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Showing posts with label Aeneas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aeneas. Show all posts

Sunday, February 21, 2021

SOME DAY, PERHAPS...

IT WILL HELP TO REMEMBER THESE TROUBLES AS WELL.*

by Bonnie Naradzay


*Aeneas to his men, after theirs is the only ship
  to survive a violent storm at sea near Carthage.

         
Friends, a study of The Black Death states the plague 
may have come from outer space. The Mars Rover 
landed in a dried up lake. Perseverance is transporting 
images home from the red planet. On earth, we learn 
that magnetic north and south may be flipping sides, 
an ominous event, according to weakening attractions 
and ancient iron shards stuck pointing the wrong way. 
In Galveston, medical workers asked for a refrigerated 
truck to store the dead bodies. Thousands of turtles 
stunned by the cold have gone to a convention center 
in the backs of station wagons. Ted Cruz got on the plane
in jeans but went the wrong way, or the optics were wrong.
Sweet Thames, and Virgil, flow gently while I end my song.


Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry workshops at a day shelter for homeless people and at a retirement center, both in Washington DC.  Recent poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), Kenyon Review Online, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, Tampa Review, Poet Lore, EPOCH, Northern Virginia Review, Anglican Theological Review, Seminary Ridge Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Friday, June 08, 2018

SHIPWRECK OFF THE COAST OF AFRICA

by Eswer El Cubadi


At least 52 people died after a boat carrying around 180 refugees and migrants sank off the coast of Tunisia on Saturday. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is deeply saddened at this latest tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea and is concerned about the high number of people dying on the Central Mediterranean route with over 700 dead or missing so far in 2018. —UNHCR, June 5, 2018; Meanwhile, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini (in photo) says he will stop migrants trying to reach Europe via Sicily. – EPA pic, June 4, 2018.

            "Can I escape from fell Charybdis and ward Scylla off?"
                        —Homer, Odyssey, Book 12, Lines 115, Odysseus to Circe


At Sfax, the news was horrible—five dozen dead—and more,
near to Kerkennah Island off of north Tunisia's shore.
Increasingly the human traffickers launch people from
Tunisia, now that Libya is tighter than a drum.
The boat was packed with migrants fleeing Africa to be
free from the lives they do not like for hope in Italy.
But, o, alas, the relatives of those who learned the worst,
their souls, like Dido's when Aeneas left her, are accursed.
But further off, up north, Salvini said at Sicily,
"We will no longer be the camp for Europe's refugees."