Let's embrace class hate,

let's fight a class war

One rich man

with a broken neck

and a stilled heart

is worth

ten living ones.

19.08.2016

The death of the famous, the wealthy,

the powerful, the moths basking in the flame

of celebrity -

all these are to be rejoiced,

taken with gratitude and cherished

as sources of endless joy.

19.08.2016

DIE JUNGE FRANZ

Hugo von Hofmannsthal(1874-1929)

Fate reserved him

an end worthy of his pen:

A child of his loins

quieting their own heart

brought him

the silence of the Earth

resting heavily

upon his unmoving bosom.

(Praise to be to the privileged

who not only end their own privilege,

without a hope of resurrection,

but their fathers' as well.)

19.08.2016-17.03.2022

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

Abu Nuwas(c. 760 - before 816)

Wine and beautiful faces,

long nights spent entertaining those

from whose hands coins dropped

on a poet's palm,

witty lines to lighten up

the crowd in a tavern and a palace,

witty lines to remember

when the poet's path

diverted to jail.

In the end, shadows closing in

hid the the fate

like arrows hid al-Amin

under the waves.

18.08.2016

Patrick White(1912-1990)

A flourishing deciduous tree, splendid

in the sunshine of the late afternoon

and just before sunset,

at the evening when all is calm.

A tree whose bright foliage

protected you from the rain

on an early autumn day

when you rested your weary back

against its bark.

A tree under a blue sky

which carried no seed,

never had a sapling growing

beside it. A tree

which was the beginning and the end.

When the leaves fell the last time

no spring ever brought them back.

17.08.2016

It matters not

The dead we carry with us,

their lives flickering in our memories and thoughts;

those that could come waver on the precipice of existence

- phantoms pleading us

to give them life and blood to flow inside veins

through our days.

The past and the future connect in us,

the past before us and after us,

the future before us and after us,

and whether we are dead, living or yet unborn

matters not, for

for time all points are the same.

10.08.2016

Stuck above an abyss

narrow enough so

that you might leap over it,

if you have no courage to jump

you can always fall.

In the end, in the great scheme

of life

it makes no difference.

10.08.2016

Something in the human nature

All those pillar saints shitting

and pissing from their high pedestals

down to the crowds waiting for the miracles

and nobody thought them any less holy

07.08.2016

Sun wrapped in the branches of an alder,

tenderly;

the sky a blue sea flapping the cloudy bays,

and I hanging from the green grass

above the abyss,

as the world spirals around.

07.08.2016

Stealing bikes from little girls

who dare to cross the chain to the Jewish side of the Jim Crow line,

shooting young boys going through a hole in an Apartheid fence

to pick herbs from his family's land for his mother,

killing young siblings feeding their pet pigeon on the roof of their home -

this is the Israel that "is a beacon of freedom shining its light in the entire world",

"the only democracy in the Middle East", Israel

"which shares our Western values".

I have had shit at the bottom of my boots

that have had more value than Israel.

07.08.2016

While listening to Giovanni Bononcini's(1670-1747) 'Il trionfo di Camilla'(1696),
with a libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym(1678-1729),
half past four post meridiem on August 1st 2016

Some rain, some coffee with cheese and salad,

droplets running down the window pane,

old coffee with a bitter taste,

the bitter taste of a darkening afternoon,

all those far-sailing clouds

giving birth to these misguided tears.

01.08.2016

WEARING OUR FACES

Some unoriginal thoughts about humans' mortality, after Wisława Szymborska.

The past is a graveyard,

and tomorrow's grave-diggers

are born today,

wearing the faces of the long dead,

the atoms in their bodies

recycled from rebirth to rebirth.

01.08.2016-17.03.2022

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

The Christians have one way

from the baptismal font,

out through the church doors

and on to the path through

the graveyard to their open grave.

Pity them.

The same church bells ring

for their birth, their death.

Pity them.

01.08.2016

The End

The Doors are praising murder,

but then what is more 'American' than murder?

Murder is the essence of 'America'.

If you take it away, all else crumbles

without its foundation of blood, bones

and the hunger to kill.

They are nothing without rivers of blood.

Behind the facades, it's all they know.

All they want.

06.07.2016

GOD IS DEAD

To Yves Bonnefoy(1923-2016)

God is dead.

Dead like an unborn being only can be.

A clean death.

No giant carcass rotting in open.

No maggots or bone worms feeding.

Just this huge gorge

through the Occidental civilization

marking where it fell,

shattering as it shattered.

The dust in our eyes

is divine ash.

04.07.2016-17.03.2022

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

Geoffrey Hill(1932-2016) in the The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon 2009

The dead man reads his poem on the screen,

alive on the year my mother died;

now dead, waiting for a burial,

the dead man reads his poem

in the past, in the now.

It's tortured speech, the lines,

the sentences becoming separated,

the connection between them lost;

each set free, each abandoned,

each pushed out there in the world,

in that moment, in this moment.

Each flickering, dying down.

Words escaping lips

to what could be eternity,

words escaping a living corpse

to life, immortality, postponement of

annihilation surely. Desperate words

thrown out at the world,

like grappling hooks

to save what can be saved,

pulling out parts of the living, dead man

to that moment around him,

to this recording, to my screen,

to my ears and mind

escaping from death, the words,

the final moment to come that came...

Escaping, shards of a man

waiting for his funeral.

04.07.2016

On the death of Geoffrey Hill(1932-2016)

He died suddenly, without pain or dread,

his wife said.

Without dread because he expected to live,

we can assume, but

without pain? Only he knew.

All is written. All is over.

Now only the words, the books remain.

The body lays in cold freezer.

The man and mind are no more.

The words liberated

from their creator.

02.07.2016

The future of Alexandria

The sea is waiting you, oh Alexandria...

As your ruined palaces and temples

set up by pharaohs and kings

lie in its murky waters,

so shall your streets and houses of today,

your monuments of old on land

see the rising sea embrace them.

Your past, today and future shall be united

in the sea, as the glaciers melt

and the Mediterranean rises,

its waves the last army

which shall ever conquer Alexandria.

27.06.2016

White phosphorus burning in the night sky

above Syrian homes

illuminated by its fires.

In human flesh a tiny piece of phosphorus

can keep burning a day;

Lancet study recorded that from Gaza.

It burns holes in human flesh,

in that darkness

it illuminates,

in that darkness

it creates

with that flesh on fire.

27.06.2016

THE NIGHT LAND

Against a light orange background

the birches sway

in the midsummer night.

I have been awaken

by a mosquito

seeking a little blood.

The green leaves, emerging

to their own colour

from black,

on those dark branches

still camouflaged.

The night is a land

whose border is still

far away.

Like the buzzing mosquito,

it escapes me, that border,

through the hours.

27.06.2016

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

Alan Hollinghurst II

A fine piece of English chalk

pretending to be marble.

17.06.2016

Tiresias to Creon

To David Hockney

It is wrong, for us - the old -

to continue

when the young die

and are lowered to the soil

to nurture it

when we, with a limp

go to face new days

etching them in our

shrinking brains

when the Earth,

their second womb

makes them a womb

for its small beings.

Cease, old man -

the tombs are ready...

17.06.2016

Alan Hollinghurst

What is the point of Alan Hollinghurst?

To produce a parody of a gay writer's oeuvre

 before they became queer;

producing pastiches of the novels of those

English gentlemen of Oxbridge

too old by then or too dead to bugger him when he was young.

That is the point of Alan Hollinghurst -

a parody on two legs, producing bourgeois fiction

so nauseatingly ready for BBC to produce that

Andreï Makine could be his French pseudonym.

A fine English piece of chalk pretending to be marble.

11.06.2016

breaking the sound barrier

the jet fighter hides behind the cotton clouds

a modern chariot from the sun god's entourage

joining huitzilopochtli hiding its light

in the white mountains floating

but tlaloc that devourer of children

sends us abundant rain

so plentiful are our sacrifices

so freely flows humanity's blood today

07.06.2016

The past, that foreign land,

is under occupation by today

and has been conquered anew

by each following era,

each proudly putting its flag

above the ruins, each

sending its magistrates to

unite that occupatied land

to its occupiers', to give it

a veneer of the culture of the

occupier, to claim it as its

source spring - only to

give way to a new wave

of proud conquerors

which shall stalk its own

ruins also, for

a passing moment in time.

05.06.2016

Constantine P. Cavafy(1863-1933) II

Blinded by your poetry,

they can't see you for what you were:

A sexual predator

preying on the young, poor

and addicted.

A man who had to pay for sex.

Some even admire you,

envy you even.

For preying on the weak.

31.05.2016

Constantine P. Cavafy(1863-1933)

Those poems of Cavafy which are presented

as personal recollections

and implied to be the author's,

read less real to us

than those placed far in the past;

in those he reaches some

universal essence of what it means to be a human -

in these, we have a man quickly growing old

half-remembering, half-dreaming

encounters and feelings more pure

and bodies more perfect than the impurities

and scars of any real life allows.

The memory of love, lust

and lost embrace distilled by time

to poetry, but poetry

which discards much of that universal essence

to gain a quick remembrance of those moments,

real or imagined, above all.

31.05.2016

Jane Austen(1775-1817)

That terrible beast Jane

and her family of priests who performed no duties

and evangelists of the empire in naval uniforms,

cricketeers and spinsters galore,

their faces venom in old drawings, paintings and photographs,

those drones who knew their place

and the place of everyone 'below' them

and the place of everyone 'above' them.

They would have made marvelous servants

instead of petty masters,

and Jane a perfect maid

and then,

instead of just being an old maid

writing novel after novel about charming suitors,

some lord of manor

could have begetted an illegitimate child or twelve for her

like the lords of manors did back then.

Oh well, the upper middle-class gentry

hanging by its finger-tips from the entrance to the upper-class

had its chronicler in her,

that awful miss Jane.

30.05.2016

Dan Fante(1944-2015)

Wreckage of a life

like yours

offers excellent building blocks

for a literary career -

if you don't mind

putting your own family among

the episodes of your

own drunken escapades,

starting from your pre-teen niece

raped by her own father,

your brother Nick

- the one who

you commemorated with a tattoo

(Killed by alcohol)

in your arm,

the one on whose grave

reads, among others,

'beloved father'.

You didn't mind.

I wonder
how she feels,
reading that poem
of yours?

30.05.2016

THE PAST IS MORE ALIVE

To my mother on her 65th birthday

Drinking the bitter hemlock of life,

tired, under the cloudy skies

pregnant with cold rain,

I imagine you are still a phone call away,

out there, breathing the same air as I,

walking on the same earth as I,

alive, at this ever-fleeting moment of now,

and that I just can't reach you -

like I can't reach you through

these years that you have been lost to us.

29.05.2016

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

uefa champions league final

past midnight
after extra time
tea water boiling on the stove

juanfran shoots the ball against a goal post

real madrid wins the shoot-out

time

to drink some hot tea

take deep breaths

a long walk among the shadows

of the summer night

repeating

it's just football

people are dying of hunger

of lack of clean water

each and every moment

it's just football

juanfran

29.05.2016

I remember seeing the clear depths of the Cretan Sea

below me, the steel cable from the buoy going down, down

into the blue;

a feeling of vertigo overtook me -

and a need to follow that cable to where it would end

on the seafloor. Fighting

that desire I raised my head, looking back

to the shore and saw it distant, the crowd

of people a barely seen union of flesh,

and shocked, I not the terribly good swimmer,

was left there for a long time beside the bouy

kicking water to stay afloat, torn

between two needs, the shore

and the inviting, blue abyss underneath my feet.

22.05.2016

ACRE 2016

A flag of Palestine drapes the old tower

facing the sea's waves at Acre again,

on this day to remember the Nakba,

when the Zionists thought that with blood

and destruction they would create a wave

to carry the natives to faraway slums

and camps to face oblivion in silence,

only to see that the waves of people

like the waves of the sea come back,

withdraw and leave on the beach what

they once carried away.

16.05.2016

Our Frozen Capitalism of 1943

Capitalism removed from the shackles of democracy

and from the 'threat' of socialism

always veers towards Auschwitz:

"Arbeit macht frei"

with the freedom being that of the death.

Smelling the ash in the air

someone tries, failing, to play Wagner on the piano

by the open window

as the rest of the party talk of the news from Berlin:

Advances on all fronts and the trains run on schedule.

06.05.2015

The Arctic Sea

I have given up, beside

this gray shore of falling rocks

where the giant waves of faded blue

hit with the anger of the abyss;

I have given up under this steel sky

and having given up I

have no strength to go either

to the clouded paths of my coming

or to the hard, wet rocks below.

I have given up, yet I stay

as the darkness gathers

and brings forth the moonless night.

03.05.2016

Of the Nature of Time

The past is like this day is -

eternal, unchanging,

each moment of it

the ever-lasting 'now'.

Nothing is lost,

nothing will be lost,

all is,

the past, the future, together.

03.05.2016

Apology

I mix up the killed, I with my almost photographic memory

lost now in the labyrinth of the dead

whose faces are carried forth by the martyrs of tomorrow.

The same hand killed them, those men with similar faces,

but their deaths demand remembrance.

The youthful face smiling through the years,

martyr Bassem Abu Rahma of Bi'lin, brother to martyr Jawaher,
leading the weekly protest.

16.04.2016

Climate change spring

Climate change spring:

Snows gone the barren autumn landscape

without a straw of new grass or a bud of a leaf

on the branches swaying in the cold wind.

A month, a month and a half

stuck between winter and spring

in this second, man-made autumn,

with all the colours of a muddy battlefield.

12.04.2016

Today is a dream

of the past

from which

it can never wake.

01.04.2016

Death of the Author

The great and -- despite his Nobel Prize -- underappreciated (in the US/UK, certainly) Kertész Imre has passed away. He'd been seriously ill for quite a while, so this isn't unexpected, but it's still a major loss. 

M.A.Orthofer

When an author is incapable of writing

more - whatever the reason -

his or her physical death is no major loss.

They are just flesh and flesh doesn't last.

He or she have done their part,

the works will live or perish

independent of whether

the author breaths or not.

I repeat:

We must not bother with the author

after the figurative pen has been put aside

for the final time.

No quick glances whether the chest

still rises and falls,

no mirror before the mouth

to check for the weakest sign of life.

Let them go in silence,

let them pass in obscurity

and when we see or hear the news

let us just nod and move on.

No need to know about final words,

the exact manner of perishing.

The executors will give us in time

what truly matters: Words unread.

01.04.2016

The Dew of Morning

On the grass the bare feet of the young

taste the dew of morning,

under the grass, in the fertile soil,

rest the bones and ash of the old

relieved from flesh.

In the dreams of the young

shadows appear among the sunshine -

the lives lived to give them life.

In the soil rest, one with the land,

those whose dreams the young were.

The young grow old and go away,

and they will rest where they forebears rest,

and life will send forth its new generations

like spring its new green grass

and again the bare feet of the young

will taste the dew of morning.

14.03.2016

What 'the end of Communism' has shown us

is that the true Communists were and are right

and the Social Democrats were and are wrong:

There can be no middle way between

socialism and capitalism,

no middle way between decent society

and the all-devouring greed.

There is no path to decent society

through bourgeois democracy of capitalism,

there is only a cul-de-sac from which

we must make our way back to the barricades.

What was build through suffering must through suffering fall:

Capitalism brought down by blood and stones and bullets and bombs.

Bourgeois society torn apart by a Red Flood that leaves devastation behind,

ruins to be swept aside to build all anew.

11.03.2016

From your brow

the sweat and suffering of a life-time

all the unfulfilled hopes

the crushed dreams

the wishes that would now never be

the disappointments caused by loved ones

the pain the fear you felt

swept away by the cold hand of death

swept away

because I didn't turn it away

11.03.2016

To Fadwa Abu Tir(1964/1965-2016)

I lived 51 years on my land,

under occupation them all.

Then I once raised my hand

in anger to struck the invader,

after 51 years of waiting

for them to go.

They shot me then

and I died there,

my blood bleeding on the

ancient stones of Jerusalem.

They have seen much blood,

they will see more

until my land is free.

08.03.2016

When the first spring after my passing comes,

the grass will still sprout sprightly green,

the flowers will grow to open their petals,

the birds will make their nests and sing,

the Sun will softly warm them all,

the spring breeze will bring them cool.

That is enough for me.

08.03.2016

The Tempest - Call for a Revolutionary Theatre

In a better play

Caliban would have them devoured

and reigned master of his island land

with Prospero's skull as his cup,

just like the merchant Shylock

should have gotten his pound of

Christian flesh,

and then another one.

Those made into monsters

by others' monstrosity

should be our heralds

shouting for a better world

from the stage before

and after the curtain falls.

01.03.2016