there is a book by Milosz waiting for me at home. (I am going to participate in the 3:15 experiment though*, because nighttime me is not expected to interfere with the new daytime me. I have to confess that after watching this Nova/ PBS documentary on what dreams are, I could barely wait for the month of August).

Fortunately, I do have the time and patience, during my long bus commute hours to read prose : novels, YA and graphic novels… I pick them randomly  from the Library’s shelves. I read them  because a friend had once chucked a remark at me or  my earthwalking friend has a sac full of goodies for me.

Now I am reading “Infidel” by Ayyan Hirsi Ali – I hadn’t finished the first part yet but it is already fascinating me. Her world is hard to imagine for a woman like me raised as a single child, surrounded by the love of a family who was thought that “whomever you decide to marry we do hope that he will be a good man and a Christian ** but you must remember that no matter how well you get along with your husband there are two things you must keep in mind: men are rarely faithful and nowadays temptation is (more global) and you shall never depend on a man for your roof or bread if you decide you may want to step out of your marriage, you must have a college degree”. For me there is nothing stranger than the concept of baarri –the wife that only lives to honor her husband.

I only picked “Infidel” from the library shelf because it was in the near vicinity of the definitive edition of “The Diary Of A Young Girl” by Anna Frank. This edition was suggested involuntary by O. It adds back in all the paragraphs eliminated by Otto Frank for the 1947 edition because of length requirements or issues he had considered inappropriate such Anne’s open accounts on sexuality. And it is based mainly on the b version of the diary. I must confess that when reading it unabridged and uncensored by an adult it had brought Anne much closer to me as a teenager – the teenager I was once, the teenager my son is. When I finished it though, I was weighted down by the same rhetorical question: How can one be so blind to ignore the intrinsic qualities of this young girl –her sensitivity and intelligence, her humanity. How can one be blind to the promises her future held for her just because he belongs to another religion? How can we be so blind?”

It was no coincidence perhaps that both books were so close to each other on the shelf as they do have one thing in common , one space that is not a mere geographical one, i.e. Holland. A place best described by Theo van Gogh’s comment : “If I can’t put my name on my own film, in Holland, then Holland isn’t Holland any more, and I am not me”***

The connection transposed in the shelf space by librarians at Carnegie Library is only one a the few events that made me change my opinion on the usefulness of librarians in US. But this is another story for another time...

*Thank you Gwen, aka Art Predator, for the invitation.

**though my mom in her role of black sheep of the family did not forget to stress that in her opinion Jewish men were better at respecting their wife and remaining faithful to them , she was biased that way I guess.

*** “Infidel” , Introduction, p xii. The quotation was Theo van Gogh’s answer to the suggestion that he remove his name from the short he made together with the book’s author (submission, part 1). The projected part 2 was never completed because Theo van Gogh was killed by a Muslim fundamentalist in November 2004.

Big Tent Poetry (a Draft)

Part II –History of Metals (From gold to steel)

Do not fault others. It was me. This is no country

for gullible men.

History (1) : after the days of the may flower the people who found the lands here to be more fertile brought steel pieces by thousands, by sea, to build new cities and Industries.



History (2) : back then, back there...

                   it was decreed that gold and silver are better than steel

                    thus steel, only used for menial pieces, was never awarded full value.


Yet here the lands, amorphous patches of raven earths randomly interrupted
                                                                               by water or mountain or human

were always flowing, never a pattern. Just to contain it’ll be enough trouble ,no fuss about metals
                                                                                      -ships brought in steel by the thousands.

Molten steel molded the land into patterns. It belonged here - a country for steel.







History(3):  a fact

                  so it was discovered that steel is better than gold and silver.

                 More flexible, it endured more.

                 Sharper edges, it cut deeper & further


History (4):  new patterns erected in steel. This land reshaped grew taller and faster. They said growth is good but it required order.
And to order is to set limits -boundaries
narrow down comprehensibility
to avoid confusion we  now decree
there is one kind of steel
stronger, whiter , sharper and lighter
to stand above the others.
(as the quality of steel is contained
by its skin...)

Note: this draft is a fragment from a longer poem project of mine.
But I think the code is not that hard to decipher ... the fragment is quite self-sufficient.

Note: other answers  to Monday’s prompt — the guest maestro’s idea to write using a hidden code

Big Tent Poetry: step 1

The poem I wrote as my first answer to the Big Tent Poetry prompt: "letter to an absent friend" has proven to be an inspired one.

A friend , one I had in mind when writing the poem, as he was unusually quiet during that  period e-mailed me the next day. He was not the only friend that I felt starting to drift away when writing it, but he was the one to reply. And thus he assumed the poem.

And if you read it when I first post it on my blog you may recall the end:

"the letter you never got to mail."
but I got to mail it, well email it, when Bryan called for submission for the most recent chapbook he edited:


And  not only that it got accepted.  It also made O.  admit that sometimes the most unrealistic horoscope type predictions may become true: " Aquarius, someone from a far away land, will publish a poem with a dedication to you."

I also got to enjoy my electronic contributor copy while waiting for the hard copy to come in the mail. For now- Leigh Binder's "No more hags" -(but gay nannies) got my attention.







Note:  The weeks'  prompt was actually about words,but my  poems seem to have a mind of their own. More poetry circus under the big tent.

Watching the Fourth of July fireworks

Trapped between

blooming fireworks on a distant summer sky

and your incidence beyond me , humid and tangy.

I'm under the influence

your touchless warmth wrapped against my senses

futile are all my sensible choices.


To turn around, to take a dive deep down'our

moonstruck flagrances.


To step forward, to blast myself into this July sky

so brilliantly.




join me on the train here.

Reading Travels: in the blogosphere

This time I will not bore my few readers with another dull review. I decided to share (instead) some of the poems I read recently on the blogosphere and liked. The list will not be exhaustive – as it is built on the imperfect foundation of my memory. And my memory has more shortfalls than the average one…


At least the list is selective –that is it is giving each reader the ability to travel to the places of its choice, rather than being directed to the one of my choice.

Simona Cratel- Ploaie de Mai
 
Julie Buffaloe-Yoder -Reclamation
 
Arnab Majumdar- My bitch (160)
 
Juliet Wilson -Slick
 
Iulian Tănase -Visele tale se varsă, toate, în uitare şi uitarea nu se umple

Guy ‘Dhyan’ Traiber (translation), Giora Fisher  - In the Aftermath, two poems

Brad Frederiksen -Autumn boy

Paul Squires- life is desire

Deb Scott- close listening

S.L. Corsua- a geometrical reading

Under the big tent :step 3

...what if I were a pelican


 egg lain beneath an orange moon

sinking maroon in the drowsy a drunken sea?

Would I invoke her deity to turn

all human beings into hairy beasts?

Return us to the times when we were kids

and all the same, the moon's offspring

stretched  back on wet rocks, nested on stilts

uplifted dreams.


More orange moon poems here: Big Tent Poetry

...(back) to the land of green plums

Lola came from one of the poorest provinces of the country. Where the drought season is survived only by sheep, melons and mulberry trees. There are six children in her family. There are six roommates in her dorm room. Lola came to the city to escape poverty. She went to college for a major in Russian. The interest in Russian majors was low and so was the selectivity. "Wishes are difficult, writes Lola, goals are easier". She wants to marry a gentleman with carefully cut fingernails and a college degree. She wants to return to her village as a lady.

Lola joins the Party. God watches over us up-above, the Party watches over us down-below.

Lola is with baby but she didn't get married yet. Lola commits suicide.

One of her roommates finds her notebook and reads it. The notebook brings her closer to three other students. They are all members of the German-speaking minority. They bring in books banned by Party Censors, they send back letters into the West.

After graduation she gets a job as a translator in a factory. There she befriends Tereza. Tereza can allow herself to behave childish - her father is someone rather important in the party. Tereza is now hiding the forbidden books, pictures ...the notes. Tereza is Romanian.

By the end of the book all have left the land of green plums behind. Two of them are in Germany. The other carry their sack someplace else :"a belt, a window, a nut, a rope."

Herta Müller is the 2009 Nobel prize laureate for literature. Her work counts around fifty volumes of essays, poetry, short stories and novels. Unfortunately, most of them stall in the time of the communist regime . And whilst there is a need for well written accounts about that epoch, I tend to think that sometimes there are too many such accounts. Thus I will not recommend that you read all her writings, not unless you are obsessed with the period. But I say that one must tread at least a few of her works. And one novel I will recommend with no hesitation is the Herztier [1] translated as the Land of Green Plums.

Herztier is a collection of individual stories, one of the best to capture the mix of ideology and feelings that lead the four young friends to revolt. A revolt which seems, at times, as silly as the wooden toy with hens they enjoy playing under a mulberry tree. Because it is not an ideology that is leading them, but exactly the contrary - a rebellion against ideologies. Ideologies like the one of their fathers who fought in the SS troops as well as the ideology of their torturer, secret police officer Pjele.

Herta Müller masters, perhaps better than most contemporary writers, a language that is equally plainly narrative and poetic, laden with metaphors and rich with feelings. And thus she is not only to reconstruct a landscape that is historically authentic but also to reconstruct the way the same landscape reflects in the hearts of young people who experience love and friendship whilst they are pushed towards shameful betrayals and their particular ways to repent for these betrayals.

For me, Herztier touched some of the deepest chords within my heart's memories. Because I lived once in the land of green plums and alike the narrator it had become impossible for me to escape it no matter how far away a traveled.


[1] Herztier means literally The Herartsanimal . And for those who read in Romanian but not in German, I suggest the Romanian translation -it may come closer to home.

Around the world in 300 poems

Whom would you find to be a better poetry teacher than a poet whose work you love and admire? You shall consider yourself fortunate when such a poet leaves behind a book that is nor a textbook neither an anthology but a bit of both and a little extra.
"A book of luminous things" is equally Czeslaw Milosz's personal selection from the world's greatest poetry and precious teaching material since Milosz adds insightful comments to most of his choices. The reader is charmed at first by exquisitely crafted poem. Than as she sinks deeper beyond the poetic form, she starts learning as well and returns many times to rediscover a poem.



As Wang Chien allows us a glance at the traditional Chinese he is also teaching us about the delicate craft beyond poems that are "very vivid and evocative, able to convey a complex relationship in a few lines .

The New Wife


On the third day she went down to the kitchen,

Washed her hands, prepared the broth,

Still unaware of her new mother's likings,

She asks her sister to taste." [1]



Judah Al-Harizi, a middle age Hebrew poet from Toledo, succeeds to capture the secret of lighting -one of the best I read - with this "slightly jocular"[2] quatrain:

"The Lightning


And the lightning laughs at the clouds,

like a warrior who runs without growing weary or faint.




Or like a night watchman who dozes off,

then opens an eye for an instant , and shuts it." [3]



The anthology includes poems  from all around the world and poets from times unknown to the 20th century. The carefully handpicked poems are organized under eleven themes, each choice stressed by Milosz in a short introductory essay . Some of the thematic choices are very familiar such as "Nature", "History", " Situations" , "Epiphany" ,"The Moment" or "Travel". A couple are more original but not quite surprising : "The secret of the thing" or "Nonattachment".



The thematic choice that intrigued me most and ,in a short time,  became a favorite "Woman's Skin". The chapter is dedicated to women as poets who, by writing about their own flesh, were able to step beyond cannons and express their own femininity. Milosz regards the poems chosen for this theme as love poems because the reader cannot help but fall in love with these women . Such is one Sanskrit poem re-created for us in English by Steve Kowit: " In the morning,/holding her mirror,/the young woman/ touches/her tender/lip with/her finger &[....]"[4]. But after the death of the beloved, the skin of the now lonely woman withers and looking in the mirror is a sorrowful experience :

"Hopelessness


When I look in the mirror

My face frightens me.

How horrible I have become!

When Spring comes back

Weakness overcomes me

Like a fatal sickness.

............................


I am filled with bitter embarrassment

When I see on the curtains

The shadows of two swallows making love"[5]

Poems about  the old woman, past her ages of romance, are rare "as if there were a tendency to relegate her to the realm of half-existence. "[6] But Anna Swir, a twentieth century Polish poet, captures the renewed beauty of a sixty old single woman as she re-lives a great love story:

"She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one,

her hair streams in the wind.

Her dear one says:

"You have hair like pearls.""[7]



I hope that the few poetry fragments I quoted here are going to entice you towards purchasing the book, or at least borrowing from your local library. Even if you do not take my word on that "A book of luminous things" offers us an unique opportunity to learn a few important things about the craft of reading and writing poetry from one of the best poets of the twentieth century. Not only that you will find at least one of your favorite poems or poets included in this anthology, but you will probably find a few more poems or poets to add to the list of favorites.



Notes:

[1] Czeslaw Milosz, A book of luminous things, p 192. translation by J.P. Seaton

[2]idem p.58

[3] idem p. 58 . translation by T. Carmi

[4] idem, p.215. A fragment from "In the morning", published by Kowit in Passionate Journey. Poems and Drawings in the Erotic Mood.City Miner Books (July 1984)

[5]idem, p.218 . The poet is LiCh'ing-chao, who was once as famous as Li Po and Tu Fu among men, speaks about her own experience as an widow by using a conventional poetic voice for the Chinese poetry - the abandoned concubine. translation by Kenneth Rexroth.

[6] idem, p.219

[7] Fragment. translation by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan of" The Greatest Love" . One of my favorites, the image of a woman letting her  hair to be blown free by the wind as her age and status of single (maybe widowed) woman with grown children had freed her from convention and she can now experience the greatest love.