When you live on your knees
you think everyone does the same
and every little tyrant
looks an invincible giant.
30.04.2025
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keskiviikko 30. huhtikuuta 2025
CHILDREN ARE STARVING AND BEING BOMBED AND EUROPEAN UNION DOESN'T CARE
"We must give Israel one hundred percent carrots."
- Sven Koopmans, European Union's Middle East envoy in September 2023.
Children are starving to death
as hundreds of thousands of tons
of food are blocked from entering
into Gaza by occupier Israel,
Israel which is giving children
bombs and missiles and artillery shells
instead of food, medicine and water,
and the European Union praises Israel
as its "good ally" and declares
"Europe stands in solidarity with Israel",
while telling us that everything that
is good and just, our basic values
are at stake - in Ukraine.
Not in occupied Palestine.
Just in Ukraine. Only in Ukraine.
Nowhere but in Ukraine.
Not in Palestine. Not in Sudan.
Only in Ukraine.
Slava Ukraini! Slava Ukraini! Slava Ukraini!
Slava Ukraini! Slava Ukraini! Slava Ukraini!
the European Union chants, endlessly,
as blocked food goes bad, medicines run out,
bombs and missiles and artillery shells
fall and kill dozens of children each day -
but that happens in occupied Palestine,
in the Gaza Strip, so that doesn't matter,
not to the European Union.
We need to give carrots to Netanyahu,
Ben Gvir, Smotrich and the rest -
and not a single carrot to the children of Gaza,
not a single carton of milk, not a single
sack of wheat, not a bottle of water,
so the European Union tells before the world.
30.04.2025
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"NEVER AGAIN!" - EXCEPT NOW
Our politicians believe
they can support a genocide
taking place now
if they oppose a genocide
that ended
before they were born.
30.04.2025
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A LIFE IN BALANCE
From the open window
comes the distant sound
of an ambulance siren
on the highway,
so quickly it rises,
fades and vanishes,
that the ambulance driver
must believe there
is a chance.
30.04.2025
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RENEWED INTO SPRING
Yesterday's gloom I had walked
replaced by sunshine, pale blue
sky and clear, white clouds
and yet here I am, writing
inside, like these words
and sentences and poems
would matter more
than the landscape renewed
into spring,
but at least now
the window is open,
the breeze and songs of birds
come touching the senses
even when the shadows grow
with these words
cast into time.
30.04.2025
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ON A HARD WINTER THE RHINE WILL FREEZE
Our age here in the First World,
the Roman Empire somewhere near
the time of Julian the Apostate,
last attempt to restore the old gods
of patriarchy and capitalism
not yet pierced by a Persian spear,
can't stand silence. There is
something threatening to it,
so we have our slaves read
to us, play to us constantly
from our screens something,
anything, banal things,
so that we wouldn't
face the silence, our own thoughts
that surface when the external
world doesn't entice mundane reactions,
the doubts they carry, the knowledge
that the emperor's Persian expedition
will fail, like all the previous ones,
that the old gods are dead
and can't be revived,
that the Huns are moving to the west,
in the lush lands of the Dnieper
defeated Ermanarik will fall to his sword,
and soon the Goths will be on the border,
and Valens will ride
to the field of Adrianople,
and on a hard winter the Rhine will freeze
for the barbarians to cross over.
30.04.2025
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THE CURRENT GROWING STRONGER
Suddenly it's again
evening, shadows
growing, when
just a moment ago
the Sun was climbing
towards its zenith
amidst the scattered clouds
in the pale blue sky,
time flowing
faster towards the rapids,
one easily thinks
the sound of the wind
raising, falling
is the roar of the water
falling into eternity.
30.04.2025
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sunnuntai 27. huhtikuuta 2025
SOCIAL MEDIA TWO SIDING GENOCIDE AND APARTHEID
Now that Tik-Tok
is bending the knee to Trump,
the app told me
I would like a post
from some random hasbara troll,
Roger something
or other,
a post
that had been shared once,
just once,
that they are boycotting Maldives
for boycotting Israel,
"unforeseen consequences"
the troll declares,
in that hasbara troll manner
Louis XI, Louis XIV
and Napoleon would have
found egoistic.
Shared once
and their algorithms
are promoting it,
it seems that
between anti-Genocide posts
from accounts I follow
they are putting now hasbara
like they would have
a quota to fill,
that for each
X number of videos
against Genocide and Apartheid
you need to be shown
Y number of
pro-Genocide and pro-Apartheid videos.
27.04.2025
THE DAILY MESSAGE BY ISRAEL
Israel has been bombing
occupied Palestine's Gaza all day
and now it bombs Beirut,
hitting civilian area in the Lebanese capital,
showing again how ceasefires
with Israel matter nothing.
There will be no peace
in the Middle East
with Israel, is the daily
message by Israel.
27.04.2025
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IN THE MANNER OF BASHŌ XI
The sap of a saucer magnolia
draws the Yellow-bellied sapsucker
and insects; a fatal encounter.
27.04.2025
IN THE MANNER OF BASHŌ X
No end to its blooming -
another spring in flower
for the saucer magnolia.
27.04.2025
IN THE MANNER OF BASHŌ VI
On the trunk
of a saucer magnolia
a Yellow-bellied sapsucker
lapping sap and insects.
27.04.2025
IN THE MANNER OF BASHŌ V
Spring has arrived -
the saucer magnolia's
branches clothed in pink.
27.04.2025
IN THE MANNER OF BASHŌ II
Another spring
and the saucer magnolia
shelters the garden
again with pink flowers.
27.04.2025
AFTER TRANSLATING TWO POEMS BY WILLIAM BLAKE TODAY
Two William Blake's poems
translated, and now another
pot of coffee going
trying to find
in vain Henry Cowell's "Daybreak"
composed from his "Morning";
alas, not to be - so
I listen to "Seven Rituals of Music"
and keep drinking coffee
as the gray windy day
goes past in swaying branches.
27.04.2025
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PAYMENT FOR BEING HERE
Wind, risen, bends the branches
outside the window
in silence, and instead
of feeling the chill wind
on my face I'm here
before the computer
writing yet another poem,
another sacrifice made
to existence, a payment
for being
here, on this moment,
watching those branches bend
silent in the risen wind.
27.04.2025
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WILLIAM BLAKE'S POEM MORNING
In William Blake's innocent poem
he comes across guiding sweet Mercy
moaning softly
and immediately he thinks
of making her moan,
his muse,
his thoughts
not so innocent.
27.04.2025
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THE UNIVERSE WOULD BE THE SAME
The urge to write -
why?
To be,
to exist,
briefly,
outside the confines
of one's own self,
this doomed flesh,
beyond others' memories
and thoughts
in which they weave
a figure not quite
like us,
better
or worse,
to be
in a fragmentary
form in these poems,
a presence
touching
the reader's mind -
what is the point?
To create for the sake
of creating, to share
because a human
being
is a social animal
inclined to sharing,
into seeking connection,
even beyond their own
existence?
From the pictures drawn
on the walls of caves
to this poem.
Because of the illusion
that there is eternity
and immortality
in these words
and sentences
soon wiped clear,
like their ephemeral writer?
All of that,
all of that,
no matter that the self
knows
one might as well
be silent
and the universe
would be the same.
But briefly,
briefly
it was different to us
and for someone else.
27.04.2025
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CHOOSE BETWEEN SURVIVAL AND THE END
You know, we need Lenin.
A Lenin. Not this talk about
organizing for peaceful protests,
the miracle of just showing up,
petitioning politicians -
ask the Chartists' shades,
that only brings defeat.
When the First and Fourth Estate
are one and the same, when
the masses are fed hate, ignorance
and poverty, when the world
is slipping into the abyss,
people who are pure and gentle
won't save it from the those
who are cruelty made manifest.
As much as pacifists inspire,
as much as they should be
the bright guiding star on our skies,
the imperfection of our species,
so far from Eden and Utopia,
so immature in our wonders,
dictates that it's still blood
that remakes the world
good or ill and we must
merely choose between
survival and the end.
27.04.2025
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A GRAY DAY NOW
A gray day now, sunshine when I awoke,
went to the kitchen, gazed at the land
awash in light, thought about going
outside, wandering somewhere,
yearning light like a plant in shade,
but made coffee, took a book, read
and read another one, opened
the computer, got stuck writing
and translating, and sunshine
went, dim gloom came, I made
another pot of coffee, wrote
and wrote, and the land lies
gray and waiting, as I get up
to make coffee to push through
some William Blake instead
of pushing through sunlit paths
under tall firs and pines unchanged
since I first walked underneath
in the lost days they evoke
and in the mind restore.
27.04.2025
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EVERY OMEN FAILS
I suppose it was a nightmare
from which I awoke to reading
Hamlet, or perhaps it was
an omen as the old folk would
say, those who read the future
from coffee grounds and cards.
It told of death or death delayed,
and death except imminent
is delayed and certain always,
and like prophecies built
from omens, black cats crossing
street and crossed twigs, broken
mirrors, everything will come true,
eventually, if not in this branch
of the multiverse, then in some
other one, and I dead after writing
this sentence, or living a hundred
and four like one ancestor dying
in midst of the famine in 1697.
If every omen strikes true,
then every omen also fails.
27.04.2025
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WE NEED ACTUAL EXTREME LEFT AND IT TO BE... EXTREME
Social Democracy won't save the world,
it's just not about losing guts, drifting
to the right and privatization when they no
longer have the Communists to their Left
as the boogeymen to oppose and fight,
the reason why the Centrists deigned
to ally for a world moderately better,
when now to the Centrists and their press,
when now to the Right and their press
a mild Social Democrat is equal
to Fascists and declared to be
"Extreme Left" - while the Centrists
and their press take the same Fascists
as their role models and no one
observes the paradox of them blaming
mild Left to be as bad as Fascists
and then cavorting with the Fascists,
blushed, telling how much they have
learned from a tumble in the political
hay on the arms of Fascists.
27.04.2025
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THEY THINK THEMSELVES GODS
To Stop the Oil - they tried.
The rich people and media they control
sabotage efforts to fight global warming
as it intensifies; even the current meagre
efforts are being abandoned by politicians
because the rich and the media they control
don't want humanity and our environment
to be saved, they prefer deluge and mass
extinction in the lifetime of people alive
to rich who have invested in fossil
fuels having to become even wealthier
at a little slower pace. These are cruel,
stupid people - they imagine a future
for themselves, unchanged from now,
in a world of ruins, billions dying,
emigrating to seek refuge, and they
on their yachts and mansions, safe
and majestic, gods disinterestedly
observing the end of the world.
27.04.2025
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WHEN THE UNITED NATIONS' SECRETARY CARES MORE ABOUT PROMOTING ISRAELI OCCUPATION DEMANDS THAN PROTECTING HIS STAFF FROM ISRAEL
Israel has killed 300 hundred United Nations' workers
in the last 19 months in occupied Palestine's Gaza,
and yet the United Nations Secretary-General
still repeats, like a priest in a religious service
going through the ordained liturgy, again and again,
the holy words "Israeli hostages!" and the demand
to release them unconditionally, without a word
spoken of Palestinian captives, of whom at least
one dies each week in the bowels of Israel's
archipelago of prisons and prison camps.
27.04.2025
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perjantai 25. huhtikuuta 2025
A BEGINNING PLACE
When I write poems
with a pen, pencil
or when I wrote them
with a typing machine,
I always align
the text on the left
side of a page
like this
because that was
how it was done
in the poetry books
I read and because
it just felt and looked
'right'; but on the computer
it started to feel less 'right',
so much empty space
on the centre where
I felt 'something' should be,
and then reading Michael
McClure I encountered
his poems centred
on the page, looking
so odd at first, feeling
very much 'wrong'
to my gaze and mind,
but trying to centre
my poems on the computer
screen it felt 'right'
from the beginning.
But if it doesn't feel right
for you, dear reader,
just copy the text
and align it with the left
side of a page, it's
written to work both
ways, or do what
you want with it -
after all, a poem
as written by its
writer is intended
to be just a starting
point for the reader,
who can do to it
whatever they want,
making it their own,
just a start, a beginning
place, for their
own creation.
25.04.2025
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IT'S NOT ENOUGH
Coming home yesterday
early in the evening
from taking the trash,
picking up the mail,
making a short walk
enjoying the sunshine,
the land becoming green,
the spring being here,
and being inside
cool, shady rooms
again, I got a headache,
a piercing headache,
I who now almost
never get one
now, they are a thing
of old memories
except once or twice
a year or so,
and all the shouting
of the world's ills,
the lives torn apart,
all the reading
of the light what
science casts
amid the gloom,
all the reading
and translating
and writing
of poems -
done, nothing
of that, just
an aspirin
and then laying
down in the bed,
sleeping, sixteen
hours gone
awakening
to sunshine
on a cold day,
the headache
gone with
the hours,
making and
drinking the first
mug of coffee,
translating the first
poem, from Edward
Thomas as the midday
light fills the room,
beautiful and cold,
and I have yet to
read about the lives
stolen when I slept,
the people who lived
in fear when I escaped
my little pain in sleep,
and who died mangled,
burning, when I slept,
because we allow it
from day to day,
from week to week,
from month to month,
from year to year,
from decade to decade.
We allow, we translate
poems, we read
and we write poems,
and we share and
we shout and it's
not enough.
25.04.2025
torstai 24. huhtikuuta 2025
THE BOUNDARIES OF SPRING AND FALL
The fields are greening
on the ridge and the valley,
but here the fields are brown
and withered, here the autumn
spreads in light and shade
under the same azure heaven
vaulting the greening fields,
and the ditches, running
silent muddy water, mark
the boundaries of spring
and fall that was and is
and will be.
24.04.2025
WHIMSY
Perhaps the gods of humanity
live around stranger stars, far
far away, and bound by speed
of light always see and leave
and voyage through the depths
of space far, far too late to solve
problems time buried on Earth
with the victims deep, deep
in the receding past?
24.04.2025
A GOLDEN MIDDAY ON A LATE APRIL DAY
At midday, brilliant
sunlight, chirping birds
singing spring
& the cool air
can chill, as other
senses make
one drunk from
the light, the sounds -
waves crashing
together, landscape
golden light
and clear sounds
& one deep
in it, submerged,
rejoicing.
24.04.2025
JUST SEEING THE SMILE
Just seeing the mischievous
smile of his muse
makes him hard,
gets his mind feverishly
dreaming of the things
he would do
with the minx
if she would be there
wearing that smile
and soon
nothing more.
24.04.2025
keskiviikko 23. huhtikuuta 2025
BECAUSE ZIONISM IS RACISM
Zionism is to believe
that Palestinian children
who throw stones
at armed occupation soldiers
should be killed
and that armed occupiers
should be completely safe
whenever they go,
no matter what they do,
in occupied Palestine,
because Zionism
is racism.
23.04.2025
tiistai 22. huhtikuuta 2025
FALLING TO THE MOMENTARY BLISS
The mind grows wild
with desire, and the flesh
responding feeds the mind,
and the mind feeds the flesh,
and together they go off
over the cliff, tumbling
down, down, down -
happy as they go.
The human mind
that could calculate
the parallax, tell there
are 274 moons around Saturn,
say when the last Long Count
date was inscribed, when
the last, mad Carolingian
was deposed for the brother
of the king of France, and
knows Li Bai didn'd drown
embracing the reflection
of the Moon, that mind
is all lust for the moment,
all that knowledge cowering
in the dusty corners of the brain
knowing there are greater things,
moments when the knowledge
matters not, and mind and flesh
go over the cliff and tumble down,
down, down - happy as they go.
22.04.2025
REGLECTED IN WATER
The rainpool has dried up
and its lost waters took
with them the dark reflection
up into the clouds; somewhere
it will rain down and form
a pool, on its surface the same
image of us gazing down,
trying to recognize ourselves.
22.04.2025
THE RARE THING IT IS
The latest gift has in it
all the gifts that came
before, it's the treasure
box holding them all
for the grateful mind
that knows its bliss
as the rare thing it is.
22.04.2025
AND ALL THE MYTHS OF GLORY
Beside the traditional subjects
of love, sex, death and gods
and how beautiful is the full
or crescent Moon we must
place the wars, atrocities,
as they are, as subjects fit
for poetry when truthfully
carved like a sword cuts
flesh from a limb, a bloody
mess of flesh and pain,
Hector butchered by Achilles
and dragged around the walls
of doomed Troy, and salty
smell of maiden blood drained
as a libation on the mound under
which rotting lies Achilles
and all the myths of glory.
22.04.2025
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