The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Fuck Hamas fuck Israel fuck
Fatah fuck UN fuck USA
Dissatisfaction desperation frustration aggression depression
Mission Impossible leading normal lives
Sick of imposed shitty existence
Being jailed for inexcusable offenses
Mentally emotionally tortured by Hamas
Totally ignored by indifferent cowards
We want to scream breaking
Shameful wall of unjust apathy
Shedding sleepless nightmares outraged tears
Overhead F16’s breaking sound barriers
We cannot say what we
Want do what needs doing
Nowhere to run hide escape
Move No shunned hope options
We don’t want to hate
Fear being heavy-hearted victims anymore
We desperately want freedom is
Peace too much to ask
No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1
The Colorado River has been dammed and diverted so many times that it no longer flows regularly into the Gulf of California, leaving its once-fertile Delta on life support. Despite its current state, the Delta can be restored. Photo credit: Blue Legacy Source: Environmental Defense Fund
Wars over California’s limited water supply have been going on for at least a century. Water wars have been the subject of some vintage movies, including the 1958 hit The Big Country starring Gregory Peck, Clint Eastwood’s 1985 Pale Rider, 1995’s Waterworld with Kevin Costner, and the 2005 film Batman Begins. Most acclaimed was the 1975 Academy Award winner Chinatown with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, involving a plot between a corrupt Los Angeles politician and land speculators to fabricate the 1937 drought in order to force farmers to sell their land at low prices. The plot was rooted in historical fact, reflecting battles between Owens Valley farmers and Los Angeles urbanites over water rights. Today the water wars continue on a larger scale with new players. It’s no longer just the farmers against the ranchers or the urbanites. It’s the people against the new “water barons” – Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Monsanto, the Bush family, and their ilk – who are buying up water all over the world at an unprecedented pace. — Ellen Brown, Sky Valley (WA) Chronicle, April 9, 2015
They are using up the Colorado River
so that hardly anything reaches the sea.
Thirsty fruits and vegetables suck up
the liquid more valuable than oil,
so much so that a fossil fuel billionaire
is buying up water companies to make
the financial killing he feels is coming.
Wind farms, solar panels, tidal generators,
hydro-electric and atomic energy,
all can create that vital commercial power,
but water escapes into the fruits
and vegetable destined for super markets
and the stomachs of millions of the hungry
or the seriously overweight.
Oil and gas is so out of date, not to mention coal,
and the oil baron will sit in his Fort Worth castle
or Upper East Side condo in New York City
and send his billions based on water
to off-shore tax havens surrounded by the sea.
Howard Winn's poetry and fiction has been published recently in Dalhousie Review, Galway Review, Taj Mahal Review, Descant (Canada), Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Evansville Review, and Blueline. He has a B. A. from Vassar College and an M. A. from the Stanford University Writing Program.
FAIRDALE, Ill. — At least two tornadoes unleashed incredible destruction through north central Illinois. Two people are dead, and several others are injured. Some people are also unaccounted for. Photo: A lone horse is staying close to what used to be his barn. Owners aren't being allowed back yet. —Sean Lewis @seanlewiswgn via WGNNews, April 10, 2015
The bloodied horse walks in small circles
Where the barn stood with the stall.
Straw, timothy, sweet feed
A bucket of spring water.
From the chopper, he’s observed
In a slow practiced rehearsal
Like a monk at his devotions,
Head bobbing, lame in the forehoof,
Miserably alive.
All that’s left of structure:
Splinters. The body of the mare,
His companion, thrown
Into a nearby field with the
Defeathered chickens. At dusk
The twister plowed a fifty mile
Path like a rogue
Tractor. Huge dark wedge
Of rotating force. Shingles
From the barn’s roof plant a pasture
Thirty miles away. This horse, bewildered
Knows only to stay
In the place that he knows.
All those whose homes are smashed
Pick through the ruins
For the one surviving thing—a photograph,
Quilt, child’s toy—that confirms
The lives they had. The horse
Keeps walking.
Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize. Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.
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).
for Walter Scott, murdered April 4, 2015 by Officer Michael Slager
See the police officer fire eight rounds Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
Watch Walter Scott crumple to the earth
See the officer saunter toward the lifeless
Fifty-year-old father of four
With the utmost nonchalance
No evidence of concern or alarm
About the murder he has just committed
Just a little stroll in the park
Just another day at work
Oh look! A body on the ground
Are you alive Mr. Black Body?
Just in case I will handcuff you Mr. Dangerous Black Body
Here is a fellow officer
I will explain to him how you overpowered me
How you wrestled my stun gun away from me
And made me afraid for my life
Where is that stun gun?
Ah yes back there where I fired from
I will bring it here
To place beside you Mr. Black Body
It will be exhibit A
Buff Whitman-Bradley is the author of four books of poetry, b. eagle, poet; The Honey Philosophies; Realpolitik; and When Compasses Grow Old; and the chapbook, Everything Wakes Up! His poetry has appeared in many print and online journals. He is also co-editor, with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley and Sarah Lazare, of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He has co-produced/directed two documentary films, the award-winning Outside In (with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley) and Por Que Venimos (with the MIRC Film Collective). He lives in northern California.
Large Hadron Collider Gears Up to Go Beyond Boundaries of Human Understanding —Newsweek headline, April 7, 2015
Have you been looking for your gluino
to glue your quarks together,
or have you hoped for a tiny photino
for your particle of light, the photon?
Or if you’re shopping for a squark
to partner with your darling quark—
building blocks of your lovely atoms’
minute protons and neutrons—
you’ve come to the right place,
to the monster Large Hadron Collider
which will be spinning even faster,
having taken two short years of rest after
rushing in circles to collide particles,
smashing out brand new ones—
as predicted by Mr. Higgs—
decaying into little fermions,
particles of matter, and the bosons
which convey a lotta force.
Ah, we’re getting closer to dark matter.
But does it matter? Do we really need
to understand what binds the galaxies
together in the skies?
Just as we found antimatter,
next comes supersymmetric matter.
Now, doubling its collision energy
supersymmetry, or Susy, will fill in gaps,
showing each particle to have
much more massive partners:
the photon’s photino,
the quark’s squark,
the gluon’s gluino,
and dark matter’s neutralino.
Until then, I think I’ll take a nap.
Marilyn Peretti writes with Chicago’s west suburban poets. She has published Let Wings Take You, To Remember-To Hope, Lichen-Poems of Nature and Angel’s Wings. Her poems have been published in Talking River, Fox Cry Review, Christian Science Monitor, Journal of Modern Poetry, California Quarterly, PoetrySky, Kyoto Journal and others. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Poetry Prize.
Anthony Ray Hinton free after nearly 30 years on Alabama Death Row —AL.com
For Anthony Ray Hinton
“the ball of free will dropped from my hand”
~ Ishmael, in Moby Dick by Herman Melville
black male, poor
innocent, as if that matters
when the DA wants a crime solved quickly
call him a suspect
find his mother’s gun
from which the bullets were not fired
stuff him in a cell
don’t worry if his lawyer
is inadequate
don’t worry if his expert witness
is so inexpert he can hardly see
through the forensic microscope
has little experience in ballistics
is so lamentable the jury
laughs at him
ask for the death penalty
send him off to prison
to live in solitary on death row
without his family
without his friends
without his free will
fight all the way to the Supreme Court
to keep him there
until after his mother is dead
after his youth is gone
after he has almost forgotten
the feel of a loving touch
after decades of not making
significant decisions
when the court bounces
the ball of free will back to his hands
after thirty years
Wilda Morris, a past president of Illinois State Poetry Society, is workshop chair of Poets & Patrons of Chicago. She has won awards for free verse and formal poetry and haiku. She leads poetry workshops for children and for adults and has been widely published. She is retired from a career of teaching graduate student and coordinating a not-for-profit peace and justice organization. Her blog provides monthly contests for poets.
AMMAN, Jordan — Islamic State militants have seized most of a sprawling Palestinian refugee district in the southern part of the Syrian capital, Damascus, an area that has been under siege and bombardment for nearly two years already, according to Palestinian and United Nations officials and residents. The officials called for quick action by international organizations, the Syrian government and all armed groups to head off an unfolding catastrophe. Reports of killings and even beheadings were beginning to circulate on Saturday, worsening what is already a longstanding humanitarian nightmare for the 18,000 residents of the Yarmouk refugee camp. —NY Times, April 4, 2015; Photo: Residents of the besieged Palestinian camp of Yarmouk line up for supplies in 2014. Most of the camp has been seized by ISIS, who are fighting a Palestinian group inside the camp. (UNRWA/Associated Press)
What is their hell, the eternity we've made their own?
Hunger, fear, murder and death,
the destruction of the spirit.
It is the human will
creates their hell, where human cruelty
burns brightly.
For millions life on earth is
an eternal accident, smoke and mist,
misfortune and despair.
A place where every hope must vanish
and darkness must fall.
Poetry, we are told, is meant to see
the truth of what is, not seek
what is the truth.
It is not honey
for the poet's tongue.
George Salamon taught German at several colleges, served as staff reporter on the St. Louis Business Journal and Sr. Editor for Defense Systems Review. He contributes regularly to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News.
a prognostication wherein Belch (no accident that)
tells a clown (nor in that):
"Come on; there is Mike Pence for you: let's have a song."
Some, however, find the name a corruption, or at the very least
too great a price to pay. On this not all folios agree.
Other scholars find parallels in the 21st-century social amusement
of placing live politicians on a hot plate,
as a form of entremet (something to be enjoyed between
servings of cute animal videos).
The recipe most often called for birds
of a uniform feather to be locked in an oven,
or statehouse, from which they would, after a time,
poke their heads out half-baked;
an uproar would ensue, after which they would be returned,
only to emerge finally
singing a different tune
to the great amusement and delight of the electorate.
No corroborative evidence supports either of the above,
though the earliest tradition, in one stanza,
clearly mentions Naughty Boys
from whom little is heard of afterward.
D. Brian Craig is a scientist, engineer, and writer, though not always in that order, nor separately. His writing has appeared most recently in The Pitkin Review and FEBS Letters.
Shell Arctic Drilling Fleet OK'd To Use 'Green' West Seattle Port. —KUOW.org, January 14, 2015
Boxes clickclack like LEGOS
escorted by confident cranes over
fragile veins to keep the whole world
up and racing.
The city, from their point of view
a sidebar, has enough year-round jade
for mercantile satiation
if only it were capital
and not growing things.
Traditionally, the city has guarded
all its life – it would rather
articulated bus jackknife all over the highway
than salt the roads during a snow
because of the tainted runoff
into the salmons’ stream.
This city that cares so much for its fish
is the same city that is making room
for an armada of royal oil drillers
to station among the blocks and birds.
Every green movement
can be whitewashed;
every commitment to fish
can be watered down.
m.nicole.r.wildhood is a Colorado native who has been living in Seattle – and missing the sun – since 2006. She has been a saxophone player and registered scuba diver for over half her life. In addition to blogging at http://megan.thewildhoods.com, she writes poetry, fiction and short nonfiction, which have appeared in The Sun, Lodestone and Ballard: A Journal of Street Poetry,ditchpoetry.com and Café Aphra. She and her husband, who is gifted both as a structural engineer and as an artist, often collaborate on poetry/painting pieces. She seeks to be an advocate for those experiencing mental and emotional suffering and celebrates the misfits, the non-conventional and the bold.
Mar 31, 2015: UPDATE 9:57pm PDT Joni was found unconscious in her home this afternoon. She regained consciousness on the ambulance ride to an L.A. area hospital. She is currently in intensive care undergoing tests and is awake and in good spirits. More updates to come as we hear them. Light a candle and sing a song, let's all send good wishes her way. --jonimitchell.com
I love the way she winged it on Hejira.
Crow, not seagulls, sounded right to me.
She got away with Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,
Don Alias on the date, and spoke
of Mingus where she used to sing. And Jaco.
It was kinda Blue-to-Kind of Blue.
A kind of transformation of the blue
horizon on a field of that high era
shot in black and white, a season chock-a-
block with ice on lipstick black. To me
she seemed the more divine. She spoke
to me from someplace new, the daughter
of a snowbound country, not the daughter
Woodstock might have wished for. But what blew
me out was anecdotal, the bespoke
position of her fingers, the Hejira
of the coffee house and Do Re Me
tautology. The maundering with Jaco
on the frozen tide, a sliding ride with Jaco
holding down the line. Abandoned daughter
of the Blues, insurgent, blond and white like me,
she bartered for the flatted fifth, a blue
note on the top. Eponymous “Hejira”
spread harmonics, spinning hub and spoke
along the endless highway Dylan spoke
of on the stage at Newport. Him, the jack of
anything he got his hands on. Oh, Hejira
to the new Medina. But Mohammad’s daughter
left behind the radio of blue
oblivion and came across to me
on carbon leather skates. She came to me
exhaling lacy signals where she spoke
into the weather and the grayscale blue.
I caught a glimpse of something like a Jack-o-
Lantern smiling in the clouds, a daughter
lost and laughing on the moon’s Hejira,
longing for Hejira, calling me,
a daughter dancing on the ice. She spoke
of Miles and swung for Jaco in the blue.
Rick Mullin's poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies. His most recent book, Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle, was published in December by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, Ohio.
Crews have torn down the home of the man who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Mass. The school was demolished in November, 2013. AP photo via Time, March 25, 2015.
Nothing will bring them back.
The shooter killed himself as well
So the marble hand of justice
Cannot signal. There’s no one left to punish
Except the building where it took place.
Halls of learning. Books and desks
Stained with the memory of what happened.
Then the house where he planned the monstrous
Acts of unreason. Nothing left but to
Tear it all down. To burn the ground where they stood
And then maybe in time to plant
Something green and tend it.
It seems reasonable, doesn’t it?
I can’t help but be reminded
Of my friend accidentally kicked
By her horse and then lay comatose
For weeks on the narrow ledge of dying.
Her husband in his grief
Had the horse killed. What else could he do?
What could relieve this? Nothing. Nothing.
She woke to the empty stall of loss.
Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize. Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.
Reading John Bolton's dangerously casual argument for yet another war in the Middle East . . . you’d never know that war with Iran poses any risks at all. Given Bolton’s record on Iraq, this recklessness is not surprising. More surprising is that the Times let him get away with it. I understand that the Times, as a left-leaning op-ed page, needs ideological diversity. But when it comes to war and peace, diversity isn’t the highest value. Honesty is. —Peter Beinert, The Atlantic, March 27, 2015
Go to war,
they cry,
even the old
discredited ones
who screwed up
originally,
drop the bombs,
send the drones,
kill, kill. kill.
No one notices,
I am afraid,
that most such
hawks have never
served nor heard
the crack of those
guns they love
like adolescent
suitors in middle
school who yearn
for glory and girls
whose love affair
is with the self,
for whom the thought
of war is a kind
of masturbation.
They do not actually
follow their own
war cries, but hide
in speeches and lead
from behind in what
is only a war dance
to the death of others.
How brave and martial
is the tin soldier.
Howard Winn's poetry and fiction has been published recently in Dalhousie Review, Galway Review, Taj Mahal Review, Descant (Canada), Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Evansville Review, and Blueline. He has a B. A. from Vassar College and an M. A. from the Stanford University Writing Program.
