ON THE 9TH DAY OF THE YEAR

Instead of turning up

the heat on the radiator

I take out her gifts

and feel the burning heat.

09.01.2026

ON THE 8TH DAY OF THE YEAR

"Never Again!"

they shouted for eighty years,

and they ignored West Papua,

they ignored Burma

and they ignored Palestine

and they ignored Sudan

and still the shout

goes on, "Never Again!"

Never again will

they oppose a genocide.

08.01.2026

THE LAKES ARE FREEZING

The waves arise
no more,

ice closes the depths
from the biting wind,

the lake

still ice

from darkening shore
to darkening shore,

but if you walk
the brittle shell

the deep
will embrace you cold.

04.01.2026

THE LEADERS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

You can't get a spine for the Estonian,

nor a heart for the German,

no magical quest in the land of Oz

or elsewhere could give them

what they lack,

and the Portuguese...

What could you even give one

who stands in the shadow

of those without a heart or a spine?

04.01.2026

ISRAEL'S OCCUPATION FORCES' ATTACK AGAINST BIRZEIT UNIVERSITY ON PALESTINE'S ISRAELI OCCUPIED WEST BANK

Israel attacked the Birzeit University

on Palestine's occupied West Bank

because a movie about child Hind Rajab,

murdered by Israel in Gaza,

was to be shown. 

41 students were injured,

9 shot with live ammunition.

This is what European Union's "good ally"

(according to Estonia's Kaja Kallas),

and "flourishing democracy"
(according to Germany's Ursula von der Leyen)

does, and still the European Union

"stands in solidarity with Israel"
(according to Kallas and von der Leyen).

07.01.2026

TO HIS MUSE

I gaze at your thighs

and imagine my hands,

the heralds

of my manhood,

opening the way

with caresses,

holding them

as we move

in unison.

07.01.2026

LIKE THE MOON ITSELF

The pale full moons

of your breasts,

I imagine holding

them on the cup

of my hand

like the Moon.

07.01.2026

WORDS MIGHT CROSS THE SEPARATING DISTANCE

Some gifts

can't be repaid

except in flesh,

but words

might cross

the separating distance

and give

a light touch

of gratitude

wandering

upon

her skin.

07.01.2026

THE FIRE OF DESIRE

The fire of desire

burns away

the impurities

of sin

that become ash

leaving the flame

bright, pure

and steady.

07.01.2026

TO HIS MUSE

I can't stop

thinking

that gift,

can't thank

you enough

for the gift

that makes

midwinter

a firestorm.

07.01.2026

ON THE 7TH DAY OF THE YEAR

Each day we see

dead faces of children

from Gaza,

and this

is said to be 'a fragile ceasefire',

yet it is so strong

that the daily murder

of children

can't apparently break it.

07.01.2026

DREAMING

He wishes

she could take a ride

with him

this night,

dressed

as she is

in that image

she gifted to him.

07.01.2026

PLEASING HER

If he could but

bring her

here from her image,

turn that vision

into flesh,

he would break

his bed

pleasing her.

06.01.2026

ONE CAN'T COOL DESIRE BY WRITING

The more he writes

the more he burns

with lust,

each word

deepending

his yearning;

in the cold

winter night

she makes

him burn

in an all-engulfing

blaze of lust,

her image

imprinted in his

each thought.

06.01.2026

BEYOND MERE WORDS

There is no end to words

after gazing at her gift,

eyes feed the mind

from the spring of her beauty

and the mind, enthralled,

comes up with these words

abundant but lacking

for nothing could be enough,

no response that includes

only words could be enough,

one would need to go

beyond mere words,

something hard

against her soft thighs.

06.01.2026

HER CHRISTMAS CARD

Two weeks after Christmas had passed

holding the best of gifts,

long travelled,

in the coldest winter time

ablaze with feelings

we might call 'passionate'

decoratively,

and which are indeed passionate:

Lust and desire burning bright

melting away the winter's frost.

06.01.2026

WHAT THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES WROUGHT AT SUDAN'S KALOGI

Five weeks ago the RSF and SPLM-North

bombed a kindergarten at Kalogi

in Sudan's Kordofan,

and then bombed it again

as a rescue was ongoing,

and then hit the local hospital

three times as the wounded

were being brought in.

116 human beings were murdered,

63 of them were children.

63 children.

63 children murdered at a kindergarten.

63 children murdered at a kindergarten

by the United Arab Emirates -backed

Rapid Support Forces and its ally, 

the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement - North.

You would have thought

it would have broken the world,

this mass slaughter of children,

but after the carnage by RSF at El Fasher,

up to 150 000 people murdered

in just days,

and the indifference

towards that mass slaughter of civilians,

one of the great crimes of all time,

we perhaps shouldn't be surprised

that the massacre of the innocents

at Kalogi

has been ignored,

the 63 children five weeks in their graves

when they should have eighty years

to live

just pushed aside,

forgotten.

abandoned

in their graves,

all the long decades of their lives to come

left decaying away.

26.01.2026

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CHRISTMAS CARD

Seeing your image, 

dear muse, 

I want to reach into it

and lift you up

on my arms

from its frame that cages

your beauty

and hold you

on my lap, 

swaying,

melding 

into one desire.

06.01.2026

GAZING AT HIS MUSE

so many places

calling for

my touch

on the map

of her

enticing flesh

06.01.2026

HIS MUSE'S IMAGE

Looking at her

I just want my hands

and my tongue

to run all over her

her body,

exploring, losing

myself

in the landscape

of her body.

06.01.2026

GAZING AT HER STICKER

I don't know where to begin

when gazing at her -

perhaps I should begin

with the carnal truth

that every part

of her demands

my attention

and every part of me

wants to touch

every part of her.

06.01.2026

ON THE 6TH DAY OF THE YEAR

An entire day spent with the decaying world,

the human lives and bodies

broken on a crooked anvil,

hammered into death,

still in my mind,

and then I take the Christmas card

and all that fades

before the pleasure her gift gives,

transfixing me before

not changing images of suffering.

but one unchanging image of beauty

that feeds desire and these words

cast against the darkness, burning.

06.-07.01.2026

ON THE FIFTH DAY OF THE YEAR

United States is currently threatening

Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark,

Iran, Lebanon, Mexico, Panama

and Palestine (at least). 

Will you play

the "Doing the right thing would hurt Ukraine,

so we must side with USA to protect Ukraine"

until eventually its your country being threatened?

05.01.2025

ON THE FOURTH DAY OF THE YEAR

European Union has its pants down 

and its hands up, 

waving a white flag

before the United States

and Israel. 

It's gutless 

and will reap 

what its own current

cowardice sowers.

04.01.2026

A SONG FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION

To be sung in the manner of Tom Waitts

We must sacrifice Palestine to save Ukraine.

we must sacrifice Sudan to save Ukraine,

we must sacrifice Venezuela to save Ukraine,

we must sacrifice Greenland to save Ukraine,

we must sacrifice the world to save Ukraine,

we must send Ukraine into space

to spin as a lonely asteroid,

lonely, lonely brave asteroid,

an airless heaven of liberty

where international law still rules supreme,

because we sacrificed the world to save Ukraine,

we sacrificed the world to save Ukraine,

we put a gun to the head of international law

and said, "You must die so that Ukraine can live!"

We sacrificed the world to save Ukraine.

06.01.2026

VENEZUELA

Those who now support the United States' attack

on Venezuela are largely the same people

who have shouted about Ukraine for four years,

declaring the sanctity of national sovereignty

while supporting Israel's genocide of occupied Palestinians

and ignoring United Arab Emirates

& RSF-Janjaweed genocide of non-Arab Sudanese.

They are not inconsistent -

they are racists.

03.01.2026

THE WORLD PUT A BULLET THROUGH ITS OWN CONSCIENCE

The year grows older

day by day

in growing light,

unlike the infants

dying of hypothermia,

dying of lack of antibiotics,

dying shot by Israeli quadcopters

in occupied Palestine's Gaza

dying because the world

put a bullet through

its own conscience

and threw it

to rot among the rubble.

03.01.2026

#Poem Poem #Poems #Poems #Poetry Poetry #Verse #Verses

ON THE 3RD DAY OF THE YEAR

Snow now, from

a darkening sky

into a dark world

snowflakes in their

multitude, like spirits

of the slain, each

unique, not one

alike in their infinite

forms the hundreds

of thousands human

beings we have allowed

to be murdered

from our midst

in the year being buried,

believing

it won't be us

because we matter,

because we are unique

like snowflakes

in their infinite variety

melting

like human bodies

on fire

after hospital

has been bombed.

03.01.2026

THE ZIONISTS

A child 8 hours dead or 8 days,

murdered, doesn't matter

to these people

because on an another continent

a child was murdered

80 years and 8 months ago

and thus - they declare -

the murderers of the former child

were justified in slaughtering her

because of the death of the latter.

02.01.2026

READING THE VERSES OF DEAD POETS

Living words from dead

moments of dead people,

behind their fossil edifice

we imagine minds

but there is only

their long absence

and our imagination

growing around their ruins,

down the empty halls

they vacated we inhabit

in the act of re-creation,

casting our mirage

of what they offered.

02.01.2026

#Poem Poem #Poems #Poems #Poetry Poetry #Verse #Verses

TO BASIL AL-ARAJ(1984-2017)

Basil al-Araj, there have been

quarter a million martyrs

of bomb, bullet, hunger

and medical aid denied

after they killed you

at your grandmother's house,

but in the end you will live,

you will all live

in your people flourishing

in a free land restored,

and the Zionists, the Zionists

will be a dissolved nightmare,

dust blown away in the wind

in the crimson dawn.

02.01.2026

THE EUROPEAN UNION NOW

Those who have betrayed

everything make lectures

about laws and values

they say they can't uphold

because it would be inconvenient,

upsetting genocidaires.

02.01.2026

REBIRTH

Years spiral

into oblivion,

down time's

black hole

beyond the event horizon

in death's singularity

the information

that we were

erupting

as a white hole.

02.01.2026

DURING THE PALESTINIAN HOLOCAUST

Everything is now antisemitism,

except billionaires

doing Hitler salutes.

They are friends of Israel.

02.01.2026

PEOPLE END UP FORGETTING

When you have lost

people, you have

lost them for good,

even when they forget

what it was, just

like they forget

what was.

02.01.2026

ON THE 2ND DAY OF THE YEAR

People repeat old mistakes

of past generations

and think theirs are

something new and binding

when they could

just shake them off

and move on, without

looking back.

02.01.2026

CURSE ISRAEL

The first day of the year burns cold,

stars ice

like corpses of children

dead of cold in the ruins

in Gaza.

01.01.2026

ON THE 1ST DAY OF THE YEAR

On the first day of the year

Apartheid Israel's

occupation forces

murdered young Khattab Daragmeh

on occupied Palestine's West Bank.

May the last day of the year

see Israel

in its own grave.

01.01.2026

HER IMAGES

The reflection in the Christmas ornament

makes him remember

what the lense saw in the mirror

and gifted to his sight

and what his eyes

imprinted in his mind.

28.-31.12.2025

BRUSH AND INK

He, gazing at her image,

invites her to step outside

those binding frames

to his caresses

of brush and ink.

28.-31.12.2025

TWO POEMS

1

A man is such a bad object

for art, he tries to make himself

the subject, when he should

be flesh for the eye and imagination,

a hollow shell to fill with desire,

but he wrestles against the governing

eye, unruly, his millennia

of domination cracking paint

and marble entombing him,

the beast, the predator to be defanged,

his immortality should be

to be put on display as a skeleton

and as a skinned flesh

over a rusty iron frame -

but dust will do.

2

What was he thinking about

when he painted this work?

We might never penetrate

this mystery of soft flesh

begetted from his brush,

that organ broken free

by art's scythe akin

to the one birthing Cypris,

this whirling of breast

and buttock and limb

and fair face straight

to capturing canvas,

Monarch butterflies

in their multitude.

28.-31.12.2025

A DAY AND A HALF BEFORE THE YEAR ENDS

The year has but a day and a half to go,

and I choose twice translated Yeats

for my artifice, repetition of the done

over the dying words of Synge

in his last year, and might feel melancholy

remembering a mechanical bird on a bough

in a fairy tale fourty years ago,

the image more than the words

whose black footprints on the page's snow

melted in the mind to slurry,

and those the years took like the singing

bird from the bough, but another child

died of cold in Gaza yesterday

as Israeli artillery celebrated ceasefire,

and in Kordofan ten thousand

were driven from their homes,

and I watching a blank landscape

through pane and years know well

that what pain there is in the loss

empty rooms and empty years make

is nothing beside the cities of the dead,

ten thousand dead under the rubble in Gaza

and blood stained grounds so vast

in El Fasher you can see them from space.

And the murderers free shaking hands

while dead the children that should watch

golden birds on trees singing

to emperors of Byzantium and Cathay,

the caliphs of Baghdad.

The true loss and melancholy

is in the child drowned

in a flooded bomb crater,

in the long years spreading

that would be theirs

murdered by this world

that can make a golden-winged robot sing

on the branch of a plastic tree

but not save its children,

not here where I translate the translated

before turning to Sigerson and Synge

and take a walk to see if the mailman

has brought a golden bird for my bough,

while children huddle in the mountains

of West Papua and in the desert

of Tindouf, parched and cold

under the golden and silver disks,

refugees in old myths

far from stolen homes

down on this Earth.

30.12.2025

WATER FROM A CLEAR SPRING

Making coffee

and making poems,

but only one has water

from a clear spring

that give them taste

of Arcady.

30.-31.12.2025

EL FASHER, TWO MONTHS AFTER

The year is almost at the end

and so many of its dead

lie unburied under the rubble

or hidden in hasty mass graves,

for the old tweets of a released

political prisoner from Cairo

are more hurtful to our era

than grass growing in El Fasher

where spying eyes on the sky

see no life but only mass death -

that can be ignored, as the pigment

of the 150 000 victims was 'wrong'.

30.12.2025

THE BRIGHT SUNLIGHT

The bright sunlight

after the storm at night

calls to its cold caresses,

but at first I will make

coffee and drink black

warmth before the light

comes freezing gold

as I step, enthralled,

in the Sun's beams.

28.12.2025

HARMLESS

One crown of a divided birch

came crashing

down in the storm

reaching for the terrace,

fragmenting

its fifty or sixty years

across the dead grass,

in the darkness menacing,

now, in the light,

reduced to the ending

of things, harmless

but for a metre

of extra growth

that the long decades

had denied.

28.12.2025

BUT I REMEMBERED

I awoke to sunlight

on a Sunday morning,

the year had four mornings

to go, and the storm

that blew throught the night

had scattered fallen

crests of trees and branches,

but I remembered the boy

that drowned in a muddy

hole filled with floodwater

in Gaza yesterday,

they sought him six hours

in darkness beside a ruin,

and lay him on a tarpaulin

his little eyes closed

his head resting on one cheek

against the cold of death,

and nothing that had happened

here mattered, his stolen

seven or eight decades did

and I, in this freezing light,

gathering fallen branches

think of those the 'West' betrayed

in the name of the memorials

for the long dead behind which

the Apartheid regime hides.

28.12.2025

TWO POEMS

What do we deserve

from life?

Everything we have done

to others.

15.02.2014

These gray days

of dead winter

climate changed

bleak windows

to watch reflections

15.02.2014

ONLY A VISION FROM HER CAN GIVE

In his lust-born vision

(may she be blessed

for granting it)

she kneels on the bed

inviting,

               waiting,

his cock, which

she will get

in a long, gentle

and passionate

merging 

of flesh

in which he

shows endurance

only a vision

from her

can give.

31.10.-09.11.-27.11-2025

IN RETURN

If distance denies

slipping between her petals

and showing her his gratitude

then at least he can work hard

as she has made her shaft

and write her verse

that might spark desire

and entice her to play

with herself, and thus could

he give her back a small measure

of what a great muse

would deserve.

30.11.-27.12.2025

BUT THE DAWN WILL BRING UP THE THE TATTERED SHROUD

The land is cast under a white shroud

and the night comes weary with its showel

to rebury the oft entombed autumn

and throws gravel on the shroud

through its long, starless hours.

27.12.2025

IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER

The dying year turning cold,

blood still runs hot

and the hand seeks for eyes

her gifts

that give the flesh

its strength

and the mind

what keeps its warm

as the land in black night

is entombed

with a white shroud.

27.12.2025

HOMECOMING

In the valleys,

thick mist

in the winter

dark,

but on the hills

stars above

burning cold,

as bright

as the winter

had seen.

27.12.2025

LATE DECEMBER DAY, FROM MID-DAY TO EVENING

First light,

abundant,

as the day

reached

its brief

zenith,

and then,

sunlight

hidden

by clouds

sending

abundant

snowflakes

drifting

down

to the darkening

earth, landscape

golden-hued

becoming

white and black,

and the descending

white

succumbing

to the ascending black.

27.12.2025

AS I TRANSLATED A POEM ABOUT LEONARDO DA VINCI'S DRAWING BY MICHAEL FIELD

The morning's vivid light,

brilliance cast 

                        over the withered

land, faded

                    to bleak white

like a slaughterer's armband

as the quick hours 

                               passed,

and where was I

when the sunbeams 

                                  playing

made alive 

the dead season?

Inside, in a cage of walls,

away from the light

flooding the fields,

greening black woods,

in a dim room 

                         translating

dead words of lost,

sinful lovers, 

                      trying

to give the poem

what the sunbeams

gave 

        to the desolate land

four months from first flower,

and now, 

                as the poem

is done,

              as the briefly

awakened land

                         is bleak 

and without the shimmering 

                            gold,

I would cast aside

                              all the words

that twitch like a dead

frog in Volta's current.

23.12.2025