Poetry Life and Times July 2006 Cont.:Resident Poets

Poetry Life & Times July 2006 Continued:

THE PERILS OF NORRIS CARTOON

Index of poets:

Robin Ouzman Hislop
Sara L. Russell
Michael R. Burch
Helga Ross

Lahore

It was a golden afternoon,
as in an eastern rose garden,
where I sat alone, serene,
in a garden house home,
watching a bluest sky bloom,
through a door, like a flower open.

No thought on my mind’s eye
passed nor cloud in that sky.

All was quiet in the room,
it’s cool shade comforting,
when, suddenly, that still scene
was gone, as if it hadn’t been...
A monstrous stallion
appeared as filling up a screen,
a pink skinned yet hairy thing,
black, as unshaven & bristling,
yet also hung long & wisping.

It’s back stood in the door frame
that held me locked from within,
& the world before, stopped then,
had left me trapped in a room,
where no noise at all came in.
Dread ran from marrow to bone,
shadows in the wall were frozen
& I feared my heart was gone
& longed again the sky to open,
& so it vanished as it had come
& once again day became the sun.

As still as ever on my mind’s eye,
with the nightmare beneath the sky.

The Lines

Day long reaching the lines
As they come & go,
Leaving behind a domain,
where only the ugly remain,
For beauty it is said, cannot stay.

Day long, the lines, out lay,
We ask too much of life anyway
From what’s missed of it, on the way.

A desert of looming dunes,
Each one behind the other hidden.

Like trees that talk only to air,
Listen to but a planetary thought,
As the flow of eons under feet, beat.

Day long, spun on a theme,
& the roll of a drum kit,
Where believing & non believing
Are the laws of the game,
Except when you reach the lines,
where no poles surround, confound.

Day long, out there on the fronds,
Different wars for different reasons,
People & their causes die like flies,
Return secured, patrolled & policed,
To lines beyond reach, to prison skies.

Noggin the Nod

I trust no one.
I do not ask your pardon
to free me from your chains.
All of you have fallen,
what a shame!

I only ask the impossible
(ever vulnerable & fallible)
but not to the world,
out there made & displayed,
all day I’ve heard
the babble of it’s word,
on record, a pack of cards,

Nothing, if not fallen.
I trust no one.
I only ask the impossible
but of no one
& I do not ask your pardon
to free me from your chains.

The thing

Where is your cat heaven, in heaven,
I say to Daphne, white angora by the wall,
Travelling all night I have striven
To unravel the mysteries of the fall.

She snipples her muffin lips at me
Softly in whitest white secret secrecy.
All day I have searched through these spheres
For you to mysteriously appear

& where more or less you disappear.
No fear, Daphne on the floor is here.
I rise to say the stars have ears
& whisper between laughter & tears.

& outside that thing that comes in, the thing,
is no more than the music left standing.

© All poems by Robin Ouzman Hislop 2006

ROBIN OUZMAN HISLOP: Born UK. Childhood in Lyme Regis & Poole Dorset. Lived Scotland & Scandinavia, The East & Spain. He now lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK. Appeared in Dawn Millenium Anthology & Crystal Dawn Anthology published by Kedco Studios. When he first joined the world wide net he abandoned his previous poet performance career, mostly had in Spain and often as bilingual joint translation recitals. His first anthology After the Cave the Comet appeared two years ago & is available here, another anthology is shortly planned. He started as resident poet with Poetry Life & Times in January 2005 & took over its editorship together with Spanish poetess
Amparo Arrospide from Sara Russell in May 2006 .

Sara L. Russell

Magnolia (sonnet)

He dressed her in a summer sunset sky,
In swathes of burning coral, rosy white;
Like flocks of roosting doves that never fly,
All drowsing where they carelessly alight.

All resting on each gently-curving bough,
Resplendednt in their elegant repose;
Each one a moment in the living Now,
No longer than the lifespan of a rose.

Magnolia was born, attired for May,
In white and pink, the first flush of desire;
Her candelabra branches bright as day,
Each waxen bud comprised of frozen fire.

Magnolia brought passion sprung from wood
And God saw that Magnolia was good.

© by Sara L. Russell 14:00 28/05/2006

One Day You'll Learn

Welcome to this narrow little space
This brittle place where all
great plans are laid to waste

Welcome to this shallow point of view
fallow to you - I'm used
to being second best.

"One day" she said, "one day
you'll come to learn
how small your world really is."

Only I never realised
that it could be
quite as small as this.

© by Sara L. Russell 14:00 14/06/2006

SARA RUSSELL Poet, cartoonist and short story writer. Founder of Poetry Life & Times. Newsgroup signature was originally 'Pinky Andrexa, Last Of The Cyber Vixen Poets From Outer Space'.

Won Internet Arts Award from Kedco Studios Artist Profile Press. Runner-up in Capricorn International Love Poetry competition 1998. Her website Poetry Life & Times recently won the Alpha Poets' Poetic Eyes web award. Won Poet of the Week in the Poetry For Thought group (The Globe groups) for the week April 28-May 4th, 2001, with the poem "If You Were Mine". Inducted into The Poets' Hall of Fame, 2001, and included in its anthology for that year. Recently broke several bones after falling from a train; now fully recovered after almost a year, and walking without a limp following a recent successful hip operation.
5 illustrated e-books published by Kedco Studios Artist Profile Press (most recent first): Worlds Inside The Head, Quickies, Spiders And Gliders, A Way With Words (in collaboration with four other poets) and Pinky's Little Book of Shadows.

Also published in several Kedco e-book anthologies and Forward Press bound book anthologies.

The Poetry Life & Times Store

by Kedco since 2005.

Also Robin's exciting epic "After the Cave, the Comet" is now available for purchase either as a CD or Ebook.

Michael R. Burch

Because Her Heart Is Tender, for Beth

She scrawled soft words in soap: "Never Forget,"
Dove-white on her car's window, and the wren,
because her heart is tender, might regret

it called the sun to wake her. As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.
She wrote in sidewalk chalk: "Never Forget,"

and kept her heart's own counsel. No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.
Because her heart is tender with regret,

bruised by razed towers' glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on ...
she stitches in damp linen: "NEVER FORGET,"

and listens to her heart's emphatic song.
The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret

when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond-
its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.
She writes in adamant: "NEVER FORGET"
because her heart is tender with regret.

The Endeavors of Lips

How sweet the endeavors of lips-to speak
of the heights of those pleasures which left us weak
in love's strangely lit beds, where the cold springs creak:
for there is no illusion like love ...

Grown childlike, we wish for those storied days,
for those bright sprays of flowers, those primrosed ways
that curled to the towers of Yesterdays
where She braided illusions of love ...

"O, let down your hair!"-we might call and call,
to the dark-slatted window, the moonlit wall ...
but our love is a shadow; we watch it crawl
like a spidery illusion. For love ...

was never as real as that first kiss seemed
when we read by the flashlight and dreamed.

Loose Knit

She clutches the needle,
fetches fine red stitches, criss-crossing,
embroidering dreams in the delicate fabric.
And if her hand jerks and twitches
in puppet-like fits, she tells herself
reality is not always as it seems.

And if her heirloom flesh grows more and more frayed,
if the end result seems increasingly ragged,
if she wakes in the pale blotched dawn
haggard and afraid, thin threads of dry spittle
clinging to her like webbing,
her huddled child, betrayed, sobbing in a corner ...

she weaves an unraveling tapestry
of fatigue and remorse and pain.
Only the jackhammering needle's industry
mends her desire again, again.

© All poems by Michael R. Burch 2006

MICHAEL R. BURCH is the editor of The HyperTexts where he has published the work of three Pulitzer Prize nominees and recent winners of the T. S. Eliot, Richard Wilbur and Howard Nemerov awards. He has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his work has appeared over 450 times in literary journals and sundry publications in the USA, England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, South Africa and India, including The Chariton Review, Poetry Magazine, Verse, Poet Lore, Unlikely Stories, Light Quarterly, Writer’s Digest – The Year’s Best Writing 2003, The Best of the Eclectic Muse 1989-2003, The Lyric, ByLine, Icon and Nebo.

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Helga Ross

More Secure?

The body politic shows signs of rot,
and so what? American Idol sings,
lulling those handing off The People’s strings,
not worried for the freedoms Founders brought.
Afraid. Liberty doesn’t mean a lot;
post Nine-One-One one values different things:
Safety’s the raft on which the mindset clings,
with wars to win still eddying the plot.
Imperium, such made your promotion;
your commotions, the sovereign of all dreads,
made subjects to reactive tactics too.
Terror’s not a nation; it’s a notion,
though; like a wound you scratch, the more it spreads.
Iraq was wrong. To barge on won’t right you.

© Helga Ross 2006

A Wild Coexistence

A Canadian poet enjoys “hot, hazy, humid” lazy
summer days on Southern Ontario’s suburban fringes:

A hammock, a hot day, a leaf adrift,
I love these warps and wefts of resistance
as breezes buffet and butterflies lift
alongside, alike, tacking existence;
enveloped, vaulted sky and grassy sea;
suspended, forest core to urban fringe.
A heron lands on quay, his bended tree;
nearby boggy pond, waterfowl still binge.
Echoes persist of habitat’s pardon.
I hear the hum of traffic over hill,
phantom footfalls native to this garden,
caring to keep these legacies we kill;
content to cohabit woodlands and lawn,
wildness as vital as the next day's dawn.

© Helga Ross 2004, 2006

First Love Lessons

“ The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." ~ Carl Jung

Her heartbeat skipped at his sight, plunged into
the pool of his want, when first their eyes locked
in feral embrace, leapt out of right time,
wrong place to touch, hold, melt in each other,
dissolve boundaries, unbridgeable space.
His eyes undressed, caressed curves of her flesh,
revealed banked flames of desire’s white heat.
No fair! Need to hide feelings released made
her weak yet the burn of his gaze bestirred
currents in her – hurt, the lesson best learned
in schoolgirl’s grapple with math, chemistry.
So, one-and-one equals two proved not true;
the magnetic proton-electron charge:
Zero: One love – One, didn't make history!

© Helga Ross 2003

Herald the Day!

Herald the day, born unfailing, each dawn.
A gift, it comes in good faith, with a soft
whisper promise rendered all in a waft
whether valued or not; never withdrawn,
lightly, hope or life but belief be pawn.
If only our self-made limits we scoffed
and manmade demands we kindlier doffed
with each other, opportunities spawn.
Aurora’s light lifts up our kohl-rimmed night
as ever it’s done, our sojourn but brief,
renewing the chance to affect our plight.
Having wakened with wonder, this insight
replaces ruefulness; provides relief:
Made - my way to affirm today – I write!

© Helga Ross 2004, 2006

Canadian poet, HELGA ROSS loves the well-written word and loves to write her own; derives great pleasure from great literature, art and life, and the great outdoors. Everything old is new again in 2006 – She’s moved back to her old home town, Burlington, Ontario, after half a lifetime--for a new start. "You can't go home again" so they say -- She shall see. Helga expresses herself through an eclectic writing repertoire of material, style and form. 2004, however, was her literary turning point: She 'discovered' poetry in a big way. Now, poetry is her passion and focus, particularly Sonnet forms, though not exclusively. For Helga, the theme is 'Passion' in the broadest sense. She believes and illustrates in her writing: "The creative mind plays with the objects it loves". - Carl Jung Her poetic voice is playful, provocative, uplifting. Her serious pieces conclude on a positive note; reflect her approach to life: "Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for." — Ray Bradbury On the key to success Recent Accomplishments: Prix Poesie's laissez-faire Faire Award, April 2004. Poetry selections published in Sonnetto Poesia Vol.3 no.2 Spring 2004; Vol.4 no.4 Autumn 2005; Vol. 5 no.2 Spring 2006.

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