The Beacon Hill Canto ----- poem by Koon Woon (unfinished)

The Beacon Hill Canto

I.

I will pay for the breeze, brief as it is,

rippling across the shroud of green leaves

over the ravine, on this sun brightened day,

in my Beacon Hill neighborhood,

where life is idle,

and Dylan Thomas would pronounce it good.

On rainy days even, it boasts of a solitary café:

[The Station],

as in a station of the metro,

“the apparitions of these faces in a crowd”

(a small intimate crowd it is),

“petals on a wet, black, bough.”

And would it have been worth it,

to order a tea, coffee, or cocoa,

marshmallow or orange marmalade

that will take you to another level of glad?

Like a walk from the house at a fresh hour of the morn,

inclined so slightly is 18^th Avenue South,

spritely I jaunt past houses with eaves and green paint,

past shrubs manicured and the variegated roses that grace

communal pledges that we made

to rescue each from days that are sad,

as the gardens were mastered by gardeners

who measure without malice and weigh without hate.

II.

Cross Beacon Hill Avenue with me to the Red Apple,

a house of plenty on this hilltop.

Take your sums from the Wells Fargo ATM,

go inside the store and give your eyes a feast,

and remember to purchase a book of stamps,

for letters to connect with Texas and Tennessee.

Let’s now continue past the branch library,

but we will not linger now, for there is time,

time for you and time for me,

time for the hope of the woman,

even though the principle has been hijacked

by the congressional corporations.

O Ezra Pound, where are you now?

Thou were the CEO of Modernist Poetry.

Why did you take up residence at Saint Elizabeth?

Oh well we won’t go see the Muse,

and even without a single glimpse of the Muse,

the walk must go on; we shall go on. 

III.

Inside his mind was the Muse.

And she moves on, as the river;

as the water, she moves on.

Stones will not impede her.

Shameless she provides,

in the estuary,

when birds rest from their flight.

IV.

That was another time.

He was on an island most of his days,

protected from unprivileged eyes.

V.

She called for the sky,

there came the sky.

She wanted rain.

She became fertile again.

VI.

As I walk now past the bicycle shop

again on Beacon Hill Avenue,

I am of this place and of this time.

There is another coffee shop,

but I won’t mention it by name when

the streets parade by with their designations

Horton and Hinds, Spokane at the Fire Station.

This is the loneliness of a long-distance intellectual,

the prelude with the pen that can enslave

better than an interminable sentence.

VII.

De la sierra, morena
Cielito lindo vienen bajando
Un par de ojitos negros
Cielito lindo de contrabando

Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores
Porque cantando se alegran
Cielito lindo los corazones

VIII.

We do not object.

We do not object to its price.

Jin tien wo men cher fan

Wo men do shih cher fan

“In the café the women come and go,

talking of Michaelangelo.”

Jonel Abellanosa ----- Three poems

Simplicity

By Jonel Abellanosa

My return to the ordinary, ways of

Each day.  The dawn and its tints,

Tilled soil, smells waking from water.

Ephemeral.  Then I run, running like jogging

Memory, more of the same scenaries:

Posts holding wires like skipping ropes,

Songs of early birds, voices without speakers, 

Yearns for the blacks and whites of language,

Calling a tree no other name.  Future

Heart I see.  The 30-minute jog an act of

Overcoming.  Nothing will redefine all day.

Silence has learned to sit like a lotus and

Instill.  Breathing has learned to slow.

Sustenance is the fixed point that glows.

Interplanetary Caravan

By Jonel Abellanosa

                                    After Imagika Om- Cosmic Sutras

The interplanetary caravan stops by

            Drops two blues

My sacred core’s small voice exclaims

            Glass!  Glass!

The small voice of laughter replies

            Orb!  Orb!

The harpist bends the music

            And the percussionist pounds

                        A hundred centuries of sadness

            Into dust

But sadness overwhelms like laughter

            As the caravan

                                     Pulls into space

And leaves the sky

                            A floating carpet

                                    Of stars

Satori

By Jonel Abellanosa

The pianist in an uphill

Burst of energy: arpeggios

The violinist pulls

The heart’s strings

Starlings swarm their skydance

Cheetahs run till they’re bodies of light

Dolphins leap free

At music’s end

Enlightenment’s dove

And they become reflections

In teardrops

From the Buddha’s eyes

Elizabeth Myhr ---- poem

Alone I Look into You

alone I look into you because

you have the eyes that are my eyes and you have the wrists

that are my wrists that sullen bracelet we finger

I look into you because you alone know how

to play with the surface of the lake that is me

dabbling silent lightshifting music

you rise and teach me to rise and to fade

because you know that to fade is also to rise

and in my fading a long look into the mountains

you made them all didn’t you I bow to you I am

so small the slope of your body shelters our body

and you built the wild rhododendron

I would do anything for you

this love affair with death is itself a miracle

and then all night I run around making plans

but you wait laughing and when I walk out

I turn to see your face but of course there’s nothing but light

and when I fall asleep again and I fall asleep again

our separation hurts like a sword driven into a wall

but you are the sword and the wall and their separation

how can you sometimes fly off don’t you know there is

worship going on here

looking up I have to stop and stare being new to this I

must pretend I am an animal don’t all people

fall back into their animal bodies

and oh no there you are downwind the great cat waiting

your belly wet from the rain in the grass

go ahead snag me on your teeth I surrender my shaking heart

until all that’s left is blood on the leaves

no way in no way out

I’ve been trapped under ice and waiting for years

begging off in the wrong silence some kind of addict

please crack the string of ice at the creek edge

in one breath you can free everything

I might wake up confused but at least I’ll wake up

I beg you please

join me to the unbroken sand

I used to think I was alone

all those years in the shifting greenhouse

I thought I was unable to tell this story

but you never abandon anyone

not so recently the journey has

I cannot make words out of this tenderness

this beautiful descending music

rain in my half-open window

Poem ---- Jerry Austin

Within And Beyond

Ten acres to explore--my grandfather's land.

Ten more--my Uncle Ernie's adjacent land.

How can one's mind narrow while roaming

twenty acres of forest and fields, like

watching the night sky fill with its lights?

How when watching an Alligator Lizard

spiral audibly down a cedar stump the summer

has dried? I celebrated the tanager colors

of June, and wanted to retain

their fervid dance, their motions near the trunks.

Always I have longed for their river of flight

and the light-filled leaves stranding down

from the alders, the big alders, and the rare birch.

Now other lessons abound. It is as if, as one looks back

on one's life, that river of high mountains

in its descent, and revisits mistakes

one would give years of life to alter,

so it is that we look at our life from outside

our life, and find lessons as if for another's

life--a continuation of our own, or

a psyche wholly other, that differs as birch

from stone, or mountain from dream, or

time from time in another place. But the lesson

learned remains, a permanence of information.

Always I have sought the glacier beauty

because I have seen the glacier; and the rural

cicada because I'd heard its song, and the horse

snorting as he steps to the fence to take

the apple from my hand. There is a reaching

out, a desperate need to reach out from within--

one's own mind seeks it and has always sought it

though it lay hidden like the shadows of a barn

or the long shadow of a mountain.

Jerry Austin / 5 May 2015

Richa Gupta ( 16 years old from India ) poem

Five Willows Literary Review: Poetry Submission

Cascade

She had nowhere to go,

nowhere to hide

Her pockets empty, painfully empty

Horribly devoid of sustenance,

of esteem, of a will to live

She scurried away,

trying to regain what she lost

when her family left her

without leaving anything behind

She cried to the heavens

for a drop of fresh water

She pleaded to the soil

to provide her a soft bed

She implored to the trees

to give her respite from the sweltering heat

All to no avail

did she appeal to the forces of nature

So she lived a life eerily deprived of hope

Until that day… when showers of diamonds

cascaded from the sky in relentless sheets,

saving her from the thirst that

wreaked havoc on her soul

She looked in delight at the thunder clouds

as shards of lightning illuminated her path,

the path to peace, to forgiveness

With unparalleled joy did her pale eyes glitter

as she lay back, deluged by the downpour

that cooled the spiritual pain she experienced

when she thought of her parched throat, the desiccated land

her dry soul

They absorbed the water, the precious Adam’s ale

and began on the golden path to inner peace