ON THE FIFTY-NINTH DAY OF THE YEAR

You wanted to see the Northern Lights.

Watching them now, each silent

shifting of the wave

a whiplash on my being.

28.02.2023

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

PREDESTINATION

The Protestants believe

everything has been too late

since your first scream,

and earlier; that before

the world was their god

condemned you.

Put you on this stage,

is pulling your strings,

and blaming all on sin.

27.02.2023

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BEYOND DUSK

Lie down,

open your eyes

to the night.

Let it come,

swift-footed,

cold.

27.02.2023

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ON THE FIFTY-EIGHT DAY OF THE YEAR

I'm making coffee,

to get something still done;

an early rise in the morning

to run after a bus, and

all those delayed things

to still carve into this evening.

Or perhaps I shall just give

way; sleep, wake at late

night, and hurried rush

in the pale morning.

27.02.2023

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COSMIC KEATS

Our days are writ in

immortal space-time

and mortal memory;

information can't be

lost in the cosmos, except

from the dying human flesh.

27.02.2023

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THE MASSACRE AT CROTONE

To Meloni and von der Leyen

At least sixty-two people,

and likely a forty more,

drowned in Crotone.

Draped bodies on a sandy

shore, mocking laments from

those who did the killing.

The sea should carry

their forked-tongued mouths

deep into its silence.

27.02.2023

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THERE ARE THINGS YOU WON'T BE FORGIVEN

How could you not

answer that kiss on the swimming

beach, take her into the shed,

and give what comfort you could

for one who had chosen

you over their closest kin?

There would be a special

place for your kind in Hell,

if there would be other

Hell than this.

27.02.2023

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TO MY MOTHER

A night has fallen.

It's thirteen minutes past six

in the evening. Black trees

stand against the darkest blue,

rapidly sinking.

People die at this time almost

as often as in the early morning -

or at late night, take your pick -

just before the dawn.

You get a call, and they are

gone, and just twenty minutes

earlier you were walking away from

their bed where they slept in a final,

troubled slumber, seeing a dream

they would never reveal.

27.02.2023

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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

He could never shake

from his shoulders the mantle

of his town-dwelling merchant ancestors,

their craven subservience before the country

lords. A creator of splendour, he couldn't grasp

that what he wrought outshone the looted

silver from which he ate in the dining rooms

of their rural mansions. Condemned to being

a giant standing among the gold-hoarding

dwarfs, in their decaying halls, believing

their diminutive forms were towering

above his wretchedly loyal self.

27.02.2023

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ON THE FIFTY-SEVENTH DAY OF THE YEAR

The long winter day of light gone,

an hour and a half from the setting

of the cold-red Sun, and darkness

has engulfed the world outside,

and gazing on the window-pane

I see solely my dark reflection.

26.02.2023

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IN THE LATE FEBRUARY DUSK

Like haze purple clouds

after the setting of the Sun

hang on the still pale blue sky,

yet in an hour, the night.

Deep blue snows all around

darkening faster than the sky,

yet in an hour blue expanses

both will glimmer and glitter

in starlight arrived across

the separating void.

Such cold brilliance

from the warm colours

of sunset's wake.

25.02.2023

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IF YOU WERE SILENT WHEN THEY STILL LIVED

It's pointless to say good things

about the recently dead -

save your praises for the living.

Praising the dead

you just announce

being too late.

25.02.2023

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THE DUAL TOUCH

Sunlight caresses the late

winter landscape both

with its own golden, soft light

and the deep blue shadows it casts

on pale blue snow; yet

in those deepening, darkening

shadows lives and grows

the coming night.

25.02.2023

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ON THE FIFTY-SIXTH DAY OF THE YEAR

Clouds torn away from the Sun

and the gray afternoon of yesterday

a faint memory in this landscape

of hues of blue beyond counting.

25.02.2023

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ZEN

All those monks seeking enlightenment

and only finding

the void.

24.02.2023

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ON THE FIFTY-FIFTH DAY OF THE YEAR

A deepening gloom marks the late

afternoon, dimness pregnant

with the barren night.

Wrap it around you,

the darkness

without

stars.

24.02.2023

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AND WE THOUGHT WE WERE ONLY HURTING OURSELVES

Our old mistakes beget new ones

by others; we have poured salt

on the land of their lives

and blighted seeds

open foul buds

over their

years.

24.02.2023

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IGNITION

 Sun shines on the shimmering

blue winter sky. A cold day,

yet the abundant light burns inside,

warming your long-withered being;

has you rooted in the blue

snow, blazing, a star.

22.-23.02.2023

ON THE FIFTY-FOURTH DAY OF THE YEAR

Snow falls slowly across the gray

hours of the day, binds the sky

of clouds with the white ground;

you stand apart, behind glass,

a specimen observing

the collection

housing it.

23.02.2023

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MEA CULPA

We are people of many mistakes,

digging the same stretch of a forlorn

ditch ever deeper and deeper.

Stagnant the muddy water

that gathers there, darkly

reflecting our barren visage.

22.02.2023

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THE ARYANS KEEP REPEATING THEMSELVES

The extremist Hindu regime occupying Kashmir invented a fictional genocide of Hindus, threw that fairytale over

100 000 real graves, soil pregnant

with blood, and cries that what

never existed is being cruelly ignored.

What it was that an another bunch

of Aryans said about inventing

a staggering lie no sane person could

believe without an endless, brainwashing

 repetition, indoctrination like

an epic poem chanted again and again

to Hindu kings with no long-term memory,

and making it the foundation stone

of your entire thousand-year plan?

22.02.2023

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ON THE FIFTY-THIRD DAY OF THE YEAR

From a mostly cloudless sky the Sun has been shining since it arose; naturally

it's a cold day, freezing; now minus seventeen degrees, but all that abundant light burns inside, fiercely, warming your

withered being. All that dried wood

of the spirit crackling as it's consumed.

You shiver, the gifted aquamarine jacket

more apt for autumn mists, your fingers inside the woollen gloves are going numb,

but all that lush light has you rooted

in the blue snow, blazing.

22.02.2023

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DO UNTO UKRAINE AS YOU HAVE DONE TO WESTERN SAHARA

Most prominent people who vocally

complain about Russian invasion

of Ukraine support long

military occupations elsewhere.

Most 'normal' people who vocally

support Ukraine against the Russian

invasion don't support armed

resistance groups fighting against

long military occupations elsewhere.

The Russian war of aggression in

Ukraine is foremost,

beyond the piles of corpses,

a story of immense hypocrisy,

of double-standards dwarfing

the Himalayas.

21.02.2023

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MAKE ALL YOUR TROUBLES GO AWAY

Take a scale big enough

in time or space or both

and none of this matters.

But on that scale

you will also be too

small to appear.

21.02.2023

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ON THE FIFTY-SECOND DAY OF THE YEAR

Bitter, people strike

out with their tongue,

every chance they can

out comes the whipping

tongue to drag them

deeper into loneliness. 

21.02.2023

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LOTUS FLOWER PIER

Reading a poem by that

old scoundrel Wang Wei,

the high minister pretending

to be a Buddhist hermit

vowed to celibacy &

his vast country mansion

 a mere sage's hut, about

being afraid to make "wet"

the red blouses of singing girls

after a long day spent on

carousing on the river.

Every morning he sails out

"to pick flotus lowers",

returning only at dusk,

"poling" his "boat" carefully

so as not to "wet" the

"flowers'" red blouses.

Why do we want so much

the powerful bureaucrat and

politician to be the mask

kept on his true face, and

not the Buddhist poet

with the painter's touch?

20.02.2023

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ON THE FIFTY-FIRST DAY OF THE YEAR

This afternoon,

all white silence.

Words are reluctant, like

people, to venture onto

the white wastes of land

and paper and screen.

Here the absence becomes

the story of forced

existence.

20.02.2023

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ON THE FIFTIETH DAY OF THE YEAR

1

A snow white,

cloud gray day,

an old black cat

like a shred of the night

lies on the window sill.

2

The day lies heavy

on the frozen ground,

among snow-white boughs

a blackbird of the night.

19.-20.02.2023

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THE HEATH DEATH OF OUR UNIVERSE

All the guises we now take

are fake, to hide the black hole

which long since has made

a singularity of that person

who was us once.

But we move among theatrical

facades, on a stage, and around

on their own orbits masked remnants

in their guises, hiding their own

all-devouring emptiness.

18.02.2023

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MATTHEW ARNOLD(1822-1888)

As a poet his problem was quite simple;

the poet, so believed his time, should live

their poetry; not write verses of misery

and then put on a coat of comfortable

success and a hat of satisfaction

and take a stroll on the Embankment.

18.02.2023

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ON THE FOURTY-NINTH DAY OF THE YEAR

Cold was the morning, born from a freezing

night, cold is the day which the morning

begat, laying gray upon the white waste

of the bleak winter landscape. No cheerful babe

can come from a union chill, and cold will too be

the early dusk it shall dutifully embrace,

to birth the freezing starless night,

from its frigid womb emerging.

18.02.2023

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IMAGINE YOURSELF BEING LEFT TO DIE IN THE RUINS IN NORTHERN SYRIA

In Turkey they were still finding survivors

four days after they stopped searching

in Turkish-occupied Syria (there

no rescuers went from the 'West'),

where the regime and the al-Qaeda

-led rebels both squabbled over aid

as trucks stood waiting, and president

 Michel of the European Council in absence

"with the Syrian people stood in solidarity",

words being cheaper than cargo-planes

carrying heavy machinery.

17.02.2023

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OVER 25 000 REFUGEES DEAD ON THE MEDITERRANEAN IN THE LAST DECADE

They leave boatfuls of refugees to drown

on the Mediterranean and make their

regular pilgrimages to piously cry

"European Values!" in Kyiv. 73 dead off Libya,

and before me on the screen, the sea washing

the body of a dead man on its shore.

If only that would be the Black Sea,

the man's skin pink and him an Ukrainian,

what wouldn't have Europe done for him!

17.02.2023

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CHRISTIAN PIETY

As the lords medieval knew,

few crimes in Christendom

you can't pay for with

a new monastery.

If you burned a church,

plundered an abbey?

Don't you worry, sire -

just found a monastery!

If you kidnapped an heiress

from a nunnery for a wife?

Don't you worry, sire -

just found a monastery!

If you had to slain your cousin

dear to be a count or a duke?

Don't you worry, sire -

just found a monastery!

As the lords medieval knew,

few crimes in Christendom

you can't pay for with

a new monastery.

17.02.2023

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THE LIVES THAT BREAK ARE OFT LONG SHATTERED

Most tragedies are not sudden, clean;

they unwind over decades, taint entire

lives, beget an offspring of their own

through that spreading taint, until

comes that moment people recognize

as the tragedy that befell suddenly,

and as quickly washed away with

the loud chiming of the bells.

17.02.2023

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ON THE FORTY-EIGHT DAY OF THE YEAR

Water dripping from the eaves,

but the temperature dropping

we'll have icicles on the eaves over

the weekend, ice hanging there

reaching through the air

towards the slumbering earth.

You never see icicles fall, that

moment they are coming to

meet the frozen soil. You just

find them on the ground,

shattered after their

spell in the air.

17.02.2023

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GRANDER IS THE SEEN THAN THE BEHOLDER

Old Walt eulogized his soul,

praised it over the sky and the stars,

praised it over time and space -

yet Walt has long been in his grave,

brain dropped on the laboratory floor,

and soul there never was separate

from the matter that fell on that floor.

The sky and the stars, time and space

they will endure, and long after no one

reads old Walt like mortal me, they 

stand guard over our grand delusions

turned to dust on a ball of dust.

17.02.2023

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ON THE FOURTY-SEVENTH DAY OF THE YEAR

'We would die without technology',

says the learned paleontologist talking

of the Oldowan tools, but as the corporate lords

of our civilization have been showing,

'We will die with technology.'

16.02.2023

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AND GOD MADE THEM IN HIS IMAGE

Why are those who loudly speak

of their loving god, always the ones

most filled with hate? They speak

of their lord's mercy, pray it will

fall upon them while gleefully

stamping innocent people.

God this and god that,

blood dripping from

crossed hands.

15.02.2023

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WHEN LACKING POETIC INSPIRATION

Sometimes all you can do with words

is to throw some of on them on paper

and hope that a few of them click,

and that out of those few seeds

come something organic, growing

to cover whe white wastes

of the sheet.

15.02.2023

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ON THE FOURTY-SIXTH DAY OF THE YEAR

These days go so swiftly

crawling by. One day there are no more

days but one, a spear cast through

each one before from the side

of a deep and a narrow hole.

15.02.2023

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ON THE FOURTY-FIFTH DAY OF THE YEAR

Again, darkness. This

Sargasso Sea of the winter day, this

dead calm of time. We float on its

unmoving surface, upon the

abyss of Chaos before the primordial

mound emerged, or is it after the world

has returned to Chaos?

14.02.2023

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THE BASEL EPIGRAM

Kayle rekyfe. Eg koyte poyte, thoneaw

labonache thewelyfe, nykoyte penega doyte.

Hello, mister! You are no longer a nice little uncle!

If you want to drink, you do not want to give a penny!

 

One of Christianity's many victims, this

Old Prussian people, left little more

behind them departing than a place name

here and there, and this epigram in

a manuscript of work of Nicolas Oresme,

written in Prague in 1369. What made

the scribe to write this down, this paltry

legacy to Europe that had come

with crusaders and them devoured?

We gaze at the marshes and the lakes

where their echoes still fade.

13.02.2023

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ON THE FORTY-FOURTH DAY OF THE YEAR

The light makes me ill,

faint as it is on this day.

So long in the dark

I can't stand this blight.

13.02.2023

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ON THE FORTY-THIRD DAY OF THE YEAR

Minerva's owl flew long ago,

and we were left behind on

the strand when the ships raised

black sails and back to Athens sailed;

there is no glad divine retinue

to gather us from this final shore,

for all the gods are as dead

as the monster in the labyrinth.

12.02.2023

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THE PRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN COUNCIL SPEAKS ABOUT THE EARTHQUAKE IN TURKEY AND SYRIA

Syrian people will have the European Union's solidarity,

said president Michel, and added, and naturally

nothing more. We couldn't think of sending

heavy machinery, because if you can't move

ruins to save people trapped under rubble

with the power of European solidarity,

you might as well not try at all.

12.02.2023

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POPULAR MUSIC

All poetry is political; the Western Han dynasty

had an entire bureau for collecting and adapting

folk songs for courtly use, and the Confucians

turned the love songs of the Book of Songs

into political commentary, the ruler becoming

the yearned lover whose attention the Sage

seeks for the consummation of a perfect state.

All poetry is political, and the poet allowing

the wind to open their weakly-tied robe

is letting it open for the calculating gazes

of bureaucrats and politicians.

11.02.2023

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SAND-CASTLES

What remains of life

will be ruins,

yet some ruins are grander

than others, and some

just sand-castles before

a rising tide.

11.02.2023

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ON THE FOURTY-SECOND DAY OF THE YEAR

The outer darkness

keeps the inner darkness

contained; thus the night

is greater than daylight.

11.02.2023

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BEIT HANINA

The same people who claimed

that parents of Palestinian children

are guilty when they are killed

by Israel's occupation soldiers,

and not the soldiers who pulled

the triggers, or the politicians who

sent the soldiers, were now upset when

their blame game was turned on them,

and the death of a Jewish Israeli boy

was blamed on those who had made

him a human shield in the brutally

occupied territory at the age of six

years, and caused his death. Their

own oft-repeated claims, when turned

around, were now the most terrible

thing these people had ever

heard, pure hate.

11.02.2023

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