COLLATERAL DAMAGE

by Jocelyn Ajami

Credit...Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times, November 13, 2023.

In the competition 

over who is more 

the victim

who is more humane

no child votes.

No child, bruised 

and maimed

battered and beaten

claims membership 

to an aristocracy 

of woes.

In the competition over

who is more 

barbaric

no child, body

peppered with bullets 

propounds…

No child whose lungs and 

larynx collapse under 

the weight of boulders

vindicates the winner

raising his mutilated 

limbs in pride. 

In the competition 

over who is more 

human

no child condemns 

or commends

suffocating

underneath the flaming 

rubble, abandoned

and unclaimed 

in playgrounds 

of slaughter.

Blood void of bias 

splatters on stone

calligraphy of carnage 

to which no child

hurls

a single stroke. 

Jocelyn Ajami is an award winning painter, filmmaker and poet. Jocelyn has received several awards for her films, Oasis of Peace, Gypsy Heart and Queen of the Gypsies. She turned to writing poetry in 2014 as a way of connecting more intimately with issues of social conscience and cultural awareness. She has been published in several anthologies of prize winning poems. Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, she speaks five languages and lives in Chicago, Illinois.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY8 MARCH 2022

by Mary K O'Melveny

Today, please celebrate all

the women we have lost.

In every war and cease fire.

On slaver’s ships. On thirsty

desert treks to walled borders.

In back-alley rooms without

anesthesia. Locked in basements,

without papers or escape routes.

Asleep in bed. Hitching a ride.

Nursing bruises or starving babies.

 

Our losses rise like mountain peaks.

Ukrainian women huddle in subways,

clutch children, family pets, a few

hastily gathered objects from lives

they will likely never know again

or tattered photographs of loved ones

they may never see again. Even in

safer worlds, friends die of causes

that repurposed money, refocused

attention could have remedied.

 

Some fade away from neglect,

inattention, dreams downsized

by school guidance counselors,

religious zealots, patriarchy.

Others drop dead without a whimper

on a sun-dappled afternoon. One friend’s

memories vanished by midnight

stroke; another’s by subtle daily

erasures. Open our mouths wide in

praise of all. Let songbirds loose.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

WATCHING A WASP THE DAY AFTER JOHN LEWIS'S FUNERAL

by Linda Gelbrich

A small yellowjacket joins me
at the patio table this morning,
absorbed in the pinch of sausage
I set aside on the tablecloth
a short distance away.

It wraps its body
halfway around the morsel,
its legs and jaw clamped on,
and the sausage begins to roll
toward the table edge.
I stop the rolling with my notebook.
The wasp hangs on.

The second time it rolls to the edge
both fall to the deck,
and the wasp hangs on
until it bites off a small piece,
flies away, then returns for more.

All this happens
while I finish breakfast,
get out my pen and begin to write,
wondering if I, too, could be
so absorbed in anything
that I’d keep on with my work
no matter who or what
sat near me,

no matter the rolling and falling
that surely would happen,
that I’d keep on, even
if bruised and battered,
that I’d want something so much
I could not be deterred,
would not give up,
as long
as I still
had breath.

Linda Gelbrich is a retired Clinical Social Worker and adult educator living in Western Oregon.   Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies, on notecards she creates, and in chapbooks.  Her spiritual reflections have been published in books of daily readings.