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Monday, June 15, 2015

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 18th 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.”

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

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



Friday, June 5, 2015

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


Tuesday, June 2, 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