GAZA'S CHILDREN

by Rakibul Hasan Khan

 

Gaza’s children are as childish as 
the children of anywhere else—
they’re full of joy,
singing, dancing, jumping,
and playing with extraordinary toys.
 
They’ve plenty to eat and drink,
and beautiful dresses to wear.
They live in luxurious houses
and are always loved and cared.
 
These cheerful children of Gaza
have no memories of Earth,
and no one is a bit sad,
even the cutest ones
who’d just left the warmth of wombs.
 
The happy children of Gaza 
have grown in number 
in such a short time,
and their number is increasing still.
 
Should Heaven—
keep a separate gate for Gaza’s children? 

 
Rakibul Hasan Khan is a Bangladeshi academic, poet, and writer based in New Zealand. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Otago, where he remains affiliated. His scholarly and creative works have been published in internationally recognized platforms.

THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

If you can see the moon from your window
even through the wall of branches
then it is calling you to worship.
Hard to stay in bed,
impossible to stay in the house.  
If you can see the moon from the front porch,
you can see raccoons and the seven doe
in blue shadows. The owl wonders
what you are doing here.  Thick
wandering roots reach from the trees, 
dusted with a skin of snow, like veins 
on the backs of your hands going 
where they must go. 
If you can see the moon from Earth,
the cataclysm is still in the future.
Your breath is a cloud without shape.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

MELTING OF ARCTIC SEA ICE

by Ron Shapiro

    a

A polar bear stands on floating sea ice in the Arctic. The bears rely on sea ice to move throughout their hunting grounds. (Image credit: SeppFriedhuber via Getty Images via Live Science.)

'Ominous milestone for the planet': Arctic Ocean's 1st ice-free day could be just 3 years away, alarming study finds —Live Science, December 4, 2024

Another warning,

Red flags up in the scientific

Community, sea ice melting

Faster than an ice cube on

An Arizona day. Polar bears

Shifting their weight on legs

The size of tree trunks while

Balancing on the moving chunks

Of frozen water over a million

Years old. With each piece

Of ice shrinking over time,

How will the polar bear find

Food if he can’t travel far

From his glacier home?

 

Meanwhile, land torn up,

Only a commodity in a world

Based on capitalism. Imbalance

Between humanity and the earth

Causes the dis/ease of fear, anxiety

And consumerism. What comes

From the ground is a commodity,

Something to sell, to buy, to use up.

 

The air warms the melting masses

But so far away from here, how can

Anyone care about this? No plans

For the future. Carpe Diem without

The seizing. Brain rot eats away at

Sanity and intention. Useless images

And misinformation to distract, to

Entertain, to confuse. Abstract words

Populate the language resulting in

Generalization, stereotypes, prejudice,

Bias, and ignorance. Not enough time

To think. Only to react. Tik Tok goes

The Earth’s clock. The air polluted,

The breath compromised, the ice melting,

Polar bears weeping in a cold puddle

Of water swishing at their feet.

Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, currently mentors college essay writing as well as teaches Memoir Writing through George Mason University. He has published writings in Nova Bards 23 & 24, Gatherings, Poets of the Promise, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine and two chapbooks: Sacred Spaces and Wonderings. He lives with his wife and Shanti the Cat in Reston, Virginia.

POST MORTEM: THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

The history of a planet in sixteen lines

by Greg McClelland

Source: Mail Online

It all began when a molten mass,

boiling within,

battered from without,

barreled through a gaping void.

 

Peaks of solidity surfaced;

tectonic hands and burning digits

designed antediluvian bone:

basalt, sandstone, granite, schist.

 

Through five hundred million years,

from Ordovician to Cretaceous,

our mother birthed and killed five litters

of living tissue.

 

Then she birthed a sixth,

which brewed its own poisons—

digital, solid, nuclear, microscopic—

leading to the first synthetic holocaust.

Greg McClelland is a retired government ethics attorney. He has published poetry in Ancient Paths, The Road Not Taken, All Around the Mulberry Bush, and his college alma mater newsletter. Besides writing poetry, he spends his retirement working in political activism, helping to ensure that Trump will never see the inside of the White House again.

BEQUEATHED

 a golden shovel by Bonnie Proudfoot

No meaning but what we find here.

No purpose but what we make.

 

That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:

Turn me into song; sing me awake.

                               —Gregory Orr

 

 

Say you are at the supermarket, no

say you are at the farmer's market, meaning

you don't go in for plastic wrapped food, but

you bring your stringy hemp bag. How nice, but what

did you think, that one tomato at a time we

can stop climate change, find

a way to keep butterflies and songbirds here?

 

Say you'll install solar panels on your roof, no

say you've already installed them, your purpose

feels urgent, you are off the power grid, but

the sun feels stronger every day, what

you never expected was tornados, floods, we

can barely hold on to any progress we make. 

 

Today each weather warning lasts longer, that

way the window of safety shrinks, and

we huddle closer, protect ourselves, our beloved,

while lightning sparks, we wait for all to clear

though we need more time to prepare, instructions

 

to face this new future. The earth will turn

against us, beyond the ladders of light leaning into

the clouds, beyond the hymns and songs

to creation, show me a new song to sing,

not king coal, not drill baby oil, give me

more songbirds to hallelujah my grandchildren awake.

Bonnie Proudfoot is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and reviewer whose work has appeared in online journals and anthologies. Her novel Goshen Road  (OU / Swallow Press) was longlisted for the PEN/ Hemingway and received the WCONA Book of the Year Award. Her recent book of poems Household Gods can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

NEANDERTHALS IN THE TILE

by Sally Zakariya

This floor tile imported from Turkey and installed during a home renovation contains what is believed to be a cross section of an ancient human jawbone. (Courtesy of Reddit user Kidipadeli75 via The Washington Post)

Check the counters and floors

check all the travertine tiles

Look for signs of the old ones

reaching up through time

   slivers of bone

      shards of teeth

Imagine the beginning: a natural

hot spring somewhere in Turkey

Layer after layer of plants and animals

trapped in the mud and fossilized

Mammoths, rhinos, giraffes,

deer, reptiles—even humans—

embedded in the travertine

Look down and count the years—

a million or more

Each step we take on earth, we walk

on the past

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 100 publications and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed a poetry anthology Joys of the Table and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

THE PERFECT HOME

by Indran Amirthanayagam

while Lahaina, Maui burns August, 2023

May I imagine the scene? Do you

agree? Coffee in the studio, light

streaming in, brushes and easel,

a multi-hued cat? But flames

are rising at five hundred yards.

Oh to leap beyond particulate

matter, to dream, go native 

again, python wrapped  round 

banyan branch, peeping through 

the window while monkey hops 

over the ledge and books, 

to the sugar bowl, scatters 

the grains, attracting flies, 

mosquitoes, the ubiquitous 

roach. Paradise does not look 

sweet. Fireball blows up history, 

belief, certainty, and cars,

drivers burned at the wheel, 

while thousands of miles

away as all birds fly,

by pure chance, living

on the mainland, in another 

corner of  the great expanse

of the once blue ball,

I try in vain to catch 

and douse embers flying 

this month’s perfect storm.

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.

POET LAUREATE ADA LIMON CREATES A POEM TO BE ENGRAVED ON A SPACESHIP

Others invited to include our own names on a chip

by Alice Campbell Romano

https://europa.nasa.gov/message-in-a-bottle/sign-on/

Years ago I bought you a star.
The framed certificate turns up 
now and then
when I sift a desk, weed a bookshelf.
An undistinguished star 
somewhere 
with your name.
You would better have appreciated
my renaming Mars for you, 
red combatant. 

Earth registers stars 
from Earth’s point of view,
assigns coordinates,
sells naming rights.
Maybe only Earth has this compulsion
to brand the infinite.

Our ambition sends craft 
to search out life
on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
We shall leave Earth’s mark— 
in—be astonished—

a poem 
about Earth. Poets ache.

I am tempted without reason
to piggyback, to add me, 
on a microchip
to Europa. 

You didn’t care when I bought you
a star. I will escape for a billion miles,
to the edge of the infinite, in my 
name alone. 

Alice Campbell Romano lived a dozen years in Italy where she adapted Italian movie scripts into English, married a dashing Italian movie-maker, made children, and moved with the family to the U.S., where they built, she wrote, and the children grew. Her poems have appeared in—among other venues—Prometheus Dreaming, Persimmon Tree, Pink Panther Magazine, Orchards Poetry, New Croton Review; Beyond Words, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Quartet Journal, Instant Noodles Devil's Press, Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press. In January, she was awarded HONORABLE MENTION in The Comstock Review's 2022 Chapbook contest, "...not an award that we give every year, but an honor set aside for a few manuscripts." Alice swooned. 

NOT IN OUR STAR…

by Phyllis Frakt

The distant death throes of a star—

entire worlds gassed, doomed, 

consumed in its stellar belly.

 

They say our sun will do the same

and swallow the Earth in the “deep future”

five billion years from now.

 

While we wait, let’s celebrate spring,

a season in love with the sun,

carefree and heedless of remote catastrophe.

 

But humans bring peril five billion years early

Our planet gobbled up, not from afar,

but from us, under our benevolent star.

Phyllis Frakt began writing poems in 2021. Her previous poems in The New Verse News are "Teach to the Test" and "Caught in Between." She lives in New Jersey.

A REQUIEM FOR ZOMBIE FIRES DEVOURING THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

by Daniel Brennan

While most wildfires burn out in the open, another form of Arctic fire is more difficult to detect. So-called zombie fires can smoulder in peat beneath the Arctic’s icy surface, throughout the winter months. When spring comes, the fires reignite surface vegetation, emitting carbon dioxide from both the vegetation and the peat, which is a natural carbon dioxide store. A report by climate scientists concluded that the increase in the number of these overwintering wildfires is directly linked to climate change. —World Economic Forum, January 11, 2023. Photo: The Bogus Creek Fire in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a state where the vast majority of carbon emissions from fires come from burning soil.Credit: Matt Snyder/Alaska Division of Forestry, via Associated Press via The New York Times.

We should have guessed by the gray, curled perfume

reaching up from a temporary grave that all good things

stay hungry. A terrible beauty; keeping one eye open

in the coldest sleep, keeping an eye on God himself. 

Blessed be the land that cracks like old skin under 

our sun, the land that shivers off its frost to be eaten

alive by a boiling stomach. Blessed be the earth that

houses the black-nailed hand reaching toward heaven

as the soil softens, as it splits open its breast to reveal

every fiery jewel we thought lost to winter. 

The disbelievers, they will tell you it cannot be this way. 

They will tell you that these new gods, burning just

below the lips, the foils and folds of the mind, should

extinguish in the night as they have for a millennia. 

But the most famished deities find the sky. These,

my sinner’s hands, hands which have held dirt in the shape

of lonely men and men crawling deep back down into

their graveyard dirt, hands which have found every other aspiring 

angel in the dark corridors of night between body high

and exaltation, these hands must clasp in a bent prayer

for someone, for something. Find meaning in the revelations,

the peeling snowfall that has blanketed a red mask of death. 

Find God in the furious inferno creeping up through nutrient-

rich soil, screaming to the heavens, making us believe

in an eternal life, for these flames do not die, only slumber. 

Blessed be this new generation of disciples, apostles, apotheosis 

in freeze-frame. They must learn to worship the earth that

cannot keep its fiery dreams beneath a dark shawl

of rock and root and snow and seed. We inherit the 

land that devours itself, the endless eulogy below our funeral pyre. 

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a resident of New York City, but grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania (ultimately serving as a focused source of ecology-based inspiration). As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Brennan’s work aims to capture both the vastness we feel in the face of our ever-changing planet, while confronting our own bodies and the daunting elements of intimacy we feel every day. His work has appeared in CP Quarterly, Grand Little Things, Feral Poetry, with upcoming work in the Garfield Lake Review. He currently lives in Manhattan, and works full-time in advertising.

EARTHLINGS

by Peter Witt

If earth was my father, he’d sit me down

for the talk, about how the birds and bees

are under threat, how humankind has polluted

its nest, and how our actions may doom us

to the inevitably of a rage of forest fires,

hurricanes, tornadoes and other

devastating weather events.

 

If earth was my mother, she’d send me

to my room, cut off my social media

for a month, make me eat green vegetables

and fresh fruit instead of junk food

that comes in non-degradable packaging.

 

If earth was my mentor, he’d tutor me in ways

to live a life that respects the planet, take on

advocacy roles that can reverse the holocaust

of degradation that human greed has wrought.

 

If earth was my lover, she’d touch me in ways

that reach deep in my being, hold me close,

look into my eyes and beg me to love

her forever for the sake of every rock, ocean,

mountain, turtle, rabbit, snake, and ladybug.

Peter Witt is a Texas poet, a frequent contributor to The New Verse News and other online poetry web-based publications.

GIVE UNTO CAESAR

by David Chorlton

Tiberius Penny at The Smithsonian

Word comes down from the mountain

that Caesar has awakened

and begun to ask for what is his,

much to the distaste of the next man in line

whose shirt tells everyone he’s tuned

to a radio in the sky and he can tell you

why Washington’s to blame

for the state of all things on Earth. He orders

enchiladas. Says with pride

he’s ex-law enforcement. Smiles

at a passing thought available

only to himself.

                        With taxes comes the time

the ocotillo greens in the front yard

where the first of summer’s orioles

has found her way back

to where she came last year. She’s a flash

between red blossoms

and arrives when the Earth’s clock tells her to:

when the people empty their pockets

and count small change, when they

find news in dark rumors, sign their checks

and send them to Caesar

on the last of winter’s winds.

David Chorlton observes the coming and going of birds in the corner of Phoenix where he lives, near South Mountain. The Mountain became the focus of his short book published by Cholla Needles last year, The Inner Mountain, which featured watercolors and poems.

WHEN WAR COMES

by Tricia Knoll

At first the war seemed far away from dying manatees, 

slaughtered wolves, prices at the pump, and bomb cyclones.  

 

Then I asked myself IF I had ever

            eaten from plastic boxes in an air-raid shelter

            witnessed the death of my children on Instagram

            slept in a subway station on one old blanket

            carried a bleeding pregnant woman from a bombed-out hospital

            met my neighbors for the first time in a shelter

            tried to explain why my dog should get food

            pushed twelve women and children into a minibus

            moved my grandmother in a wheelbarrow

            asked where all the shoes went in the shoe store

            lined up all my books—from Dante to Harry Potter

                        to Yeats and Dickinson as shields from bullets

            considered shooting a saboteur on my street

            sang a song to comfort strangers

            clutched my passport every minute of every day

            cooked for a soldier in the basement

            hoped there was enough water for bedtime

            decided to name a newborn as a missile fell

            realized I had to leave behind the family Bible

            worried about who is running the nuclear plant

            mixed a Molotov cocktail in yesterdays’ Chablis bottle

            tried to resurrect the footprint of my family’s home

            fled from ancestral graveyards

            appreciated bright stars in a black-out

 

in dark days for the globe—midst pandemic, 

climate change, aggression, lies, inflation, poverty,

and pollution. What song does the Earth sing today? 

Tricia Knoll understands concerns about rising gas prices and inflation. She is able to drive less, to stay home while others cannot and buy less. The televising of the war against Ukraine is ceaseless and compelling, She wishes we could act as if we are all residents of Earth, what destroys one hurts us all as citizens of this globe.

LIFE ON MARS

by John Whitney Steele

NASA’s Retiring Top Scientist Says We Can Terraform Mars and Maybe Venus, Too —The New York Times, January 2, 2022

Imagine the red planet with an atmosphere,

replete with plants and animals. It isn’t hard to do. 

A couple billion years ago Mars lost its air,

its water too, and so it is no longer blue.

But should we choose to live there, we could change it,

claims NASA’s top scientist. All we’d have to do

is terraform the planet—that goes for Venus too.

Put up a magnetic shield, block the sun, retain

more heat, and watch Mars turn from red to blue.

The solar system’s ours. Imagine life on Mars 

while back on planet Earth we churn out CO2.

John Whitney Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher, assistant editor of Think: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction and Essays, and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University. His chapbook The Stones Keep Watch was published by Kelsay Books in 2021. His full length collection Shiva’s Dance will be released in 2022. Born in Toronto and raised among the pines and granite cliffs of Foot’s Bay, Ontario, John lives in Boulder, Colorado where he encounters his muse wandering in the mountains.