The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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“Our biggest dream is to just be able to stand by the windows.”—Saleem Aburas, a relief coordinator with the Red Crescent near Al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis, quoted in “Two Hospitals in Southern Gaza Are Left Barely Functioning," The New York Times, February 19, 2024
To stand by a window. To see my neighbors water their geraniums on the stoop. To watch traffic, the old blue cars and the new cars going off to work. The children waiting at the front doors for a mother to walk them off to school. To watch my wife in the garden. At night to watch moths flutter at the street lights. Of course it’s holidays with family. Feasting foods after fasts. The hug from my cousin who owes me money. My hug to him. A first drink of cold water after sleep. It’s all these things, plus those moths fluttering at the street lights who think dreams come true.
Tricia Knoll welcomes the arrival of her new book of poetry Wild Apples from Fernwood Press this week—poems that tell stories of downsizing, moving 3000 miles from Oregon to Vermont, running into Covid and welcoming two grandsons.
If you give gifts for the holidays this year, I hope you’ll consider Kobabe’s Gender Queer, and don’t forget Mike Curato’s Flamer, because a tradition that I would love to start is equating the holidays with banned books and banned art, like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part- Time Indian sitting underneath the Christmas tree alongside The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky— even though it is claimed to be sexually explicit with profanity— my hope’s for the opposite of Fahrenheit 451 where adults have free speech and the children aren’t dumb and muted and lack understanding of different religions and cultures and worldviews and more. So please give the gift of George Orwell’s 1984 and Feast of the Seaweeds by Haidar Haidar, and do it before this poem gets banned like North Korea banning The Quran, and Hunan, China, banning Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Along with the dreidel, matzo, and mistletoe, I hope your holidays are filled with George by Alex Gino and Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, because they can’t ban books if we give them away in the thousands, no, millions, this Christmas Day.
A seven-year-old boy has been collecting essentials to distribute to homeless people this Christmas. —BBC, December 21, 2019
This is how we
celebrate holi-days
I found.
Baking sugar cookies
in festive shapes,
food that comforts,
spirits and laughs.
But the sun rises and cries
for a different kind of sweetness
and fullness on these days.
To forgo righteous and
judgement and right-way thinking.
To look for the light of the fire
of those without homes,
to stand in a house of wor-ship
and declare that love is love,
to walk along a border-line
and to feel what should be—
health, safety and promise for all.
The stars shine on the evenings of holi-days,
the moon still hangs, sadly,
but brightly for the lonely,
and in the dark spaces in the
sky where there is nothingness,
there is room to imagine what
these days can be for.
A present wrapped in hope,
for the most vulnerable among
us, the dreamers, the defeated,
songs for those lost and found in stigma,
merriment for the heart.
Before those sugar cookies burn,
I open the oven, take them out,
and see what they really mean to-day.
Diana Poulos-Lutz has a B.A., M.A. in Political Science from Long Island University as well as an MPhil, Master of Philosophy in Politics, from the New School for Social Research. Diana's poems have recently been featured on media sites such as TheNewVerse.News, the Rye Whiskey Review and Pantsuit Nation. She is the 1st place winner of the 2019 Nassau County Poet Laureate Society poetry contest as well as the 1st place winner of the 2019 international Spirit First poetry contest. Diana's poetry is inspired by her deep connection to the natural world, along with her desire to promote equality, mindfulness, and empowerment.
Today the wilderness is too big.
Even my own body
was made for an ancient
race created on a larger scale.
My hands are winter gloves,
gorilla hands, capable and waterproof.
My feet leave huge, deep prints
in the snow. My heavy head
is too big for my ski cap,
my thick arms too long for my coat.
I am a Neanderthal. I know what to do.
I have survived a lot. Wilderness and I
are the same size. Language
does not interest us. Nor love.
And yet, deep inside, resting under
my primitive heart like a baby,
is my modern self. And like a fetus
I curl in the warmth of the prehistoric
womb and suck my thumb.
I have bad dreams. I cry, but my tears
are absorbed by amniotic fluid
and my moans are muffled by blood.
I want to talk. I want to dance.
I want to read a book. Write a poem.
But everyone else is interested in survival—
their own, not mine. Like my splendid
cave woman, they eat meat. Not words.
Not views. Their dogs run off
with sheep innards hanging from their mouths.
They are right. I am wrong.
These holidays are about having enough
to eat. Not having enough to love.
We have come full circle—
grown thin and sensitive then
muscular and numb all over again. My neighbor may freeze, but as long as I don't, life is good.
Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness, performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov, and teaches seasonal poetry workshops that revolve around "wilderness writing." She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Lalitamba and Bombay Gin. Her poem "And Then the Sky" was recently nominated by TheNewVerse.News for a Pushcart Prize.
“People love you and you win, and when your son looks at you and says, ‘Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.’ I said, ‘Baby, they don’t, because we’re going to go in there and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.'”
They’re outside in their blue shirts with patches and neckerchiefs. Oh mama!
The Cub Scouts are out in the rain recycling the disrobed trees again. Look—
the little ones are struggling to lift and load those noble corpses! You
know I’m not going out there to help. No way-too cold. I think they’ve won
the War on Christmas, by the way, those little deconstructionist bullies
hauling away holiday cheer for a donation sealed in a Ziplock bag. I don’t
really care, though. I’m teasing, eating too much chocolate. And I can win
at other things. Like raising a glass before lunch, refreshing newsfeeds and
licking the rim of the eggnog carton. With the ornaments packed, I
can pour more vodka in my coffee, light my bowl and kick it. Someone said Be Best and you know I’m being and doing my best now, baby.
No one is paying or being paid, toilets overflow, the zoo is shut and they
say maybe it's really a strike. National emergency. Yeah, okay, chill. Don’t
you know smooth voiced 44 hit the Billboard charts? Yeah, that’s because
there is some karma left. And it dances, sings and swears. Now as we’re
forced into gingerbread cookie detox programs, I ain’t gonna
lie (like the king). This won’t be some “but-I-posted-about it” easy go.
Things get uglier before they get prettier. I had to put all the nutcrackers in
boxes that looked like coffins, pack up the merry-making, stack them there
in the garage 'til next Thanksgiving. The scouts are dragged out there, and
really, they just want to shoot arrows at camp. Go ahead, please, impeach
the Grinch, the happily-ever-privileged, the liars, the pussy grabbers, the—
never mind. I’m off to take a nap, hoping to sleep off this motherfucker.
Editor's Note: The Golden Shovel is a poetic form devised by Terrance Hayes in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks. ("Golden Shovel" is a reference to "Seven at the Golden Shovel" in the Brooks poem "We Real Cool" from which Hayes built the first Golden Shovel poem.) The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken often, but not invariably, from a Brooks poem.
Karen Shepherd lives with her husband and two teenagers in the Pacific Northwest of the United States where she enjoys walking in forests and listening to the rain. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in various journals including Constellate Literary Journal, The Literary Nest, Halfway Down the Stairs, Riddled With Arrows and Wales Haiku Journal.
Students in India mourn the Pakistani students lost in the Peshawar school attack last week.
And as the alto line shoulders its ache of dissonance against the calm soprano, I think, Always the same mysterium: The moment when at last the milk-drunk infant droops against the breast, and the new mother sighs into sleep, is darkened by the knowledge that soldiers from a foreign empire are quartered in the next street, while a strongman in the hills clings to to his shreds of power. When he strikes, we wake to scenes of the bloody slaughter of children.
For them there are few carols, rarely sung.
Peshawar remembered on 28 December, Feast of the Holy Innocents
Maryann Corbett's poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Mezzo Cammin, Linebreak, Subtropics, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The Writer's Almanac, and many other venues in print and online, as well an assortment of anthologies, most recently Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century. She has been a several-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, a finalist for the 2009 Morton Marr Prize, the 2010 Best of the Net anthology, and the 2011 Able Muse Book Prize, and a winner of the Lyric Memorial Award, the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. Her third book, Mid Evil, is the Wilbur Award winner and is forthcoming from the University of Evansville Press.
