Author Archives: Sarah

DAWN CHORUS

After the cock-crow,
counterpointed by a barking dog,
cue the precentor, blackbird solo,
with responding voices swelling
from antiphon to chorus
– thrushes and finches, chiff-chaff,
warblers, even a honking crow,
until song verges on cacophony.

Fresh rhythms break through tumult
shaping the daily glossalalia;
deep underlying currents
voice this pentecostal speaking
of the birds, as light unfolds,
spreads iridescent wings that
open up the eastward sky

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Tony Lucas has lived and worked in inner South London for many years.   Hs work has been published both in the UK and America, with the most recent collection of his work, Unsettled Accounts, issued by Stairwell Books in 2015.

Anattā: Promenade Beach, Pondicherry

I sat meditating in my
pale and painless blemish-
gray garb in the alabaster
prayer-porch beneath the
pointed and water-stained arch
of a placid aquamarine dome.
Early morning surf had passed,
and if one cannot disbelieve
the incessant cadence of
thunderous clamor, the gusting
and rushing winds, the goading
summons of the sea—it is
hard, to say the least, to
disbelieve in
the sea.

So much more so my self, so
singularly like the shimmering
skin of seawater, within my
own body, immersed in its deep,
biting heat—the heat of
the dazzling tides, perhaps,
or the sun; the heat of the
burning brine; or for those
who don’t like to see things
that way, the chill of the
disorienting, eternal
solace.

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Though born in humble circumstances, Clarice Hare received a privileged education and has lived a fascinating life, traveled widely, and never said no to an opportunity for exploration or enlightenment. She currently lives in obscurity in the southern U.S. with an assortment of furry and scaly pets.

DIVINE COMEDY

Writing can be opening the gate latch of our inner being so we can start to understand how our life on an outer and interior level can align. If we are not balanced we become neurotic and destructive. Psycho spiritually speaking, keeping in touch with our soul keeps us in harmony with who we are in our most natural form.

Having a nurturing relationship with oneself is having a life-giving relationship with the world. We can’t operate lovingly on a humanitarian level if we can’t connect lovingly with ourselves.

Writing is either a conscious or unconscious pursuit. Many writers fill their pages and swear black and blue that their narrative means nothing more than what is literally understood. Even though all writers are unconscious of at least some of what they write, the danger lies in being barely conscious of our narratives as a whole. Even those who write for escapism instead of confrontation leave a great deal of wealth buried in their pages for those who can sugar soap the walls.

One way to discover what is burning in the collective is to hook up the similar themes prevailing in writing. These are similar to nocturnal dreams in that they reveal the sacred in us. Similarly, the problems of the collective can be lifted by analysing the dream content of our times.

The collective unconscious runs underneath the personal unconscious like the thick foil base of a tiered cake. Conscious writers ploughing their personal complexes eventually reach the foil base. This is where we realize that many of our inner wars overlap with the struggles belonging to everyone. This analogy can also be compared to the earth’s physical structure. If we deal with the underwater currents to confront our sea monsters we eventually hit a common floor.

Wrestling with our demons under this ground is as hard as hell which explains why Dante described Inferno as being inside the centre of the earth. Processes stirring from the earth’s solid core can drive through volcanic activity that form islands. Symbolically, these islands represent a new consciousness which aim to dilute the collective and propel humanity towards evolution.

Analogously, if we as humans don’t experience great pressure or an extreme disturbance from our depths through the experience of, for example a breakdown or a death of a loved one, it is not possible to experience the type of transformation which is fluid enough to erode the collective. It is only from this deep hole in us – this cold bath of fitful sleep, the breaking up of our childhood roads and cities and this grinding fear of complete loss that consciousness is able to finally gush to the surface.

What point is there of literally reaching out to the stars via a rocket when we don’t even know our own soil? Why worry about living on Mars if we can’t even live receptively on earth? It is easier to pretend to be passionate about what is outside of ourselves because then we don’t have to stand nakedly in front of the mirror.

We can only reach the sacred if we, as Dante, through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, explore the meaning of what we’re doing. Writing for escapism is like believing in science without emotion and intuition. Writing consciously can help us take a leap of faith so we can trust in what we don’t yet fully understand. The sacred is largely unknown and more powerful than us. If we allow it to flow through us with hope we take the wick of the candle in the dark and give it light.

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Annie Blake (BTeach, GDipEd) is a divergent thinker, a wife and mother of five children. She hopes to one day publish her chapbook ‘Studium Spiritus Sancti’. She is an advocate of autopsychoanalysis and a member of the C G Jung Society of Melbourne, Australia. You can visit her on annieblakethegatherer.blogspot.com.au and https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009445206990.

Attentiveness

Solitary at a streambed:
I speak to myself
about the blockages
at bounds.

This isn’t the dictate
of downtime ardor
but occlusion
of another order.

When antiphons
come back at the seams:
it’s according to Hoyle
to buckle before the all-powerful.

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Sanjeev Sethi is published in over 25 countries. He has more than 1200 poems printed or posted in venues around the world. Wrappings in Bespoke, is Winner of Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux organized by the Hedgehog Poetry Press UK. It’s his fourth book. It will be issued in 2020. He lives in Mumbai, India.

Passover in Plague Time

So this is how it felt
to have it all turn
against you to be
blamed in the burning
choking recesses of
each breath for decisions
by untouchable powers to
watch the river of your
everyday turn red your days
turn nights your very sky
fill with swarms of deadly
devouring tininesses your
massive milieu could not
fend off was this how it felt
when no safe distance
could save first born elders
and silly unschooled children
who gathered regardless
what was the hieroglyph for
“death count?” a human with
no animal head as every beast
had quit us in joyous liberation?
did the symbol rise and widen
grow and dominate until
everything infected everything
with enslavement to remoteness and
collapse? if we were all there back at
sinai then we were all there in giza
and luxor did we say “no, nameless one,
not this! egypt loves its children too
their grandparents are not pharaoh let
our liberation not be bought with plague?”

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Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, teaches Humanities at Nichols College, Dudley, MA. He publishes broadly in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His novella, Everything We Want, was published in 2018 by Bloodstone Press. A poetry collection, The Realm of Blessing, will be published in 2020 by Unsolicited Press.

If I write this

it is not to show you the abyss,
but to upturn it and make it a mountain;
to paint for you bullying winds on the summit
that box our ears and forests of larch,
soft as fresh-cut hay, which welcome us
into mottled light to rest our feet on warm
needle cushions; rivers of molten glass
talking to themselves, weaving liquid skeins
over pebbles blinking with mica and quartz,
like the granite of pharaohs; deep blue
trumpet gentians sharing velvet grassland
with sun-dried marmot scatterings and crisp confetti
of mountain avens, where I lie, wrapped
in silver lady’s mantle, watching the world turn.

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Jane Angué teaches English Language and Literature in France. Writing in French and English, work has appeared most recently in Le Capital des Mots, Amethyst, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Acumen and Poésie/première. A pamphlet, des fleurs pour Bach, was published in 2019 (Editions Encres Vives).

The Gods We Make

Earth is full of Heaven’s glory
Heaven’s Earth in full

God’s no fool with a pyrite ring
but everyman’s pure gold

to airy thinness He is beat
a sheen for all creation

better beat than tarnished here
or never mined elation

never mind what can’t be felt
or seen with naked eye

we trample treasures unaware
and kick the ash to sky

we gather haloes shed in haste
cold and man-made rings

choke on coal dust as we try to
find a man with wings

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Rachel Barga Simpson lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and three children. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, a master’s in Speech-Language Pathology, and zero accreditations in parenthood. Her poetry can be found in Ever Eden Literary Journal, In Parentheses, and here.

Walking with Aiko

Sun’s rays and cerulean skies
belie the chill of March
on this imposter of a warm spring day.
Bare black branches aiming skyward
like arms reaching, beseeching
the heavens to warm the earth.

Nose and ears pinked by the wind,
my pace quickens to heat my body
and hasten a return to hearth and home.
Beside me, my true companion,
reveling in the freedom,
oblivious to brisk breezes that chill the bones.
Eyes bright, tail wagging,
she leaves no smells un-sniffed,
no fellow being ungreeted.

Oh, to be so joyfully present
in this very moment!
How grateful I am to be in step
with this exuberant teacher of life.

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Ann Weil is a former teacher and professor from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work can be read or is forthcoming in Poetry Quarterly, Nine Muses Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, Headline Poetry and Press, Young Ravens Literary Review, American Writer’s Review, The Voices Project, and Clementine Unbound. Her website is www.annweilpoetry.com.

Did Katie?

The afternoon sun filters through the mid-sized elms, and the asphalt smells like a heated oven. My car registers 95 degrees, even parked under the trees. I throw my work tote in the front seat, and crank up Elfin, roll my windows down farther, and glance at my side view mirror before backing out.

What is this? A florescent-green something clings to my mirror. Crisp, furled up leaf? Fresh snap pea? Bright avocado slice with legs?

Whatever it is regards me with black, pinpoint peepers.

On the 25-minute drive home, my eyes dart back and forth between the road and my lime gelatin-colored passenger. I squeeze the brakes carefully. I wonder about wind shear.

I need not to have worried. Those chartreuse tootsies stick like suction cups. Maybe she enjoys the breeze. Maybe she likes to go places as I do. Maybe, a bit of a gypsy.

I relax my shoulders when I pull into my driveway. Not a microfilament of her pristine little self appears ruffled.

My little passenger can make a home here on these two acres of lawn, stream, pines and maples. I wish her well and leave her to figure out relocation details.

I search online for my pretty bug and discover she is not as pedestrian as a cricket or a grasshopper, but is a lovely, magically colored insect called “katydid.”

As the bright afternoon softens into a translucent evening, I light a white candle and settle down on the floor to meditate. In the pale glow, I try to still my mind, but thoughts return to the little katydid that journeyed home with me.

A distant memory of a story my Aunt Katie told me surfaces. Before Alzheimer’s took her mind and, ultimately, her life, Aunt Kate –speaking in her country twang –shared that schoolboys at Unicoi Elementary taunted her, jumping at her and back, singing, “Katy did, Katy didn’t, Katy did. She didn’t! She did!” In the telling, my aunt wrinkled her nose remembering how that, well, bugged her. I feel a sad “missingness” for my aunt.

I briefly consider whether Aunt Kate might use the katydid to reach out to me. – aware that I might make a connection with this particular insect like no other. What an imagination, I think, and blow out the candle.

Ten days later, I lift the trunk of my car to stow groceries. There on the back window glass basking in the morning sunshine, perches another katydid. She faces me, her long antennas gracefully sweeping several inches past her compact body, six tiny legs gripping the glass. Do you see me? she seems to ask.

Three mornings later, I pull back my bedroom curtains at six-thirty. On the window screen, the shadowed outline of another katydid welcomes me. I blink my eyes and peer closer and blink some more. It cannot be, I think. I lie back in bed and quiver a little like a furled leaf, myself, incredulous at the unlikely creature poised behind the curtains. What are the odds of three katydids appearing so close in time –as if they are showing themselves to me purposefully– situating themselves in places I cannot help but see?

Almost a month passes. It is now late July, dog days of sizzling heat. I visit my mother and park on the street in front of her small white house. Returning to my car a couple of hours later, I whisper, “Katydid,” in a little trill, laugh a little to myself, and start to open my car door. Near the side mirror reposes another katydid. By this time, I just marveled and accepted this little insect visitation. As I drive home, she pads across my windshield to the other side of my car, nonchalant as if she knows its terrain like the back of her feelers. Arriving home, I find her near my car’s back window.

I consider whether Aunt Kate sent those little green critters to say, “Susie, you did what you could for me and I am well now and sending blessings to you. Stay open to guidance from our side.” Did Katie? Or did she not?

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Susan H. Evans writes and educates college students in East Tennessee.  She is published in Deep South Magazine, Ornery Quarterly, Six Hens Literary Journal, and Christian Science Monitor.

The Day Mary Oliver Died
(in some of her own words)

I want to believe the day you died,
you lay down in a field of lilies and
let bliss have its way with you.
One by one they came to comfort you,
the fox, the owl, the hawk, the deer
that you communed with at dawn,
the wild geese guiding you home,
the goldenrod, the lilies, the peonies nodding
you off with their light-filled bodies.
I like to think you died of an overdose of bliss.
Your tombstone would say, here lies a poet,
killed by delight, a bride married to amazement.
You who loved the world so much, I
want to believe you are still alive in another,
in the body of a rose or a tree or a fox.
Is it true that when Mr. Death, that imposter
came for you, you were nowhere to be found
because you were everything everywhere?

Oh, it’s not true that you are not needed.
More than ever we need you to remind us
to trust the dazzling untrimmable light
outshining the dark stories of our lives,
to call us to be astonished by this
one wild and precious life, and in the end
be brave enough to give up the world.

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Marilyn Grant has taught writing at Cerritos College and journal writing to Hospice nurses.  She belongs to a weekly Sangha with like-minded spiritual seekers, which is the inspiration for much of her poetry.  Her poems have appeared in Amethyst Review and Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poetry.