With Words - by Ian Grinblat
Degas: “ Yours is a hellish craft. I can’t say
that I want, yet I’m full of ideas…”
Mallarme: “One doesn’t make poetry with
ideas, but with words.”
With words neither flesh nor roses
Meaning is turned into stone;
A questing that itself is questing,
Delivers me bound and alone.
Hence the goal of my poems:
An effort to fly and be free
Speaking an inner-bound language,
Whose meaning blood edits to honey.
Buried, butterfly-cocooned,
I await the emergence of light:
A vocabulary clean as the sun
Unfolds the day in illative night.
The world is a flutter with nectar,
Drops of dew contract to a lake;
All words are as crystal and amber,
And the writer the reader’s namesake.
A language of flesh and roses
A meaning transformed into verse,
A waywardness settled to writing
Offers me to the universe.
You Have to Write - by David Blumfield
You have to write a poem today
I wont I wont I wont
Oh yes you will I wont you will
And don’t go back to bed
But I aint got no poetry
Abuzzing round my head
O yes you have I've not you have
And mark what I just said
First I'll have my shower
Okay Okay Okay
And then I'll have some coffee
To start me off my day
And then we'll do some research
On the last minstrel and his lay
And then maybe some poetry
Will surface in our head
And we'll dredge the stream of consciousness
And put the poem to bed.
Another Sonnet - by Mike Scheidemann
From the disaster of my youth, all desolate
Through the garden that never has been,
Memories take form and dissipate
Still my life is noosed in a lyrical pattern.
I flutter from crisis to crisis; a butterfly
With a whir of wings, stronger than birds;
Drawn to the furnace of the creative fire,
I forge the world’s torrents in a cauldron of words.
For it was words that sustained me at abyss’s brink,
Like laughter that echoes down dark empty streets.
To a child they may be his breath, food and drink.
They are more telling than a list of brave deeds.
Let them stir the air above the rubble of ages;
If they link two beings briefly, may they fill pages.
The Mother of the Soldier - by Phyllsie Gross
I can't look her in the eye
the mother of the soldier -
Tomorrow there will be a ceasefire
It arrives a day too late
The early hour feels like dusk
abrim with fellow pilots
grim as they fill the pathways of the kibbutz
The mother of the soldier
faces the endless canyon of loss
teetering between the watch over
the remaining goslings in her nest
and the blackest hole of shredded
lungs screaming out to infinity
The rip of freshly born mourning
frays other mothers of soldiers
They wish her no more sorrow
knowing the immeasurable emptiness
that will drape across her door
Today my own son starts training camp
and I can't look her in the eye
- the mother of the soldier -
Later - by Susan Rosenberg
After we watered
the flowers
planted to adorn
his grave and ours
we sat on a curved
stone bench
under a tree,
held hands, were calm
only bird songs
filled the silence
seemed to harmonize
with life and death;
all was so
poignantly familiar
that we
began
to feel
at home.
In the Old City of Jerusalem - by Helen Bar-Lev
We were peace-parched
ordered the peace special
on the menu
in the Arab café
in the Old City
We tasted peace
proclaimed it sweet
like baklava
and Turkish coffee
in an Arab café
in the Old City
Cherished the stillness
peace brought with it
toasted it
cup clinking cup
in all the coffee shops
in the Old City
Ignored the signs
in the coffee grinds
in the cups
of Turkish coffee
in the Arab café
in the Old City
But peace is uncomfortable
in the Middle East
it chokes in our throats,
dissolves in our thoughts,
like lumps of sugar
attempting to sweeten
the Turkish coffee
in the Arab café
in the Old City
Crossing - by Kyoko Uchida
At Qalandia we cross on foot:
a mud-deep path between concrete barriers,
shadowed by the wall, graffiti of twisted steel and rubble,
barbed wire tangled into illegible script.
The few men shuffle single-file, unspeaking,
their hands and faces emptied.
The women overflow their waiting area, a mass of hipbones
and elbows pressed against one another, clasping bundles,
briefcases, small clammy hands —
nothing but bodies, the sounds of so many
tongues clucking, of shushing and sighing.
The light turns green; we surge against the cage-like turnstile,
two or three women squeezing into each quarter-turn, calling
for their daughters to stay close. When an arm or a bundle is
caught in the bars, the others push it through, impatiently.
We cannot see the soldiers; only the word visa comes across.
Now and then the turnstile reverses direction, pushes someone
back into the crowd, where she gropes her way out,
as though blinded. We wait.
Again we cling to the rotating grate, the metal bars
cold in spite of all the palms pushing.
And suddenly I stumble into open space, blinking,
as though I have crossed some distance:
not far, just to a place where my body has been neatly
segmented, then reassembled on the other side, but
in the wrong sequence — so that a tiny muscle
keeps clenching and unclenching itself, involuntarily.
Lilacs - by Dina Hanukov
A road, two poles
A narrow path
A barbershop across the street
Some leaves on yellow hopeless grass
And endless shouts from neighbors' door
The soul seeks something more
something purple to appear
to live, to blossom, to endure
to scatter a silky, purple scent
on every violet petal
Till then
A road, endless shouts
A barbershop across the street
Two poles, some leaves, a narrow path
On hopeless, yellow grass
About the Sea - by Gretti Izak
Whatever I came to love is here
rooted in the dance of the wind
as happy children and the dogs' exuberance
chase the waves in the sea and I notice
the honeyed pleasure in the eyes of a woman
whose lover savors her body, drinking in
her flesh that undulates like foam
in the sea and for this she forgets his shortcomings,
for it’s easy sometimes to feel happy.
The sea's in-and-out swell of emerald and blue
self-confidence keeps in check the earth
spread upon the waters, a promise for all times
since the days of Noah and moderates
my self pity when salt blisters my lungs,
when I swim my present loneliness,
the body landlocked by gravity but which yields
to the moon's pull, a Venus recreated,
as all women who praise the eyes of love.
Horses - by Moshe Ganan
Then I took to bed, dozed off, went to sleep,
And below there the horses were galloping in the deep.
The moon sent its rays and in a trance
The stars on the hills glistered in a dance.
And my soul, drawn to them, from there below,
Went astray among them, the lights, shadows, - and even now.
Where to now? I asked, and the earth, the very sand
Merged with my blood, my soul, till my mind went numb.
Then I found cut the roads leading to the valley.
My soul turned to ashes, and in a blind alley.
I asked the waters, spirits of old beloved
But no path opened, and the winds only laughed.
And I rose and left and the horses’ hooves still beat in the night
I rose and left for the city: and there was light.
Step by step I walked, passing the stalls in the market:
I sat down and wrote:
The memory of those days on a pond I found I marked.
Four Simple Words - by Natalie Griffiths
four simple words
so hard to say
it's not your fault
i feel this way
the truth i know
is hard to take
a lot to lose
your love at stake
the things i did
the lies i spoke
the games i played
your heart i broke
the lie i live
the truth i hide
the pain i cause
can't be denied
four simple words
so hard to say
it's not your fault
i feel this way
the lies i keep
the tears i shed
four simple words
remain unsaid
Smoking Raleighs - by Willa Schneberg
When my mother still believed
my father was who she wished he was,
she kept a card file of recipes, and
Red Skelton was the voice of Raleigh
whose ads depicted a couple in evening dress —
a man in tails, a woman in a formfitting gown
with a flounce in the back— dancing
as if they owned the hall.
They could have been my parents.
At family affairs distant relatives
asked if they were on the stage,
and my parents flattered and tired
would shake their heads, no
as they left the floor to look for their table.
My mother would sit down demurely;
my father would sit backward,
nonchalantly on a folding chair,
from the inside of his tux jacket
take out the pack, Sir Walter Raleigh
prim on the cover, pat the bottom just enough
for two cigarettes to spring up like skyscrapers,
then pluck a match from the matchbook
of Howard¹s bar mitzvah,
or Mollie and Irving¹s wedding,
to light the smokes in his mouth and slowly
place one between my mother¹s full lips.