New Poetry From Peter Golub

Latin Parataxis

1.

The day the dictator

was sentenced

to death

I noticed a lot of musicians in the street

they weren’t out because of the sentence

the musicians in this country are typically apolitical

I’m sure most of them didn’t know about the sentence

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them didn’t even know about the trial

our dictator was captured by another country when he was visiting

his mother

nobody really complained

it was bound to happen

this morning as I walked through the cement square of my urban village

I felt a little sad for our dictator

sure he’d made a travesty of television,

persecuted doctors, writers, thieves, clerics, etc.

but death by hanging?

is a hanging supposed to make us feel better?

I am sure there are those who oppose it

I am sure there are those who praise it

I for one think it’s a little excessive

but only a little

I must meet Codford and finish the piece

I have other things on my mind

maintaining the formal categories of the language

in it

while keeping true to the process

trying to balance the extrinsic and intrinsic qualities of the thing

a double helix of honky tonk blues and Handel

I take a cigarette out of my pocket

and find:

lately I’ve been feeling a stranger in my own mind
walking here and there
up to an attic with growing levels
ladders
I open a box
I funny picture of a dictator in his underwear

2.

I feel my remember God language children

green

green

green

I am the happy genius of my contented universe

The curious child at your door with a bag full of insects

You know that guy over there, yeah, that’s me too

when you crawled into my bed

gene asked me to take you out, and close the door

so I picked you up, recited some Pushkin, played a song on the guitar

when I got back into bed

gene was asleep

I dreamed of a manatee on the beach

a little suspended off the ground like in Ben’s paintings

it’s eating comfort food, covered by a net

I’d like to cut it out

but I’m afraid of slicing her skin

3.

человек с пивом

мальчик с мороженом

обсуждают женщину

-я тебе одолжил 200 р.

(ты мне одарила поцелуй –по щеке.

пошел пешком дамой долго шел.

простудился. подслушивал.)

-ты плохой, но любимой.

-я все понимаю.

я уранил корзинку с грибами.

-ну и что?

уранил так уранил.

они не кому особенно не нужны.

-THE QUESTION OF LIFE AFTER DEATH

HAS INTERESTING… ALTHOUGH

MOST PEOPLE SEEM TO CONSIDER THIS A

QUESTION OF WHETHER DEATH EXISTS.

WHEREAS I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT

THIS A QUESTION OF LIFE. THAT IS

DOES LIFE EXIST? ALSO, THIS QUESTION

MAKES ME THINK OF HOW WAR

SELECTS FOR CERTAIN GENES

AND GENRES. HOW DID WWII

SELECT FOR PARTICULAR

ALELLES?

4. Africa Mina

Brazil

my death awaits me in Brazil

dancing his skinny hips in your direction

he grabs a martini, nods to the man in the white suit

you’re turning thirty-thirty-three

spinning spinning spinning

creating ice age molecules

a library of paleontology

5.

the bad thing about the English department

is that

it doesn’t reward failure

in all fields?

at least in science

failure is seen as an important

piece of the puzzle.

6.

where is the poetry?

where did it go?

do you know any poets?

I certainly don’t.

the universal grammar though

has an old career

you needn’t fear

the language instinct

the maternal bee string

driving the piano up the hill

dropping it down the stairs

burning your feet on the hot pavement

ringingringingringing

Dave please don’t say that

your lover’s doorbell

hell she might not

not be your prince

6.

Dvorak my queen

what signals are you radiating?

who has picked them up?

how many friends do you have?

what women do you have beneath your tongue?

I am a rather lonely rabbit

I find my situations lacking

my images do not comfort me

at first I was flattered

I am still curious

but who knew that curiosity

like beauty

is an attribute?

or that the old poets listend to

such terrible music?

7.

the dictator shakes his fists

the judge faces another lonely night

starring at the TV screen

watching himself in the dark

his kids play German techno in the other room

he is in love with his daughter’s best friend

his wife is on her second affair

he hasn’t had an orgasm in three months

his friends say he is an effigy of virtue

pan-paniscus: shoa-ecology

pan-paniscus

as always you are the last or first to know

the law of the excluded middle child

I saw this almost phenomenologically

I listen to my friend

it smells like pasta he says

it doesn’t smell like tuna

it’s not stupid

I like tuna

if people don’t laugh at my poetry there is something wrong with them

or me

it’s always a little bit of both

never this or that

like porn

what kind of laughter do I want

like what kind of love do I want

isn’t it odd that most homosexual men are also pedophiles

our country dressed in homosexuals

I really like children

do you like homosexuals

I don’t mean like to tolerate

or appreciate

or respect

or whatever

but do you lovvve homosexuals in the same way you love americanos

or americans

or buenos aires

is your relationship as complex and as interesting

as when my roommate was home and I didn’t know he was home

so when I… and he walked out of his room… I jumped

in the shower I oftentimes study

plato’s republic in my mind

I sing in greek then latin then german

I sing the national anthem of luxemburg

I I I I

it’s all about me isn’t it

well what about you

what about you and me

what about us

we together us together we together break

the wives of the world have foiled the swastika cookie cutters

remember we re-memeber remember

forget the time the phone rang

and you a childish paladin running with your horse head full of sushi

catching the tin drum by the little screaming brat’s pabst

shoa-ecology

10

100

100,000,000,000,000,000,000

when you get lots of people into the same place the thing (at its best)

engineering is always the same

the better it is the more it is the same thing

the organizing principles

what it looks like after the organizing

you have no friends just mates

just in it together

in line

in many respects

lots of things

fucked up

but we don’t boycott mom

for fucking up by buying us crayons instead of a tank

or america for bombing the chinese embassy

where was it

or my friend because he fucked my girlfriend

sorry I mean our friend

my girlfriend

our girlfriend

or my girlfriend’s girlfriend

las vegas is a place of second chances

second comings

and one day

fuel air bombs

fucking up is what good ecosystems do best

they do it in abandon

don’t abandon the bonobo

if it eats too many echidnas

rips them limb from probiscus

with its teeth

with its culture

with its tools

don’t abandon the little nazi in your son’s video game

it’s like puberty

don’t abandon puberty

or prepubescence

or rape

or jabbing wires through the mammilian body

it’s about all of us sea cows

don’t toss billy into the toilet

after you’ve carried him around

under your arm for over 72 hours

when he is six he will fill his foster dad’s

beer cooler with night crawlers

and we’ll all have a good chuckle

like TV audiences

the message being the massage

the massage is the message

you don’t know a goddamn thing

but you don’t need too

if you can enjoy a massage

about what you are talking about

your mother

who is the castrated shell of her father

who was a fat golden retriever who smoked cigars and stank of scotch

who was the effigy of a sea lion or was a manatee

made of $20 bills

the waiter being the waiter

the man who waits

at the oxygen bar looking for air

tired after a long day at the plasma clinic

living off and after and before

pre-Stroika in the bag

living off catholic boloney sandwiches

Contemporary Analytic Philosophy in 5 Acts

I would like to ban the words: machine, fountain, and snow

metallic drinking fountain

truth has an accent

like gook-jews

midget-luchador

redneck-niggers

and some machines drop radios made of microwave parts

lovingly

metallic water

tumbling from a communal bathhouse

bassquiet stands up

Gregor Gregorovich (a favorite character of: 0 users)

pours the last of the gin over the computer

-that fucking does it, he says, and suddently cries, I’m jewish! I can’t

feel my eyes!

-come on you two, says Yassen Gregorovich.

-what are you, the gestapo?

-come on fellas.

-jeez just let us finish our drinks.

-you’re finished; lets go.

-look, says bassquiet, it’s peter.

-what’s it doing up there? asks Gregor Gregorovich.

-maybe he has something to say about a memoir, says bassquiet,

and leaves through the back door.

(Peter, dribbling briskly into position in front of his goal, squaring up to encompass his own destruction.)

When I missed your flight

sitting in a new way

-don’t shoot, cries Gregor Gregorovich.

-don’t jump, says Yassen Gregorovich.

-give him air, says the violinist in bar light.

(peter continues, a transcription without notes.)

not anything about love or poetry or st. leningrad

or hymenoptera models

of roots and branches

standing in oppisition to themselves

-It’s Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D minor, says the violinist.

(peter sways and takes a drink of water.)

the airport smells like an old couch

the old woman asks you to watch her bag

I think about the impact this act will have on the U.S. economy

the female asks the male

sit on the floor

she puts her head in his lap

he watches the escalator

meat being moved into its places

-I can’t stand it, cries Gregor Gregorovich.

-Oh, the horror, the horror, says Yassen Gregorovich.

-The horror, the horror, repeats the violinist.

(peter continues)

I am hiding

in the imagined thoughts of others

in the fat woman’s conversation with her bags about security

the old woman in the bathroom

siting on the toilet

the ghost of my death

the light of my hour

(peter puts a hand to his brow and falls to the floor)

a gathering crowd:

-there are of course limits

we wait peacefully

like something from a haiku

just like the plane was never invented, mummbles peter coming

tWo…

-somebody give him a bank card, says the violinist.

when I left

when I was scheduled to leave

-take the mean and multiply it by the square root of (t)1, suggests

Gregor Gregorovich.

-are the people on the converyer belt transplanted into sausages?

asks Yassen Gregorovich.

packed into planes

packed into planes

taken back to Africa

fed to my grandmother’s dictator

cluching his nappies

hemorraging –bleeding from the ass

asleep

dreaming of a yellow meadow from a movie

(peter gets up, wobbly on his feet. Mandy Potemkin walks through

the small doors in the back, takes him under the arm, smiles weakly

toward Gregor Gregorovich and the violinist. Yassen Gregorovich

takes him by the other arm.)

Exit

Peter Golub was born in Moscow in 1982. At the age of seven, he emigrated with his family to the United States. He studied Russian and philosophy at the University of Utah. He currently studies poetry in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, where he also teaches. A frequent visitor to his native Russia, Golub spent the summer of 2006 in Moscow and St Petersburg translating contemporary Russian poetry. Some of those translations appear in Caketrain Issue 04.

Peter Golub nació en Moscou en 1982. Cuando tenía siete anos, se mudó con su familia a los Estados Unidos. Estudió ruso y filosofía en la Universidad de Utah. Corrientemente, estudia poesía en la programa de Master of Fine Arts en la Universidad de Nevada, en Las Vegas, donde también es profesor. Un visitor con frecuencia a su Rusia nativa, Golub pasó el verano de 2006 en Moscou y San Petersburgo, traduciendo la poesía Rusa contemporánea. Algunas de estas traducciones aparecen en Caketrain Issue 04.

Three Poems from Lincoln O'Neill

Migration

In that myth the young were told of the dead
being buried into the sky, the smoke of them
rode thermal air to the mountain that held

the land up from the limits of the sea.
Against tradition, some trekked those gradients
balancing on high ridges to be closer

to guiding stars, and grounds where the dust
of the beloveds had settled, the night’s
provisions spent, they descended, leaving behind prints

that they’d breached the sanctuary under the heavens,
carrying down some of the dead on the soles of boots,
granting range to extend into the oceans.

Details

On sampling the edges of the millennia-old
sacrificial altars, the pigments of their deities,
or from the selvedge of the Shroud of Turin,
time’s print peels away from within

history’s collage of in-and-out reception,
as with the stone for the more recently breathing
where lichen has climbed to consume
inscription, leaving a wordless stele

that executes the silence of time’s edict,
or that lifted from a seam compressed
by a dozen eras, now behind museum glass,
the murdered and leathery peatbogman who stood up to time.



The Grains

It’s an inch of some infinity between towels
with summer bodies sunk in its mould ¬-
sand’s a whole tradition that demands a coast,
though in the oldest countries, the core of the land is sand.

It’s in the masonry that fuses, yet mobile
in storms to subside suburbs or bury old wars,
it’s the knocked off edges of civilizations;
with hourglasses - it composes the outside, the within.

A kilo of powdery white carbon, the particles
that had stood as a human, crowd the living
forward for the dispersal’s settle with other elements,
the ground’s company of those fine grains.

Lincoln O’Neill lives in Wellington, New Zealand, having recently returned from a year and a half in southern Asia, principally in India. His poetry has been published in various journals/magazines in the UK, the US, India, Singapore, Austria and South Africa including Stand, The Rialto, The Journal, Coffee House Poetry (UK), Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria), Crimson Feet (India), Porcupine (USA), New Contrast (South Africa), JAAM (New Zealand) and The Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore.

Three Poems from Jack Conway

THE WOUND OF BEING NEVER HEALS

“The wound of being never heals,” he said, bowing his head in prayer

before the meal. No one dared say a word until Aunt Martha had the

nerve to compliment the china plates and silverware. “What a lovely

setting. The forks and spoons and knives are superb,” she opined.

It only made him cry. He snatched them up and wiped them with his tie.

On the 15th of July, 1965, Uncle George took his life, jumping

off the Brooklyn Bridge, the pockets of his coat brimming with

every piece of silverware they owned. A witness to the grim event

said Uncle George seemed intent. “He looked like someone was

chasing him the way he scaled the fence and dived.”

Martha didn’t seem a bit surprised. “No one survives the wound of

being. This infectious disease leads us to quarantine our rebellious

heart and fill our lives with antiseptic remedies and cures that never work,”

she philosophized. “Still, I wish he hadn’t taken all the forks and knives.”

THE DEAD WATCH OVER US

The dead watch over us at night, coming up from fields.

Whispers and smoke, vapors and breeze, moving unseen.

We dream the dreams they once dreamed. Live lives

inside the homes they owned. Sleep in their beds.

A curtain that moves, a candle snuffed out,

a sudden chill, words barely said.

We make our way out to the graves during the day through

briar and brush, fallen trees leave us no path, to there and

back. Dark granite stones, some barely erect, record

their age, their birth and death. That’s all that we know

from these stones. We read the ancient dates, imagine

their hard lives, stone walls they built by hand still survive.

I was a farmer, a soldier, a friend,

a husband, a father, in a world without end.

Whispers and smoke moving up from fields.

These are the ghosts that watch over us.

Imagining them imagining us.

This is my house. That is my bed.

I once had a life. Now I am dead.

Who are the ones that bear witness to you?

And who will we then bear witness to?

FIRE TURNS THINGS TO SALT

White flowers grow wild in the empty lot

next door to Junior‘s Variety Store. Some

people say it‘s stayed that way too long.

He dreamed he’d pass it all along to the

next generation. Rumor is a burning cigarette

lit the bed on fire. The official version is faulty

electrical wires. It remains a tragic mystery.

Everyone lost in that blaze. The house, gone,

the foundation razed. He’s received a multitude

of seasoned platitudes but it remains an

unreasonable reason just the same. He’s grown

weary of trying to place the blame. It doesn’t

matter who’s at fault. He doesn’t care. He

wonders how anything could grow there in that

corrupted field. It hardly matters. Looking back

he turns to salt. “Aren’t they beautiful,” she says,

putting the white wild flowers in a vase

on the table where her children wait.

Jack Conway’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Columbia Review, Yankee, The Potomac and The Norton Anthology of Light Verse among others. He is the author of, My Picnic With Lolita and Other Poems published by North Country Press in 2004. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth and Bristol Community College in Fall River.

Five Poems from Duane Locke

AL FRESCO CAFÉ POEMS #91

I desired
To construct from air
A flower for you,

But the air is elusive,
Slips away.

Why, I ask,
Will not air
Stay long enough
For me
To shape it
Into
A stem and petals.

I could photograph
Whiffs of smoke
Coming from
The burning of
Old love letters,

Have the smoke
Resemble Indian Pipes
Growing in
Dark oak shadows,

But this paper flower
Is not the flower
I wanted to give you.

I wanted to give you
A real flower
Made from the air
That was shaped
By my hand
After touching you.

AL FRESCO CAFÉ POEMS #92

I wish you had
Seen it
As I saw it,

But such compatibility,
Closeness
Is impossible.

Corn stubble,
White gold hair
Hung from a husk.

An object became
An event,
A past moment.

It was your
Hair,
My shoulder.

Perhaps, my
Recall
Is a revision.

Why are you
Sitting with a distance
Between us.

I am staging
A fiction
In my mind.

I no longer want
To pass this stubble field,
Stubble has its beauty.

AL FRESCO CAFÉ POEMS # 93

What commenced as an abbreviation,
A slight hug, became an aberration, due to suffixes and
And the absence of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
Bourgeois, and upper classes, a solo and soliloquy
Became states rights and a Statue of Library shaped kite.
It was stipendiary from a spasmodic secretary.
The preliminary was sustenuto, so we spoke sotto voce.
Later on,
I resurrected the first person pronoun and it was
Followed
By sixty blank pages.
On the sixtieth page I added a copula.
After forty more blank pages, a predicate adjective.
An examination of what in popular parlance
Is designated as space and content, I decided
I was excommunicated from the community.
So I did not finish the sentence by the placement
Of a period at the end
No closure for me
During this echo
I need an ethos
Not Aristotle’s
Not Spinoza’s
Death of a hug is not an event
For the hug was lived through a long line of
Analytic fear
The tics of zero
O mio code
O mio swim
O mio mia

AL FRESCO CAFÉ POEMS #94

Tell me, you who want me to sleep,
So I won’t disturb with screams
The concentration on the toss
Of one person in sequins to another
Person on a swinging
Distant trapeze, Tell me
Is there somewhere on this earth
A chorus girl so sensitive
She can when she is passed out in a drunken sleep
Can feel a dried soybean
Under twenty mattresses.
Your story had clarity, was transparent,
Accessible, and your syntax was immaculate
According to the textbook, there were no non-sequiturs,
Its ontology was a return to Plato,
Although it muted the existence
Of a supersensible realm of ideas
To impose on our consciousness
our ordinary world was a reality.
In your rendition there was erudition
And precision, but it was all Babel.
You have told me the same story
Every night, because you repeat words
That have no meaningful content to you,
But tonight you tell this bedtime story
More rapidly as you want to get away,
Go back to the TV set to watch
A trapeze act simulated in a movie.

AL FRESCO CAFÉ POEMS #100

Her attic, art deco, until
Cobwebbed
With
A
Group of spiders’ extreme abstractions.

Now, under the roof,
The enchantments
Of frozen smoke,

Melting,
Dropping,
Dripping.

The drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-drop
Makes a music
Similar to music made by tulips.

One drip-drop
Sings a solo
Before the choir.

She does not hear, she
Is away
At the Waldorf-Astoria
In her daydreams.

Duane Locke, Doctor of Philosophy, English Renaissance literature, Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, was Poet in Residence at the University of Tampa for over 20 years. He has had over 5,000 poems published in online and print magazines including American Poetry Review, Nation, Bitter Oleander, Poetry, Jacket and Badosa. He is the other of fourteen books of poetry and several e-books. Locke is also a widely published photographer with numerous recent shows throughout Florida. He lives in Lakeland, Florida, after a forcible eviction from his Tampa home, where he lived for half a century.

Two Poems from Sydnee Stewart

American Arrogance

We are conditioned, oppressed, depressed, accessed

Excused, confused and intrusive.

We are proud, rude and cruel.

We choose capitalism as a spiritual tool.

We are corporate, ignorant, combative, consumers

and humorous.

We are intimidators and interrogators.

We are litigious and imperialists.

We exploit our young and discard our old.

We convince ourselves we are just

Just because

We are Americans.

We are leaders, teachers, students and philosophers.

We are believers, volunteers, dreamers and achievers.

We are mathematicians, astronauts and iconoclasts.

We are Americans.

We have landed on the moon yet have no use for

Harmony with humans.

We are global yet local

We are survivors lost and slaves paid for with a cost.

We are abusers and users mistrusted for

corruption and consumption.

Who can believe an American?

Will repentance reap grief from decadent soil?

Who is to blame for a tarnished name?

Only an American knows which side

the green grass grows.

SUPERSHERO

We wild women ride railroads with combat boots strapped and laced tightly

Protecting our young like sheep our children who sleep with nightmares

We keep our emotions frozen from fiction in history books

We the daughters of Sheba, heirs to the throne

We imbibe on intuition

We bear our burdens on backs barren our gender specific

We are the superwomen

The ladies who give birth to revolutions in boardrooms

Break rooms, bedrooms, bodegas and brothels

Some of us finance romance because of personal circumstance

We survive

We build bridges that generations will cross

We crochet uniforms for marching armies

We pray, repeat mantras, we chant and sing warrior lullabies

We connect with ancestors for answers to questions that six year olds conceive

In Georgia where blood colored soil echoes dreams of four little angels

We climb heights with deer and send out warnings about lightning and thunder

Rain washes our wounds clean and we are positioned for battle again

Our memories are like elephants and our swords are like tusks

We travel in packs and use our weapons when necessary

Our words pierce through flesh that is diseased

We bring forth healing in our metaphors

Some of us are doctors. Some of us midwives.

Some of us serve as counsel and the rest of us wait.

We use our gifts and barter with our dignity to gain honor

We consider property, friends and fruit.

We choose carefully.

Our wisdom has been the passport on this journey

We rub cocoa butter on scars and mend broken bones

We survive

We look until we find the red orange yellow sunset

We sleep until we are tired of being tired

We rise until we kiss the sky

Our mothers are silent because they cannot speak

It is our time now and we have to rely on the moon inside of us

The tide is current. The tomatoes are ripe and the harvest is ready

It is the woman in the mirror who will make history hers

Change around physics to make the earth rotate with her cycle

We are the axis. The center of creation consistent with theology

The marrow in our bones is where Solomon hid his riches

We are virtuous and yet simple complicated and creative

We the mothers of nature daughters of the dusk

Our names are written by scribes and translated into hieroglyphics

We are Julie Dash, Dorothy Dandridge, Lisa Zuré, Martha Stewart, Shab Bahadori, Matahari, Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Madam CJ Walker, Zora Neal Hurston, Brenda Stewart, Barbara Walters and Betty Boop

We are the sisters of Lotus. Fuck Charlie.

We love him but this poem is about us!

We forget and we remember

We are welfare mothers with no man at home and five mouths to feed

We succeed

We are crack heads with habits trading places with movie stars

We breed

We are aid to dependent children

We breathe

We are public in our quests to conquer the world

We dream

We are the heads of state, chairmen of the board, senators and presidents

We are free

As we walk miles on roads less traveled with shoes tight around our ankles

The footprints we make are indelibly recorded in the computers of little girls

Who in turn play hopscotch with other little girls and they pass the lessons on to little boys

Our names are documented in court dockets

Scribbled on prison walls in notebooks and typed in code by paralegals.

We are eagles

We aid and abet we teach the alphabet to kindergarten classes

We help the illiterate we make breakfast for the poor and needy

We build homes for the homeless

We make no excuses and apologize only to ourselves

We are the superwomen. We call ourselves She short for Supershero

Our men call us blessed and learn Lamaze

They purify our breast milk for us when we are sleeping. When we sleep

Our spiritual teachers send messages and we use the ocean to interpret

The moon changes our moods and so we are balanced

We believe in ourselves and so we are brilliant

We use the colors of aura to paint our destinies

We are infinity.

We are the Superwomen. We call ourselves She short for Supershero

We discern decipher and identify bullshit with ease.

In our suffering and pain we have conceded

We wild women ride railroads with combat boots strapped and laced tightly

So only the unattainable can render us insane.

Sydnee Stewart is a performance poet, actor and writer. She has won various poetry slams and competitions, was featured in the Langston Hughes documentary called Hughes’ Dream Harlem, which aired on the cable networks BLACKSTARZ, was a featured poet on BET’s Lyric Café and starred in a feature film called Everyday People which premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, the prestigious New Director’s Film Festival at Lincoln Center and is aired on HBO.

At present, Stewart is completing her second book of prose and poetry with an accompanying musical poetry album. She has been featured in The New York Times, Variety, Jane and People, and has published works African Voices, Rolling Out, QBR Magazine, The Lasting Joy (1998), America at the Millennium (2000), Signifyin’ Harlem (2002/2003), and Under a Quicksilver Moon. She is currently writing a screenplay.

Four Poems from Surekha Vijh

SEVEN
ASTRONAUTS

We
travel in an orbit,
through space: we think—
we know ––
we control—
we brag about
our mortal bodies—
skin, hair and eye color, private mansions,
exclusive neighborhoods
safe---
until object disintegrates into a million parts
just like the Shuttle Columbia
giving back to Mother Nature
within the fold of five elements.
Where do we learn who we are?
No barricades,
no boundaries
or borders in Space.
Earth looks a tiny marble,
its inhabitants invisible.
Only visible is blue water
and brown land, celebrating
the unity of earth and sky,
humanity and cosmos.
Seers and sages throughout time
and now the astro-explorers
narrate the lesson clearly—
We are only visitors
We are not owners.

DEATH OF
A ROSE

A rose arrived
in early summer
without a buzz, a murmur.
Nature played adroitly,
its finest symphony.
Splendor touched the mundane.
The raindrops fell gently
on leaves, buds and flowers.
Composing an aria.
And a new cavatina.
My heart beat stopped,
absent for awhile. Then
the bud turned blue
its acceptance questioned.
My rose was depetaled---
by strong winds.

FACE OF EARTH

Each
day they
crucify the messiah

in
the name of color,
race and religion.

Each
day they find reasons
to fight wars on Earth,

for
power, greed
or just for fun:

Alexander,
Darius, Babar,
Caesar, Napoleon

and
others fought
the wars for

destruction
of evil,
for bringing unity, for

religious
brotherhood,
or for colorless continuum.

Is
war a necessity
or only an occupation?

But
this war is
another story.

You
explain
I will try to understand….

ROHAN
AND ROHINI

From
the stars you arrived – crossing
the cosmos, the atmosphere, then touching
the peak of the Himalayas,

soaking
in the pure and purple Ganges, you arrived
in my prayers, as if emerging
from the sacrificial fire of Maha Yajna, from fire

she,
Dropadi, who rose to the history and
became a Queen. From earth, she, Sita, who
rose to the height of the sky,

the
Lady. From a child of negligence, he,
Prahlad, became the pathfinder and guide
and others who found a nourishing place.

I
say all this to give you strength and meaning.
You too, most cheery, most sparkling
sought a virtuous vision within my heart.

Your
wishful presence, although cut short,
enlivened my being. Was I to pray along
for your stay? Should I cry for your loss?

Two
gentle essence in human form.
Will I eventually arrive at my destination
to rock you? Or will I seek forgiveness

from
you. The song you started still
hums its wondrous tune, although my eyes never
saw you blossoming, all that magnificence,

seeing
change a seed into a plant,
watching your tender gestures, glorious pranks,
pure ragas when cried - I miss the companionship

between
mother and children—
The whole of that experience. The majestic
lapses of “life” in my lap.

Mahayjna: grand
fire sacrifice
Raga: Indian classical notes
Sita, Dropadi and Prahalad: characters from Indian mythology

Born in India, Surekha Vijh was educated in India, England and the USA, receiving her master’s degrees in English Literature, journalism and bachelor’s degree in sciences. A published and award winning author, she concentrates on domestic and international affairs and human-interest issues. Her journalistic career has involved work for The Washington Times, Capitol Hill, United Nations, The Times of India, and the BBC while also contributing to various local newspapers, magazines and TV and radio programs. She leads poetry workshops and readings internationally at various universities, colleges and book festivals. Her published works include poetry books Without Echo, Until the Next Harvest and Uttrarddh Kavita and poetry anthologies. Surekha’s works are often a reflection of her travels, and the cultures she encounters, prompting her works to be translated into many languages. She lives in New York City and Washington DC.