Judy Brackett Crowe, The Watching Sky

A Poem That Grew from a Mistranslation

of Some of the First Lines of the Poems

in Claribel Alegría’s Sorrow

My grandmother told me a story about a kind of butterfly

that sings, one of the Gossamers. Only special children

and old women can hear their angel voices.

It is the sweetest, airiest sound, rather like a baby’s

Mrrring in her sleep, perhaps a question for the angel

who watches over her and whispers about the way

to be in this world. They say a smiling sleeping baby

is dreaming about angels. I always knew I was one

of those children, a lovely flower whose name begins

with G—It might be Gardenia, I cannot remember.

You were from the sea; I did not know the seas,

but you lived in my pocket. My labyrinth is a circle,

yours all kelp and foam and angles, so I invented you

in the garden where I lived. Today is the night of my

sadness. You were my other me. When you went away,

I left my home to try to find you. Today is the day

of the Camellia, so I climb the hill. I say the word love.

What will it be like when we meet again? Everyone talks

to me about death. I do not want to live forever, and I, too,

die a little every day. I do not want to live with your ghost.

They say that death is solitary. I am not alone. My past

is with me, and if I fall asleep and dream that I am dead,

you will be there. My Gossamer wings are sure and luminous,

my petals fragrant. My angel’s song is happiness. Give me

your song, your light, your warm hand.

Further details

Clive Donovan, Movement of People

Babysitter

The children play with pots and pans

I have promised to keep them safe

while Magda fetches rations from the trucks

it is useful play – they learn about weight

and metal and receptacles

                                                and percussion

my ears suffer din remembering

blistering rounds of bullets

ruined glass and wasted copper and brass

I collect and hammer things from

to pass the days

I have fashioned plates and bowls

they cannot resist fighting

                           over biggest pot

I teach them to make communal drum

and then to fix firm shelter tent from carpet

they know how to live like this

                   huddled snug in den

the pattern of carpet is helicopter

I shift to a book I cannot read

those far-away stories

I make it all up

sprawled

upside down I look at sky

it is mostly blue these days and clear

yesterday I     saw a banana

                     ate a kitten

                   got smiled at by soldier

I grab a child before it climbs

perilous concrete stair

leading to nowhere

Further details

Helen Finney, The View from the Hill

Spoon and Pusher

A handle,

forcefully curved  

to fit the grip of a tiny fist,  

arches its stem to its pusher bowl head,  

angled to fit the full of a tiny mouth.  

Tarnished now, 

after many a year  

in a keepsake drawer,  

held as a reminder  

of just how small 

those precious hands were.  

That hand now grown,  

holds the pusher bowl firm,

in steadiness 

for the faltering

grip of frailty, 

the arc of its curve  

now full circle. 

Further details

Mahua Sen, Nostalgia Crafting a Home Within

My Sky

There is a mammoth sky

inside of me.

Scoops of cloud floats there.

Soft, ripe, womanly.

Carrying the weight of

thousand pilfered droplets.

When I’m tired and weary,

I sit under its shade

and reflect on gnosis —

a breather.

It sprinkles pelagic drops

on the solitary desire —

that lay unclaimed

crushed beneath the pool

of the tarmac of

time’s hostile roulette.

Oft, that sky acts like a portal.

It elucidates another world

cloaked in cumulus cloud,

that holds my slender waist

in its tight grip of sedimentary promises.

During my nubivagant journeys,

I touch the sky with my parted lips

planting a peck,

I erase the sky with my lips

cutting the umbilical cord that joins it to the clouds.

Now it belongs to me-

The cumulus.

I bleed effervescent vehemence from

my soul.

My eyes reflect an enigmatic lore

that was stuck in the crevices of my cranium.

Wiping the ashen charcoal in my eyes

I soak in illusionary figments of fleeting moments.

An epiphany of mortal vitality

plays in a staccato rhythm.

Tasting yesterdays

on the tip of my tongue,

I glide through another day.

Further details

Ram Krishna Singh, Knocking Vistas and Other Poems

Loss

The chimneys around my home

print black spots on the walls

darken the air I breathe and

the water I drink or bathe in

the owners know how to shut

the mouths of inspectors

and the mafia know how

to make money this season

politics of lack of rain

repair and management

scraunch smoke from wildfires away

to country’s gas emissions

they have their priorities

mission to rewrite histories

erase the past and erect

new walls of divisions

climate change is no excuse

to mould the minds of Gen-Z

in face of imminent doom:

stay quiet at morass of loss

Further details