“Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams, healing can begin.” Danielle Bernock, Emerging with Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, and the Love That Heals
they dwelt in houses of silence
chewed through grudging fences
swam in oceans of best intentions
tried to find one another on the
shores of their fears and confusions,
alienation was their warrior shield
their lives were lived in a boxing ring
the fist in the glove was a malignancy
and the mom passed her days sparring,
she thought the winner would be the
woman who was pretty and hushed
she saw herself as a victim,
she exhausted her own mother’s charity
when she turned her silence on kinfolk
there was no one else she could
beat upon or say her grief to or even
show her bruises and lacerations ~
except for that wee child of silence, useless in matters of such magnitude
over the woman’s left shoulder
your breath hummed
a background dirge…
for the echo of her lonely feet
plodding the snow-covered streets
to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,
dripping shame with her broken water
while you wed another in the Byzantine manner
No used-goods for you though you were the user
The child born saw the mote in your eye
growing like Pinocchio’s nose
when, as kin to a secret vice,
you kept her in your dresser drawer
to be pulled out on a whim and a whisper Is anyone looking?
We’ve all seen it and perhaps everyone experiences and passes it on to one extent or another: if not physical abuse, then emotional, or some combination of the two, perhaps with the added whammy of abandonment. My mother’s default parenting position was silence. My father’s default parenting position was absence. Both are expressions of abandonment.
I’d never publish these poems were my parents alive. Parents are, after all, in process. They don’t come to parenting in full blossom. They have their own painful holes to fill and histories of which we will never be fully cognizant. I know my parents were wounded soldiers. It’s very likely yours were too. Such things are a matter of degree and it’s good to write about them to help raise the general consciousness, to build understanding, and to clear the trauma, our own and perhaps that of others if the writings are shared. So write about parenting or being parented and the complexity and the issues you’ve experienced or observed.
Share your poem/s on theme or a link to it/them in the comments section below.
All poems on theme will be published next Tuesday. Please do NOT email your poem to me or leave it on Facebook. If you do it’s likely I’ll miss it or not see it in time.
IF this is your first time joining us for The Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt, please send a brief bio and photo to me at thepoetbyday@gmail.com to introduce yourself to the community … and to me :-). These will be partnered with your poem/s on first publication.
PLEASE send the bio ONLY if you are with us on this for the first time AND only if you have posted a poem (or a link to one of yours) on theme in the comments section below.
Deadline: Monday, September 17 by 8 p.m. Pacific.
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. This is a discerning nonjudgemental place to connect.
Poet and writer, I was once columnist and associate editor of a regional employment publication. Currently I run this site, The Poet by Day, an information hub for poets and writers. I am the managing editor of The BeZine published by The Bardo Group Beguines (originally The Bardo Group), a virtual arts collective I founded. I am a weekly contributor to Beguine Again, a site showcasing spiritual writers.
My work is featured in a variety of publications and on sites, including: Levure littéraure, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature,Compass Rose, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, Second Light, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta / Phor(e) /Play, and California Woman.
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
“If life is not a celebration, why remember it ? If life — mine or that of my fellow man — is not an offering to the other, what are we doing on this earth?” Open Heart, Elie Wiesel
Thanks and a warm welcome to Jim Wardell, new to The Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt. Thanks to Gary W. Bowers, bogpan (Bozhidar Pangelov), Tamam Tracy Moncur, Sonja Benskin Mesher, Carol Mikoda and Susan St. Pierre. Special thanks to Susan and Bozhidar for sharing illustrations.
Read. Enjoy. Be inspired. And do join us for the next Wednesday Writing Prompt. All are encouraged to participate: beginning, emerging, or pro poets.
Quietus
On this dew soaked morning
gentle sunlight streams between
the dampened boughs of an awakened day.
I think of you and of me
and of the many misted mornings
we laughed and whispered
until we had to part for a time.
Afternoon and evening sped by
but morning always lingered.
We moved at the pace of sleep
slow and without effort
to prepare the day for ourselves
while hustle and bustle and rush and whim
scurried and fretted about us.
Hidden smiles and secret plots contrived in haste
deals brokered in the light of the rising sun
conspiracies bound in blood and love
carried us through the day apart
the time of our unknowing.
Always when evening came
separated paths joined once more
promises of morning were fulfilled
in the drifting dusk.
As this morning of our lives lingers
I sit share laugh cry
etch upon my heart this memory
of hidden smiles and secret plots.
We have not changed
You and I remain bound in blood and love
we have not changed.
Morning ends as it always does
you on your path and I on mine
frightened to be alone.
We now step into the time of our unknowing
confident that when evening falls
the other will await.
JAMES WARDELL, a native of Kentucky, is a musician and educator who has made his home in the mountains of southwest Virginia. He plays, writes, teaches and learns at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. Some days he works.
Previous publications include Jimson Weed Journal, Tipton Poetry Review, Goliath, Snakeskin Magazine, Bitterzoet Magazineand Press, and Voices Literary Journal.
tsftpot
teapots and tempests
some crafted some not
tosspots and destinies
often are wrought
if you behold
you’re beholden eh wot
but
cast
away rules
and then blossom some more
doorways to wayfaring ferret
glissandos
chandelier faceting
billboardish asseting
heat-rubbled smoke
the rising signal
A hell it made
not merely of manglecrush forms
but of the simmering magma
of hatred
the bombs we make we
lob into crowds
and they unmake
and we know it is wrong
but it is again a signal
that we are lost
but some of us love
some see seedlings
and keep them for spring
and some beyond us
save all endeavor
a tempest is not endeavor
a teapot is endeavor
thought is endeavor
some thought is divine
and tsftpot
stands for
the society
for the preservation
of thought
oral tradition
was its larva
movable type its nymph
and eons hence
its adult form
will be the very texture
of reality
stars do not die
they become something else
as will you
as will i
How do I look at my own demise?
It’s not a surprise because the one thing we all know
Is that one day we too shall die
We will pass from this plane into eternity.
At 73 many people close to me have made
This transition in creation to another place in space.
Twice in my dreams two of my loved ones have appeared
at different times in my life
To free me from fear and doubt
First my grandmother and then years later my son
Each came during a time of hurt
Each came during a time of spiritual pain
Each came during a time of emotional distress
My grandmother and my son
They made that journey from the world beyond
to give me a supernatural hug
A magical hug
A mystical hug
A hug that enveloped me in God’s love
A hug of reassurance strengthening my mind
And my endurance to always walk in faith
Until my ultimate release into peace comes.
along the rivers Maritsa floats the cut head
of Orpheus
– „no,“ he had told the Maenad,
but they did not understand
in this land only in this land
„yes“ is for a return
the legend tells you that in the autumn you can hear
the tender sounds of the Lira, for everything is back –
Eurydice
now
only on the sounds and on the drops of blood
you can find me
To be remembered…
Leave footprints in the
Fresh sand of youthful wonder,
And seek wisdom found in
Questions you can’t answer .
Make memories on the
Pristine palette of a baby,
And explore forever with an
Eye on being present.
Eternity belongs to those
<Who stand out in a child’s life>
Etched in time and tradition,
You’ll be remembered.
Sonja Benskin Mesher, RCA paintings (This is her Facebook page, so you can connect with her there as well as view photographs of her colorful paintings.)
The first postcard from hell said, “Don’t you get sick of being honest all the time? Everyone is always checking and making sure. Why not give them something to surprise them?” So I allowed jewels to fall from my mouth along with my impeccable word and flowers and once in a while bolts and washers with no nuts. Everyone was continually surprised.
The second postcard from hell told me I could relax, slough off my usual care and meaningful intention. “It’s so hard when you’re always trying to do your best, isn’t it? You deserve a break!” So I collected up a million of my favorite human beings and tooks us all to a resort where we relaxed in hammocks and beach chairs. All of our beverages included blossoms and little umbrellas. We napped.
The third postcard from hell was direct but a bit strained: “Some of these people? The ones with you at the resort? They look funny or smell funny or eat weird foods or speak funny languages! They don’t match you. Who knows who is lurking in there?” So I walked among those million people, talking, laughing, singing with them, sharing meals, until we all found something in common, like the color of our socks.
The million human beings had to go back to schools, jobs, homes, so I read the fourth postcard from hell all alone sitting in a broken beach chair. “Ha! They left you! Loser! They don’t like you! Go eat worms!” So I invented a machine to rearrange the grains of sand on the beach to send messages to the stars. The message I sent was:
L O V E
Poet and writer, I was once columnist and associate editor of a regional employment publication. Currently I run this site, The Poet by Day, an information hub for poets and writers. I am the managing editor of The BeZine published by The Bardo Group Beguines (originally The Bardo Group), a virtual arts collective I founded. I am a weekly contributor to Beguine Again, a site showcasing spiritual writers.
My work is featured in a variety of publications and on sites, including: Levure littéraure, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature,Compass Rose, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, Second Light, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta / Phor(e) /Play, and California Woman.
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
“These verses believe; they love; they hope; that is all.” Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works
The house that does not exist
(Ah, Shiraz, the Nightingales sing
at night)
nothing but the whole
hope exists
(do not sell carpets with
patterns, Fatima).
There the river flows into
River. As a dream in
dreams
(he speaks nothing of sorrow
already, you with a veil ).
They quietly sing,
sing without being heard,
without having them.
Quietly, they quietly squeeze
the fingers of my hands
The poem above was Bozhidar Pangelov’s (a.k.a. bopan) response to my short story, The Damask Rose Garden, a fairytale meant to bring attention to the lives of refugees escaping areas of violent conflict.
I’m always held breathless by the lyric beauty of Bozhidar’s poems. English is not his first language, so he’s the more impressive for that.
According to one reviewer, he “has been present among contemporary Bulgarian poets for some time, a long time. He is a poet who manages to disorder the order of the usual in order to breach a material world for a more human world of ideas and feelings. Using dramatic tensions within the poetic and semantic, Pangelov’s spare yet verdant imagery evokes the sound of bamboo sticks and Zen Buddhist monks, poem after poem.”
Writer and poet Palmi Ranchev says, ‘Pangelov will enrich the palette of world poetry with new colors and nuances.’
Of what I’ve read to date of Bozhidar’s work I’d have to agree with these analyses. However spare his poems are, they are never stark. They are never rigid. There’s movement, color, feeling. The sharp edges of pain are all the more striking juxtaposed against the subtleties of his style. Lovely!
“There the river flows into
River. As a dream in
dreams”
Visit Bozhidar’s blog. He often shares poems there that he has written in English and – sometimes – we are fortunate to have Bozhidar participate in Wednesday Writing Prompt.
Poet and writer, I was once columnist and associate editor of a regional employment publication. Currently I run this site, The Poet by Day, an information hub for poets and writers. I am the managing editor of The BeZine published by The Bardo Group Beguines (originally The Bardo Group), a virtual arts collective I founded. I am a weekly contributor to Beguine Again, a site showcasing spiritual writers.
My work is featured in a variety of publications and on sites, including: Levure littéraure, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature,Compass Rose, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, Second Light, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta / Phor(e) /Play, and California Woman.
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
“I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.” Jorge Luis Borges in Boast of quietness
I am pleased and honored to introduce DEBASIS MUKHOPADHYAY (between ink and inkblot) here today, though I suspect there are many who already know his work.
Debasis isthe author of the chapbook “kyrie eleison or all robins taken out of context” (Finishing Line Press, 2017). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals & anthologies, including Posit, Words Dance, The Curly Mind (UK), Erbacce (UK), Strange Poetry (UK), Yellow Chair Review, I Am Not A Silent Poet (UK), The New Verse News, Rat’s Ass Review :Love & Ensuing Madness, Writers Against Prejudice (UK), Manneqüin.Haüs, Algebra of Owls (UK), The Skinny Poetry Journal, Of/With : Journal of Immanent Renditions, Anapest Journal, Communicators League (Nigeria), No Tribal Dance (UK), Quatrain.Fish, Duane’s Poe Tree, Walking Is Still Honest, Leaving My Shadow : A Tribute to Anna Akhmatova, Thirteen Myna Birds, Whale Road Review, The Apache Poetry Blog (Sweden), Scarlet Leaf Review, Silver Birch Press, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Foliate Oak, Eunoia Review, Revolution John, Fragments of Chiaroscuro, Down in the Dirt, With Painted Words (UK), The Wagon Magazine, Snapping Twig, Words Surfacing, Praxis, Apple Fruits of an Old Oak,and Voice of Monarch Butterflies. His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net.
He was born in India & spent many years of his life in Kolkata (Calcutta), where he began writing poems. A fair number of poems in pora gach o megh oré, his debut collection of poetry in Bengali (Art Publishing, 2005), date back to this time of his life in India. Debasis holds a PhD in literary studies from Université Laval, Québec, Canada. His doctoral thesis constitutes an instance of multidisciplinary approach, exploring the linkage between two broad themes of social epistemology : travel and spatiality. The work is focused on the analysis of the Occidental subjectivity’s search for self and its perception of spatiality through Third World travel. The thesis can be found here :
Debases now lives in Montreal with his wife and his son. When his hand turns poetry, he just walks up to Monnet’s poppy field against the wall & bends down to swaying flowers thinking of the words gone in blood. When he is not writing, his best inspiration turns out to be what Xu Schen wrote (58 CE ̶ ca. 147 CE) : “Ink, whose semantic component is ‘earth‘, is black.”
Connect with Debasis at debmukhop@yahoo.ca or @dbasis_m on Twitter.
India journal
New Delhi : to get more than the dawn
a red tulle body flaring up.
the mosquito net
white & whooshing at times
& this foundry of wings of mosquitoes
now ready for the spilled over blood.
here sun.
somewhere birds crack the sky
dawn what I fear has never been so late
kid’s head buried in my chest.
do I know
what’s to cry like a bleating sheep
broken lines unfurls K’s poems in my thoughts
obliterating the bleeding sun dissolving into now a distant hum
very soon a cacophonous mix
what’s K to make of it in his poems
I think of the young poet of Kolkata.
somewhere the oblique overpasses ask for boundless love
slogging through memories
snuffing out the first azan of the day & the litanies of the stray dogs
kid’s skull rolls on my chest
his eyes waking to dawn
what’s that poet to make of it
kid’s eyes etched on his notebook page
which is perhaps whiter than the mosquito net now emptied like times
when I used to live in this land
& never had to step inside.
tomorrow I would be again in Kolkata
brushing dust from a palimpsest
today I would just pass the day
Kipling Sahib gazing hatefully on New Delhi
the breeze stirring a tattered liana of madhabilata
high up among the colonial columns
dust on dust
to creep through
Kolkata : the waterboarding
K’s poems are now bowing lower than this plane
bleeding off its speed
the cinnamon colored brick kilns look plastered by a green
that feels so unwanted in a blood brick telecast on BBC
years of rising smoke have gnawed the moulded bricks but the green
green green so green that I turn to Lorca’s ballad
& cry like a fool unheeded
for the girl of bitterness
until the touchdown when I hear K whispering
I leave you alone for the eve
now you would be too blind to trust my poems
begin me only when you end your quick days & nights in Kolkata
when you are left again to think that
you are still stuck like an albino bone in its craw made of loose scoria
these long years
these long years
were not so imminent in my mother’s dream of me becoming a Caliph one fine day
seven thousand miles away.
these long years were not a life book that rustles inside memories dying in the throat.
for a crown of light
she has been counting a thousand & one nights.
every morning
kneeling to the earth she tries to find me again amongst the sprouts.
ha the world has to pass
mutters my father
sparrows cluster in the back of his throat.
& here we are home, kid
hello hello
I say opening the gates of shadows of the crows
aloft & aground.
the long-spiked coconut tree leaves dance across K’s sun-blazed notebook page
capturing kid’s fingers making a ghost with a lump of earth
mine tearing the sword-shaped leaves only to reminisce all afternoon
upon a palm frond hat from my schooldays
maybe everything might have been…
everything like your face in my hands
dark eyes glistening in the folds
like malaria now & then
those love vomit & rum stained clothes moving under the coal iron in the neighborhood
coming back laundered the following afternoon
only to redeem truth
& to rehearse a hundred summers of solitude…
to think I’m going to see you again tonight
a conjurer had his time
on earth this is the place
where I can sing I am your man
a place that has no place in time
or maybe it’s always just half passed
like this late afternoon sun on water in K’s notebook page
like this fish put out to crawl through a hologram
never failing kid
fish eyes always give him thrills
processions pass
the foreheads of the deceased pressed against the cobwebbed evening
feel the reference point that had rattled so hard in life
now the queue in the burning ghats
souls reassured once oxidized flake after flake
& then beguiled by the creeping waters.
placid slumbers the Ganges like the night at the bottom of the root
this is the country
where cicadas chase every evening the crackling stars of each cast & class.
my friend sings taking my breath away
the dead to become boats floating downward the rim of the dark skies
drifting anew in the city alleys
in search of hearts that had no refuge from any versions of hearts.
processions pass
shouts drawling a tribute to dawn
poppy red flags
a street full of scars
you ask me how I feel now with my eyes peeled
K’s poems stopped to bleed into the evening
so wet & claiming
now again mouth into mouth
we keep frisking & gamboling round the night
we come & coming on
like a hemorrhage
like Fidel Castro floating belly up dying of his own death
O Sultan mine, I just read your poem Notice to recast where looking on your flowerpot sky you feel the smudge of my absence on your skin. You hear the train behind the fence, you hear the rain in the kitchen and you are reminded of the necessity of touch. Several lines down you say, “I heard it and I heard it again. A song that stayed unopened in my throat.” Honestly, I am never very sure how your poetry works on me. You could hear everything : the rainstorms behind the kites, the pantomime in the trammels, the trampoline behind the rampages, the songbirds in the pantechnicons… everything across your roughcast of solitude. And everything reminds you of everything, from windpipe sonata to wingspan of a pansy. I wish I could understand how you napalm me while I sleep. As if just like my body my mind also can’t shake you and always awaiting you in bed unopened. True that poetry never sucks and the blancmange sloughing in the overdone ruts between my thighs. Sultan dear one, my husband, my boyfriend, my needleman of tournament, my winger right to left, my slaloming tramline behind my fertility, my panegyric of fucking superintendent, why can’t I understand your poems? Or why can’t I just write a poem that is what when my handgun trades the simile of blankness? But that won’t make it all right. No point in blitzkrieging to unbalance the brain. Let’s think about honeyed baklavas and listen to balalaikas. If you are my bloody bastard, I remain your bloodied bitch.
Poet and writer, I was once columnist and associate editor of a regional employment publication. Currently I run this site, The Poet by Day, an information hub for poets and writers. I am the managing editor of The BeZine published by The Bardo Group Beguines (originally The Bardo Group), a virtual arts collective I founded. I am a weekly contributor to Beguine Again, a site showcasing spiritual writers.
My work is featured in a variety of publications and on sites, including: Levure littéraure, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature,Compass Rose, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, Second Light, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta / Phor(e) /Play, and California Woman.
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 