Christina Pacosz

The Mother of Violence


Now I am seeing
the natural blackness
of this world
not only objects
illuminated by light.

How to measure the darkness
lingering beneath the trees –
the imported silk, the native oak –
even as their upper-
most branches

are a green blaze
in the sun.
Remember the iridescent
plumage of the hummingbird
is black

without the light.
Black like a branch
bereft of the life of the living
leaves, charcoal waiting
for the flame.

This is not the time
for debate: which came first –
the light, the dark
but recall how shadow
is at the beginning

before the word.
The vinyl appliqué
a black silhouette
of a hawk
on the window.

A warning for birds
to stay away.
How the shadow
of the predator
troubles the dreams

of its prey.
The swift darkness
of the mongoose
darting across
the blacktop road

on the path
of lava erupting
from the molten void
at the center
of the earth.





In the Garden

“In Baquba a woman and her four children were killed when a bomb went off in a neighbor’s house bringing the ceiling down on the family sleeping in the garden.”


A hot house in Baquba
Only a week after Zarqawi is killed
The stars shining like lanterns
In the night sky
Jasmine scents the air
Figs and tomatoes ripen
In the warm dark

Here in this country I am even now trying to reach this family

A woman and her four children
Buried under bricks and debris
From the ceiling of the bombed-out
Neighbor’s house
It is too late to rescue them
Too late when they closed their eyes to sleep
On pallets near the cucumber and chard




“The Mother of Violence,” first appeared in Kritya April 2007
"In the Garden” first published in Downgo Sun, March 2007

Christina Pacosz has been writing most of her life. Her most recent book of poetry is Greatest Hits, 1975-2001, Pudding House, 2002. (A by invitation only series.)

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Tovli Simiryan

The Day Papa Surrendered His Passport

for Haim ben Ben-Tzion who survived Stalin’s gulags and lived to pray with a strong voice in America


i like the small letters
they chose to type our names.
they’re self sufficient,
wise, and make speech crow
with the high pitched
fervor of abandonment.

i want to decide what’s safe;
pretend stalin stored water
with an inner wisdom seldom murderous;
dislodging dirt beneath fingernails
as an act of good hygiene
the afternoon he forgot to
lock prison doors.

i want to endure, finish last,
learn new adjectives
for what grows indigenous
even in sand.
i’ll give my money to strangers
and imagine the names
of their children twenty years later.

i want to move through the world
like a holy beggar;
pack my own sandwich,
quote sounds rebbenu whispered
while swaying in prayer:
begging to give; not receive.

i want to return,
when the seeds of patience
blossom into reality;
spit-out the old language,
cause russia to swallow my accent
or pretend she’ll miss me
if I crawl through too many windows.

i want to exchange your blank stare
for a relief map;
one soviets molded from cotton bed sheets,
while sleeping late on monday mornings
instead of planning for work,
besarabian fabric and orchards.


I want to watch you hide dreams
inside poems that read slowly,
as though a light rain of words
establishes prominence,
sounding—g-d forbid—
like a damned herd of camels
lost in the desert.

Tovli Simiryan is an award-winning writer living in West Virginia with her husband, Yosif. The family came to America as refugees from the former Soviet Union (Moldova) in 1992. Ms. Simiryan’s short stories, essays and poetry have appeared in a variety of publications. She has published two books of poetry. Ruach of the Elders—Spiritual Teachings of the Silent, a collection of stories will be marketed by HDM-Publishers in 2009.

Haim ben Ben Zion “Pappa”—1908-1995


Pappa was one of many—a simple man
who believed in hard work and survival.
Most of his life was spent avoiding war.
He survived the Holocaust only to be
imprisoned in Stalin’s work camps and
gulags. He was one of the few to
return to his beloved Moldova and spent
years avoiding war and hatred. In 1992,
following Perestroika, the family left for
America where he lived in peace for
three years.

To read more about Pappa visit:
http://www.jewishmag.co.il/127mag/story_yefimovich/story_yefimovich.htm

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Richard Downing

Brian Avery’s Face

.... Human shield, Jenin, ........ April 5, 2003



Our faces become us.

When they change – collisions with windshields,
...............................burns of varying degrees,
...............................attacks by animals armed with tooth or gun – we change.
It’s simple really:
Those who see us.... change us.
We have become .... different.
(Why did he want to be a human shield in the first place?)

So you say I will be careful to keep the face
I’ve got. I will keep my eyes straight
ahead, know what’s coming directly toward me. But what’s not direct can
....ricochet,
........bounce.... off
the intended target.

Brian Avery was struck in the face – an apparent ricochet bullet from an Israeli
armoured vehicle, officals said. It must have first struck something in one of his hands,
which were both raised
....................above
................his head. Yes,
that would explain his wounds,
........ the person he’s become.



More information about Brian Avery is here.

Richard Downing's bio/recent poetry publications/contests: The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award Winner of New Delta Review’s Matt Clark Poetry Prize Tacenda – featured poet, Potomac Review, and the anthologies Hunger Enough: Living Spiritually in a Consumer Society and The Dire Elegies Nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Co-founder of the Florida Peace Action Network, PhD in English


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Donald Harbour

Shi Tao

Shi Tao your thoughts are as water,
They will always find a way out.
Your suppression is a cotton gag,
Soon to rot and disintegrate.
Despot leaders and jailers all die,
Their passing the cleansing of stain.
Their trial against your humanity,
Rust on the steel of human rights.
History's repressive governments,
All of them are footnotes in time.
The poets, the writers, the teachers,
Their words the soil of expression,
They pay the price for our freedom.
Your penned words etched on paper,
A killing field of social injustice.
The world's authoritarians fear this,
Their minions the truth eradicators.
Shi Tao, unlike you they are fools,
They never learn the pen's strength,
The weight of your written words.
They cannot dismiss freedom's voice,
For your brothers and sisters speak.
Your indignity poison to the corrupt,
The gall that spills over black deeds.
Nothing exists forever except,
The verdant fields of knowledge.
The poetry of your life, Shi Tao.




Donald Harbour lives in Maumelle, Arkansas where he is an Environmental Code Enforcement Officer. He spends much of his time in the forest of the area from which he draws inspiration for his writing. His prose and poetry have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines nationally. He is a member of the Poet's Roundtable of Arkansas and presents his poetry on his website The Poetry Tree


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Rick Mobbs

SIZZLE

Sigh, child, and sink into the world you know.
Let butterflies appear in snow.
So what, if the rains come back to Nicaragua?
They always do. Would you add your wishes
to the weight of ignorance
that presses down upon the world?
I don't think so. There's work to do.

You stand inside a world that moves on wooden wheels
and as you watch the chirping cart
roll across the concrete cobbles,
a child up-ends a bucket,
and wears it on his head, and laughs for you.
Can you remember, and paint that laughter?

And those trucks that died beside the road
and all those tools that proved so useless.
The way he threw them down and hiked the mile,
and then on top of that, the extra mile
to walk along with you.
Can you paint those colors, too?

Try to find the spirit that inhabits an abandoned truck,
and you'll have found the trick to universal language.
We know that face, that truck, that walk.
Just like we all spot the places
where the city keeps her secrets safe
and where the forest ties the secret love-knots in her braids.

Listen, it's good you burn the candles
for the children of the dawn,
and all the men and women
laboring in Chinese prisons;
it's good you recognize that we are one.
But what did Broadus say about the meantime?

Crack the word and drop its contents on the frying pan,
and listen to your mornings start to sizzle.
Think about that old black man who took the time,
(before he left to do his dying)
to send you north to find your father and your son.

You brought them home. Paint that.
You'll find the recognition that you want inside your bones.
And who knows, friend, who knows?
You may find your brush has known the grip of other men,
and other women. Their hands will lead your hands, if you will let them.

The rains will come. The hurricanes, the liquid eyes
of thirsty, starving, children. Will these things change
for all your writing, all your painting?
Perhaps the best that we can do is celebrate, and honor them.
Ask the dancer. What he knows is he must spin and spin and spin,
and after that he has to practice spinning.

Don't think you are the first to wonder at the questions.
That's why we came. Feel sadness when you lose your friend,
and you may truly wish to die if you should lose your lover,
or your children. We are mated to illusions real as frying pans,
as eating. Grief is spelled out in our bones
and we are issued names to lose, at the beginning.

Didn't Broadus tell you? I think he must be grinning.
You didn't know he died? You have missed a thousand things
I would have shared, but gave up trying.
Now, the time has rolled around again.
I revise my gift and place it on the table as my offering.

In the meantime I build shrines, and travel.
I talk to cats and listen for their names.
I bear witness to small miracles of pleasure and of pain
and sketch them out, and write them down in long-hand.
I charge the little world I know with color,
I store milagros on computer.
One day, I'll meet the spinning dancer who can dance them.

For now I watch the river run.
I work, and do these meantime things.
Paris and New York? It's you I am committed to.
The children begging in the streets of Rio, the kids in Guatemala
huffing fumes and solvents, people running for their lives,
and all the cats and dogs we lose…

The way that politicians try to eat our children…
even as they promise us our safety, even as they promise us
our freedom, and the nightmares that daily feed upon us,
breathe and eat us, one by one.

The bridges that collapse beneath the best and worst,
that do not hold the weight of love,
that do not hold the weight of hope.
And the sleep which brings relief from these assaults,
and brings relief from their amazing weight,
or we should truly die from grief. This is the raw material
of our meantime. This is where our art comes from.

My words are marked, and handed down from trees.
What should I eat? Should I wear leather?
Should I buy this thing if it was made in China?
Plastic, or paper? How much does it matter?

I have a small gift to offer: I would see you dressed in rose petals,
sprays of hyacinth, lavender and lilac, covered with mother-of-pearl,
with diamonds, with the painted shells of almonds.

I would brush your skin with feathers, with starlight, with small pebbles.
And I would see your daughter learn to dance, unashamed, entirely naked,
across the universe, the seas, and stars and flowers.

Because the gift of the heart is one gift, it's breath one breath,
its word one word. It speaks with one tongue,
in one language, one idiom.
And love sits on her throne. She seats herself, and listens.
She is easy with the world. She relieves us of our burdens.



a little note of explanation... I wrote this upon the passing of my friend, Broadus Evans, from AIDS, just before the medicines that would have saved his life were introduced. He was a long-time activist in the African-American community in Wilmington, NC. He was an educator, counselor, a concert pianist and an activist in the gay and recovery communities there. He was valedictorian of his Williston High School class, the designated Black high school in the city. He graduated in the 1950's (?) but he was not allowed the honor of speaking to his class at graduation because he was already "out" as a gay young African- American male. This, in the South, in the '50's was no small thing. He also made his own clothes and sometimes wore a black cape. When I met him he scared the daylights out of me. I am grateful to him for a lot of reasons, one of them being that in a very short while he also started to shake the homophobia out of me. He was an interesting and wonderful, beautiful man, and I still miss his friendship. My wife and I named our son after him.

Rick Mobbs


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Allene Rasmussen Nichols

Silence is not an Option
(For Alexandr Solzhenitsyn)

Your words sliced like jagged ice
from East to West
through cold war temperatures
and government denial

of your gulag.
I remember your voice like drops
of water in monotone on my face
with the sound of distant whips,
and no hope of salvation.

At fourteen, I shrank
from your steel sharpened words
but returned again and again
to the blows and bruises

until I fled
into the cool Illinois afternoon
breathing deliberately
because I could breathe.

The shroud that clung to me
like a spider web
glistening with agonized
screams

still clings.

.


Allene Rasmussen Nichols lives in Arlington, Texas, where she teaches English at Gateway School. Her poems have been published /Philament/, /Ariel/, /Sylvan Echo/ and other journals and the anthology _Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa_. Her plays have been produced in California, Dallas, and New York.

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Evie Schockley

a call to words
—for saw wei



poetry is not the art of silence. . . .but it can

encompass quiet. . . .meditation. . . .the moments when we

attend to breath or thought without speaking

cacophony is only one

end of its spectrum. . . .there are spaces between words


politics is not an art. . . .but politicians do

exercise craft. . . .their media include words. . . .but

also wool. . . .white noise. . . .and wars. . . .they

cough can’t say and can’t do all day and night into our

ears. . . .we’ve forgotten the sound of our own voices



personal lives are our proper domain we’re told. . . .so

explain to me where they lie. . . .what spaces

are private when our rulers use their power to

control our bedrooms and bodies. . . .to clamp down our lips on

every word of potential dissent



people. . . .we must all become poets

each of us must cultivate the difficult art of

articulating personal lives in political terms. . . .we must

create words that drown out the noise of war. . . .poetry must

excavate a space for the silence that is evidence of peace



Evie Shockley
February 20, 2008.


The Burmese poet Saw Wei (Saw Wai) was arrested on January 22, 2008 for writing a poem.

Saw Wei is a well-known poet and performer whose philanthropic works include raising funds for AIDS orphans. He took part in the 1988 uprising and has headed a performance group called “White Rainbow”.

His acrostic poem (titled “February the Fourteenth”) stated that General Than Shwe is power-crazed.

For this he was arrested and is being held incommunicado at the Insein Prison, which is known for the use of physical and psychological torture.

According to a report in Mizzima News, Saw Wei’s family was permitted to visit him on the 20. February. His wife reports he is good health, but has not been given a trial date. The journal which published the poem has been permitted to resume publication. (IFEX, Amnesty Int. and PEN have not posted updates yet, please pass on information if you have it.)

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