Featured poets this month
include Aberjhani, Richard
Vallance, David Turner, Recommended
further reading:
Randy
"Randall" Barfield, Katherine L. Gordon,
Christopher Major .
RANDALL
Randall has been writing for many years. His first publications
began
in the mid-eighties, including a poem in the literary journal
Ploughshares. His
topics of great interest are family, locations, psychology,
movie stars, beauty, and tributes for certain individuals he
admires.
He also writes about many secondary topics. His greatest
readership to
date lies with his poems for children (Abrakadoobra
and others via
google.com). He dislikes long poems and believes they eventually
"disappear", never again to surface. Conversely, certain shorter
poems such as
She Walks In Beauty seemingly live forever. He tends to be
traditional
in format and, in certain ways, a "Southern" (USA) poet. Randall
has
read widely in poetry and has half a dozen favorites which include
Emily
Dickinson.
Interview with Aberjhani
Hard and Crazy
They were crazy
He said
But after a few
Years I realized
It wasn' t true.
How can everybody
Be crazy except
You and yours?
It had dawned on me.
Then it was hard
To stomach.
Yet, it had to be
Done. But if he
Was or is crazy,
Why is he still
Managing? Why
Does he know
What to do every day?
When to rise? His
Words were limited.
Those people weren' t
Crazy and he knew it.
But it was the only
Way he could describe
Them. Imprecise.
Later I went to college
And discovered that
Crazy or not crazy
Was hard to determine.
Maybe they had been
Crazy and we hadn' t.
Some kind of comb-
ination? This is closer,
I think. Anyway, I know
There is craziness there.
Among us all.
This poem, if it is
A poem, has the word
Hard 4X and crazy 10X.
Life, I think we can say,
Is hard and crazy.
Sometimes only one.
Sometimes both.
But neither during our
Lucky moments.
Now, if we could just
Lengthen those moments.
In a Poem
I like economy
in a poem
and each word
in its time
I like economy in a speech
a meeting and a quiche!
A short kiss can
too be sweet
Don't you remember
Jesus' feet?
Intellectuality
Intellectuality
never called on me
otherwise I would
with glee
have offered her some tea
Then a doubt
urged check her out
Webster tells no lies
proved this word
with ality
indeed qualifies.
I Find My Sanity
At times I find
my sanity
sets out for ports
not far away
In her void
I toss and turn,
wish each night were day.
When a hunch
comes over me,
says her tour' s complete
I rush down to
the pebbled shore,
with open arms
we shout and greet.
© Randall 2007Randy Barfield .
Richard
Vallance
Richard
Vallance, the Chairperson of the
Ottawa Chapter of the Canadian Poetry Association, is an
internationally established bilingual English-French Canadian poet and
publisher. He also writes his own poems translated into English from
French, Greek, Italian and Latin originals. His poetry home page, Poesie's laissez-faire
Faire
Foire, is a well established registered Canadian domain. As a
publisher, he runs Aux Éditions Describe Adonis Press in Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada.
He
has published two books of poetry, both in CD-ROM format and both
the equivalent of hardcover books of at least 500 pages. They are
Canadian Spirit Voices and
The New Pleiades Anthology of Poetry, aka Le
Florilège de
la nouvelle Pléiade. The first book is comprised of over 500
of
Valance's own poems, while the second is an anthology of some 600 poems
by 33 contemporary 21st century poets from 8 nations around the world,
writing in English, French, German, Turkish and Japanese. Of these, 32
poems are by Vallance.
He
is also the Editor-in-Chief of two world class poetry quarterlies:
Canadian Zen Haiku, co-edited by Sondra Ball of the USA and
Shigeki Matsumura of Japan, and Sonnetto
Poesia, which has Pamela H. Murray of Canada, Carmen Ruggero of
the USA, and Michael R. Burch of the USA and The HyperTexts as
Associate Editors.
Recommended reading:
Richard
Vallance~Sara Russell Interview
Three Poems
© by Richard
Vallance
Carmen
Luminis Deo *
Were they Your songs, the sonnets we compose?
When angels hymn your praise, what dove descends
in spiritu on us, 'til we repose
in poetry no nightingale transcends?
Can our communion, Lord, with you compare
Eternity from prophecies of death
we poets in our mortal verse declare
to be Your Will until our dying breath?
If Homer soothed once proud Achilles' heart,
if Dante's Paradiso raised the dead,
perhaps our fairest sonnets may impart
a sense of Grace through every phrase they thread.
Carmen luminis Deo *, allay our sins,
and lightly play, attuned to violins.
Previously published in print in:
The Eclectic Muse (Canada) ISSN 1181-8158
Vol. 12, Christmas 2006, pp. 42-43
and in Sonnetto Poesia (Canada) ISSN 1705-4524
Vol. 6 no. 1 winter = hiver 2007, pg. 24
[all rights reserved]
Our
Seas, Pluralities
We inter the Dead; they unearth our fates.
Though we, from hallowed grounds cast off, abjure
Eternities, we'll drown in howling straits
we navigate in nightmares we conjure.
Once cast up on shoals, shipwrecked on our fears,
our oceans littered with our souls' desires,
what signals can we send, deep in arrears,
to wake the Dead, consumed by sirens' fires?
How can we fathom deaths we won't escape,
God's pluralities, unless angels haul
from depths the Dead, our eyes and mouths agape,
and we are mesmerized and in their thrall.
Will their Hosannas, manna to our souls,
drown Satan out, however hard he trolls?
© by Richard Vallance 2006
Previously published in print in:
The Eclectic Muse (Canada) ISSN 1181-8158
Vol. 12, Christmas 2006 pg. 42
[all rights reserved]
La
Neuvième
[The translation into English is available here]
selon
L'Ode à la Joie de Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1802)
composée
par Beethoven (1770-1827)
Déja des frémissements reluisant à l'aubade
correspondent aux chansons des oiseaux éveillés,
enfants des vallons, martyrs de la nuit maussade
évanouie grâce aux anges qui viennent les chercher.
Et si l'écho divin des hallalis résonne
au coeur du musicien, comment, n'entends-tu pas
le bois abandonné aux désespoirs d'automne
qui ne peuvent ni taire ni assourdir sa voix ?
Mais si la voix des immortels est reniée
aux choeurs éphémères et attristés des coeurs mortels,
Beethoven, tout sourd qu'il est, saurait célébrer
le mystère des anges agenouillés à son autel.
Si le coeur qui était sourd et muet ne l'est plus,
seul Beethoven, fils de Dieu, l'a toujours connu.
© par Richard Vallance 2006
Previously published in print in:
Sonnetto Poesia (Canada) ISSN 1705-4524
autumn = automne 2006, pg. 13
http://sonnettopoesiahome.homestead.com/index.html
top of page
DAVID TURNER
David Turner is married with 2 grown up children, a retired
software engineer, an ex-teacher, a
lifelong poet, a student of English literature, an avid croquet
player and interested in `all the uses of this world!'
Recommended
Further Reading:
His work
has been previously published in 'Poetry Life
and Times'; 'ASTRAVANTGARDE' and
'Voices from the Web' . He is
currently the Poetry Competition judge at Scribe Spirit -
I Sing a Song
of Lamentation
by © David Turner
I sing a song of lamentation,
A song for the Earth
And for the human race
And for the long slow progress of evolution.
I sing of tears to come
Of wailings in the night
And innocent children made to lie down
In the darkness
Among the straw beds of misery.
I sing of the greatest loss ever known -
If it should be that any will remain
To remember this loss that is yet to come.
How could it get to this, that such a gift is thrown away.
Such a great gift and so hardly earned,
So dearly bought and so many years in the making.
How can this come to be?
And yet it will be
And still they stand and deny what is all about them.
Would that man had the courage and sense
Of lemmings
To face what must be done
And simply do it.
Not by following that myth of mass suicide,
But to pay the price that must be paid,
To act together and start the journey to salvation,
To share the pain
Even if some individuals
Must make a sacrifice
Greater than the rest.
Now it seems the paragon of animals
Is less than the lowliest of mammals.
How can it be that the maker of myths
Should chose voluntarily to live out the myths of others?
How can the seeing be led by the blind?
But of course, greed blinds as wealth grows.
This paradox -
That the greediest are the wealthiest -
Is a deadly truth.
Inert gold is poison to men's souls,
Now it will murder a whole world.
I cry to great Gaia,
Come to our aid,
Exert your force,
Practice those arts
That in former times
Transformed so perfectly
This small planet
From a terrifying Hell into a beautiful Eden.
Oh, such prayers are bootless!
Gaia and Demeter and Prometheus
Are consulting with the Fates.
Useless to appeal to the three Moirae -
Clotho, the spinner,
Has spun the thread of human life;
Lachesis, the measurer,
Has marked out our span;
And most powerful,
Most impervious of all
Silent Atropos,
She who will not turn,
Standing ready now
With her great shears in one hand
And in the other
Six billion threads of life,
Ripened for harvest.
Oh I send pointless pleas into the wind;
Shed useless tears into the rain;
Who stands here with me?
If you stand with me
Cry aloud,
Make this plea into a mighty shout!
Is it not beautiful this tiny planet?
A blue and white jewel
In the blackness of space.
Hard not to think that some Great God
Set it there for great purpose
And stood back to admire his work.
But there are foolish gods it seems,
Or else no gods -
And only foolish men,
Unwilling to learn the skills required
For the care and maintenance of a small planet.
Perhaps after all we should do the decent thing,
Act out the lemming myth,
Sacrifice ourselves to Gaia
Before Gaia sacrifices us to Poseidon,
Leave our place in the sun
And let the rodents have another chance.
Dinosaurs had their day,
Men have had their moment,
Let the lemmings live with our leavings.
Out of the depths I have cried to You, O Gaia.
Gaia, hear my voice!
Let Your ears be attentive
To the voice of my supplications.
If You, Gaia, should mark our iniquities,
O Gaia, who could stand?
There is no forgiveness with You,
That You may be feared.
We wait for You Great Gaia,
The soul of humanity does wait,
But there are no words and no hope.
Our soul waits for Great Gaia
More than the watchmen for the morning;
Indeed, more than the watchmen for the morning.
O Earth, hope in Great Gaia;
For with Great Gaia there is loving kindness,
Even if She must be cruel to be kind!
And with her is abundant redemption.
And She will redeem the Earth
From all man's iniquities.
The judgement of Gaia is just.
They that destroy shall be destroyed
That the Earth may rise again from the dead.
That Life may live
And the World, once again,
Come to rights.
Let us pray.
All Glory be unto thee Great Gaia!
Do unto us according to Thy will.
c. All poems by David
Turner,
2007.
Katherine L. Gordon,
author, editor, publisher, judge and reviewer, lives to write in a
secluded river valley in Ontario, Canada. She is an award-winning
poet whose work has been translated into Hindi, Chinese and Spanish.
Katherine has 3 full collections, many chapbooks, articles and
essays. She works to promote
poetry
as the vital link that binds the cultures of the planet.
Recommended Further
Reading:
Her latest anthology is a collection of the myths and legends of
Canada: Myth Weavers,
Serengeti Press,
release
date April 2007.
Recommended
Reading:
Her Literary Review of Ancient Heart Magazine
Anthology 2006
Martian Music
Red dust sings in the blood,
miles of star-slivered space
netting us back
as salmon in a fiery sea,
floundering in little tin ships
to find our beginnings:
ancestral graves
in dried red beds.
Our loneliness keen,
as the genocide of Earth
inflames the obsession
to rejoin anything of source,
lost beauty and meaning,
the anthem we need
to survive.
Archeology
Somewhere between love and murder
lie the small hours.
We push hot goblets through thick air,
the dam that holds back day
grey-muffling all.
Banquo arises, sits between us
as we duel for words.
We speak in hushed voices,
afraid to disturb the guardian of night.
This time belongs to "the other"
who sense our intrusion
in a different terrain.
What is settled angrily here
is written in laser script,
cutting the family stone
of archived time.
Ashes On Wednesday
Are they the bones of ground-up saints
mixed with priest-spittle?
My sister said they were,
when as a child I knelt,
the thrill of this rite of penitence
anticipated.
The rough-pressed cross
I would not wash off for hours
marked me always
as a child of dead martyrs
in my own wilderness.
Now the day returns
with only memories of wide-eyed belief,
so little faith remaining
in the ashy cauldron of life
to light the forty days passage
from death to liberation.
Launch Longing
A wind arose from torpid corners
suddenly storm-harbinger howling,
tossing away caps, lifting skirts,
challenging us to fly.
We substituted kites for wings,
floated them like prayers
above the upheld arms of trees,
beyond wooded copses
where a darkness dwelt,
matching our fears
of fastenings to earth
where we struggled to be free
of bonds that clip our flight,
hood the desires of eyes
that dart hastily from dark to dream.
Some wild longing flies along taut strings,
pulls hearts from shut caskets,
mixes sparks with evening stars,
sets us in orbit.
Leonardo's Flying Machine
The longing overwhelmed me
when I saw it,
as it must have possessed Leonardo,
the time-traveler whose spirit could leap
outside the confines of the medieval mind,
to fly into a universe of thought,
where man could soar with birds
in a light canvas on wood
swallow-tailed, one-with-the-air frame,
catch the updraft,
glide over green spaces
close the eyes
and inhabit the wind.
He comes through the centuries
as I touch his machine,
built to tantalize the earth-bound.
I want to devour the grace,
the hurtful beauty,
of a glider born to bridge
not only man and bird,
but free the soul,
lift you over the torpid,
no fire, no sound,
a kite into eternity.
Smog Retribution
To-day the heavy heat is visible,
clinging like molt
to veiled birds, bewildered flowers,
the cat stretches endlessly as a python
beneath a chair.
The old stones of the house remember lava.
I turn on the fans and hear Icelandic geysers
steaming the air.
Aproned ladies in summer kitchens
once faced infernos to make pies:
I reach for salad and water,
green betrayal of old cuisine,
wonder if the fields will resign,
curl up and wait another eon
while we feed them our failures
with our bones.
top of page
Aberjhani
Aberjhani
is a winner of the Choice Academic Title Award and Best History Book
Award for his Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance; a Best of
Publication Award for his poetry; and the Thomas Jefferson Award for
his journalism. A former editor for the U.S. Air Force, his writings
stretch the boundaries of literary form to fuse impressionistic
dreamscapes, spiritual vision, intellectual inquiry, and erotic
confession to create a literary style uniquely his own. In addition to
the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, the Georgia native is the
author of The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois and the underground classic I
Made My Boy Out of Poetry. Readers voted him "Best
Poet/Spoken Word Artist" : more info is also available online at
Connect Savannah. Aberjhani's works can also be found at Amazon.com
Recommended Further Reading:
Aberjhani is interviewed by
Randy Barfield
Aberjhani
Site
AMERICAN WIDOW: SONG FOR
CORETTA SCOTT KING
Martin you could not of
course
but you should have seen it,
the wind turned to frozen thorns
when your coffin kissed the earth,
they drilled leprous holes in my arms
and the children all said
Mama please don’t Mama please—
but Friend where are you?
I have searched the bellies
of stars and storms for your
miraculous voice, I have walked seas
and seas of crippled night to hear
the songs of your touch and…
Friend of Mine when the dirt covered
your coffin crowds fainted
in the streets and up on the hills
of their souls our children sang
“I’m goin’ up yonder, I’m goin’
up yonder to be with my Lord, ”
but not without me I’d always thought.
Oh my Soul, why did you go
so far without me, but the most
wondrous thing, the kind of wondrous
thing that amazed you most
was the sun gushing blood all over
my bereaved life while the preacher
said such nice true things about
you he must have thought
he’d made them up, I recalled
as he spoke, the early days
when we burned like two summers
in the shade of our hearts, I recalled
days of swimming bare-skinned
in the waters of each others’
freedom-hungry minds and even now
a cloud is coming yonder dripping bones
over my bones it is the kind
of wonder that amazed you most
oh dear good Martin, call me to where
you are please I long to show it to you.
By Aberjhani
(from Visions of
a Skylark Dressed in Black)
JIGGED AND JAGGED
AND SANITY BE DAMNED
Broken! The damn of covenants and souls,
of laws, egos, and love’s voice shouting
through history and promises of now,
dripping shadows of blood flowing dread
over crimes of blood screaming innocence.
Broken! This vial which held Founding
Fathers’ dreams, broken, Whitman’s
American Vista––broken––the strangled heart
of the son of man, dear heaven so broken,
the will to respect freedom or hope––
Alas, all these tears boiling mud in graves.
Good citizens of no protest, how clean
our asses are serving tin Napoleons,
plastic Hitlers and glass Idi Amins
marching over hell’s charcoal tongue
like lemmings seduced by cyanide, twitching
to the rock and roll of sanity be damned.
Broken! The crystal moons of once
upon a time brotherhood and sisterhood.
(Is it safe to write this poem???with soft
black eyes reflecting faith sabotaged???)
BROken, the long wide wings He gave
brKEN us such a long…brokn…time…brkn…ago.
By Aberjhani
© 1/1/2007
ANGEL OF HOPE’S
PERSISTENT FLIGHT
I.
Wreaths of nuclear ash
decorate civilian hearts
with unresolved blood.
Greed, crowned emperor,
rules the earth with cold disdain
for harmony’s path.
War poisons the land
like diseased minds downloaded
into bowls of tears.
Chaos, loving none
so much as itself, slurps and
spits dead souls like bones.
What is belief now?
What is faith that will not die?
What news from heaven?
II.
In midnight’s orchard
rose’s blossom the secrets
that heal daylight’s wounds.
Beats of broken hearts
flow waves of revelation––
open gates to strength.
Cradled in scorched arms,
a soldier’s moon keeps its vows––
shines persistent hope.
This love that God is
curves in figure eights greater
than both time and space.
Death wins nothing here,
gnawing wings that amputate––
then spread, lift up, fly.
by Aberjhani
© December 2006
