“Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.” Aberjhani,Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Memory splinters … Splinters linger on
Orphaned … Amputated … Alien
Earlier hellbent … Later bent
Like a banana
Like a tasty adventure
Up … Behind … To infinity and beyond
Like the neighbour who
Spotting the Buddha in the back garden asks
“What’s wit’ monk?”
Like a glance above wondering
In this boundless blossoming heaven
“What’s wit’ bird?”
What’s wit’ Bird?
Variations on a theme
Came a long long way to end up here
To land up here wondering
“What’s wit’ Miles
What’s wit’ all these miles an’ miles?”
BEN NAGA (Ben Naga / Gifts from the Musey Lady and Me. “Laissez-moi vous recanter ma vraie histoire) has lived in England all his life, apart from brief periods in France, India and Scotland. Music is probably his greatest love, with England’s Lake District not far behind. He has privately published “Northern Limericks” and “September Shadormas” and is working on two other collections. His poems have been published in several online magazines.
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
“Jazz, like left-wing politics and ‘the common man’, was a cause.” Martin T. Williams, King Oliver
Jazz is
A way in to a way out
Way up down deep inside
An audio odyssey
A jet stream blowing in from Ghana
Belted out in Congo square
Jazz is a round trip ticket
Round the world of Africa and Africa touched
Jazz is
New Orleans second line
Voodoo queen looking so fine
Jazz is a diva’s honey croon
Looking for love, spell of full moon
Jazz is a man down and out in Chicago
Jamming entranced beyond his sorrow
Jazz is a child with a sense complex
A feel for a world beyond that given
Jazz is Havana throwing off heat
Blaze of a trumpet, bodies in beat
Jazz is a Jew on a clarinet
No hold back, he lets it rip
Jazz is a gypsy heeding the call
To new found sounds in his finger tips
Jazz is in duo with Mozart and Bach
A spoon in tune with Cafe Vienna
Jazz is a niche on a back-street in Paris
Rendezvous lovers, loners and poets.
Jazz doesn’t know solitary confinement
Be big band, be bop, slow motion shuffle
Be ballad, be blue.
Lay back and be cool
Come in and go out
Each time unique
Like the last time
Jazz is
A cargo the trade winds sail
To the door of the depot of the lost be found
To ring your ears and throb your heart
Stormy Monday turning sunny
Feel the blues depart
Jazz is
A riff that walks me home
Is a bass line I climb to the top of the stairs
Is the hand holding mine when nobody cares
Jazz softly whispers – I know how you feel
Jazz is
Chump change and scratch
Is chewing through the gristle
To suck on the bone
Jazz is a holler, a cat call, a hymn
Dollar down, dollar a month
Why I’m so broke I can’t pay attention
Jazz is red wine, white wine, up in smoke
Raising caine, strung on dope
Jazz is singing Lush Life in the shower
Jazz is
An instrument of fingers and tongues
A vessel of muscle and breath
Body and mind in sync with itself
Jazz time tics free off the clock
A serpentine march out of formation
Jazz can leap to the end of the line
Makes every stop along the block
Jazz goes uptown to get down
Calls night time the right time
And the right time is now
Jazz is
A teller of history, a history maker
Jazz be love oh so tender
Off the chart form the heart
Jazz is memory come with forgiveness
Jazz is a bitch
She´s the mother load
Jazz is
Sweet smells of incense, of jasmine, of hormones
Deep note moans, high pitch groans, twists and turns
Sharps that burn, flats that howl
Guitar licks that sparkle
Drum beats driven off the four corner map
And the beat goes on and the beat goes on
Through the Rio night, the Harlem dawn
Jazz is
A gas, a liquid
A solid mass of substance
A floating island in the center
Of the infinite sea
So vast is jazz, so deep and wide
How the middle passage
Placed us side by side
Jazz is
A family, a family of man
Whose taproot is the music of the Af-ri-can
Poly-rhythmic pollination from the talking drum
Graced in gospel, rolls of rag time
Tears and laughter of the blues
The gifts of many makers
Freely given me, freely given you
Jazz is
A way in to a way out
Way up down deep inside
A way to, a path through
The mindless rubble,
The poison propaganda
Lies of the masters
The illusion castors
Now cross you over to another side
No papers, no passports, no human claims denied
No charges pressed, no back-seat guests
Welcome to a dynasty of open borders
Jazz is
A free country
MOE SEAGER (Moe Seager- Paris Calling) is a poet and jazz & blues vocalist who sings his poems on stages in Paris, New York and elsewhere and has recorded 2 jazz-poetry c.d.s. Seager founded and hosts Angora Poets (Paris) World Caffé, 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Paris and is one of the coordinators for le Fédération des Poètes paris. He has 5 collections of poetry and currently publishes published with Onslaught press, Oxford, U.K. Other poetry collections are issued from the French Ministry of Culture – Dream Bearers,1990. One World, Cairo Press – in Arabic translation, 2004. We Want Everything in French translation, les Temps des Cirises, Paris, 1994. Perhaps, La Maison de la Poesie, Grenoble, France, 2006. Fishermen and Pool Sharks Busking editions, London, 1992. Additionally Seager won a Golden Quill Award (USA) for investigative journalism, 1989 and received an International Human Rights award from the Zepp foundation, 1990. He teaches writing in Paris.
Your donation HERE helps to fund the ongoing mission of The Poet by Day in support of poets and writers, freedom of artistic expression, and human rights.
Poetry rocks the world!
FEEL THE BERN
For Peace, Sustainability, Social Justice
Maintain the movement.
“Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Bernie Sanders
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
“Anything is better than lies and deceit!” Leo Tolstoy,Anna Karenina
This is not an epic tale in dactylic hexameter
Such as Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey;
No kidnap of Helen or destruction of Troy,
Nor a lover’s star-crossed tragedy,
But an Ohio story, not as unique
As you might well imagine:
My father aspired to escape his parents
And their protective quarantine,
To write stories for the radio,
And met a beautiful poetess
With the soul of a whippoorwill
And a heart born in the wilderness.
She could poem all day
And poem all night,
She could poem you a poem
Till the dawn’s first light.
She could rhyme you by the river,
She could rhyme you in the wood,
She could rhyme you in the field
Where the scarecrow stood.
She could mete out any meter
Like galloping horses on a plain,
Dactylic or iambic
Till you went insane.
He put a ladder to her window
And they ran away together
To a justice of the peace in ol’ Kentuck
Too young to know any better
And got married, till death did them part.
O how we loved them both,
My little sis and I,
Their happily-ever-after troth.
But I’m getting ahead of my story –
I was born respectably later
And my sister sometime after that
Not knowing of the traitor.
Mama suckled me on poetry
Instead of mothers’ milk.
Maybe that’s why I grew up skinny
With a voice as soft as silk.
Dad told me stories sitting on his lap
O how he could spin yarn,
He could tell me stories
That would burn down an old barn
And Mama burned his face with kisses
After we were put to sleep
Dreaming dreams with safety nets,
Little souls deposited in God’s keep.
If only our stories had continued so
We would have been content,
But that was not what was to be
And nothing we could prevent.
Maybe Dad grew jealous of her poetry
Or his parents threatened him
That if he didn’t break it off,
His fortune would be slim.
One night she was loved and cherished,
The next night she was betrayed.
Her fragile soul was broken
When she saw their vows unmade.
I’m sure they didn’t mean to hurt us,
We were just collateral damage,
Thinking we had somehow caused it
And felt like abandoned baggage.
How could she stop being Mama?
Things like that couldn’t be,
Such was inconceivable
To a seven-year-old and one who’s only three.
We were raised by housekeepers
For the next two years,
Grandma made sure they were ugly as sin
To assure there were no affairs.
I remember Missus Weber
Told me of the Rapture at the end of days
And scared the bejesus out of me
With the world being set ablaze.
Then Dad brought home another Mom.
They told us Mama never loved us,
That she’d take a pancake turner to me
If something made her fuss.
The new Mom, that’s what I was to call her,
Not stepmom; that she wouldn’t stand for,
She promised she would love us
Better’n we’d been loved before.
Years later I grew to understand that
Love meant something else to her
Than what we had understood:
Cooking meals and pots were stirred,
Making sure we brushed our teeth and
Washing behind our ears.
No poetry would feed our souls,
No one would wipe our tears,
The ten commandments would have to do for us,
We pretended that was love
And laid our dreams to rest
In the starry night above.
One day Mama married another man,
They moved to Panama
And adopted two new infants
But a careless driver killed Mama.
My little sis and I grew up and moved away
To escape from our ordeal,
Sis went to live in Connecticut
And I moved to Israel.
We’d keep alive our memories
Of evidence of Mama’s love.
Sis was always certain of it
But I had doubts thereof.
What with all the fictions I’d been told,
What memories could I believe?
I continued to play the son
But myself I couldn’t deceive.
Dad passed away; it’s been ten years now.
Soon after that, Mom became demented.
Her brain was strip-mined by disease
And claims that she had married Dad were soon rejected.
With all the fictions gone, all that was left was truth:
That sis and I were Mama’s kids, Mom had to agree.
A few years ago, the infant girl Mama had adopted
Sent us Mama’s book of poetry,
Casting away my many doubts
And resurrecting love from Lazarus’ cave.
Mom passed away some months ago,
Buried next to Dad, grave to grave.
Maybe they’ll warm each other’s bones
On the long train-ride to eternity
Pointing out the windows with bony fingers
At stars and galaxies flying by.
February 16, 2020 (c) Mike Stone 2020
MIKE STONE (Uncollected Works) is a regular participant in The Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt. We are always delighted with the opportunity to read and share his work. Mike was born in Columbus Ohio, USA, in 1947 and was graduated from Ohio State University with a BA in Psychology. He served in both the US Army and the Israeli Defense Forces. He’s been writing poetry since he was a student at OSU and supports his writing habit by working as a computer networking security consultant. He moved to Israel in 1978 and lives in Raanana. He is married and has three sons and seven grandchildren. Mike’s Amazon Page is HERE. His work is recommended without reservation.
Your donation HERE helps to fund the ongoing mission of The Poet by Day in support of poets and writers, freedom of artistic expression, and human rights.
Poetry rocks the world!
FEEL THE BERN
For Peace, Sustainability, Social Justice
Maintain the movement.
“Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Bernie Sanders
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
“For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Old” is not a pejorative,
We’re ripe not rotten
We’re flexible not fossilized,
We started out with typewriters,
Slide rules and comptometers,
Moved on to hand-held calculators
And word processing, transitioning
In time to sophisticated software, to
Wi-fi and laptops, and from slow mail
To social networking and Zoom
We hail from good years for people,
A crop of fine folk with a refined sense
of conscience, who knock on the doors
Of those who are asleep, those who
Lack scruples perhaps by nurture, by bent
Or sheer ignorance, our heroes are the
Ninety-nine percent who persist despite
Systemic inequalities, the unsung ones
We know what’s real, what matters,
And where to invest ourselves as the
Sentinels, strong and not silent, given
To sounding alarms, penning our warnings
Or marching in the streets, calling for humane
And accountable transparent governance
We write for op-ed pages, announcing our
Analyses, our perspectives, our distillations
Expressed in language muscular, sometimes
Lyrical, but always honest, prescient, and
Enduring, committed to justice, social and
Environmental, and to leveling the field
We’ve lived through recessions, drought, the
Cold War, we continue on, lively despite the
Unremitting devastation of violent conflicts
Twenty-four named genocides and that
Doomsday Clock (born when we were), now
A few ticks from midnight, still we endure, we
Give back to life as it has been given to us to
Be free, to be vocal, to be conscience, always
Stouthearted as the elders, venerable and
Adaptable, empathy and experience to counter
The follies of stupidity and greed, the king
And queen of the world’s pain and grief
This week we focus on maturity. What is the value-added as years go by? You don’t have to be “old” or “elderly” to respond to this prompt. You have more years under your belt today than every before. So share your thoughts in your poem/s and
please submit your poem/s by pasting them into the comments section and not by sharing a link
please submit poems only, no photos, illustrations, essays, stories, or other prose
PLEASE NOTE:
Poems submitted on theme in the comments section here will be published in next Tuesday’s collection. Poems submitted through email or Facebook will not be published. If you are new to The Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt, be sure to include a link to your website, blog, and/or Amazon page to be published along with your poem. Thank you!
Deadline: Monday, April 20 by 8 pm Pacific Time. If you are unsure when that would be in your time zone, check The Time Zone Converter.
Anyone may take part Wednesday Writing Prompt, no matter the status of your career: novice, emerging or pro. It’s about exercising the poetic muscle, showcasing your work, and getting to know other poets who might be new to you.
You are welcome – encouraged – to share your poems in a language other than English but please accompany it with a translation into English.
Your donation HERE helps to fund the ongoing mission of The Poet by Day in support of poets and writers, freedom of artistic expression, and human rights.
Poetry rocks the world!
FEEL THE BERN
For Peace, Sustainability, Social Justice
Maintain the movement.
“Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Bernie Sanders
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
MIKE STONE (
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 