PANTOUM: THE TALIBAN TALI-BANS WINDOWS

by Steven Croft

No more open casements, no more moments at windows

Bring back the view of flowers and the love-burned orchards

Buildings now a punishment, knowing prisoners love windows

Talibs say: "Seeing women through windows is an obscene act"

Bring back the view of flowers and the love-burned orchards

To bodies now haram, faces now haram, our voices now haram

Taliban warn: "Seeing women as women is an obscene act"

Captive in darkness, dark-bitter roots till these walls come down

To bodies now haram, faces now haram, our voices now haram

At breast, our babies, throats filled with milk and woodsmoke

Captive in darkness, seeds for flowers, till these walls come down

No more subterranean, no more cavemouth blocked

At breast, our babies, throats filled by milk and woodsmoke

In the candlelit square of mirror, I hope myself, hopeless

No more subterranean, no more cavemouth blocked

But for the world I've stopped hoping, hope tombed long ago

In the candlelit ghosts of windows, I see myself hopeless

My pain bleeds down the panes, alone with my punishment

For the world will not see us, our hope tombed long ago

For the world will not see us, it stopped looking long ago

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

IMAGINE

by Steven Croft

AI-generated graphic for The New Verse News by Shutterstock

If instead of munitions, we could send Ukraine a spring

without war,

see Russian soldiers march off singing, "There is No Rank

Higher Than a Soldier's Mother," as mothers

who love them call them back home,

As the Dnieper thaws, let Ukraine beat its swords

into ploughshares for its golden fields of wheat, the farmers

no longer molested by fighter jets,

Let its cities be beautiful European cities again, free of

shelled and crumbling buildings, with

vibrant commerce and carefree nightlife, let people

sit idly in cafes, reaching calmly for coffee cup, newspaper,

its list of dead gone – for now,

Unwind stacked car graveyards of burnt-out husks,

bomb-twisted chassis, put them new again on roads

unpocked by explosion,

Let the countryside host tortoiseshell butterflies and roe deer,

the sound of bees visiting flowers, instead of armies

of tanks,

Let unstartled horses and cattle whip their tails idly in pastures

behind mended fences,

Let Ukraine part the dark curtain of daily anticipatory death,

box up the war strategy, the screams of wounded and dying, grief

of the living, tape them shut—for now,

Send home its stretched-thin, worn-out army of war,

Let its President wear a suit again, let his face cast off its war

fatigue, his body the green battle fatigues,

All over Ukraine let bells of peace and respite ring from the shingled

belltowers of wooden churches, let them dance the hopak

with fevered joy.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, December 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

DOOMER MADNESS

by Steven Croft

Why climate ‘doomers’ are replacing climate ‘deniers’: How U.N. reports and confusing headlines created a generation of people who believe climate change can’t be stopped. —The Washington Post, March 24, 2023

"If I am mad, it is mercy!" —H.P. Lovecraft, The Temple

Boundary between our world and the speculatively doomed

one finally dissolved, we all just sing with AC/DC now

as the world burns, as we inherit the hurricane winds

A man in Kentucky carries a mattress on his head, wades

from his flooded house to dry ground, collapses on it

in despair, lights a cigarette and laughs at all his/our ruin

A few years ago, just the faraway Seychelles were disappearing

Now, shunning sedate natural laws, future ghosts enter our minds—

"Oh, our prophetic souls!"—telling us all is irreversibly rotten

It's not like we were never warned—but, now, the world

of Soylent Green—2022—a year ago, if all that's left is to fail,

we've got catchin' up to do!

Now, loud muffler-rumble pride of our gloriously gas-powered,

world-castrating civilization as it races us all to the fiery oblivion

of Satan's eternally beckoning ancient mouth—sons of perdition!

Now, Paris Accords ripped into victory lap confetti for those

who can make it first to this perverse ever after—What of

those who still cling to hope in the sweat-throes of our mania:

Soon, as Seychelles-erasure goes nuclear, our heads spinning

faster than the earth some already orbit—the lucky few—even

the hopeful will cling to their rockets like Afghans fleeing Taliban

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

LET PEACE BE THE MOTHER OF EVERYTHING

by Steven Croft

Polemos pater panton (War is the father of all things.)

—Heraclitus

From the internet I read about the bombardment of Barcelona

by Italians, Germans, in 1938, watch the Movietone footage

of children running, the torn arm of a father's tweed jacket dark

with blood even in the film's black and white.  Omen, prelude

of what would come.  Today Germans, Italians, the rest of us,

condemn the bombs' carnage in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol.

The UN was founded in 1945 to prevent world war and make

the world better.  A gradualism powered by hope, a world

where the center will hold, held by our civilized will, forged

from what we all want and what we know we did wrong.  But...

those bomb-melted multistorey wrecks of buildings in the gritty,

jumpy newsreel are grimly colored in today in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol.

War could never be a mother.  Not that she couldn't cradle a rifle

as easily as a baby, plant a garden of mines—but motherhood

is too likely to want the peace to nurture children, is too ready

to negotiate, to drop the aim of a final strike on the wounded,

seeing her own sons and daughters in them, their mothers' pain.

Even if it, she, starts small like an opening bud in spring, compassion

could start at a steel plant in Mariupol where bloody-bandaged men

are being stretchered out to buses today on CNN.  Negotiation

could spread to Kharkiv, Kyiv, Kherson, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, peace

could become a warm-bedded garden, now the mother of everything.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

QUESTIONS OF PORTENT

by Steven Croft

"the wind will rise, / we can only close the shutters."

—Adrienne Rich

The Emergency Alert System dial-up screech has crossed

the television with warnings several times when I nudge

the dog out the back door.

Tall pines freighted with the wind's push sway, wave lateral

arms, recompose when the wind lets go. Finger branches

splayed with needles snap, parachute down.

The dog finishes, runs back to the sound of myriad drops

touching leaves with tiny slaps. I close the glass door,

watch the wind flex muscles against an overgrown azalea.

In the house, out of harm's way, I realize there is really no

safe distance anymore.  I feel anxiety born recently,

how Irma ripped a five-hundred-pound branch from a pine.

And I still hear its fingers' soaked-green needles whipping

the edge of my tin roof, and later the sound of chainsaws

in the island's sunlit wreckage, mine one of them.

Can the twenty-first century afford the price of petroleum?

Our bad karma circling back on us with skies dark as

a funeral coat, ready to drop snakeskins of churning wind?

Should we consult climatologist oracles: leave the coast,

construct your buildings with rock-solid materials. Or forget

warnings and sniff the air like animals knowing when to run?

Or is the world brighter now when, after the wind sweeps

the earth for hours, like tonight, in catharsis, the power

stays on and no destruction comes?

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

WOMEN OF GHŌR

by Steven Croft

In twilight we stare into our deaths

like we are the coming darkness

Our harrowed babies cry

but we dare not sing to them

The flour is gone in days

even tea is scarce

Our colorful dresses long hidden

or already burned for warmth

A bird calls a melody from a snowy tree

like joy trapped by the coming darkness

Warlords with stern faces walk the streets

with whips, rifles,

Whip-march a head-bent man with hands

bound behind by thick layers of rope

They tell us we have now what the hands

of the people have earned

And there is nowhere else to go, just

a cold valley, hill passes snowed for winter

If allowed to sing, we would moan a dirge

now even the night-bird is quiet

Nowhere is even a seed of relief

markets, kiosks, shops, silent and empty

They say our sins haunt us now—

girls wanting work and education

In the cold schools boys recite the Quran

Ameen

But how many times, O Knower of the Unseen,

until all our sins are erased

In our dreams of spring we see green trees

goat's milk and markets full of vegetables

In our dreams of spring we dance and sing

in our colorful dresses

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

ANTHROPOCENE ANXIETY

by Steven Croft

Illustration from The Guardian, October 23, 2021

As the beehive of news stories grew,

scientists reporting back from Greenland's

shrinking ice sheet, coral reefs in Australia, the Florida Keys,

the feedback loops of forests lost and wildfire,

a beehive building like the global sauna our

drowsy governments offer an impossible treaty to slake,

suddenly a question rose before me:

why are we losing our grip on our world's biggest problem?

Because it is too far gone to hold?

Because floodwater and crabgrass want our cities?

Miners complain about the earth's heat

as they dig lower for coal to send to the surface.

Metaphor become metamorphosis.

Today, I can't look at a dome of beautiful October sky

without my mind's eye seeing a blue-lit jail

for a fevered planet, without my mind's ear hearing

buffalo herds of wind speaking in tongues

of shrieks across this doomed green land.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

WIFE OF IDLIB

by Steven Croft

Hammers echo now from the rebuilding of houses,

pounding at my heart as I carry tea to the patio, stare

down at the tiles you laid. Tear-filled eyes raise—

who moves through the terraced almond trees on the hill,

their clouds of white flowers? Alas, it is only today's dream.

If Allah allows, may you one day walk into this daily dream

of your return. You were no terrorist, only a man

who loved the warmth of the land, wheat and barley,

the green joy of lettuce. When the planes bombed the fields

you ran to the town square to tell the protesters. Then,

the security men knocked at the door, and I kneeled before God,

but they dragged you out while my heart stopped.

Now, I wait in bed for the creak of our door, a call, again,

from the kitchen that you are leaving for the fields, anything

to bring you back into existence. My soul is a leaden weight.

Our country is a corpse. How can hammers sound? How can hope

trouble us anymore? Let our dead hearts rot. Just let our loneliness,

like the bombs' fires, burn us away.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

GHOSTS

by Steven Croft

Syrian pro-government forces and their jihadist opponents flagrantly violated the laws of war during the battle for Idlib province, UN investigators say. Civilians endured "unfathomable suffering" when the Syrian military launched a campaign late last year to retake the area, according to a report. They were subjected to indiscriminate air strikes and ground shelling, as well as arrests, torture and pillaging. Hundreds of civilians were killed before a ceasefire was agreed in March. Almost one million were displaced by the fighting and many were forced to live in dire conditions in overcrowded camps or open fields. Now, the investigators warn, "a perfect storm is in the making" as the war-torn country faces both the coronavirus pandemic and an economic crisis. More than 380,000 people have been killed and 13.2 million others - half of Syria's pre-war population - have been displaced inside and outside the country since an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011. —BBC, July 7, 2020

In a Syria that should have died of its wounds
years ago, still, the white noise howl of low-flying jets
bombing the rubble for any survivors

In a basement a mother cradles a child and screams
to the percussive palsy of cold dark stones
The jets pound the ground with deafening fists

Wanting to soothe her crying baby's fear, only screams
slip past her tongue, wails of surrender, she tastes
tears from lips, the corners of her mouth

These screams an echo of others, today's question:
"Who said I must lose this child, who?!"  The demons
of war give, again, yesterday's answer: BAROOOM!!!

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia.  He has recent poems in San Pedro River Review, Red Eft Review, Poets Reading the News, TheNewVerse.News, Synchronized Chaos, Gyroscope Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other places.

MAY DAY REVERIE FOR A PLAGUE YEAR

by Steven Croft




Let us go madcap into the outside air physicians tint
with rolling globes like schools of fish that find the darkness
of our lungs, lodge and sting there, a cyanide of suffocation.
Let us go out, walk past every microbe merciless and seeking
like a crow's flat eye

To the Exchange Club Fairgrounds where the Dixieland
Carnival has parked in silent rows gathering the field's dust
for the last two months, unpack its trucks, let the carnies
fire up the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round, share our
cotton candy, hear the cries

Of the game booths' winners and losers, fun with probability
where stakes are low, but as night wears we'll remember
the risk we've taken, repack the carnival, carry a day's memory
of joy between our hands to the solitary wards of our homes,
our national hospital we fled briefly and against all advice.


Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He has recent poems in Willawaw Journal, Sky Island Journal, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, San Pedro River Review, Poets Reading the News, Gyroscope Review, and other places.