NEFER(2011-2024)

We lost you today.

You were the last one.

Last one of the three

friends: You, Heta

and Tara. You were

lonely these last

two years. You

are not lonely

anymore.

27.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

PHOTOGRAPHER HUSAM DABAKA KILLED WITH HIS TWO SONS BY ISRAEL'S OCCUPATION FORCES IN GAZA

Five days ago photojournalist Husam Dabaka was killed

by Israel's occupation forces in occupied Palestine's

Gaza Strip along with his two sons Hadi, aged 3,

and Husam, aged 6, and three other relatives,

including Majida, aged 8, in a bombing of their

family home in the al-Maghazi refugee camp.

But some Wall Street Journal journalist imprisoned

by Russia, same Russia that supports Trump like

Wall Street Journal does itself, mattered more

to the 'West' than all the 176 journalists killed

by Israel in the last ten and a half months.

27.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

WAITING UNTIL IT COMES TO THE MOVIE THEATERS

During an ongoing genocide,

hundreds of millions of people

are silent, apparently waiting

for the movie version.

26.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

IN A MULTIVERSE OF MIRRORS

You have been here, times beyond counting,

on these moment in life, every atom the same,

and you have been here, times beyond counting,

one leaf now green in the tree withered, one

book on your shelf different. This but one

of endless versions of you in endless worlds,

you will be here again, times beyound counting,

every atom the same, and times beyond counting

with a different shirt, and I'm not sure if its

beauty or horror that it willl keep repeating,

that we still put so much weight on this brief

existence in a multiverse of mirrors.

25.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

READING JOYCE KILMER

Joyce Kilmer thought Christ

had brought down to Earth

a sword and so he went to war;

but what had been a sword

was now a sniper's rifle

in German hands.

25.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

EZRA POUND DIDN'T COPY THIS IN HIS POEMS, ONLY IN HIS POLITICS

The troubadours could write of things one would not believe

based on the selected poems about courtly love and battle

we are now given from them; Rabelais would have thought

twice, thrice and decided not to publish what they could

do with their quill pens. But credit where it belongs

to - even I was shocked reading how they would do

scatology and write about licking anuses. Did

Eleanor of Aquitane listen to these, sitting on her

chamber pot? Yet, the troubadours joked about raping

shepherdesses in their poems, so why not this?

A dirty mind is a dirty mind, even when it

sings like a nightingale to queens.

03.-24.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

DECIDING NOT TO TRANSLATE A POEM BY SYLVIA PLATH

People become seduced by their illnesses,

they rebuild identities with them, amputating

healthy parts of themselves to make prostheses

out of diagnoses as replacements, reshaping

themselves reading about symptoms to adopt,

seeking out as role models those self-destructing

as a  sacrifice to their own illnesses. We must

see only loss in these lives given up willingly.

12.-24.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

16:31

The trees stand still,

branches unmoving,

yet, a breeze!

18.08.2024

NOW THE SUNLIGHT GOES

Now the sunlight goes, and somehow

the wind feels stronger, even when

it has been blowing like this through

the last golden hours. The light calmed

it for the brain, and now the light

is gone and the wind blows

against the unsheltered mind.

21.-24.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

IN THEIR EYES A GLORIOUS WAR

Perhaps the myth of the Trojan war

has so gripped martial-minded men

through three thousand years

because of its utter, pointless futility.

A war fought for a decade because

of a single woman, ending in destruction

and massacre, laying waste to a great city

and the winners mostly perishing

on the way home, or slain after return.

No permanent conquest, Troy left

a barren ruin, winning survivors bringing

some noble slaves to show for it all,

and the hate of gods. No wonder

it has so aroused the men who love war

for the sake of war, this war fought

for the sake of waging a war.

No wonder that to underline the glorious,

pointless futility of it all, some embellished

the myth so that Helen had never been

at Troy at all, but chaste in Egypt.

24.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

WE CAN TRY TO COMPREHEND

We can't comprehend the vastness of the cosmos,

I heard said a lot. Perhaps. Yet I think I can reach

towards comprehension and that those people who

make the claim just give up too easily. We can try

and fail, and if nothing else, in our failure get

a glimpse of that vastness to which they so

easily surrendered before even trying. and

if nothing else, get overwhelmed by awe.

24.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

THE FRIENDS OF CORONAVIRUS

They claim that Covid is just a flu,

and that people who died of it

died of something else, and if not,

then anyway are better off dead;

no reason to take vaccines, it's just

a scam to them or meant for the very

old; wearing masks is either an oddity,

or even terrorism intended to make

supporters of a genocide unsafe,

but certainly an insult to them

who keep getting sick even when

they have done nothing to avoid it.

24.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

SUNLIGHT AND AQUAMARINE

Birches carrying green swaying in a gale

against deep blue, its immense depth,

that thin slice over the planet which

Gagarin saw. Almost twenty degrees,

wind making it feel more cool than it

is, yet still summer. A dog is howling

at the neighbour, and I remember

the dream I saw, cats living and dead,

my dead mother and her dead dog,

one gone fifteen, the other eighteen

years, in the dream the latter gone

missing and I remember still how

happy I felt finding her, safe, before

awakening to the sounds of an open

window swaying, with the trees,

in the wind. My mind thought it

was hearing the sound of rain,

it expected something else

than sunlight and aquamarine.

24.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

JOURNALIST HAMZA MURTAJA KILLED BY ISRAEL

Journalist Hamza Murtaja killed in occupied Palestine's

Gaza Strip along with at least 11 others when Israel

bombed a school where interviewed displaced people.

Yasser Murtaja's brother. You don't know who Yasser

was? He was a photojournalist fatally shot by Israel's

occupation forces during the Great Return March

on April 6th in 2018. Ten other people died with

him on that day, killed by Israel. This is Israel,

beloved and worshipped by the 'West'.

19.-23.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

LATE DINNER IN DYING SUMMER'S SOLITUDE

I'm making pea soup and coffee at ten

in the evening, really at night this time

of the year, trees now mere black silhouettes

against the darkest blue. Will have to drink

it black, coffee, milk gone and I wouldn't go

to the store today, two and a half hours just

to get some poor confined bovine's milk

in my coffee, so black coffee, pea soup, 

flatbrod with salad and pickled cucumber

on top, and poetry, can't forget poetry,

the main part of a late dinner eaten

in dying summer's solitude.

21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

THIS IS HOW GENOCIDES ARE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN

There are people denying an ongoing holocaust

saying they owe that to the victims of the Holocaust,

that they don't recognize a genocide by a state

claiming to act in the name of those older victims.

And the worst thing is, many of them are actually

sincere, and truly see nothing odd or terrible

in this denial of current suffering in the name

of remembering and respecting past suffering.

21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

THERE ARE TIMES

There are times when,

giving up resistance,

you just need to open

the messages on your

phone, gaze at the images,

and let your imagination

take its wild ride, starting

with taking off those

knickers that are on its way.

21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

LATE SUMMER AFTERNOON

The landscape outside windows still

green, blue and white, with a slight touch

of gold, and as the late afternoon advances,

blooming shadows that lengthen and merge,

the high tide of light withdraws down

to the valley, shadows weaving the dusk.

12.-21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

SUCCUMBING TO IT

I have to smile to my own lust, this

aching eagerness that so easily

awakes, and is so hard to extinguish

without succumbing to it. And why

would I extinguish it? I'm a fool,

but there are so many ways to be

a fool, and this one is far more

pleasant than most.

14.-21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

THE BIRTH AND TRIUMP OF VENUS(1740) BY FRANCOIS BOUCHER(1703-1770)

Fly away, all you swarming Cupidos,

don't you know you are anachronisms,

flying there over your just born mother,

and there should only be one of you;

go, or I'll take my own bow, of stronger

make, and shoot you down one by one,

so as to enjoy the charms of paint made

flesh without you mosquitoes of love.

07.-21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

LATE SUMMER EVENING

The evening comes early

to this side, while the ridge

across the fields bathes still

in sunlight, the fields rising

to the houses mowed golden

and here, deep, dark shade,

and the fallow fields spreading

in shadowed green beside

gravel crunching underfoot.

21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

THE LOST RESURRECTED

Coming back from getting the mail, 

I sit on the porch steps, drinking

coffee, reading comics, and the late

summer's light and the nostalgic

reading together resurrect shades,

end the desolate silence, raise up

fallen trees and lost, loved people,

pets dead and buried in years,

from this graveyard time

makes of us.

21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

DISAPPOINTMENT

Not a glimpse of a dryad

when wandering through the forest

today, in golden sunlight and deep

shade altering on moss like Wang

Wei wrote about, must have their

tent in some other wood, haunted

by the spawn of Ungoliant.

21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

IN THE SPIRIT OF THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS

Yesterday the Sudanese military junta bombed

the town of Ed Daein in Darfur, at the hands

of the military junta's rebellious, genocidal

Janjaweed militia. And what did the junta

target? Janjaweed / RSF genocidaires?

Of course not. In the spirit of the Abraham

Accords, the military junta's airplanes

bombed a hospital and a dialysis centre,

a mosque, and girl's elementary school,

killing from four to fifteen civilians.

Janjaweed genocidaires, in the same spirit,

destroyed a warehouse housing medicine

supplies in the besieged city of al-Fasher

on Sunday with their artillery fire.

As in Gaza, so in Darfur.

International humanitarian law

just one more massacre victim.

21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

THE GRAVEYARD OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

Tens of thousands of refugees

and migrants have been left to drown

on the Mediterranean by Europe,

deliberate mass murder that

repeats again and again and again,

yet the regular drowning of dozens

is given little notice by the press,

but then a billionaire's yacht gets

in trouble and it fills headlines,

Titanic submarine all over again.

The only good billionaire's

yact or submarine is a one

that marine archaeologists

can study. That's all I'm

going to write.

21.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

NOW THEIR LIVES AND DEATH DOESN'T COUNT TO THE 'WESTERN' PRESS

Israel killed a mother and her six children

on Sunday in an attack at Deir al-Balah

in occupied Palestine's Gaza Strip, and it's

nothing to the 'Western' press, which would

be screaming headlines if it would have

been Russian invaders killing a mother

and her six children in Ukraine.

19.-20.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

AT LEAST THEN 'WE' WOULD BE HONEST

We should end all Holocaust memorial events,

stop remembering the liberation of Auschwitz

by the Soviets on each January 27th, because

the ongoing genocides in occupied  Palestine

and Darfur show (once again) that our official

remembrance is a charade to hide that 'we' (our

lords and masters, the politicians) have learned

nothing and want to learn nothing from all that

wreath laying at memorials and speeches they

made about how genocides can't be allowed

to happen again. It was and is all bullshit.

They couldn't care less. They just like

the theater of pretending to care.

17.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

I CAN ONLY IMAGINE WHAT I WOULD HAVE BEEN TRANSLATING AT THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES

It took translating two poems by Robinson

Jeffers, two by Thomas Merton, and one

by Robert Frost to curtail my desire.

to beat the flesh down with the word

and be at peace. Those people who

just take a cold shower have it easy.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

IN THE DUSK

Light fading, clouds breaking

rifts between show clear sky,

pale banners of evening.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

STUDIES SHOW MOLECULAR MOVEMENTS IN GLASS ARE REVERSIBLE, HAVE NO PREFERRED DIRECTION IN TIME

Inside glass, time's arrow could be reversed, in theory,

but only for the molecules in it, to them the future

and the past no different. But break the glass and it will

never be whole again, and it's like that, with us,

our mind using memories to reverse time's arrow,

now and then, bringing us back into what was,

while we, when broken in time, will never be made

whole again any more than the shattered glass.

16.08.2024

 Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poetry #Poem #Poems #Verse

WHEN THE MIND MERGES MEMORIES

Another late summer morning

beyond counting, merging

already in memory, becoming

part of what never was, a vision

of all in one, the Platonic

ideal of a late summer morning

if you wish, or the mind lying,

if you prefer that, to itself.

16.08.2024

 Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

CLOSER TO THE SATYR THAN THE CENTAUR

 Govaert's satyr too shy,

frozen forever looking,

Böcklin's centaurs too rash,

the dark opposite,

but the hooves fit,

how well they fit,

those hooves.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

THE SURGE BREAKING AGAINST THE CLIFFS

I'm translating hundred -year-old poems

from California in this afternoon gloom,

putting the long-travelled waves hitting

a distant shore against the waves rising

inside, colliding with them. But the Pacific

billows of a hundred years don't subdue

my visions. The latter no longer water,

but hard cliffs rising above the sentences

incapable of eroding the embedded desire

as they come rolling and break.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

THE CAT WAITS FOR THE PORRIDGE TO COOL DOWN A BIT

The cat will stop circling around

the hot porridge, but it doesn't

forget the enticing smell that

drove it, nor the burning on

the tongue that instead of

scaring, encouraged, drove

it to seek more.

16.08.2024

THE SUMMER BLEEDS OUT

The green of trees suddenly

faded against the bright blinding white

of the clouds, such bright, great

whiteness in the afternoon gray that

what remains of the summer

has bled out, becoming dark

reflection in the standing puddles.

16.08.2024

 Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Verse #Poem #Poems #Poetry

HE CAN'T BUT THINK OF HIS MUSE

He tries to write poems

about nature to calm

himself, but how can he

when the only landscape

he wants at this moment

to explore is her landscape

of flesh, yearning

to explore her

undulating form

 

as the rain and the wind

and the Sun touch the landscape

opening before his gaze,

the landscape which memory

replaces with her form,

waiting

as the land awaits

the caressing rain, the wind

and the beams of light.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

A NYMPH HUNTING A CENTAUR

A centaur galloping

after a laughing nymph,

evading, evading,

that lust on hooves

that only sees flashing

flesh, only thinks

of mounting her,

yet she slips gracefully

away from reaching fists.

and runs again, tiring

him down, a huntress.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

ROHINGYA

In Burma, "Never Again"

is seven years.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Verse #Poetry #Poems #Poem

AFTER BASHÕ

The frog can't keep away

from the pond of lotuses,

but the poet must gaze

and not jump in.

Who would drag them up?

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

THE CENTAUR AT REST

The nights becoming longer more time

for dreams, seating my fast-hoofed centaur

at rest on a chair beside a pool bright blue

as the skies of the vanishing summer.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

COMPENSATION

The photographs showing

her loveliness close out

everything but the imagination,

yet it walks boldly forward

into the pictures.

(Boldly like Holofernes?)

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

THE LONGER MY GAZE RESTS ON IT...

That gauzy kimono,

how my hands long

to feel its fabric

casting it away!

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

ONE STRIKE

Even in dreams one approaches

cautiously scantily-clad ladies with sharp

swords, polished with hunger for crimson

such as the soft lips of those wielding them.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

THE SWORD MISSING

 My imagination forges the sword

missing from the images that otherwise

lacked only what they didn't need, garments

fallen like plum blossoms; handle carefully

- the sharp blade might not cut flesh, but it

will cut dreams and ink...

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

UNSHEATHED

The mind adds a sword as a prop,

but somehow even glittering steel

only emphasizes what is not there,

the lost burden of discarded robes,

cast aside unneeded like a scabbard.

16.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

WE CAN SAVE THE LIVING

We can't save the 137 000 Palestinians we

have allowed Israel to kill since 1948,

but we can save the living, the seven

million under occupation and Apartheid.

Or we could, if our leaders, if our press,

wouldn't stand before us and the killers,

protecting them with their own careers.

We should end those careers.

We should end those careers

and then we should end the genocide,

end the occupation, and end the Apartheid.

We can save the living. On both sides.

15.08.2024

Poem Poems Poetry Verse

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse