NEW CALEDONIA NATIVES FIGHT FOR RIGHTS

by Lavinia Kumar

New Caledonia has been under French control since 1853. The indigenous Kanak population, who make up approximately 40% of the territory’s 270,000 residents, has long sought independence from France. The 1998 Nouméa Accord provided a framework for gradual autonomy and promised three referendums on independence. The first two referendums in 2018 and 2020 saw close results against independence, while the third in 2021, heavily boycotted by pro-independence groups due to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulted in an overwhelming vote to remain part of France. The recent violence erupted after the French National Assembly approved a constitutional amendment allowing French citizens who have lived in New Caledonia for at least 10 years to vote in provincial elections. This change is viewed by pro-independence leaders and most Kanaks as a threat to Kanak representation, as it could significantly increase the number of pro-France and non-indigenous voters. —Mirage, May 23, 2024. Photo: Police forces pushed back rioters near a shopping center in Dumbéa Sur Mer, New Caledonia, on Wednesday. Credit: Bruno Favre/EPA, via Shutterstock and The New York Times, May 22, 2024.

3000 BC is when Kanaks made home

in the west Pacific, in Oceana,

          south of Papua New Guinea, 

          north of New Zealand.

 

10,000-miles-away-France, took over

the islands in1853, parked its prisoners,

          destroyed crops of the Kanaks,

          forced labor, and brought disease.

 

1854 marked the discovery of nickel,

began years of foreign mine expansion –

            nearly ten mining sites –

            one selling nickel to car-maker Tesla.

 

A 1998 Accord enscribed island voting rights. 

Then 40,000 more French arrived, and

          today rights undone by Paris law—

          expanded migrant voting, diluting Kanaks.*

 

Today Caledonia’s nickel is third in world.

Today Kanaks have no control over the mines.

Today Paris has sent President, ministers, 3000 troops, police.

Today Kanaks block roads, fight for freedom.

* President Emmanuel Macron says he will not force through a controversial voting reform in the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia following deadly rioting. Speaking on a visit to the main island, Mr Macron said local leaders should engage in dialogue to find an alternative agreement for the archipelago's future. —BBC, May 23, 2024

Lavinia Kumar writes in New Jersey.  Her latest poem is here.

OLD WOOD

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

April 16, 2019 Fallen debris from the cathedral’s burned-out roof lies near the altar. Christophe Morin/Bloomberg News via The Washington Post.

Halfway through my last dinner, I saw the blaze,
unfathomable as the Grand Canyon creaking shut.
The owner confirmed:  Everyone on staff is following

as firefighters poured the river onto the flames.
When the spire lifted as it toppled, people gasped,
wailed as though a suicide had jumped.

The day before I’d walked the quais,
browsed the bookinistes, shot mood pics of the towers,
total cornball, through the mist of new leaves.

Arrow of God, the spire had fallen before the sun was down,
The fire turned the sky red, turned the cross white-hot.

Not all the water in the world, not even the river could help.
People stood and watched, sang and wept.
Rains came only the next morning.

Ash sifted down catching, reflecting coral light
I’d brought my husband’s ashes in a carved wooden box.
No need, no need.

After dinner, the owner walked me to the door. We sniffed the air.
Vieux bois, she shrugged, wincing. Old wood.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya’s third and weirdest chapbook Kafka's Cat will soon be available at Kattywompus Press.

IN THE JUNGLE, LIANAS COVER WHOLE CITIES

by Devon Balwit




After 1,700 years, two vast Buddhas fell
to dynamite. 856, and Notre-Dame scorches
the Paris skyline, a spark from a restorer’s blowtorch,
or some other carelessness, small
to have such large consequences. Strangers tell
each other stories of the time they marched
up the narrow spiral staircase to perch
in the tower, uplifted by history, and marvel.
The Stoics warn that as long as we place
our highest good outside ourselves, we’re at the mercy
of caprice. Inside is our rose window, our flying
buttress. Inside, the thunderous bell and the space
for God. It’s hard. We trust what we can see.
But each loss invites us to keep trying.


Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found here as well as in The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Fifth Wednesday (on-line), Apt, Grist, and Oxidant Engine among others.

NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS

by David Southward





It took nothing—
a smoker’s match, a welder’s spark—
to start the blaze
in my ribs.

You will search
the smoldering grandeur
for some dire cause.
That is your rhythm.

But remember:
the one you blame
is small and frightened, like you.
Like you, my child.

Forgive him.


David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His chapbook Apocrypha was published by Wipf & Stock in 2018; a full collection, Bachelor’s Buttons, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (April 2020).

EASTER PASSION AS NOTRE-DAME COLLAPSES

by Earl J Wilcox





In my town today, construction workers
digging in red clay clipped cable lines
to thousands of homes causing early
morning mayhem—no computer
access, cable news, email, stock market,
baseball scores, weekly NEW YORKER—
civilization as we know it. They say, I
learned many hours later, the fire began
in the spire while all morning I fumed
and fiddled the hours away by cleaning
listening to old CDs, feeding humming birds,
washed/dried/folded three loads of
laundry, walked for 35 minutes—all
before noon as the Cathedral burned.
Early afternoon, as the fire spread
and panic roared in Paris, I napped,
after eating a spare lunch of boiled
cabbage, lima beans and a small meat
patty, walked again, vacuumed,
angrily and with petty vengeance
sprayed carpet bees buzzing my
pergola, watered an Easter Lily,
began the first of several classic opera
CDs, strolled to the street to fetch junk
mail, texted family and friends,
(none mentioned a great fire!)
as Parisians panicked in peril, prayed
for God’s intervention here in Holy Week.
In my passion, I ignorantly enjoyed our
Magnificent Spring sunshine, took
Images of my majestic azaleas, wondering
how a pilgrim feels spending April in Paris.


Earl J Wilcox is regular contributor to TheNewVerse.News.

ARMISTICE COMMEMORATION IN PARIS

by Alan Catlin

T***p appears disengaged,

outside of the spotlight, except

when greeting Putin and his thumbs

up salute.  Forced to listen to solemn

solo by cellist Yo Yo Ma, the day after

failing to lay a wreath on graves of

the fallen due to inclement weather,

he seems  preoccupied. Compelled to

listen to President Macron deliver

a speech decrying Nationalism, directly

criticizing him, T***p appears tired

as if formulating new ways to become

unchecked and balanced as autocrat-

in-chief, electoral defeats, and late night

television viewing, is wearing him down. 

Protestors raise new trial balloons of baby-

in-diapers-T***p to see if anyone salutes.


Alan Catlin is poetry editor of online journal misfitmagazine.net. His latest book of poetry is American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press.

LAST SUPPER

by Paul Smith





Richard Corey went out to eat
crossed the bridge over the canal
from the Old Quarter
followed a dark street
where suddenly appeared
a place brightly lit
where laughter, grub and cheer
were served
in a room full of shadowy silhouettes
‘What’s good in here?’ he asked
the waiter
‘Wait here’ he said
and brought the chef
a sober man
who told him
‘Not the White Gazpacho’
‘What then?’
‘Not the Osso Bucco’
‘What then?’
‘Not trying to make up for lost time’
‘You, then, chef of chefs’
Richard Corey took the chef’s hand
walked him down the dark street
crossed the dark bridge
over the dark canal
and had dessert

Paul Smith lives near Chicago. He writes fiction & poetry. He likes Hemingway, really likes Bukowski, the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Kinks and Slim Harpo. He can play James Jamerson's bass solo for 'Home Cookin' by Junior Walker & the Allstars.

READING HOUELLEBECQ THE NIGHT BEFORE EARLY VOTING BEGIINS

by Katherine Smith

If this emptiness were all that was left
I would spend the rest of my life reading
paranoid fantasies late into the night.

Instead of going out early to see the leaves
of the cherry trees turn a creamy peach
I would read every night till three the words of the hero

who rarely stepped out of the Sixth Arrondissement
of Paris, a place I happen to know quite well.
I would drink cocoa and fall under the spell of a clash

between fascists and the Muslim Brotherhood
the critics call satire. But I’m pretty sure
the writer believes far more in his dark story

of veiled women, cowardly professors, conspiracies,
than he believes in me, his American reader,
a middle-aged woman in the suburbs. This morning

I regret losing myself in his tale. Dew has already dried
from the late blooming roses. My face sags. I shower,
and accept that my thoughts are unlikely

to persuade anyone. Dependably sane
and despicably naïve, I start my car, drive
to the Frederick Senior Citizens’ Center

to cast my ballot during early voting.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003; her second Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press, appeared in 2014.

THE HOMOPHILOUS GENE

by James Penha

“You’ll see people complaining that the media doesn’t give as much prominence to terrorism atrocities outside of Western Europe as it does to those that take place in cities like Paris or Brussels. The data shows it is much, much harder to get people to read those stories.” 

—Martin Belam, Medium, March 28, 2016

I shall always ❤ New York. And on Marathon Day I stand again

with Boston, and #BlackLivesMatter in every Charleston nightly.

Bien sûr je suis Paris parce que j’aime Paris chaque instant,

chaque moment de l'année. Bruxelles?  Bruxelles est assez

de français pour moi d'être Bruxelles maar ook

Vlaams naar Brussel elk moment van het jaar.

Last summer I devoured simit and baklava at Taksim windows

and petted sprawled dogs in the shade of the Obelisks: İstanbul'u

(but to Ankara I have never been).

Part of me must be Lahore. Remember? it was Easter after all

although I cannot find a timely # for that attack 3 weeks ago

(#PeshawarAttack impertinent; #PakistanBleeding obsolete) and

if میں نے پاکستان تھے whenever a bomb explodes in Pakistan

how to find the time to face Java and Bali?

islands where I love a Muslim whose faith in  الله 

is sighted darkly at every Western checkpoint, mall, hotel,
monitored whitely by attendants on Southwest Airlines,

and so I will—must—be Aleppo, Hit and Lashkar Gah 

walking dead from graves cracked open by exceptional shocks

of retribution and survival 
of the selfish.

James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News .

AS THE PARIS CLIMATE TALKS BEGIN

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Place de la République on Sunday. Thousands of activists took to the streets of Paris ahead of climate summit, despite a ban on public demonstrations following the Nov. 13 attacks. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters via CBC News.

The weather has turned cold.
The sky is dirty white.
A crow caws without enthusiasm
From high up in a bare maple
As I scuffle through piles of leaves
On my way home from the post office.
The day is deeply still
As if holding its breath in anticipation
Of the massive storms
That have been predicted for this winter
After years of drought.
A sudden shower spatters the leaves
The decaying gardens, the pavement
Then stops abruptly
Leaving the ground barely wet
And the air smelling of winter rain.
I scan the clouds for signs of big weather
But see nothing that suggests
The downpour we so eagerly await
Not without some anxiety
Since heedless and profligate profiteering
Have so drastically mangled
The natural systems that have made the Earth
Habitable for us and others
And once the deluges begin
We cannot be certain that they will end
Before catastrophe.

We march in the streets
We block entrances and intersections
We interrupt and interfere with business as usual
Demanding an end to the toxic practices
That could mean the end of us.
But time is running out
And the ones with their hands on the throttles and gears
Act reluctantly
If at all.

I open my front door
And step inside the warm house
My morning's errands completed.
I have bought a few groceries
Returned a library book
And mailed a birthday gift to my daughter.
And now I settle down
With a magazine and a cup of tea
Glancing from time to time
Out the big front window
Wondering when it will rain.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesday and others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

GOOD BOY

by Laura Rodley





You made it, speeding squirrel,
barreling cross black asphalt
as five cars careened
towards you each way,

north and south, no bombs
tied to your body, just
soft grey fur, acorns awaiting.

What know you about bombings
in Paris, 128 killed,
I’m ready for love
what know you

about guns in kindergarten
I’m ready for love
what know you but the rumble
of the road, earthquakes

that pass as the cars swirl by
and you’ve made it to high ground
leaves barely moving
as your tiny feet scramble up.


Author's note: I’m ready for love from Bad Company’s song "Ready for Love."

Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

NIGHT RATS

by Carolyn Gregory

At night, they run toward each other,
biting off each other's tails.

They flagellate themselves
over an unknown God
who answers none of their prayers
for work, land or hope.

Hiding during the day,
they are aroused by the need
for meat at night,

their prayers not inspired by love
but by the drill to capture,
biting off the heads of the enemy
and spitting out their hearts.


Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Main Street Rag, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ygdrasil, Seattle Review. Her first and second books were published by Windmill Editions in Florida.

PONT DES ARTS, 2015

by Scot Ehrhardt

Photograph: Remy de la Mauviniere/AP via The Guardian

The city had warned us
about the weight of promises:
the civil engineers, our parents,
one parapet of the Pont des Arts
predicted this would happen.
Five ounces for two lives
padlocked to padlocks
an exponential mass
on an iron grill,

and when forever
proved temporary, no one
returned for the divorce.
No one dredged the Seine,
a bed of discarded keys,
for the one they jettisoned
the summer their lives
brimmed with youth.

Let us dismantle this
monument of hope,
scatter and melt the
seven hundred thousand
moments we dismissed
the weight of a symbol,
when we thought
that steel could represent        

the fickle carbon of our hearts.


Scot Ehrhardt is a teacher and writer from Baltimore, MD. He has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Lines + Stars, Tidal Basin Review, and Infinity's Kitchen. His first book of poetry One Of Us Is Real is currently looking for a home.

FINDING BEAUTY IN SEWERS

by Catherine Wald

A new photography exhibition featuring images taken by Paris’ homeless and most vulnerable citizens was inaugurated by Deputy Mayors Bruno Julliard and Dominique Versini this week. The photos are on display on the railings surrounding Paris City Hall. This new initiative is the outcome of a partnership developed between 'Deuxième Marche', a nonprofit association offering assistance and educational opportunities to vulnerable individuals in France, and the start-up Wipplay, which organizes amateur photography competitions online. After a short training period, the twelve homeless individuals selected spent 4 weeks capturing Parisian life from their perspectives. Accompanied if they wished by students from Paris’ art schools, the photographers set out to depict their daily lives and to provide an insight into a side of Paris that most people never experience. The exhibition aims to raise public awareness of homelessness, and to demonstrate photography's potential as a means of reinsertion and rehabilitation. A selection of the photos taken are on display outside the City Hall until March 19th, and will also be available for purchase online on Deuxième Marche’s website. The profits from these sales will be shared equally between the association and the photographer concerned. The hundreds of photographs submitted depict scenes of solitude, insecurity, exclusion, and public indifference, as well as moments of beauty. —Mairie de Paris, February 20, 2015

In the tradition of our patron saint, Baudelaire, we are exhorted
to find harmony in mud, trash and indifference; given cameras
and point-and-click lessons; sent in search of photo ops.

We have no hesitation in rising to the challenge – we, the
flowers of poverty and displacement, society’s poisonous vapors,
perambulating poets that trail nasty refrains after us wherever we go.

Our longing for beauty, actually, is more poignant than yours.
We have learned to conjure it from sewers, air vents, public
toilets and fountains, billboards, and tunnels that only
sometimes have light at the end of them.

We are the visionaries -- not you soft, you sheltered ones.  It’s easy
to embrace loveliness when it wraps a silken shawl about your
shoulders, when it looks like your kin and feels like your birthright.

It’s supremely possible to celebrate ugliness when it’s a choice, not
an obligation, not a brooding and inescapable horizon.

Do you doubt us?

How do you think we’ve survived thus far on nothing
but fumes and cold pavement?  We are not metaphors,
we are the living dead, and we have learned over and
over again how to inject beauty into our thinning veins,
decomposing clothing, the cracked and bleeding
soles of our feet.

We have been artists all our lives.

Catherine Wald's books include poetry (Distant, burned-out stars, Finishing Line Press, 2011), nonfiction (The Resilient Writer: Stories of Rejection and Triumph From 23 Top Authors, Persea Books, 2005) and a translation from French of Valery Larbaud’s Childish Things (Sun & Moon Press). Her poems have been published in American Journal of Nursing, Buddhist Poetry Review, Chronogram, Exit 13, Friends Journal, Jewish Literary Journal, The New Poet, Society of Classical Poets, The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly and Westchester Review.

PARIS 1974, 2015

by Martha Deed

Photo by Ian Berry

What has the sun said to you, my child ‒

that the world is a dangerous place

and this is a day to stay in bed?

But, No. It said

Do you see the shine of morning dew

on the cobblestone streets

and the spires of Notre Dame

kissing the clouds

The cafes bursting with coffee

and croissants in the hands of kids

on their way to school

on their way to work?

This is a day

the sun said

to take a good walk

along the quay

This is a day to look for a book

to visit the market of live birds

to hear them call

to admire their feathers

shining in the sun

the light flashing on them like sparklers

not like bullets at the newspaper

not like flash grenades

at the grocery store

This I tell you:

Because you heeded the sun,

you will live another day

your survival as accidental

as those held hostage

as those who died

at your grocery store

you did not visit

because you were taking 

a walk in the sun 

In this poem, Martha Deed has woven the close call she had in Paris in 1974 or 1975 when Millie was a baby.  They usually went to the news stand for the Sunday paper at 10:30 AM.  Regular as clockwork.  But that day, Martha simply thought to take a walk to a farther away news stand instead.  Carlos, the Jackal, had planted a bomb at her usual place, and it exploded, killing people, as Martha pushed Millie in her stroller down the Blvd Saint-Germaine.

ZERO IN THE CEMETERY

by Carolyn Gregory 

Nocturnal Sunrise by Alison Strange-Green

The angels at Pere Lachaise Cemetery
weep this morning,
tears glued frozen to classic features,
wings unable to fly.

They are mourning the dead journalists
who were too saucy with cartoons,
lambasting the prophet
when thousands die under drones
in trenched caverns in Syria.

One man's religion is not
another man's feast to roast and ride
when children and women drop
at weddings and in small cells.

The angels light the graves
of Oscar Wilde and the French Resistance,
stones shining above snow

and then they retreat
to melancholy for this season of violence,
wings bent down with grief.


Carolyn Gregory's poems and essays on music have been published in American Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Bellowing Ark, Seattle Review, and Stylus. She was featured in For Lovers and Other Losses. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2011 and is a past recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award. Her book, Open Letters, was published by Windmill Editions in 2009 and her next, Facing the Music, in 2012. She has been working on a series about the history of guns in America for several years now.

IS PARIS BLEEDING?

by Bill Costley

A million parisiens stand
facing the Tour Eiffel
shutting down quickly
on a massive film noir,

minus tourists,
minus frivolity.
What's amusant about
Charlie Hebdo now ?

Rien. (Nothing) Rien.
Millions of its
next edition will absorb
its dry editorial sang.

Paris is media-sanglant
The world, sympathique.


Bill Costley, among the earliest regular contributors to The New Verse News, served on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the National Writers Union. He lives in Santa Clara, CA.