EPITAPH FOR AN ELOQUENT: REMEMBERING KRIS KRISTOFFERSON

by W. Barrett Munn

Above are marble figures,
unmoving angels' wings,
with pale and polished faces
that will fade and flatten over ages
like forgotten wax on summer shelves,
and there, below those two
future faded vestiges,
lies a troubadour,
with nothing more to sing
and an epitaph hard to accept—
Here Lies Me and Bobby McGee.

W. Barrett Munn is a graduate of The Institute of Children's Literature where he studied writing under Larry Callen. His adult poetry has appeared in Awakenings Review, San Antonio Review, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Volney Road Review, Speckled Trout Review, Book of Matches, and many others. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A REQUIEM FOR OUR WORLD

by Janet Leahy

For more information about the Boccaccio Project, please click here.

How will our story be told, a world

in mourning for the millions who have died.

Who will write the score for the new

requiem, our sense of loss overwhelms,

day by day we feel the dread of what 

may come next.  How will a new symphony

hold the pain of pandemic, will the cello

anchor the gravitas with a call to prayer,

will strings of violins rage against

the virus, will the oboe conjure healing 

in the slow low notes of a minor key.  

Is a musician at her piano today, 

arranging chords to evoke

the pain of isolation, the fear of Covid.

Does she know her music will save us,

will redeem our lapses into despair.

I think of composers from the past… 

will a new Mozart, Verdi, Dvorak, arrange

dissonant chords to tell this story,

a Requiem Mass for Our World.

Janet Leahy is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her poems have recently been published in Halfway to the North Pole, the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar 2021, and Art in so Many Words.  She has published two collections of poetry.

REQUIEM FOR ELIJAH

by Shelly Blankman




How do you say goodbye? Always a brew
of duty and love, a fusion of friendship and
family. Stir in politics and the recipe can
kill the comfort of mourners united in grief.

This country said goodbye to a statesman
and grieved in prayer and song, in speeches
and memories by colleagues, family, friends,
religious and political leaders. Those who knew

him and those who did not. Thousands filled
the church and lined the streets to honor a
man loved by the people he served, reviled
by a government he angered with his staunch

defense of human rights and lifetime lessons
of common sense. Absence of a president
unnoticed in the presence of a humble hero.
Elijah Cummings, a Baltimore native, would

certainly have sunk into the annals of history, if
not for raising the spirits of those mired in chaos
and despair. A sharecropper’s son who lived what
he’d learned and left the legacy of a legend.


Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Shelly Blankman now lives in Columbia, Maryland with her husband, three cat rescues and a foster dog. Her poetry has appeared in First Literary Review-East, The Ekphrastic Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, and other publications

SAMIZDAT

by Tracey Gratch

A Russian court has convicted poet and teacher Alexander Byvshev of ‘inciting enmity’ and sentenced him to 300 hours of community service, confiscated his computer and prohibited him from working as a school teacher for two years.  His ‘crime’ – the poem ‘To Ukrainian Patriots’ in which he expresses his opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and suggests Ukrainians should ensure that not one inch of Crimea is handed “to Putin’s chekists”.  —Human Rights in Ukraine (KHPG), July 14, 2015

The storefront windows dim with filth and soot.
Cyrillic, signs hold sway and hang above
the wooden-blocks paving the streets in rot.

In nineteen-twenty-one the husband's shot –
The committee puts its strangle-hold on nearly
everything the others wrote, and thought.

Damp fire-wood and famine, typhus rages
in darkened spaces – their words, to memory,
then burned.  An apartment bare, but for the language,

whispered in the cold rail cars which pass
beneath the towers. Outside a prison's gate,
in the crowd she waits to see her son, for hours.

Here, a crimson-history is wrought:
"Can you describe this?"  She said, "I can."  She thought.


Author’s note: Alexander Byvshev’s situation is reminiscent of the plight of other Russian poets, including Anna Achmatova, (whom the poem is about) in post-revolutionary Russia, when Achmatova's work was officially stifled, though it continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work hidden passed and read in the gulags. With the conviction of Alexander Byvshev it seems that Russia is returning to the practice of censoring  and persecuting its writers for their political views. 

Tracey Gratch lives in Quincy, MA with her husband and their four children. Her poems have appeared in  publications including Mezzo Cammin,  The Literary Bohemian, The Flea, Annals of Internal Medicine, Boston Literary Magazine,  The New Verse News and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Her poem, "Strong Woman" is included in the American College of Physicians, On Being A Doctor, Volume 4.

UKRAINE: NOTES, 2014

by Kathleen Sousa Capps

@anadoluimages: A piano painted the colours of Ukrainian national flag at Independence Square in the capital Kiev.
Image source: Veooz 360

If I knew how to play
I’d set up a grand piano
In Kiev
In Independence
Square
Right now
While it’s winter
Though each note hang on the air
Like an icicle suspended
From the frame of a burnt out bus
It would still be carried with passion
Wrung from the heart of a nightingale
I’d play every Handel and Mozart Requiem,
Every song that blows out a candle
Every thought that says THIS IS NOT A COUP
This is a cry for human rights, to let us out of this
Dictatorship, this collaboration with fascism
To deny freedom of choice, to deny free trade,
Intellect, spirit, Ukraine and Europe.
Right now
While Kiev is burning
In flames
And riot police claim lives
And protestors toss Molotov cocktails
If I could I’d sit in front of a grand piano
And each moment would pray for peace


Kathleen Sousa Capps holds a PhD in English from University of Oregon (1998).  Publications in literary and academic journals, including Paideuma.   Dissertation topic: Image Trouble: Pound’s People-Making as Visual Discourse.  Trying to find an agent/publisher for her novel, Blackberry Woman.  Because Kathleen is hearing impaired and blind, her father forbade her to learn to play the piano; he said it was a waste of time.  And college is no place for women.  (That’s what he said.)