JERUSALEM LAMENTS

by Greg Friedman

William Blake, The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Object 41 detail from “Jerusalem” 1804 to 1820

From the south I hear their cries: 

David, 

Wala’a, 

Yochered, 

Aya, 

       Oded, 

      Muhammad. 

They call from the tunnels, 

the dead unburied 

from beneath the ruined hospital 

    where mothers search  

    in the dust for the lost. 

From the north I witness the terror, 

from the south I suffer the terror, 

with my sons I bear the terror, 

with my daughters I carry the terror, 

the whistle of the anonymous messengers, 

raining their sentence of vengeance: 

alarm across the city, 

dread beyond the border, 

anger unchecked by reason, 

retribution fueling the advance, 

memories etched in blood staining 

my land gifted, 

inheritance claimed, 

my land usurped, 

inheritance ignored— 

my land where only the stones now cry 

to me its mother.  

I hear them from captivity,  

I hear them from subjugation, 

I hear them from internment, 

I hear them  

from Nasser Hospital, 

from Kibbutz Nir Oz, 

from Deir al-Balah, 

from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, 

from the shrines sacred to my children, 

from mountain, mosque, temple, basilica, 

from the holy rock, 

from Herod’s enduring walls, 

from the ancient sepulcher, 

from the sudden sepulchers of rubble, 

from the entombing walls of Gaza City. 

 

I hear them all 

from mountain, mosque, temple, basilica, 

ancient in my mourning, 

young in my anguish, 

vigilant for their outcry, 

I wait for the silence, 

I despair for the peace, 

I remember and watch and listen. 

Greg Friedman is a Franciscan Friar who travels frequently to the Middle East, leading pilgrims. He has been a magazine editor, radio host and pastor.

WHERE DO YOU GO TO DIE?

by Adele Evershed

Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran has said that she is "deeply worried" for her extended family in Gaza. Moran's mother is Palestinian and members of her family in Gaza are sheltering in a church after an Israeli missile struck their home. Speaking to the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire, she said: "No longer are people saying, where do we go to be safe? The question they are now asking is, where do we want to be when we die?" —BBC, October 29, 2023

to the sea
already so full of salt
so you become part of the ebb and flow
governed only by the mourning moon
and any tears shed lost in the tumult of waves
or crusted in the creases of a carcass 
left to rot on a far distant shore
 
to a rowan tree
already listing from the bombardment
so you can nourish the roots
that once nourished you
and the redness of your screams
can hang like a bloody reminder
of all the things you were too young to see
 
to the mountain top
with its beguiling back story 
so your shallow breath 
can dovetail with the off white clouds
and fall as gentle soaking rain
delivering an absolution
to those who have asked for none
 
or do you simply 
pick up a stone
and say…
I will not die today

Adele Evershed is a Welsh poet living in America. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Finishing Line Press published Adele’s first poetry chapbook Turbulence in Small Places in July. Her Novella-in-Flash Wannabe was published by Alien Buddha Press in May. Her second poetry collection The Brink of Silence is available from Bottlecap Press.

THROUGH DESERT CLOUDS

by David Chorlton

An Ariane 5 rocket second stage deployed the James Webb Space Telescope shortly after launch on Dec. 25, 2021. It's 'humanity's last view' of the new observatory, says NASA PAO Rob Navias.

A cloud filled with shadow

floats up towards the gods

veiled in shades of cold

who look out from the mountain

and talk among themselves

about creation and energy

channeled to become this slender ridge

as the first step to infinity

and home for the coyotes

who come out every night to ask the stars

for guidance through the dark.

Word has it

 

from the hawks ascending

that a rocket has left the Earth

to go so far back in time

that all remaining to be seen

are the final ashes from

the cosmic dawn. What

a flash and what an echo

must have issued from the moment,

they reflect. And yet

 

not a single mockingbird

and no woodpeckers flew

from the crash. The day

is chilly but beautiful in how

the sheets of rain drift past

each other, and crossing

the peaks are the souls

the fates could never capture for themselves.

David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix, who continues writing, painting, and keeping track of the local bird life. His newest book is Unmapped Worlds, a collection of rehabilitated poems from his files of the past.

IN THE ASH

by Sandy Sortwell Makau

Flames from the Glass Fire consume Chateau Boswell Winery. St. Helena, CA, September 27, 2020. Credit: Noah Berger/AP via The Washington Post, September 30, 2020. 

Burned remains float over the mountain ridge, houses, old cars, furniture and dreams, reconfigured into gray soot, travel to the valley floor on the wings of scattered ash to rest on my back porch.

The air quiet, oppression settles on every surface a reminder of the fire’s distant destruction, how lives suddenly transform from hope, to fire, to smoke, to ash.

Trapped in my air tight house surrounded by a white fog of smoke; its haze deceives me. Through my kitchen window, I see a cloudy winter day until I open the door, the smoke bullies me with its toxic fumes, it taunts me with the threat of more fire to come, saying to me ‘maybe when the wind changes tonight I will come for you too.’

I walk across the porch, the wind billows swirling like a desert windstorm trying to lift. My footsteps sink into the ash like freshly fallen snow making a path barren and gray. The destination unknown.

The mountaintop has shown me its sadness in the ash today.

Sandy Sortwell Makau lives in Butte County, California–30 minutes from both the Paradise 2018 Camp Fire and this years Bear Fire above the town of Oroville. She is surrounded by fires nearby in northern California, in southern California, and across the border in Oregon. Friends of hers have lost everything in these fires. She is a freelance writer and poet.

ON THE BATTLE AND THE RACE

by Rick Mullin

Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind 
and directs this Storm?—from a letter written to Thomas Jefferson by John Page, July 20, 1776,
quoted by George W. Bush in his first inaugural address, January 20, 2001.

How is the Angel in the Whirlwind fixed
for drumheads come November? Isn’t she
supposed to show us something bright betwixt
the mountain and the river? Pardon me,
but aren’t we all endowed with intuition
in our human state? The crystal liver
of the Angel in the Whirlwind waits
for a replacement on a frozen river-
bank in Pennsylvania. She hates
when she’s strung out in this position.
Once the Angel in the Whirlwind was
in charge and teleology in vogue.
But now, the latest polls get all the buzz.
The drummers and the general go rogue
and disavow the shock of recognition.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.

THE COST OF THE WHITE

by Cally Conan-Davies

“When Roman emperors, Michelangelo and Mussolini needed the finest marble they all knew where to go—Carrara in Tuscany. But some are worried about the future of the quarries that have been used for thousands of years,” writes Antonia Quirke., BBC News Magazine, July 24, 2016. Photo: Carrara marble quarry. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Turning to stone is how some old bones last,
but David's statue seems to be relaxed
as if the stone were going the other way
into a body full of the light of day.

As if it could make light work of defeat,
after all, it had survived rejections
(unstable, they called it, flawed, the risk too great).
Until one man could see through imperfections

something to put his hands on, and set free
a man from a mountain.
Now the mountain is sinking
into counter tops and bathrooms, artlessly.

There are shadows in the falling light.
And nothing—not paper or pearls or stars—is always white.


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who lives by the sea.

TO JAMES BALDWIN FROM A WEARYING POET

by Patricia Brooks

Image source: Family Equality Council

You died too soon, precious James.
We need your eloquent voice
right down here, now more than ever.
Some never heard it; others seem to have
forced their brains to forget.
Most are still dazzled by
those old lures of fortune-and-fame.
Some of us – sorry – have been so intent on
exercising our vocal cords in the vain hope
of singing like yours, that I guess we just missed
some of the subtler beats
on their ominous drums.

Into that vacuum,
the manufacturing skills of The Man
have grown craftier.  Could you even have
nightmared this parade of our frivolous lives,
this legion of beautified faces
by which he is masking his face.
While The Chosen can’t seem to get over
the sound of their magnified voices, crooning to us
everything we still want to hear, showing to us,
in their glossy white pages, everyone we ever wanted
in our beds.

You saw so clearly The Man,
working maniacally in his sealed laboratory,
the gleam of destruction in those eyes
we mistook for human, concocting
ever-more-enticing concoctions --
a dash of weakness here,
a taste of envy there,
a big dollop of greed on the top.
And I must report, it is working!
The cells of the basically decent are breaking down
into confusion.  The skins of the only-observing
are showing seared edges.  Next it will be
those who stand on the rung just below them,
promised a big bite of American Pie for their
loyalty, now just going up like the rest of us
in that smoke you so keenly detected
so long ago.

Then there are those – you would weep for them –
locked in locked closets,
once fooled into doing our dirty work for us,
Now -- 80 each day! every day!
are putting their guns into their mouths,
just hoping to be shot
into a better world.

That sure fire you proclaimed
from the top of your mountain
is growing ever-hotter, is faster and faster
turning our lives to vainglorious dust.
While those once well-meaning but weak
have been oh-so-cleverly enticed to shout out
Yes!  Yes!  Bomb those bastards for bombing us!
Torture those torturers!
as lustily as any Roman spurred on his gladiator
blinded by pride, to sink his sword into a lion
just being a lion.

Your eyes would never believe,
James the Ascetic, just how high is
this mountain of goodies The Man, posing as baker,
keeps turning out on our well-polished tables
for our runaway gluttony.
Just the shine of his toys
would blind you in minutes.
And our sons and our daughters,
godhelpthem,
believe they can talk to each other
in only one hundred and forty lowercap letters.
And Jimmy, they actually imagine
they are saying something so tiny
is profound.  Those of us older
pretend that our hearts are still beating,
while the lifeblood of our bodies is leaking,
almost unnoticed, away.  Until soon
we’ll be only so many dried leaves
under his feet.

So we need you, still need you,
kind Mr. Baldwin.  That teacher
who instructed us so softly,
so mightily.  Even the best of our voices
can’t rise to the height of your mountain.
So please, sir, if you cannot come back,
could you possibly find just some castoff connector
from the home of one of the fallen, to give us
just one more transfusion
of your healing fire?

So sing to us, sing to us,
just one more time.  We promise to
study your lyrics more clearly, your words with more
reverence if you’ll only come back to us
just one more time
before it’s too late.


Patricia Brooks is the author of two commercially published novels and is now working 24/7 to finish the epic historical novel Eagle and Child, eleven years in the birthing.  A key chapter of the novel will be published in the Spring issue of the Mandala Journal, the literary publication of the Afro-American Studies program at the University of Georgia.  She has published short fiction and poetry in a variety of journals, most recently Whirlwind, Blast Furnace, The Voices Project, Narrative Northeast, and The Great American Literary Magazine, now posted on-line.

THE SLIDE

by Cally Conan-Davies



When we met the moon was over the house.
Now the house is gone beneath the mountain,
And night drops weeping through the broken day.
On the ground the mired leaves of autumn
move in the drying wind, and blow away.


Cally Conan-Davies hails from Tasmania, and now lives in the Pacific North West. Her work can be read now, or soon, in The Able Muse, Angle, The Hudson Review, Kin, Lavender Review, Mezzo Cammin, The New Criterion, New Walk, Poetry, Quadrant, Raintown Review, The Sewanee Review, Shotglass, Southwest Review, Suptropics, Virginia Quarterly Review.

BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

by J.D. Smith



Someone may have wondered
How much does a mountain weigh?

There was no great balance to set it on,
no human scale, but the question
could be divided, layers taken and tallied
with rounding of inevitable error.

Perhaps the only way to pay for this answer
was to sell off the resulting heaps
of shorn stone and dust,

which some believed
would lighten, if not the earth,
our passage over it.


J.D. Smith’s third collection, Labor Day at Venice Beach, will be published later this year, as will his first humor collection, Notes of a Tourist on Planet Earth. His poems have appeared in journals and sites including 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Texas Review, and Dark Mountain 3.