EARTHSET

by Margaret DeRitter

 

Four astronauts traveled farther from our planet

this week than any humans had gone before,

saw the Earth set over the lunar surface—

 

a colorful crescent sinking into a dusty

pockmarked gray—while down here a madman

threatened to destroy an entire civilization,

 

ninety-three million souls and thousands of years

of history, one of the oldest cultures we know,

and his cronies did nothing to stop him.

 

What did those warmongers say to their children?

Did they ever teach them the lessons of space,

the singular beauty of our one blue home?

 

Perhaps they should take their own long journey.

Perhaps they should never return.

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Margaret DeRitter is the author of Singing Back to the Sirens (Unsolicited Press, 2020) which Pulitzer-winning poet Diane Seuss has described as a collection of "achingly beautiful and gutsy poems." DeRitter also wrote Fly Me to Heaven by Way of New Jersey, co-winner of the 2018 Celery City Chapbook Contest. Her poems also have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. DeRitter lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she worked as a full-time journalist and taught journalism at the college level. She is currently the copy editor and poetry editor of Encore, a regional magazine for Southwest Michigan.

NEW DARK AGE

by Richard Schnap

A crowd in Selma, Alabama before the historic March 1965 march. Photograph by STEVE SCHAPIRO, “The Long Road from Selma” in The New Yorker, 22-29 December 2014.

I hear the cry

Of a distant siren

Wondering if it will bring

A mother to tears

And I hear the words

Of a holy man’s sermon

Instructing small children

On the best ways to kill

And I hear the testimony

Of a fat politician

Saying that those tortured

Got what they deserved

And I hear the ticks

Of a madman’s clock

Moving with precision

Backwards in time

Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

SEPTEMBER

by Shirani Rajapakse

Image source: Wikipedia

Remember, you said, that day. People
falling from the sky like stars,
burnt out flares unable to cling on. Fire

in the sky metal crashing above. Remember
how it felt as you looked up at the
heavens, the noise deafened

and the dust from the stars crumbled
into your eyes. Horrorstruck, was this the end?
Remember the smell, flesh, iron roasting

cheap like a giant barbecue in the sky
while all around the grey dust of construction
falling like haze on an early morn.

You screamed but no one
heard amidst the noise of a world gone mad.
You cried in vain for what you

couldn’t hold, then forgot as
the years flashed by and they made plans anew
leaving you out of it. No use to no one

anymore.  Remember how you forgot
it all, buried in your life, the chores, the rush
and swirl of work, the demands

of modernity. Remember how she felt falling,
burning, crying. But do remember
how a madman rose in the sky

one day to steal the future leaving her
with tears and nothing else except a few
burnt out shreds. Remember.


Shirani Rajapakse is a Sri Lankan poet and author. She won the Cha “Betrayal” Poetry Contest 2013. Her collection of short stories, Breaking News (Vijitha Yapa 2011) was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Award. Shirani’s work appears or is forthcoming in Linnet’s Wings, Channels, Spark, Berfrois, Poets Basement, Earthen Lamp Journal, Asian Cha, Dove Tales, Buddhist Poetry Review, About Place Journal, Skylight 47, The Smoking Poet, New Verse News, The Occupy Poetry Project and anthologies Poems for Freedom, Voices Israel Poetry Anthology 2012, Song of Sahel, Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology, World Healing World Peace and Every Child Is Entitled to Innocence.