A YOUNGER NETANYAHU RETURNS TO ADDRESS HIS OLDER SELF

by Gordon Gilbert

"What terrorists do is target the innocent deliberately, and therefore my definition of terrorism is… the systematic and deliberate attack, murder, maiming and menacing of innocent civilians for political goals.... You can tell a lot about terrorists and what happens when they come to power. Those who fight for freedom and come to power do not impose terrorism.  Those who do, who fight in terroristic means, end up being masters of terroristic states."  —Benjamin Netanyahu to William F. Buckley on Firing Line, May 30, 1986.

Ah, Bibi, habibi!

 

You are not the man I thought I'd be,

no, not the one I find I have become.

I always knew how absolutely

power does corrupt.

I see now how just knowing that

was not enough to keep me

on a path of righteousness,

or save me from myself,

my own worst enemy.

 

So much suffering for all,

and in the end,

so much worse for Israel,

even now, as I,

the man you used to be,

confront you!

 

But no, I must say "we."

I am the former you.

Can you not see

you once were me?

 

We are taking down with us

our own beloved Israel!

 

Ah, Bibi, habibi,

what have we become?

Gordon Gilbert is a resident of the West Village in NYC who got through the pandemic taking long walks along the Hudson River.

A NEW WINSTON CHURCHILL STATUE

by Tom Bauer

‘Self-indulgent’: Churchill statue plans stir public controversy, perplexity over motivation. Statue will be installed at Calgary’s McDougall Centre in 2023. —Livewire Calgary, August 27, 2022

Like deadly white mold, signs keep surfacing.

The skin of life develops pustules and blisters;

past echos of a fierce disease of dominance

resurfacing to blight the natural landscape.

Looking at faces I see hope and care.

I see landscapes of spontaneous growth

moving as one towards some shared outcome

each of us unconsciously wants to see.

Statues do not see, and will not see us through

their purpose, ownership of all we seem.

Their stone presence blocks our human landscape.

The greatest monument might come to be

feeling connected when we come together

and see the real enemy: the harms we cause.

Tom Bauer's an old coot who lives in Montreal and plays a lot of board games.

ANTIGONE IN MARIUPOL

by Bonnie Naradzay

Mariupol, Ukraine 17 April 2022. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko

I searched the ruined city for my brother

to consecrate him with a proper burial.

Snow was still falling in the cold spring then.

I stopped at a body pockmarked with bullets;

the fingers on each hand had been bent backwards.

I came upon a corpse without a head. 

Do I know him?  Oh, they are all my brothers,  

in mass graves everywhere, shoved into ditches, 

dead in the midst of life from this unholy invasion.

Now I myself am buried—in tunnels below the city,   

refusing to surrender to the enemy king who said

not even a fly will be allowed to leave alive.  

Sentries are everywhere, barricading the doors. 

Where oh where is the civilized world?

Some day, perhaps, Sophocles will create a tragedy

for people to witness—and make sense of this.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry salons at a day shelter for homeless people and also at a retirement community, both in Washington DC. Poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review online, Tampa Review, Florida Review online, EPOCH, The American Journal of Poetry, and others. While in graduate school, she took a class that Robert Lowell taught: “The King James Bible as English Poetry.” In 2010 she was awarded the New Orleans MFA poetry prize: a month’s stay with Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary in her castle in Northern Italy. While there, she had tea with Mary, heard cuckoos calling during mating season, and hiked in the Dolomites.

UKRAINE, FLOWERING

by Janice Northerns

after Van Gogh’s “Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed”    

Stalks slashed, petals scattered along the road

to the bomb shelter. A country drained of color

 

waves its flag as a placeholder for the sky.

But spring will green the world again and seeds

 

crushed under the enemy’s boot will fire

with life. War’s buried relics will multiply

 

into bright bouquets, blood blossoming

into patches of helianthus coming up

 

volunteer. Shimmering in the blue breeze:

sun-soaked fields, lapping up the light.

Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum (Lamar University Literary Press, 2020), winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award from the University of Kansas, the Nelson Poetry Book Award, and  a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University. She and her husband live in southwest Kansas.

PANDEMIC PANTOUM

by Catherine McGuire

KALISPELL, Montana — The October death by suicide of the ninth local teenager in 16 months prompted offers of counseling, training for teachers and visits from national suicide prevention experts. But it also whiplashed into partisan recriminations, as residents lashed out in public forums against the superintendent of schools for failing to impose dress codes and discipline, against parents for not securing their plentiful firearms — used in several suicides — and against the supporters of masks and other pandemic restrictions for stifling teenagers. An issue the valley might have rallied around, in another time, risked dividing it yet again. Photo: The Flathead Republican Party float drives on Main Street in Kalispell. (Tony Bynum) —The Washington Post, October 25, 2021

It started in panic, pulling in—

closed doors, empty roads,

huddling—unseen killer abroad!

Whole towns went still.

 

Closed doors, empty roads,

displayed by drones, at first.

Whole towns went still with

the novelty of crisis

 

displayed by drones, at first.

We drank in urgent news,

the novelty of crisis,

but weeks smudged together.

 

And we drank, as urgent news

became the same old: needles into arms.

The novelty of crisis

morphed to anger at refuseniks.

 

And now the same old needles into arms

became a rallying cry,

morphed to anger at refuseniks:

“How dare you endanger me?”

 

The same rallying cry,

spread like a virus on both sides:

“How dare you endanger me?”

revealing a comorbidity

 

that spread like a virus on both sides:

or like a wildfire flaring from a spark

to reveal a morbid comity:

we’re right; no sympathy for them!

 

And like a wildfire flaring from a spark

that falls on parched, unhealthy ground

this drought of sympathy for “them”

ravages communities more than virus did.

 

Self-absorption is parched, unhealthy ground.

How will we explain to grandkids that what

ravaged our towns more than virus did

was the climate that turned townsfolk into enemy?

How will we explain to grandkids that what

had us huddling—unseen killer abroad!—

was the inner climate that turned townsfolk into enemy?

It starts in panic, pulling in.

Catherine McGuire is a writer and artist with a deep concern for our planet's future. She has four decades of published poetry, four poetry chapbooks, a full-length poetry book Elegy for the 21st Century (FutureCycle Press), a SF novel Lifeline, and book of short stories The Dream Hunt and Other Tales (Founders House Publishing).

FORGOTTEN

by Tricia Knoll

I forget the name of the first boy who kissed me,
which books I read by Jane Austen during that summer
the l7-year locusts made their outbreak, the names
of most of the horses I’ve ridden except for Daisy—
the bay mare who galloped me to a win in a quarter-mile
race against a field of adolescents on dude ranch mounts.
I remember ear infections as a child with no medicines
because my parents believed in faith healing.
I remember my first polio shot at the age of 18, more
than a decade after everyone I knew had theirs.

Forgotten? The word, sir, blasphemes the dead
and those denied funerals and family mourning.
Those struggling to recover and keep family safe.
The worn out first responders and medical teams.
I fear for a grandson born in this year, a wee boy
for whom immunity is uncertain. I have staged
my will where my family can find it. I have
family who sit home from their jobs. We know
those risks for people of color from old,
old inequities, wonder why those who jobs
are critical to our survival as a people
work for minimum wage, without masks.

You may forget. At your peril and ours.
Are you counting your investments
in the medicine you hawk? Open
will not mean the way the world was.
Open will mean masks, tests, shots,
sanitizers, worry, strategies, research,
and consequences. New normal
will not forget what we have endured
and what we learn about the way
the world’s fate is tied up as one.
We have seen our Enemy.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet hunkered in the deep woods. Her recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry.

AMERICAN GHAZAL

by Gail Thomas

Crosses for each of the victims of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, sit before being taken to a memorial site. CALLAGHAN O’HARE / REUTERS via The Atlantic, August 5, 2019

Innocence dies in every season, bullets spray in America.
Red blossoms swirl and drip, night and day in America.

Prayers don’t erase the names waiting to be spoken.
How many voices stilled? Money betrays in America.

School, church, temple, mosque, theater, mall, club.
False gods, assault weapons stay in America.

Oh, he was a hater, loner, misfit, bully?
Rage hides in plain sight, decay in America.

Abraham, faith-blind father, God saved your son.
We know the enemy within, but we pray in America.


Gail Thomas has published four books: Odd Mercy, Waving Back, No Simple Wilderness, and Finding the Bear. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and awards include the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press for Odd Mercy, the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s Must Read for Waving Back, and Naugatuck River Review’s Narrative Poetry Prize.

THE QUESTION GULLS

by Alejandro Escudé

“Boy, some days I sure wish I was an ensign on the bridge of that destroyer again.” —Admiral Mike Rogers

It makes sense the Admiral would rather
be where the brackish sea-wind
sweeps away the confusion, where
the gulls are questions rising up into the air,
always answered. The 5-inch gun points
in one direction, whatever direction
it’s trained to point, no traitor likely
to sidle up to the Admiral on that deck,
no wickedness, because the enemy
of a destroyer isn’t wicked after it’s dubbed
“enemy.” Evil isn’t within the purview
of soldiers. Ask the Romans who had
to watch Christ drag his own cross.
They believe the only commandment
is the order. But the Admiral speaks
into his microphone and knows how
to translate I won’t tell on the president,
I’ve said enough, and you should know that.
There will be a closed-door meeting
in a room that they call a SCIF as if
the senators were anglers out on the sea,
nothing to do but discuss sensitive issues.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

CREATIVE ANACHRONISM

by David Chorlton

The Society for Creative Anachronism is an international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe. Members, dressed in clothing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, attend events which feature tournaments, royal courts, feasts, dancing, various classes & workshops, and more. --SCA

A man who died five minutes back
is standing at the action’s edge
and watching his army regroup
for another charge.
                              The war begins
in February, he says, as pennants
wave in Sunday sunshine
and dust clouds are rising around
the bright warriors
                             in the park. You see
someone in black and red you want
to kill him, that’s how it is. Today
it’s only practice for when
the forces to gather at Queen Creek.
The rules say that if you’re hit
where the armor doesn’t cover,
                                                you die.
See this? He indicates the metal
cut to fit around his upper arm. It’s
a Left Turn sign.
                        From the yellow eagle
on a dark blue shield
to banners in black, colors show who
is on one side and who on the other,
while the plan discovered today
                                                 is for
someone to infiltrate a crowd and stand
next to his enemy, looking so much
like him as to render violence
invisible until
                     the bomb explodes
leaving no chance for the dead
to move away from the action
to touch the Resurrection Pole and be
allowed to fight again.


David Chorlton came to Arizona in 1978 after living in England and Austria. He has spent more than three decades stretched between cultures and writing poetry, the pick of which has just appeared as his Selected Poems, from FutureCycle Press.