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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (the poetry) WORM ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 20
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Fishing off San Blas
The guide put out for Guano Rock at dawn
just as the shrimping fleet came in,
trailing flocks of gulls that flapped
and dipped along the nets,
skimming the wake with a sad cry.
You can smell the rock a mile away.
We must have circled it a dozen times,
half-blinded by that jut of dazzling white
where a gang of boobies screeched their crazy tune
and the sun beat like a blowtorch on the waves.
We caught a shark and bashed its head against
the seat before we threw it overboard
and headed back past islands where the rare
green turtle leaves her eggs, and when they hatch,
the frigate bird, that split-tail skydiver,
spears the new life as it waddles toward the sea.
© Sandy McKinney
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Totem
The totem of his camp rose from the sand.
The poles were gathered in and neatly placed.
The rounded stones were set by human hand
and on their sides the fire's warmth was traced.
What hunter passed this way before we came?
What wrinkles lined the corner of his eye?
Who lay beneath this barren teepee frame?
What dreams unraveled underneath this sky?
Our paddles ply the same meandered course,
compelled by something he would understand;
a gentle but insistent guiding force
that sighs its pleasure softly through this land.
In solitude he rested in this place.
I know this man. I just don't know his face.
© Peter G. Gilchrist
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Alnmouth
Dawn mists shift
across the ebbing water -
on Bracken Hill -
the tang of dew damp fern,
the stink of seaweed.
Stillness darkens
like a wave's cold edge
the moment before its slow, glittering fission.
What breathes,
closer than the surging ocean?
Beyond the wind sifting grasses
heavy wings murmur;
from salt reeds a swan rises,
glinting silver in the deepening blueness:
a fading star,
a dreamed coherence.
© Alan Wickes
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Alternative rhymes
1,2,3,4,5
Mummy's only just alive.
6,7,8,9,10
Daddy beat her up again
Why did he beat her so?
Don't ask me cos I don't know.
I close my eyes real tight
when Daddy beats her every night.
Hush
Hush little baby don't say a word
Papa's had a drink and he's on his third
If his third drink's not enough
Papa's gonna show us he's really tough
If we cry we'll make him mad
so hush little baby don't be sad
If we try not to make a sound
Papa's gonna smile when he comes around
© Karen Doherty
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On the Suicide of a Friend
"God help the kids!" I heard the neighbours say -
so quick to judge, though mostly they were kind.
They saw the sorry mess you left behind
and thought you took the coward's selfish way.
The coward's way? No, not that I can see.
Despair's a snare. They say a fox will gnaw
its fettered foot and sacrifice the paw.
What desperation drove you to break free?
Nor were you selfish. Just beneath the calm
the darkness gathered; I have known it too.
It touched those near. It's my conviction you
believed you were protecting them from harm.
God - if there's a God - will grant you rest:
you failed, we all do, but you did your best.
© David Anthony
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The Psalmist
She was only warm once a day. They took her
out of the Auschwitz rag shop where she sorted
clothes brought in hope, blessed, folded into tissue,
in carefully marked cases. Now stamped 'Lost in Transit'.
'Put on your usual shoes!' One with a flat heel,
one too small with a high arch, forcing a limp,
their first joke of each day. 'You Jewish sow -
we'll turn you into a Christian over the ironing!
It better be right today.' They promised
a blow for every crease. She starched the cotton,
reached for the iron on the red stove, clenched her fingers
to draw pain from the metal. 'No cloth, you bitch!'
She worked the curve at the throat and settled pleats
fanned to join sleeves, stroking the surplice sides.
Her steamed sweeps drew the hem to a ridge of bone,
crisp as the words her son would sing to them.
' ' It's finished. Now get out, back to your shed.'
She imagined his high notes, escaping snow
against cigar fog, slops from brandy rounds.
She saw thorned wire as staves, as the old setting
for numbers they bellowed. 'Make a Christian sound!'
She imagined his hands clenched tight inside her covering,
phrasing the words for freedom after exile,
German for justice. They threw him scraps of pork.
She never saw him. She imagined him somewhere
boxed in a hut. She prayed his voice stayed high
as promises, until they could return,
walking as in a dream, as the book promised.
© Martyn Halsall
(The Psalmist: Editor's Choice of M.A Griffiths,' I find this poem painful
to read, with its precise catalogue of cruelties. Yet despite the
bleakness, it ultimately captures the hope and resilience of the human
spirit, enduring the most terrible circumstances.'.)
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limpets
This is a modern war
of news and aircraft,
land of the free
v home of the brave
v us on the couch,
boxed
24/7.
A soldier with a bitter pill
sent across the sand to still
the cradle of civil-
isation, boys
heard but never seen.
Was a modern war
of bombs and baking,
Alan Turning
up at the park,
cracking the code
of sex.
An apple sliced with cyanide
given for the nation's pride
eaten as an aside
to the problem
of intelligence.
We stand on the shingle beach, wait,
keep fast with the limpets,
hold for the turning tide
to flood back in.
© Matthew Williams
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Nine Hours in Ahmedabad
How loud the sound that swallows up the boiling street in Ahmedabad;
here the hundred-thousand, howling-handed pulses beat in Ahmedabad.
Raheem and Ram once shared their prayers before the burning train;
now it's Jai Shri Ram, the chant that silences the feet in Ahmedabad.
The songs of holy wars are chords all lit without refrain;
the songs that Gandhi handed out with bread to eat in Ahmedabad.
And as Modi fiddles in the diwan of his dreams of pain,
the pall of Naroda-Patia falls across the elite in Ahmedabad.
A Pata hand rips out an unborn and casts it with the slain;
each petrol flame snuffs out a sacrifice complete in Ahmedabad.
A god carves bindi on a bibi like a mark of Cain;
while at Paldi bridge, Kabbadi Market overheats in Ahmedabad.
The shrieks, the sobs for death; the rapes; the death; are burning rain
that fires the frantic parishad to the drumbeat in Ahmedabad.
Who risked the steel and heaps of weeping flesh which clemmed the drain?
With his sons he went to save the people of his street in Ahmedabad.
With the fall of night the fires raged on in temples to the strain
of songs of halting love, yet love lives on, in retreat, in Ahmedabad.
© Nigel Holt
(Nine Hours in Ahmedabad: Editor's Choice of Freda Edis,'Though the poem
seems uncompromising in theme and rhythm at the beginning, the continuity
of random acts of humanity and hope are explored in its closing stanzas. The classical form is cleverly turned to an insistent beat which supports the strong initial stanzas before reverting to a more lyrical language which better fits the final humane statements.')
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the keep: a mirror form
the keep,
a curved stone tooth,
juts below a scumbled sweep
of oyster-grey and pearly blue.
Thunder shakes the eastern view
and wakes old lions from sleep.
In war, all truth
lies deep.
© M.A.Griffiths
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Still Howling - the next Generation
dedicated to Alan Ginsberg
I saw the not particularly bright minds of my generation
driven to obscurity
red brick Mickey Mouse degrees promised us
interesting world changing careers
but all we got were mortgages
interest rising
Thrust expectantly from the womb of a post-war
black and white, still rationed, once great nation
that shared its greatness if you were born from the right stock
but we were not
From one room to baby boom, suburbia,
Bevin's babies with national reassurance
blue collars stained white by the new blue whiteness
of copy-writers' lies
and the white heat of technology,
gadgets in the ideal home
for the nuclear family
Our optimism shattered by Cuban missiles
and a man on the grassy knoll
While bombs rained down from LBJ mothers running
screaming napalmed Buddhist monk barbecue
Charlie's brains blown out
for the camera boil in the bag convenience
TV tea time bland horrors daily
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh and Che washed up
in a Bolivian bath house
while Mao Tse Tung said - change must come
through the barrel of a gun
Terence Conran made shopping fun
as our habitat degraded
buy now, pay later, must have, have not
pot bellied, fly blown black babies starved
still - we had the Beatles
Yeah, yeah, yeah
born with plastic spoons in our mouths
substitute fabric for the modern world
moulded multi-coloured
scream in your grave Henry Ford
any colour as long as it's black can sit in the back
too much it's a magic bus
They taught us Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen
but not Ken Kesey, too merry a prankster he
for their sensibilities incensed by DH Lawrence.
And Yes, our servants could have read it
if we had them, but we didn't
We laughed at such absurdities
but raged when they locked up Mick and Keef
who would break a butterfly on a wheel?
The News of the World with no news
but vicars and tarts, prurient
where Oz never was
yet still they slammed it, the small minded
blinded Mary Shitehouses
of this scandalized post Profumo island
where the pavements of Grosvenor Square
were splattered with teenage blood
where Queer was a dirty word
where a young milk snatcher rubbed her dry cunt
dreaming of Maynard Keynes and the power
she would one day wield
in Middle England
where a nouveau-riche phoney middle class
sold votes for loadsa money and the right to buy
their council hovels
where joy riders ripped up the night
and raved ecstatically until the Public Order Act
repossessed the right to dance
and the building society foreclosed
until WE had had enough
of things never getting better
and got THEM out
only to find we'd swapped the same old thing
for a brand new drag
as the 'special relationship' dragged us into
yet another pointless war
while headmasters fake results for pupils
playing Nintendo in class
where English is reduced to CU L8R
tapped out between votes for this week's pop stars
and I'm Still Howling
at wounds festering under a Karma Suture
© Mick Moss
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'Guernica' by Picasso
Even after all these years, the women are still screaming,
fingers transmuted into sausages or sardines
that can't stop the babies from falling.
Body parts mix with those of bull and stallion:
eyes flared, hooves, horns, teeth, faces ripped in two.
The bellows of animals become human.
© Christopher T.George
('Guernica' by Picasso: Editor's Choice of Seshadri Veeraraghavan; ' The
splendid descriptions bring the painting to life in spectacular detail for
me. Considering the reasons behind the painting of Guernica, this poem is
particularly timely.'.)
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Invita Minerva
Outside
sky is grey.
Slumped on a table,
a boy picks his nose
before a box of cereal.
I calculate
that when rain drools
down the glassed window,
my little brother
will fatten himself
on milk and dried grains.
Then I can
invoke the goddess
to feed on young Abel
enough to defecate
inspiration into a bowl.
I do look forward to
swimming in pre-warmed mud,
taste slick words
on my lips again,
scrawl long-order
poetry on white walls.
Boy quits
breakfast table in favour
of television couch,
artificial lightning
and salted greens of the nose.
On the table,
a blue-bottle fly settles
on the sealed box.
Outside
sky remains grey.
© Arlene Ang
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The Sun Always Wins
Today he's decided to slant through the trees
and create venetian blinds on brown canvas.
Traces remain of his anger from last year:
cracked earth, skeletal branches of a eucalyptus
that beg the skies for succor.
The sprinkler creates moving rainbows, bobbing
prisms suspended between excited droplets of water
and a quiet, wizened ground. He watches over for nine hours
that day, growing strong, growing weak; in two months
his hunger will rekindle, he'll take away what he gives today.
© Seshadri Veeraraghavan
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Knock Knock
In heaven's Writers' Bar the booze is free -
Herrick's preoccupied with holy hops
and Pushkin's pulled the barman on his knee
while Yeats is plastered, supping up the slops.
He's done with scribbling, just as Donne's done too -
they've had a bellyful of rhyme and verse.
Fitzgerald says the whole thing's deja vu
but Willie reckons it was all a curse.
The Metaphysicals are in the john -
a Welshman with DTs, stuck in the bowl.
Sir Philip's starkers (really - nothing on)
fixating by the mirror - bless my soul!
But Jonson's bored - he's sick and tired of men...
Knock, knock - an angel - 'Hi, I'm Aphra, Ben...'
© Christina Fletcher
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Author's contact details:
Arlene Ang... ....................... aumelesi@libero.it
David Anthony.................... http://www.davidgwilymanthony.co.uk/
Karen Doherty ............. karendoherty80@hotmail.com
Christopher T.George........ editorcg@yahoo.com
Peter G. Gilchrist -............ . http://www.pgilchrist.ca
Nigel Holt ........................... nigel_holt@yahoo.com
Sandy McKinney............ mckinney3@earthlink.net
Mick Moss....................... ....kmo7@btinternet.com
Seshadri Veeraraghavan sveerara22@hotmail.com
Alan Wickes .............. ........ Alan.Wickes@ekno.com
Matthew Williams............... newt@clara,co.uk
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Compiling Editor: M.A. Griffiths
Associate Editors: Freda Edis and Seshadri Veeraraghavan. With special thanks to Charles Cornner (ccornner@mindspring.com) for stepping in to judge the editors' submissions.)
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