A land full of love by Amy Stewart

A land full of love, colour and surreal prosperity.
I am sad to see our world in a nocturnal way,
profoundly dark and dingy. The light
carried away by hatred and evil, riots and corruption.

Our earth, home, planet, safety net
of which makes us feel at ease… is struggling
with us and our loss of humanity.
Global error of sadness offering nothing
but fourth coming pain.

My mind is whipped to dust and my
soul is coping with internal pressure
to become something more than the world I see.
Once was a followed flower by many
shining stars, now a shell of once was.
Dull, gloomy and afraid.

I wish the rainbows would return
and we can live again, never to worry.
Not to ever lose hope and to
always make room for love and kindness to all.

Woman Alone by Geraldine Mitchell

When she wakes

darkness

five strokes

of a church bell

close-by the      room still

conceals its contours,

the narrow bed its thin quilt.

The brick floor grits underfoot

like blown sand

as she moves to the window,

pushes open shutters on air

smooth with the promise of heat.

The wake of the ringing

washes the walls of the cobbled street

and above furrowed rooftops

                                                 stars

waver like sparks,

lustre the air with lost notes.

She leans on the sill, feels

the mystery of sound emerging

from silence, returning into it, of being

in time, then out of it,

                          the thinning night,

how her day has been changed before it’s begun

and no-one to know it but her.

This Is the Dark Time My Love by Martin Carter

This is the dark time, my love,
All round the land brown beetles crawl about.
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.

This is the dark time, my love,
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?
It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.

My Body is a Vessel by Cynthia Atkins

My body is a vessel of dictation, forever told
what not to do. Always under investigation
with finger prints on the bannisters,
pocks and dents on the wood tableau.
My body’s invisible, but listen hard, you’ll hear
the gut rankle and the refrigerator
in the apartment below, where the moans
of a woman are being twisted and squashed
like a spent cigarette. My body has been
burned to Eden and back. It has been
sent to endless zip codes and put through each
government test like a desk clerk smile
of dread. My body has flirted, endured the gaze,
lost the gaze, caught between the manly
battlefield of wills. My body worked
hard at being anonymous, a paper clip.
Harder at being lonely. Under my body’s
floor, a woman irons the shirt her body will wear
to be beaten and torn and entered. My body
listens to him crack a beer after.
Through the floor boards, past the humming
appliances, in my body like a dormant
pebble stuck in a shoe. Long ago, this body doodled
on an unmade bed, listened for a tooth fairy
with nicotine on her breath—This body worried
for the body of her mother getting bruised
under the lintel in a doorway, a tooth
knocked out. These limbs hear too much,
fasten to the shade of trees, on tender hooks.

www.cynthiaatkins.com

Orphan Planet by Yumi Fuzuki

Having stored up a gaze
The infant’s eye pierced me.
The lustre of those unclouded black irises,
Transparent as a clear sky,
I stood up and it swallowed me whole.
People call this giving birth.
Just as I would peer into clouds,
I followed after the vibrating pupils.

Twenty years later, we passed each other in the street,
You’d been sharpened into an adult,
In the glinting train window, a needle aligned in a row.
With your face that could be a boy’s or a girl’s,
Smiling faintly at someone.

(Everyone is dancing,
but that was the sound of a needle breaking.
I’ll cover your ears,   cover your eyes.
Ten years later, no one will remember today.
I pray that you’ll have soundly let it pass.)

Pulling out from the station, you look up,
A sky with the eyes of an orphan.
Beyond where its gaze reaches,
Are we duly giving birth to the future?
The things we’ve done beneath this sky—
All of them    can we confess them to this sky?

That day, uprooted and snatched away,
We loathed the spring.
Even after clearing away its shape and form,
Making sure not a shred was left,
We obsessively made off with the waves.
So were the needles’ days grown long,
One after another, they pierced the sky.
The needles pricked the sky to life, flooding it in light.
Before long, will it awaken to the eternal morning?
In your eyes,
The sky has found the home to which it will return.

 

Translation: Jordan A. Y. Smith

Prelude by Jorge Barbosa

When the explorer landed on the first island
no innocent, fearful or naked
men and women
peered from behind the vegetation

neither poisoned arrows flying
nor cries of alarm or war
were echoing through the highlands –

there were only
sharp-taloned
birds of prey
far-travelled
sea birds
melodious birds
whistling unknown songs.

The vegetation
had sprung from seeds
carried on the wings of birds
swept to this place
by furious storms.

When the explorer arrived
jumping from the beached boat
his right foot
sinking into the soaked sand

and blessed himself
uneasy and amazed
thinking of his King
then at that hour
at that very first hour
the destiny of us all
began to be fulfilled.

Nothing Remains by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Nothing remains of unrecorded ages
That lie in the silent cemetery of time;
Their wisdom may have shamed our wisest sages,
Their glory may have been indeed sublime.
How weak do seem our strivings after power,
How poor the grandest efforts of our brains,
If out of all we are, in one short hour
Nothing remains.

Nothing remains but the Eternal Spaces,
Time and decay uproot the forest trees.
Even the mighty mountains leave their places,
And sink their haughty heads beneath strange seas;
The great earth writhes in some convulsive spasm
And turns the proudest cities into plains.
The level sea becomes a yawning chasm –
Nothing remains.

Nothing remains but the Eternal Forces,
The sad seas cease complaining and grow dry;
Rivers are drained and altered in their courses,
Great stars pass out and vanish from the sky.
Ideas die and old religions perish,
Our rarest pleasures and our keenest pains
Are swept away with all we hate or cherish –
Nothing remains.

Nothing remains but the Eternal Nameless
And all-creative spirit of the Law,
Uncomprehended, comprehensive, blameless,
Invincible, resistless, with no flaw;
So full of love it must create forever,
Destroying that it may create again
Persistent and perfecting in endeavor,
It yet must bring forth angels, after men –
This, this remains.

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me by Delmore Schwartz

“the withness of the body”

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, disheveling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
—The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

How to be Happy in 101 Days by Tishani Doshi

Adore stone. Learn to manoeuvre

against the heat of things. Should

you see butterflies gambol in the air,

resist the urge to pinch their wings.

Look for utilitarian values of violence.

Use the knife lustily: to peel the mango’s

jealous skin, to wean bark and cut bread

for the unending hunger of stray dogs.

Renounce your house. Take just one

object with you. Slip it in your pocket.

Marvel at how a simple thing can

connect the variegated skeins of time.

On the 99^th day, you must surrender

this object, but until then feel free

to attach sentiment to it. Find a forest

to disappear in. Look for thirst-quenching

plants. Rub the smooth globes of their roots

in our palms before biting in to their hearts.

Lean backwards and listen to the slippery

bastard of your own arrhythmic heart.

Remind yourself that you feel pain,

therefore you must be alive. Stain

your fingers with ink. Set out into

the world and prepare to be horrified.

Do not close your eyes. Catch a fish.

Smash its head and watch the life gasp

out of it. Spit the bones into sand.

Offer your bones to someone.

Clavicles are the chief seducers

of the human body. When you hear

the snap, allow yourself a shudder.

Find a tree to hold all the faces

of your dead—their hair, their rings.

Hang their solemn portraits from branches.

If you cannot find happiness in death

you will not complete the course.

Give your child to a stranger.

If you are childless, offer the person

you love best. Do not ask about possible

ways of mistreatment. Trust it will be terrible.

Climb a mountain. Feel how much larger

the world is when you’re alone.

Try to find words or images

to explain your loss. Give up. Stand on your head.

Grow dizzy on your own blood.

Spend the night in the cemetery.

Keep still and listen to the dead chortle.

Tattoo your face. Do not bother with the stars.

They are for romantics (who are not happy

people). Learn to steer through darkness.

If you’re attacked, spread your legs and say,

Brother, why are you doing this to me?

​​​​​​When you approach a crossing in the woods,

take the one instinct tells you to take.

When you are knee-deep in mud, turn

around and try the other path in order

to understand how little you know

of yourself. In a few days you’ll be ready

for the sublime. Before that, meditate

in a cave. If a tigress finds you, offer her

the meat of your thighs, give her cubs

your breasts. If tigers are already extinct,

wait for some other hairy, hungry creature

to accost you. It will happen.

It is important for you to lose both

body and mind. Dig a hole in the earth

with your hands. Place your treasured

object in it and thrill at how little

it means to let it go. On the 101^st

day, search out a mirror. Strip

away your clothes. Inch up to

your reflection. Much of the success

of this course will depend on what you see.

Lines on Love’s (Loss*) by Erica Hunt

what we do not dream we cannot manufacture

Art follows ear and echo
covers/chooses
selective
eyesight searches the dust
and is surprised by love’s
apophatic blinking

what love sees in daily light
holds open color – ink, roar, melody and quiet
is its own steady gaze
to better endure bumps

“always more song to be sung” between the words
jars memory and its subatomic ______
moving at the speed of thought ______

in random thirsts rise _______
name the sensations, ______
to fish for breath, ______
combing through hair as tangled as nets, as _______

thick as the beat of blossoms’ ______

a fine line between mind and senses spinning ______
in which her/my/their body becomes expert ______

without waiting for unified theory,

loving the body of one’s choice and ______

to live so surrounded ______
with fewer asterisks and _______
more verbs and ______
fewer security alerts ______

there eloquence before ______
and above
______ the grave.

*For Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor