MAY MORNING BEFORE SUNRISE,
ON THE SECOND YEAR

Sun hasn't risen,
the land hasn't awoken.
In the depths
of the conifer forest,
the birds are silent,
the mind is dreaming
that this is another day
on another year
and the lost
are to be found
by just walking
up the hill to home,
picking up a phone
and calling,
waking startled
the one person
you would resurrect
if only one could be.

03.05.2010

INTENTIONALLY MISUNDERSTANDING

1

There are other ways of
encountering sorrow,

Qu Yuan,

you don't have to go and
meet it

at the bottom of a river
carrying stones.

2

It comes to you
wherever you are,

at the top of the mountains
shining in the Sun;

among firs and pines,
deep in the northern forests,
               
it will make yellow and red
leaves go flying in your thoughts;

turn the dawn to a twilight,
move clouds to block the light
   
of Moon and stars. It eats
your mind every waken hour

but to jump in the river
carrying stones in your pockets,

like Virginia did, Qu Yuan,
like you did,

is to just leave an ugly sight
for the unfortunates

who pull your body up
from the depths

where your last thoughts
were extinguished in fear.

23.10.2010

Clouds after a fiery sunrise
gather to put out
the emerged joy of living.

08.01.2012

Winter sun

 A yellow globe hangs

over all the white misery

of a life hibernating.

08.01.2012

THE DARK BEAUTY,
THE MOTHER OF THE WORLD,
THE MISTRESS OF THE WORLD

Eyes closed in sadness,
those beautiful eyes
of calm oceans,
no longer bear to look
when once they saw
the whole world;

lips closed in sadness,
lips which once
kissed us all
as babes just taken from the womb;
the kiss from which
all other kisses spring:

the first kiss in the
days of youth,
the last kiss to a loved one
when romance or live ends,
the last kiss we get
to our cold cheek -
too many of these last ones
to bear it anymore,

perhaps heart closed in sadness,
no longer beating
in tune to the
sorrows of this world;
too much to bear,
the rivers of pain
flowing endlessly to death.
Too much, us.

26.01.2010

If you want to become a hero,
enlist in an army
and in some foreign country
get yourself killed.

The next day, when your body
- or what remains of it - is cold,
you are declared to be a hero
by both kin, commander and press.

05.07.2009

Others pick spring flowers,
I pick autumn leaves
as snowflakes fall.

28.10.2009

To exist, be adult and sane
is to feel the weight and pain
of a life lived with mistakes
and shortening years ahead
bring the feeling of claustrophobia.
The walls are closing in,
and Atlas is going on his knees.

31.01.2009

The robbed tombs of kings and queens
give us few bones, some trinkets of gold
and broken pottery.

A line of writing here, a name there.
Everything else stolen long, long ago
by those who have no name now.

Thus the rich robbed the poor
to sent themselves to the life
beyond death in style.

And the poor robbed the tombs,
mutilated the bodies,
and robbed us, we who
   
would like to have a mummy
and a golden mask
to be put in display.

At least they would have had
full bellies and some fine things
perhaps, until it came time for them

to die and be put in meager tombs.
And we, we who dig up and salvage
of the past what we can,

we who ride this particular wave
in the ocean of time
leave but little in our graves

for archaeologists of the future
to find and write about.
They must consider us poor indeed.

17.01.2009

It's just an echo,
reverberating through the decades,
of a live lived
and a life ended.
Touching lives,
through others,
fading, waning,
ever travelling further
as centuries
turn to millennias.

06.06.2010

Like pale lighti
 through shallow water
reaching the
ice moulded pebbles,
sorrow enters the
the remaining days
of life, illuminating
them, as time
wavers.

12.05.2010

Johnny Roosevelt Polk(b. 1969/1970, d. 31st of July 2009)

Roosevelt charged and Cuba was not libre

even nominally for years, dons just

changed to sirs as the people continued

to live on their knees.
 

Polk went and took from Mexico what

Spanish had taken from the Natives.

Vistas that no Spanish had ever seen,

no Mexican had ever travelled through,

no Yankee had ever heard of,

mountains not yet walked by the pink man,

these Polk took.
 

But Johnny Roosevelt Polk

didn't take more with him from Kirkuk

than the injury which would kill him.

No more than a small town glory

for the former sport jock,

and an orphaned daughter left behind.

05th of August 2009

Nicolas Poussin's(1594-1665) "Le Printemps ou Le Paradis terrestre"(1660-64)

Among the clouds
flies El of the Canaanites,
the Sumerian Enki
in his white nightshirt,
bearded and pale
of skin and hair.
   

Below, on the ground

among the ample green

forested grasslands

of Eden

Eve points El to Adam.

(Some would say
it's the apples
in the tree
she wants Adam to see,
a wily woman corrupting
the simple man
when his male creator
has flown away.
But this is a path
we do not take.)   
           
But Adam
sees only Eve,
gazing at her face,
not at El in the clouds,
and perhaps it is Adam
of whom El is escaping,
a god who lost
his creature's interest
to a woman.
               
But it was Eve
who got the blame,
not Adam,
Adam who didn't gaze up
in the sky
to see the old god
flying in the sky
without wings,
El the abandoned,
soon to be usurped
by Yahweh his son,   
the storm god.

Yahweh who would
so hate women
that he would erase
his mother Asherat
from the religion
of his believers,
Yahweh who would
bring forth his
own son with a
virgin mortal.

And perhaps
the darkening clouds
behind El
are Yahweh,
coming to
embrace his father
with his thunder clouds,
to erase the Lord of Wind
and Water
bringing forth an age
of his own thunderous
wrath and spite.

25.10.2009

In the rocks
lives the memory of the world,
imprints of lives aeons past,
from pre-human mandibles
through huge dinosaur bones
to single leaves of trees
made eternal.

25.10.2009

WHAT SHALL I CALL THEM

The dead and wounded

of besieged Gaza,
what shall I call them?

Shall I try the trickery
and lies, used

by people worshiping
those who command Israel
to massacre
civilians in an effort
to get votes?

No. I shall be better than that.
I shall call them
victims.

Victims. No other word
for them.

And to those,
who murdered them,
no excuses.

Oppressors
who commit ethnic cleansing,
enslave populations
and murder tens of thousands
for seventy years
have no right

to "defend themselves".

The whole concept
is an absurd mockery
of sanity,
justice and morality.

If Israel
wants peace and safety,
then let it withdraw from

the occupied land,
give justice to refugees
and be ready to live as equals
and not as
masters of life and death.

03.01.2009-06.02.2022

PAINTING, A MEMORY

Rivers running to the sea

calm and slow

with muddy banks
and beyond them
fields of green vegetation
until the gray black mountains
arching towards the sky
like spear points
their spikes
wounding the sky.

04.11.2008

The small river comes from the hills
that are ruled by the evergreen forests,
slowly moves through the fields
like a snake,
making it's way to the lake
nestled between rolling hills
that carry high pines on their spines.

Occasionally a human breaks
the tranquillity of the landscape
through his existence in it.

We must not give him undue importance,
even when it was he who created the fields.
Let us make him a small traveller
in some corner of the landscape -
like in the Eastern landscape paintings,
minuscule voyager in the nature
and lost in it's infinity.

01.08.2009

OF EVOLUTION AND DISBELIEVERS
 

Endless change

infuriates those

who want

eternal today.

11.10.2009

So much misery in this world of dust,
where everything at the end
turns out to be a mirage,
all our achievements just sand
running through our fingers
when the clock calls midnight for us.

It has been all in vain,
the good and the bad,
all we did.
Eroded to dust by time,
carried away,
decades turned to a life completed,
left behind as the world continues.

21.09.2009

January white
Snow a veil
Over the decayed flesh
Of the Land
Last Spring's
Bones

26.01.2013

ISRAEL

From seeds of Ethnic Cleansing

Growing Apartheid

Shouting "Holocaust!

To all who question

Hiding behind piles of corpses

Victims of genocide

They use the dead as shields

For their own Atrocities

26.01.2013

Sadness binds together the days of life,
these raindrops dripping down,
counting the fleeting moments
of an existence that became meaningless.

And every sunrise is a twilight,
every twilight just a sign
of one more drop of time endured.

22.01.2010, modified 21.01.2013.

WILFRED OWEN(1893-1918)

Life and work ended by a bullet,
fame sealed more by death than poems.
The death of young man on a river bank
a beginning for a poet's immortality.

06.11.2008

In the horrible death of one 13-year old child

of Kismayo,

in the south of broken Somalia,
one can see the essential flaws of humanity as a whole.
The reason for our fall, why we are
trying to take an entire world
with us in to oblivion.
           
A thousand people witnessed the brutal murder
of a violated child,
and not one who had the courage
to be a human being.

Would I have had the courage?
Would you?

The price of bravery
would have been death,
if one couldn't have been
an example to hundreds.

But if in a thousand people
there is not one ready to put their life at stake
to save a raped child from a terrible,
violent death,
then what hope there can be
for humanity?

What hope for a species
that faces
the greatest tests during it's existence,
when among a thousand
there is not a single hero?

02.11.2008, modified 21.01.2013.

Remember the past
so that the future
would remember you.
Be truthful to those
whose lives have ended,
so that you
would be given justice
by those yet unborn.

Abridged from a poem written 31.08.2012.

The Sun shines brightly in the November sky,
I shine, draw strength from the light,
in Gaza children are burning and bleeding
and USA declares "Israel has a right to defend itself",
the words that mean "Kill with my blessing."
The Sun shines, so bright after the dark,
rainy yesterday, when half a dozen kids in Gaza
were still alive, playing, similing,
their hearts beating.

15.11.2012

This pain we call life,
these sharp shards of memories
stained in loss,
cutting so deep
without offering release,
we bleed our past
in one continous hemorrhage of the mind.

05.09.2012

Pre-Raphaelites praised saints,
but were themselves,
as artists must be,
mostly sinners
and the pearly gates of heaven
would've been closed
before their faces - etched deep
as signs of less than virtuous lives -
by armies of smiling,
beautiful saints
from God's own modelling agency.

If Caravaggio's Madonna
had bare, dirty feet
the saints of Pre-Raphaelites
could walk in muck and mud and crap
without staining theirs.

Beauty as an example,
but never as truth,
as truth is poison to legend.

Unwashed saints with bad, rotten
and missing teeth,
ugly and broken by hard
living as much as torturer's
rack and wheel,
they didn't exist when
an artist united beauty and religion.

Always they went back
to Arcadia's cold springs
as the Renaissance imagined it,
and not to the
muddy, spoiled, worm-infested waters
of reality.
               
Lambs on summer meadows,
smiling sepherds in the prime
of their life
they painted,
when the blackened slums
under skies of ash
spread misery and cholera.

The sepherds were absent
in their Puginite little palaces,
the lambs unwashed,
without hope
as much as without
knowledge of religion.

Neither they nor the bishop cared,
and lost in their legends
the Pre-Raphaelites painted
and writed, blind
to but to their imagination
and the curves of their models.

16.04.2012