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ain’t no big thing but it’s something…

From the esteemed Charlie Martin …

slpmartin's avatarRead Between the Minds

i should have been
surprised
but
wasn’t
when
i saw
the brown bag prophet
folding
christmas cards
into
paper airplanes
for
some reason
i
suspected
that would be
representative
of
his attitude
towards
such
a commercial
holiday
what surprised me
was
that
he was singing
christmas carols
as
he folded
so
i was once again
compelled
to
ask
what he was doing
and
why
the prophet said
i’m making
you’re loved cards
to
send over
the wall
of
hate and ignorance
at
the border
they’re
for
all souls
women
men
parents and children
who’ve been
brutalized
raped
then
demonized
for
political reasons
by
the soulless
so
i sat down
with
the prophet
and
began
folding

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AN INTERVIEW WITH POET LINDA E. CHOWN & A SAMPLER OF HER POETRY, PART II

“Poetry refreshes who we are and opens our eyes. It is a second sight on all that we’ve known and done. It penetrates into the invisible world we don’t speak of often and thus can bring us together . . . Poetry is the biggest surprise. It can be our double, echo, enhance our solitudes and tell us how the world is in its mysterious questioning ways. Poetry is a beautiful agent of radicalism in all ways.” Linda E. Chown

In Part I – published yesterday – we served up two of Linda’s poems along with her interview. Today, we share six more of Linda’s poems.  A rare and rich treat for all of us. Thank you, Linda Chown.

POETRY SAMPLER

Uncle Sasha

Dear Sasha. Great Sasha.

You were something very special.

In Moscow’s somber streets, flagellated

and smothered by summer’s heat

and simmering peat bog fires,

you in that outrageously dignified hat

and cane, sickness pushing your bones,

overcame these pains and your daughter’s

shame of you to cut a swathe of finesse.

 

Haunted man who knew prison.

Proud man whose family split and fissured,

warred in the expected Russian Jewish way.

Sick man just three days out of bed.

I’d watch you as patriarch at your end

of all the tables heavy with food and talk.

You barely had the energy to smile sometimes

but you did and lectured about smoking

through all-conveying looks

of emotion when you caught our eyes.

My grandmother grew red from the efforts

of translation.

I babbled in smiles while the women

stroked and rubbed the top of my head.

I felt a volcano in you.

A bursting open in the long gray hair.

 

There.

Two worlds

barely touching in the air:

American blue jeans. Chekhov in English

My Darling Clementine Slavicized on a dusty Victrola.

You’d look at me, the youngest,

wanting and getting something

but all my claims, living in Spain,

the bases, were wanting.

 

My mother’s birthday dinner night

on the 25th floor of Moscow’s swankest hotel

I read the speech you wrote

in English the whole afternoon long

and you stood up speaking in Russian,

saying things that made all the relatives cry,

the agility of Fred Astaire in your body’s texture,

the weight of a visionary in your eye

and I felt an unexperienced pride in family,

the inherited forms.

 

Dead of pneumonia and gone

you fused so much and played so lonesome

light, so honor driven.

Man who knew pogroms and the family’s

leaving you and war and jail and revolution.

Uncle who said my name like I used to

as a little girl, Yinda,Yinda.

I didn’t get enough of you.

© 2018, Linda E. Chown

 

Time of terror

Then, when they killed

the Rosenbergs

for espionage

it was

a time of terror

for my family

eyes peering everywhere

no iPhone, no tv,

rumors turned to fact

in a mystery.

We turned to poetry

which would howl

and music with a whole

lotta shakin goin’ on

which spoke us true

stranded as we were

then in the quicksands

of conformity.

© 2018, Linda E. Chown

 

My Father Had a Dream

He had a dream

 

My father taught me to dream,

to take bigger steps,

his eyes flashed with happy need.

 

At the Lincoln Memorial

whose steps he went up like the tall giant he was with

his bad knees and flappy cane tap tap tap.

 

Us-all at the top like a vision

marble white we saw greatness,

something you can’t measure or fathom,

My father did more than smile:

he beamed, he purred peace and salvation,

like his life’s work had been done

by taking us there.

 

My father such a simple good man

whose light reached beyond

our messy, contentious, lives.

© 2018, Linda E. Chown

 

The Three Kings: Later

It is not that we don’t have

gifts and luxurious robes:

the child robbed the cradle

and his daddy’s not home.

The mare is in the kitchen

and the pope’s just on loan.

The food’s all dried out now

and the whistle doesn’t blow.

The roads have all been polished

and the stars don’t hardly show.

The roots are somewhat buried,

the times a passing slow,

we’re moving into darkness

where the candles rarely glow.

Where the gifts we bring

are seldom seen,

where there is no place to go.

© 2018, Linda E. Chown

     When all fell away from me

Paul Celan

 No Ballroom Dancing

in the stark stare of wide-snow and beggars hiding under the Blue Bridge

in the stark slant of a pilgrim’s walk to the plenty of the poor
silk slack people with their lips plunged in
to the silence of their dark thoughts
of the endless ending cursing and coming in this pen, sneering

when that old woman there with a Red Hat

can not go in without her teeth
she clinks and the pauper people point and peer stare

like pauper people are wont to do


where her Red Hat falls into a pea soup of fear
just a happenstance

 

no ballroom dancing here

© 2018, Linda Chown

 

A day they say to remember

It’s Memorial Day again,

a day they say to remember

those missing in action

remember missing those

long blue sky sailor stripes

remember your father in action

when you were little remember the Marne

and he was in action burning the brush

fire mixed black soot on white

fog drifts remember when you were

little with that big frown

and your mother sat there waiting

pulling down on her red skirt

© 2018, Linda Chown

PART I includes Linda’s interview and two poems HERE.

LInda E. Chown

LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row.  BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. She was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite.

 

ABOUT

Testimonials

Disclosure

Facebook

Twitter

Poet and writer, I was once columnist and associate editor of a regional employment publication. I currently 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. My poetry was recently read by Northern California actor Richard Lingua for Poetry Woodshed, Belfast Community Radio. I was featured in a lengthy interview on the Creative Nexus Radio Show where I was dubbed “Poetry Champion.”

 The BeZine: Waging the Peace, An Interfaith Exploration featuring Fr. Daniel Sormani, Rev. Benjamin Meyers, and the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi among others

“What if our religion was each other. If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth. If forests were our church. If holy water–the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships. If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being.” Ganga White, teacher and exponent of Yoga and founder of White Lotus, a Yoga center and retreat house in Santa Barbara, CA

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton

 

 

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AN INTERVIEW WITH POET LINDA E. CHOWN & A SAMPLER OF HER POETRY, PART 1

“The word “palimpsest” helps to describe the trajectory of my poetry. I grew up as a pianist, practicing five hours a day—Haydn, Mozart, Bach. I played in recitals, long pieces of music I then memorized by heart. Music gave me a sense of both sequence and depth, the combined sense of which has never gone away.” Linda E. Chown

INTERVIEW

JAMIE: I know you’ve been writing poetry for most of your life. How has your writing evolved?

LINDA:  Initially, I wrote poetry feeling and being rather locked in, in the confines of McCarthyism and terrible asthma. These poems were outcries, full of a sense of being an outsider and a non-success. This first stage of my poetry was full of words, big words sometimes, as I was reading a lot of Faulkner at a young age. And I think my poems were without much nominal direction.

A second stage took place as I went to SFSU and got a degree in Creative Writing. Then, I worked intimately with and heard truly great poets who encouraged me to write spare poems, to take off the loud pedals of my poetry piano. I wrote at this time very lean poetry, often of minute changes in the physical world, of bird calls, of colors blending. Sometimes, I also wrote at this time much longer narrative poems presenting moments of meeting, losing or finding. Then, there was a long time I lived and taught in Spain and the poetry stopped for some years, also when I went to get my Ph.D.

Now, in this third phase, I’m writing of the unforgettable, the personally traumatic, of artists in poems I call “intrications,” I find myself able and ready to write of traumas. I think my poetry has become freer and truer. Not now attempting to use strong fine words, but to allow language to match and measure the person I’ve become and am becoming. Also, now I write without immediate readers. That fact alone gives me a kind of freedom I didn’t have before when people “made suggestions.” My poems today draw upon the first period of Faulkneresque big word poems and the spare lean writing of my creative writing days. It’s as though I can now write of anything in a form which has more hybrid, mingling poetic terseness and prose expansiveness within a guiding imagery.

JAMIE:  What were your original inspirations and who or what inspires you now?

First, I was affected by the Holocaust and its pictures of the opening of the Camps. Since I was mostly in bed at that time, I was dramatically changed by seeing this ghastly suffering objectified. Seeing the thinning bodies and expressionless faces. And the stripes in the stillness. Then Albert Camus’s The Stranger brought the world in my focus: I’ll never forget how Meursault wrote at the end, before being hung, about “resigning himself to the benign indifference of the universe.” I did not yet totally understand the kind of social repression Meurseult lived under, its deadening proprieties. I have always resisted imposed proprieties. I was enormously impressed by Camus as a writer and as a fighter, by his argument with Sartre over what was important.

Later at SFSU, I found Jack Gilbert’s writing to be enormously profound and compact. The great Samuel Johnson influenced me to mind myself, to take myself in hand. Linda Gregg’s poetry is beautifully simple and calls to me from everywhere. Her poems are like dense, language-smitten miracles.

Having worked at SFSU’s Poetry Center, I met Robert Creeley and was extremely impressed by his writing and the utopian spirit of Black Mountain College. Now the passionate simplicity of Dylan Thomas, as in “Fern Hill,” slides me into a happiness. I love Gerald Manley Hopkins and John Donne for their enormous reach and power of generalization, all the while growing in images. Poets who can draw together the terrible horror of an actual event and the beauty of a reflective mind captivate me.

Wisława Szymborska’s sense of mystery intrigues me and draws me to her. She said,” Poets, if they are genuine, must … keep repeating ‘I don’t know.’” Now I like a poetry which does not pretend to know but which charges ahead into mystery, into politics, love, parenting, learning with great curiosity and the power of imagery fresh. I don’t like poems of words, of mechanical play.

JAMIE: Why is poetry important?

LINDA: Poetry refreshes who we are and opens our eyes. It is a second sight on all that we’ve known and done. It penetrates into the invisible world we don’t speak of often and thus can bring us together. I heard many of the best poets reading in San Francisco and London. I was lucky enough to hear Voznesensky. Once, he said “metaphor is the motor of form.” Tomas Tranströmer, a genius of internal life and artistic form, wrote: “We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don’t know about.’ Poetry is the biggest surprise. It can be our double, echo, enhance our solitudes and tell us how the world is in its mysterious questioning ways. Poetry is a beautiful agent of radicalism in all ways.

POETRY SAMPLER

Part Payment

To Don

who came to see me reading poetry at the I-Thou Coffee House

and whom I visited later in a VA hospital

 

Compact, with wiry bones, you had the face

of a near criminal except for the sweet doe’s

eyes that would sparkle and lust.

You loved motorcycles and speed and solitude.

A man of incompleted skills, you were my

first lover in a dank drunken room

where I performed with such aplomb

you never knew it was a cherry

we so casually took together.

In the dark, I asked just what it meant

to have a “heart-on” and you laughed,

slapping my behind. Short-lived lovers,

when I had my fill, we drifted off

into others, without our moment of pain

or regret.

 

You grew enthusiasm as old ladies tend

their orchids: printing, Cuba, phoney ID’s

used to acquire tons of new TV sets to sell,

carrying big-time dope across the border

for small-time profits from other men.

These fruits were short-lived, too.

like brushing skin in the dark.

Somehow that does’s sense of honor in your eyes

kept you blinded to the way life juggles

fixed points and unambitious men.

Dead end street blues got you before the police

took both you and the haul

at some barren Texas border town.

 

Too clean to squeal on the commercial

zeals of your well-fed friends up north

one thing led to another as before—

handcuffs to a narrow cell in Leaven-

worth and bells and bars and guards

spare sunlight came about as often as Christmas

and the flowers of your hope withered

in unceasing and unfilled

promises of future parole.

 

You thoroughly marginal man,

to think our skins fit once

and I don’t know how you signed your name

or how you approached your mornings.

How was it, then, to get deathly sick in the glands

alone, to be blasted with mustard gas

and to watch your own physique shrink,

lessen, until your joints weakened

and took you forever to bed, leaving

a gaunt man’s face on a child’s thin bones,

to walk into death at 32 in a military bed

where your listless legs dangled

without reaching the slippers on the floor

and your neck looked chicken-scrawny,

bony and grotesque?

 

Perhaps, hombre, it was your crowning

success, your way to elude all the many

buyers of your exceptional loneliness,

that terrible disintegration proving

you did, in fact, exist, but

you died, doe-eyed, as you lived, adrift

in the shadows, never really being

missed.

© 2018, Linda Chown, All rights reserved

A Man Who Laughed in the Dark at Jackie Gleason

Daddy, this one’s for you,
whimsical father marooned
in a sea of women.
You appear by heart-light
in the sheer pores of feeling.
You appear lean and indelible
stretched out at life like that from within.
Your blue eyes raging truth at the sky.

How we snickered like fools at you.
At your cane’s tap-tap clattering.
At your soundless chokings on food

in mid-afternoon deluxe restaurants.

Your eyes gasping about for help.

When Schatzki’s ring kidnapped your throat.

How you got fixed sometimes
in a Victorian long-suffering,
fixed to pretend, to smile tolerant
in an eviscerating niceness.
Long you. Long suffering.

Badged in a dark-grey suit
pitched against the sky here
on a bare bridge in Grand Rapids.
Inside feeling burbled strong,
strong enough to burn the blue clamor
of your eyes into concrete pillars.

To shatter the still airs
and countermand finally

a long ingrown stillness:

To rage that truth of yours at the sky—
shedding passionate heart-light out

about us everywhere.

© 2018, Linda E Chown, All rights reserved

PART II CONTINUES TOMORROW WITH MORE OF LINDA’S POEMS. STAY TUNED …

LInda E. Chown

LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row.  BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. She was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite.

 

ABOUT

Testimonials

Disclosure

Facebook

Twitter

Poet and writer, I was once columnist and associate editor of a regional employment publication. I currently 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. My poetry was recently read by Northern California actor Richard Lingua for Poetry Woodshed, Belfast Community Radio. I was featured in a lengthy interview on the Creative Nexus Radio Show where I was dubbed “Poetry Champion.”

 The BeZine: Waging the Peace, An Interfaith Exploration featuring Fr. Daniel Sormani, Rev. Benjamin Meyers, and the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi among others

“What if our religion was each other. If our practice was our life. If prayer, our words. What if the temple was the Earth. If forests were our church. If holy water–the rivers, lakes, and ocean. What if meditation was our relationships. If the teacher was life. If wisdom was self-knowledge. If love was the center of our being.” Ganga White, teacher and exponent of Yoga and founder of White Lotus, a Yoga center and retreat house in Santa Barbara, CA

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton

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“Living on the Glebe”. . . and other responses to the last Wednesday Writing Prompt

The Japanese Tea Garden, San Mateo, CA © Jamie Dedes

“What is this life so full of care,
We don’t have time to stand and stare.”
William Henry Davies, The Collected Poems of William H. Davies; With a Portrait

The last Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt, to write about farms and farming (Conjuring Farmhouses), December 12, is covered quite broadly here with responses from Gary W. Bowers, Paul Brookes, Irma Do, Jen E. Goldie, Shiela Jacob, Frank McMahan, Mike Stone, and Anjum Wasim Dar. These will provoke some thought and much pleasure, spiked as they are with memoir, questions, humor, and insight.  Enjoy!

Wednesday Writing Prompt will return on January 16, 2019.  

three cow salute

walking to my high school meant walking past three cows
just as 61st avenue came to its
senses and straightened up
south of bethany home road
and what was then
a bobwire fence held back these bored cows
who stood and chewed or didn’t
and slowly turned
their
heads
in
unison
as
you
passed

they were the stolid
they were the stupefied
the stunned
the milkbaggy trio
the watchers of boys and girls

they needed a date with a frisky bull
or maybe they needed nothing
but daily relief from udder strain
grass
and me tweaking their monotony
into near monotony

couldn’t tell you
don’t know why those bored
and boring cows still lease space
in a pasture in my head
just know
the smell of horseshit does nothing for me
but
the smell of cowshit
has more than once filled
my stupid stolid eyes
with nostalgic tears

© 2018, Gary W. Bowers (One With Clay, Image and Text)

 

Purifying shepherds

Smoke from burning

droplets of blood from the tail
of last October’s sacrificed horse,
ashes of the stillborn calves,
the shells of beans.

We are sprinkled with water,
wash our hands
in spring-water,
drink milk mixed with must.

Towards evening after shepherds
fed their flocks,
laurel-branches
are used as brooms
to clean their stables,
water sprinkled through them,
then stables adorned
with laurel-boughs.

Shepherds burn sulphur,
rosemary, fir-wood, and incense,
usher the smoke through the stables
and the flocks to purify them.

cakes, millet, milk,
and other food
is offered.

Hay and straw bonfires lit
cymbals and flutes play
as sheep and shepherds
are run three times
through the fire.

At an open air feast
we sit or lay
on turf benches
and sup a lot.

© Paul Brookes (Wombwell Rainbow / Inspiration. History . Imagination.)

A Burning Fox

A twelve year old lad in a valley
at the end of a willow copse
catches a vixen fox, snacker
on many a farmyard fowl.

He wraps it in straw and hay,
sets her alight, she escapes him
and in her fleeing sets fire to crops
in the fields, a breeze goads the flames.

Vital winter’s snap to feed
family destroyed.

So every festival of Grow,
a fox is burned.

© Paul Brookes (Wombwell Rainbow / Inspiration. History . Imagination.)

White Lady

Crowned white lady with flowing hair,
and fiery shoes, carries a spindle
and a three-cornered mirror
that foretells the future.

For nine nights before May Day,
chased by Wild Hunt Winter,
hounded from place to place,
she seeks refuge among villagers.

Folk leave their windows open
so she can find safety
behind cross-shaped panes.

Implores a farmer she meets to hide her
in a shock of grain. He does.
next morning his rye crop
is sprinkled with grains of gold

© Paul Brookes (Wombwell Rainbow / Inspiration. History . Imagination.)

Blessed Are These Sacred Folk

who plough
who prepare the earth
who plough with a wide furrow to bring water from the river
who plant seeds
who trace the first ploughing, reploughing as first did not work
who harrow
who dg
who weed
who reap
who carry the grain
who store the grain
who share the grain
who share their good fortune with us, the dead

© Paul Brookes (Wombwell Rainbow / Inspiration. History . Imagination.)

Paul’s Amazon Page U.S. HERE

Paul’s Amazon Page U.K. HERE

More poems by Paul at Michael Dickel’s Meta/ Phore(e) /Play

Prolific Yorkshire Poet, Paul Brookes

FYI: Paul Brookes, a stalwart participant in The Poet by Day Wednesday Writing Prompt, is running an ongoing series on poets, Wombwell Rainbow Interviews. Connect with Paul if you’d like to be considered for an interview. Visit him, enjoy the interviews, get introduced to some poets who may be new to you, and learn a few things.

The Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Jamie Dedes

Bed and Breakfast – A Haibun

The blue sky smelled of manure. Even the allure of coffee and raw milk, homemade bread with rhubarb jam and omelets plucked from their mother just that morning couldn’t overcome the scent that distinctly said, “You’re on a working farm.”

The distinct sound of a tractor pulled up to the farmhouse door. The farmer offered us a hay ride around the farm and explained the difference between hay and straw, silo versus barn. The farmer named each machine and it’s purpose, but not the animals.

That night, I briefly wondered if the chicken that gave her life for our pot pie dinner also sacrificed her progeny for our breakfast. And if the rooster that would wake us in the morning, knew what happened to his family.

Plastic and foam trays

Deception and protection

Farmers eat the truth

Yes, that’s me on a tractor – picture courtesy of one of my sorority sisters who posted some “throwback pictures” of a reunion we had a bed and breakfast in the Pennsylvania countryside a few years after we graduated college. I don’t think the tractor was actually moving for the picture, but it was a first for this city girl!

Coincidentally, Jamie Dedes’ Wednesday Writing prompt requested: This week share poem/s out of your own nostalgia, experience, impressions, gratitude, concerns, or convictions about farms, farming, or farm policy. Despite now living in “farm country”, I still don’t know about farming although I do appreciate the numerous farmers markets in our area.

One thing I do know: I am very appreciative of the men and women who work on farms because I know I don’t have the constitution or inclination to grow things or kill things to eat. Maybe because living in cities, I was never exposed to that reality and thus my aversion to being close to the true source of what I/we eat. Food came in a package and didn’t have faces. Maybe if more people were aware of the reality of farming, there would be less food waste and a better understanding of the need to conserve and protect the environment/nature and animals as finite resources. But what do I know…I’m just a city girl…

© 2018, Irma Do (I Do Run, And I do a few other things too ….)

A Secret Place

When Dad barked
You hopped to it,
Let’s go! In the car!
He loved the country.
One day, he said,
I’m moving to some
Small town,
Somewhere,
Someday.
Got my love of trees,
Wide expanses
And the smell of grass
From him
I guess.
Let’s go pick strawberries.
Get some fresh picked apples,
Some corn, if it’s ready,
Right from the field.
He always took the
Side roads
On our way to
Where he wanted
To be.
I marvel,
Now,
Where he was
Coming from,
Some secret desire,
Some past life,
Taking him home….

© 2018, Jen E. Goldie

Living On The Glebe

A tithed farm had flourished
since Queen Victoria’s reign.
Then the council needed acres
of land, built a housing estate
in the 1930’s for families like
us who couldn’t afford to buy.

Small, airy houses with an inside
toilet and coal shed, no running
hot water but spacious gardens
front and back.We made our home
here in the ’50’s and I walked past
apple trees to my first school.

Elderly neighbours recalled
the redbrick farmhouse, told
how they were sent there
as children and exchanged
a few pence for pats of golden
butter and hay-warmed eggs.

They felt the land’s closeness
despite shops and post office
and bus routes to the city centre.
Road names were echoes.
Farmcote Swancote
Old Farm Glebe Farm

And during the War,they dug
over their long back gardens.
Potatoes and turnips grew again.
Carrots were shaken free of soil,
peeled, grated and added to cake
mix instead of rationed sugar.

© 2018, Shiela Jacob

Allotment

Hefting water out of the river to
feed the newly-planted.Long years since I
had to do the same on Uncle’s farm:enamel
white bucket hung from a windlass,sweet
water drawn from deep. I could lift but half
a pailful then. Brothers, neighbour’s girls,
rudimentary washes after endless
play; earth closet in the yard, potatoes,
their skins slowly curling in the cauldron
on the hearth.Somewhere a clock. Bored one day,
I stood beside the well and bawled for help.
Dad came running and rough chastisement
was love’s affirmation.

Brief check before I
swooshed down the hay bales in the barn, guiltless
until the straws in my hair betrayed me.
The years have added muscle, as I bend
and dip and lift from the grateful water,
remembering my boyhood’s guilty smile.

© 2018, Frank McMahan

.trail.

the sight is disgusting

to the last degree

blind horse

liver sauce on fish

they turn the hay

eighteen

times

© 2018, Sonja Benskin Mesher

. monday evening.

rain came, seeds will grow.

watered places i cannot reach,

butt half full.

noisy day, farmer making hay,

lambs moved from mothers.

they say the sun will come

later to dry .

© 2018, Sonja Benskin Mesher

.growing potatoes.

the robin came down as he cleared the ground,
all red chest, pretty eyes.

we discussed the earth, rich now, without
the stones. we could grow potatoes as they
did here in the war. i have the photograph.

these are fortunate times, while have disliked
the tuber since the flu struck.

there has been a lot of it this year here.

we plan a pretty little greenhouse, all white
with embellishments, red geraniums.

the robin watched, i am told he will like mealworms.

© 2018, Sonja Benskin Mesher

.limousines and chevrolets.

it was quite a while

then while travelling she noticed

an interest in cattle.knowing little

noted their shapes and patterns.

mentioned the farmers yesterday

most in rugged vehicles

dogs barking

one in a saloon car, the passenger

kind

full of food stuff

for cattle.

she wondered at the white ones

on her way home.

© 2018, Sonja Benskin Mesher

The Grand Scheme of Things

Raanana, April 11, 2016

The dark cloud squats heavily on the horizon
Undecided whether to drift slowly
Over our dusty fields with its fat bladder
Full of drought quenching rains
Or to drift up the coast a ways
To quench the thirst of our enemy’s fields.
O Lord, I know it makes no difference
In the grand scheme of things,
But I can’t help the fact
It would make all the difference in the world
To me.

(c) 2016, Mike Stone (Uncollected Works)

The Dead Don’t Envy the Living

Inspired by Wendell Berry’s “Testament

Raanana, August 17, 2018

The dead don’t envy the living
Any more than the living envy the dead.
Who’s to say what’s the best state
For matter to be in
In the long run?
I would think the best,
For one above ground,
Is to make the most of what you are
And, for those below,
To make the least.

(c) 2018, Mike Stone (Uncollected Works, Call of the Whipporwill)

Mike Stone’s Amazon Page is HERE.

Wheat Fields in Punjab, Pakastan courtesy of Ammarkh under CC BY-SA 3.0,

Farm and village
soul and spirit
a nation’s harvest  giver,
agri-armor of defense ,

lived in one,never,
but  loved  one where
Grand Dad lived
near the Jhelum River

A place, Sarai Alamgir
with tilled fields
lush green yields,
lands fulfilling needs

wells run by cattle
in circles, bound
pulling out water
round and round

and we so freely….
running in the fields
touching the trees
shouting and singing
with the breeze

But

When land is threatened
by famine ,when food is scarce
by waywardness and sins,
when fuel is short
and dry are the streams
the farmer with his horse
and plough
is back in the fields-

the backbone of the people
he is following his dreams
or so it seems-
going back in time

working coping hoping
amidst blasts and screams’
Farmer Farmer get some coal
if you want your crop
and reach your goal

Farmer farmer get your horse
for salvation of the loss
Farmer Farmer get your plough
Let us work and fulfill our vow’

© 2018, poems (English and Urdu/below), Anjum Wasim Dar

کسان اور گاوؑں

 کسان اور  گاوؑں
روح   رواں  زندگی
زرہ بکتر  زراع و دفاع

رہنا فارم پہ کبھی نا ھوا
دادا کے گھر سے پیار ھوا
سراےؑ  عالم گیر جھلم دریا

گاوؑں تھا  پیارا سا
لھلھاتے کھیت و باغ
ھر سو سبزا سبزا ھوا

کوؑیں سے جوتے بیل
کھیت میں پانی ڈالے
ڈبے پے ڈبا  ٓاتا  جاؑے

اور ھم  کھلے میدان میں
بھاگتے دوڑتے ھنستے
درختوں کہ چھوتے رہتے

مگر جب

 زمین خطرے میں پڑھنے لگے
قحت و قلت ھو جاےؑ زیادہ
ایندھن کم اور ندیاں خشک

پھر کساں اپنا سامان لیکر
کھیت میں  واپس  جاتا ھے
گھوڑا جوت کہ ہل چلاتا ھے

اپنی قوم کی فکر ھے لاحک
اپنے خواب  ادھورے پا کر
محنت کرنے لگتا ھے

بم دھماکے اور چیخوں میں
بھایو ٓاو آوؑ  کوؑلہ  نیکالو
اپنا اپنا کھیت  اپنا  ہل بچاوؑ

صلیب کو دیکھو مسجد  جاوؑ
اپنا وعدہ پورا،  خوب نبھاوؑ

شاید  نجات مل  جاےؑ شاید بخشے جاوؑ

“Let us all strive for peace on Earth for all. Let us make a better world. Write to make peace prevail.”  Anjum Wasim Dar, Pakistani poet, writer, artist, educator, and parent.