I WANT TO LOVE WAKING UP

by Lynne Schilling

after “I Want to Love the World” by Christine Potter

I want to love waking up again, but for months

I’ve been waking up to thoughts of being a day 

closer to death, to images of the bony ribcages 

 

of starving children, to the blankness of hope. 

I want to be light as birdsong at dawn, but instead, 

I am the heavy keening of families of deportees. 

 

I want to love waking up, but joy evades my grip,

drips off my fingers and evaporates, like drops 

of water on a hot pan. I want to wake up happy, 

but doom is leaning on her horn under my window, 

making thoughts of anything else impossible. I force

myself to get up, and only then, when I feel my feet 

 

on the floor, do I remember poetry—a few lines

I want to revise, a poem I want to reread & that 

is enough to get me down the stairs to my coffee.

While Lynne Schilling has been writing poetry on and off for forty years, she began writing it seriously four years ago at age 75. Her day job was as an academic in an entirely different field. She has published poems in Quartet, The Alchemy Spoon, Rue Scribe, The New Verse News and others. She has poems forthcoming in Lucky Jefferson and MacQueen’s Quinterly.

THE WORLD AFTER MORALITY

by Philip Kitcher

Cartoon by Zez Vaz

In honor of his troops, he comes in black.
To save his shattered nation he needs aid.
He’s desperate.  The last defense may crack.
Their only interest: to be obeyed.
 
No ghost from Bucha whispers in this room,
a precinct where the truth is not allowed.
He craves security.  They talk of doom.
He asks for help.  They offer him a shroud.
 
Their callous lips mouth platitudes of peace,
heedless of all the wounds his people feel.
Their “gift”: an interval for war to cease—
and, in exchange, demand that he should kneel.
 
More than a nation’s honor’s left for dead;
they do more than encourage future strife;
the damage wreaked within this room will shred
the moral fabric that sustains our life.
 
What are these creatures in their costly suits,
obsessed with vulgar thoughts of squalid gain?
Do they know what divides us from the brutes?
We’re fully human as we are humane.
 
Indifferent to their or others’ crimes,
to any words a moralist might pen:
what foul distemper has convulsed our times
to vomit forth such parodies of men?

Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His new book The Rich and the Poor (Polity Press) is all about the costs of abandoning morality in politics and public life. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.

WAR, BY ALL MEANS

by Indran Amirthanayagam 

War. To end all wars. War. To squash, squeeze,

stamp out flea, bug, virus, hate-filled cur. War.

To avenge children, women, men, mowed

down by cars, in homes, gardens, streets.

War. Angels of doom, of death, thousands

of flares splashing the night sky, shot down,

blown up, debris falling aimlessly, thousand

injured, two thousand dead and counting. War.

Invasion. Unprovoked. Stoked. Warships

and aircraft carriers roaring towards the middle

of the Middle East, with sheikhs and princes,

and restless armies, drumming again, to defend,

to protect the right to exist? To live unbombed?

By a temple unbombed? School unbombed?

Agricultural cooperative, unbombed? War.

Peace. Yes bring the 'niks into the chat. Unify

the world before the horror and awe. Get

laws passed that will legalize the extra-

territorial execution. War. Times of War.

Times of throwing civic bones to dogs.

Dogs of war. Howling, yapping dogs

of war. Poor canines we steal for metaphors.

Metaphor. Cadence, Rhyme. Unreason:

War. Temporary Solution:War.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun. (Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

SOUTHERN BIRDS MOVE NORTH

gigan by Martha Deed

The dense, green woodlands of Germany that gave rise to the "Grimms' Fairy Tales" are turning gray and dying. Forest still covers a third of the country, but 80% of all trees are sick. Weakened by years of drought, they now face another onslaught—bark beetles. As Esme Nicholson reports, some blame commercial forestry, but others say it's climate change. —NPR, July 26, 2023

The trees have gone gray.
I can see the sky.

Bark Beetles take advantage
of the drought that has weakened the trees.
I remember the young professor’s wife in 1960

weeping that we are ruining the planet
when others were distracted by nuclear threats

when my father in 1950 had already said
Cardinals and other Southern birds

are moving North. They are building nests.
The trees have gone gray

weeping that we are ruining the planet
while the doomed children focus
on learning how to tie their shoes

learning to focus on what we can control
and to ignore the rest.

Author’s Note: Ruth Ellen Kocher invented the gigan form.


Martha Deed’s third poetry collection Haunted By Martha was released by FootHills Publishing, July 2023. She has published ten books (poetry, mixed media, non-fiction) and ten chapbooks along with inclusion in more than 20 poetry anthologies. Individual poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Earth’s Daughters, First Literary Review—East, Shampoo, Gypsy, and many others.

A WOMAN’S FACE

by Ana Doina

Tweet by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad 9/16/22

Dark clouds covered the sky 

for months before the year 

Troy fell prey to a wooden horse.

 

Scientists now tell 

nothing had been growing 

for years before chieftains  

took their tribes

in search of better pastures,

warring one another for the right 

to greener valleys.

 

Homer decries 

the face of a beautiful woman

for the first war,

but tree stumps 

tell of darkness, drought;

the bowels of the earth tell

of roaming hordes 

drifting, losing their roots.

The underworld 

brings back abandoned hearths, 

jars still full of honey, tools, 

cradles, toys,

weapons

buried where a fighter fell.

 

The scientists can’t yet tell

what covered the sun, what 

drove the peaceful herdsman 

to take up arms and leave 

the simple habits 

of his pasture, 

but back there, where ancient empires

used to thrive, five thousand years on 

and, still, a woman’s face, 

even when veiled, 

is blamed. Is doomed.

Ana Doina, Romanian-born American writer living in New Jersey, left Romania during the Ceausescu regime. Her poems appeared in numerous print and online magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. She won Honorable Mention in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience contest in 2007, and three of her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2002, 2003, and 2004. 

DOOMED

by Richard Meyer

a sandwich board pessimist proclaims the apocalypse

the blighted land, a globe on fire,                     

the sludgy oceans rising higher,

the sky an ashen winding sheet

no place to run, nowhere to hide,

a species bent on suicide,

extinction on a dead-end street

maybe a plague, or flood, or war

or greedy scoundrels gulping more

on a planet wrecked, made obsolete

or tumbling toward us through the void

a stone and iron asteroid

the size of old Minoan Crete

no matter what the fatal blow,            

from up above or down below

no refuge in our self-deceit

it’s doom and doom and doom from here

the die is cast, the end is near,

a final reckoning complete

Richard Meyer, recipient of the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize, lives in Mankato, MN. His book of poetry Orbital Paths was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON

by Gail White

Explosions in Kyiv heard live on air https://t.co/JGLvh4k8tX

— HectorM (@JaguarVer) February 24, 2022

All times are times of impending doom,

If one knows how to read the signs.

But old gods walk through the living room

And lay down nets and fishing lines.

Clutching the mesh, I begin to seek

Wonders and signs I’ve let slip by:

The fish impaled on the heron’s beak

Miraculous as the butterfly.

Between war and depression the end will come.

With plague and famine we take our chance.

But the cat moves her kittens one last time,

And the sandhill crane does a mating dance.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

ICE AND FIRE

by James Penha

after Frost . . . after Francis . . . after Charleston

Some see America destroyed by hate;
others forecast a torrid flood as its fate.

I feel its glacial faults cracking 'long lines
      blue and red and black and white,
thence to implode and dissolve, O Columbia!
      into the ocean, a gem out of sight.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.

MANHUNT

by George Held

A note with a caption "Have a nice day" left on an opening in a pipe by two inmates who escaped Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. (Source: New York Governor's Office)

Why do you always secretly root for the hunted?
Is it American love for the underdog,
your persecution complex, paranoia?

You feel sorry for the hunters, embedded
in uniforms and armed to the teeth
but terrified of ambush or sniper.

Why do you hope that the canniness
of the fox will outwit the nose of bloodhounds
and elude the mechanics and strategy          

of the men encased in uniforms
as they march strung out across a cornfield
in PA or file along a dry creek bed in CA?

You hear the experts on TV call the hunted
“psychopaths” and smugly speculate on whether
they’ll be brought to earth by the hunters

or by their twisted selves. It’s best if they
die in a televised shootout, to save the state
money for a trial and stem viewer sympathy.

And as the camera pans in on the front yard
you feel the sense of doom when the hunted
strolls through the gate in that picket fence

and lives are about to change forever …


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

DOOM

by George Held

Image credit: philipus / 123RF Stock Photo

brought early dawn
to Aurora,
early recess
to Newtown,
early marathon-ending
to Boston
early tornado season
to Moore, Okla,
and lurks
on the outskirts
of your own town:
so hunker down
and pray
it passes by
before it’s
your turn.


An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com