A POEM

by Pulkita Anand
 

Write a poem using the rhyming of the hollering peacock and deer.

Use metaphor to describe their running helter-skelter. Do mention the arrest of the vulnerable students. Include the numbers: forest areas, trees cut, displaced birds, temperature rise, dead animals. Add a phrase about how some animals were buried before dying. 

Typographically present the stubs and remains after devastation. Use rhetorical questions: Where will they go? Why are they destroying forests? What crime? What punishment? Should development be at the cost of dead sentient beings? Use all your senses to describe the joy in a forest. Compare then and now. Use other poetic devices to draw readers’ attention towards their heated future. End with a bird song or end with a couplet about global warming or a burning planet or nothing. 

Consider titling the poem Green vs Greed.

Pulkita Anand is an avid reader of poetry. She has translated one short story collection, Tribal Tales fromp Jhabua. Author of two children’s e-books, pher eco-poetry collection is we were not born to be erased. Her creative works have been widely published in journals.

THE COMING RENAISSANCE IN HIGHER ED

by Philip Kitcher

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

Is there a deeper problem with campus unrest?  One not solved simply by replacing presidents?

 
 
The point of any university or college:
Discover, advertise and sell new knowledge.
We can expect to make big money off it,
Provided that we maximize our profit.
Pernicious liberal miseducation,
Re-fashioned as a thriving corporation,
Led by a practical economist,
Strives to appear on Forbes’ Best Business List.
To reach that rank requires a stable anchor.
The CEO we’ve hired? An ex-World-Banker!
 
Obnoxious humanistic psychobabble
Incites the young to form a mindless rabble.
Recurrent demonstrations by this mob
Divert attention from our proper job.
After reflection, we have deemed it prudent
To expurgate the useless role of student,
Replacing faculty (eternal moaners)
With affluent trustees and docile donors.
Columbia, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale
Will learn their lesson: profits must prevail.
 
A needed Reformation!  We who led it
Will take away some cash—and all the credit.

Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.

FINAL EXAM WEEK AT NC STATE

by Jerry Krajnak

Last week, students at North Carolina State University concluding their first week of finals learned of terrible news: two apparent student suicides. “This is heartbreaking,” Chancellor Randy Woodson wrote in a community message Thursday. “And I know there’s little I can say to console the deep hurt or heal the immense grief felt by the family and friends of these young people and others we’ve lost this year. What I can say is that I, along with so many caring members of our community, share in this grief.” Such messages have become familiar on the Raleigh campus this year, where 14 students have died, half of them the result of suicide. —NC Newsline, May 1, 2023. Graphic by Chiara Zarmati for The New York Times.

Two more students killed themselves this week.
That’s seven on campus this year. We watched the news,
wondered if some fool would wander off Hillsborough Street
with an AK-47, start shooting one day.
But the perp we should have feared was here on campus
all along, hiding among the beautyberries,
under dawn redwoods. Academic demands
and social pressures lay in wait to spring
on those he'd already chosen. Our seven this year.
Our two this week. We wonder who is next.
 
Our Pack depleted, we mourn as we lug our stuff
to our Moms’ waiting mini-vans.  As a mower roars
or as we pause before springing off a board
this summer, we will think about the need they all felt
to escape the crushing pressures that shattered their lives.
We’ll memorize 988. Return in August, 
greet friends, view them with new eyes, listen 
to them more closely. Hope they will do the same.

Jerry Krajnak gardens, writes poetry, and worries in his North Carolina cabin. Recent poems appear in Autumn Sky Poetry, Rat’s Ass Review, The New Verse News, The Examined Life, Star 82 Review, and other journals.

UNIVERSITY WOMAN

by Tamam Kahn 

Female students are stopped by Taliban security at a university in Kabul, on 21 December 2022 (AFP via Middle East Eye)

We the Taliban 

will make you 
go quiet. 
We want 
an empty blackboard.
We the Taliban
are erasing the rights 
of each one 
with breasts 
and a vagina 
and a clitoris.
 
Each girl-student and
female professor 
splashes silenced outrage 
into a ruptured world,
zig-zags suspense 
back and forth 
across her mind,
hides a spaded heart 
raw with hiccups.
Each one cracks open
a brain-leak 
of stories and poems,
stashed backpacks 
of notebooks filled with 
foundational work,
knowledge, science—
 
all soon to be 
academic ditch-litter.

Tamam Kahn is the author two books on women of early Islam. Untold, A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad, (Monkfish Books, 2010), and Fatima’s Touch, (Ruhaniat Press, 2016). Both won International Book Awards. Tamam believes that sharing the lives of women, famous or in difficulty, helps bring awareness and change into today’s difficult times. She lives near San Francisco, California.

MS. SOPHIE PENDER

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

Sophie Pender started The 93% Club when she was at Bristol University for students who felt discriminated against for not being rich and from private schools. Photograph: Graeme Robertson / The Guardian, March 6, 2021.

My name is Sophie. Don't look down on me!

So what, if you talk posh, and scorn low-cost?

Since I met you, at university,

Our paths have never frictionlessly crossed!

Posh accents and the privilege they buy

Have short-changed us poor chavs for far too long.

It's time the ninety-three percent decry

Entitlement for private schools as wrong! ...

Pooh-poohing state-school kids as unrefined,

Excluding us from chances to succeed,

No longer will be suffered by my kind——

Determined, as we are, that you will heed

Elitist education taught by me:

Remember to respect the Ninety-Three!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, The Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, and The Tallahassee Democrat. His limericks have appeared in Britain’s Daily Mail.

THE PROBLEM OF WHITENESS

by Darrell Petska

Snow-covered Abraham Lincoln
statue in front of Bascom Hall
 Photo by Jeff Miller, University
of Wisconsin-Madison Photo Library.

Republican legislators in Wisconsin are threatening to reject the University of Wisconsin-Madison's requests for additional state funding unless an elective course they find offensive is cancelled and its professor is fired. Rep. Dave Murphy, chairman of the Wisconsin Assembly’s Committee on Colleges and Universities, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he believes the course “The Problem of Whiteness” contributes to “the polarization of races in our state.” —Slate, December 22, 2016 

Some rubes in America's Dairy Stand
say U'd better teach just what they command
or they'll wave their Nazi luger
i.e. hold back on their lucre—
curdling Dairy into the New Reich Land.

Darrell Petska's writing appears in The Missing Slate, Whirlwind, Verse-Virtual, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, previously in TheNewVerse.News, and numerous other publications. Darrell cut short his career as a university editor to be the arbiter of his own words. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

ALTERNATIVE FUNDING

by David Subacchi

Many students are secretly turning to sex work to fund basic living costs while at university, a study has found. Research by Swansea University shows one in 20 students has worked in the sex industry while studying for a degree, and men are more likely to do so than women. Students are involved in everything from prostitution and escorting to stripping and internet work, the Student Sex Work Project report found. —The Guardian, March 27, 2015; Photo source: Metro.

Education is not an optional extra
So if you can’t afford the fees
You’re under an obligation
To explore alternative funding

Why pay expensive rent
For conventional accommodation
When you could live quietly
In a van parked on campus

This may interfere with social life
And there would be trouble if discovered
But you would have more time to study
So a calculated risk is worth taking

Like working in the sex industry
To provide essential income
This could finance the purchase
Of text books and extra tuition

It may enrage the family
And lose you many friends
But respectability is a luxury
When means don’t match the ends

Then there is the more direct approach
Towards separated parents
Who look too solvent on paper
Suggest a quick divorce

In order to enable state aid
Also there’s crowdfunding
A kind of on line begging
That everybody’s doing

Lastly don’t forget you can always
Take out even more loans
With no intention of paying
In a learning process we call defaulting.


David Subacchi is a 59 year old former senior civil servant living in North Wales. He is of Italian origin and also writes in Welsh. He studied at the University of Liverpool and Cestrian Press has published two collections of his English poetry First Cut (2012) and Hiding in Shadows (2014).

SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED LEADERSHIP

by Tendai Mwanaka

I will sleep with you if you can neglect your ailing wife for me. I will sleep with you because your wife would soon die. I will sleep with you if you show me where the money is. I will sleep with you if you show me where the power is. I will sleep with you if you allow me to sleep with other men, who will bear you kids. I will sleep with you as you rape the country, raze and plunder it. I will sleep with you as we gallivant in western capitals, in oriental cities. I will sleep with you for the clothes and jewellery. I will sleep with you and you and you... I will sleep with you for my kids’ future. I will sleep with you for my education. I will sleep with every professor of my studies. I would have slept with them had they improved my grading at that Western university, but they refused. So I slept with that Eastern University’s professors to get my honours. I will sleep with you for the doctorate degree. I will sleep with you for the chairmanship of the League. I will sleep with you for the publicity. I will sleep with you as you support my candidature for the presidency. I will sleep with you as you vote for me. I will sleep with the whole country to vote for me. I will sleep with the orphans. I will sleep with the women. I will sleep with the youths. I will sleep with every rival politician to garner their support. I will sleep with you for the future of my kids. And then, my kids will sleep with you to positions and power. Their wives and husbands will sleep with you to positions and power. My grandsons and daughters will sleep with you for positions and power. Their wives and husbands will sleep with you for positions and power. And yes, …

Tendai Mwanaka’s  work has appeared in over 300 magazines in over 27 counties, making him the most published Zimbabwean poet of his generation. Tendai's collection of poetry titled Voices from Exile was published by Lapwing Publications, Northern Ireland in 2010. His novel Keys in the River: Notes from a Modern Chimurenga is a series of interlinked stories that deals with life in modern day Zimbabwe. It was published by Savant, USA in 2012. Zimbabwe: The Blame Game, a collection of non-fiction pieces, was published by Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2013.

THE PROFESSOR SAID

by David Plumb

Image source: UTPA

I teach soldiers
back from war.
I hear so much silence.

I see such glow
pale suchness
pride, a slim yes
a nod, an offset
remark or two.

They sit in when
Muscle-sharp
A pin drop, a cut
A dark brow, a tuft
A quick smile.

Somewhere in the room
I have soldiers who
ask without asking
What now?


David Plumb has worked as a paramedic, cab driver, cook, tour guide, and adjunct professor. 
Writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Outlaw Poetry Network, Sport Literate, Beatitudes 50 Years, 100 Poets Against the War, Salt, Blue Collar review, Gargoyle and One Paycheck Away. The author of ten books, he volunteers for the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project and is past director for a homeless shelter.  Will Rogers said, “Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.” Plumb says, “It depends upon the parrot.”

VALUE ADDED TEACHERS

by Ann Bracken

Image source: Precarious Faculty Rising

She feels frustrated
as she rumbles around in cramped offices
with all the people shouting
Words don’t matter.
Especially when she hears graduates
of the university
referred to as output.

When people become output
there is no need for nurture.
Sewage pipes have output,
as do factories that churn out row after row
of standardized parts.

In cramped classrooms and windowless lecture halls
teachers are gauged by their productivity--
here every human complexity is reduced
to a series of data points, quantified and measured,
success or failure—positive or negative output.

These days she no longer relishes
seeing joy or surprise or the flash
of an ah-ha moment on her students’ faces.
Instead of planning for a field-trip to the meadow
for a sensory experience,
she spends time trying to quantify
commitment, measure amazement
and determine a cut score for
how much inspiration one needs
for a journey into the unknown.


Ann Bracken is an educator and writer whose poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in the Little Patuxent Review, Reckless Writing Anthology: Emerging Poets of the 21st Century,  Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire:Love Poems, Praxilla, New Verse News, Scribble, The Museletter, and The Gunpowder Review. Ann’s poem, “Mrs. S” was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize. In addition to teaching professional writing at the University of Maryland College Park and working as a poet in the schools, Ann presents frequently at writing and creativity conferences including Mindcamp of Toronto, Florida Creativity, the Maryland Writers’ Association, the Association of Independent Maryland Schools, and The Creative Problem Solving Institute.

ALMA MATER, CONTINUING CARE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY

by Mary E. Moore

Photo: Paul Moock

There are no commuters. All live on campus.
Spacious, well-maintained dormitories are coed.
A diversity of social activities is offered and,
in the absence of sororities and fraternities,
an atmosphere of universal fellowship prevails.
Elective classes, lectures and discussion groups abound.
Independent Study is the only required course.
Continuous throughout residency, it incorporates
elements of philosophy, psychology and physiology.
Some students graduate after short enrollments.
Others graduate gradually over many semesters.
Commencement services are held off campus.


Mary E. Moore is a retired physician/educator who moved to a Continuing Care Retirement Community almost three years ago. Since living there she has been struck by the similarities between life there and what she encountered living at college. Dr. Moore's poetry has been published in print journals such as Light, Raintown Review, Modern English Tanka; on-line at The Hypertexts, Tilt-a-Whirl, and Bumbershoot; and in several anthologies.