poem – Page 50 – The BeZine

At Model Nails

In early morning light, large black
eyes stare from his shower-fogged mirror.
He compares his profile with worn photo
of his father. Once, his mother stitched
it in a secret panel of her tunic,
hiding her lover’s face from Viet Cong.

His mind wanders back to days of childhood.
Cruel taunts prattle from Vietnamese tongues,
chattered whispers return, full volume…
“You children without fathers are like homes
without roofs. Ugly bastard left-over!
Child of dust! Who’s your Daddy?”

At Model Nails, he scrubs dead skin
from feet, infuses lavender into cracked soles,
trims toenails on hundreds of phalanges.
More than two decades he’s worked,
stooped over, bending, twisting
from a red three-peg stool.

He greets customers with a smile,
massages legs in a habitual rhythm
that reminds him of an ancient song
his mother often sang, washing clothes
along muddy banks of the Mekong.

If she were here, he’d paint stars
and stripes on her nails, perhaps
fireworks or a blood-red flag
with a sinking yellow star.

– Sharon Frye

Turtle Speaks

Painted Turtle by Gretchen Del Rio c 2010, rights reserved — Painted Turtle by Gretchen Del Rio c 2010, all rights reserved

we live on Turtle Island and turtle is my totem ~
she speaks in the easy way only turtle can,
as one who is at home in herself, at home between
her plastron and carapace, wisdom in her measured
gait, her introversion a model for freedom, for cutting
the nets spun of wars and deceptions . . .

she is the everyday re-enchantment of my solitary
cosmos, my solidarity with life, i read her pastoral
letters in green on green, the sweet grasses and seas,
she speaks of connectedness, the basic constituents
of enigma, wizardry; and in the insanity of the times,
how best to journey and retrieve this world’s soul . . .
she is the unrushed cure for nature-deficit,
that consuming affliction, the spawn of culture’s
back-lighted screens and advertising of every bilk

turtle healing is simple peace and master lessons in
self-containment, she draws me into my meditations
and back along the first path of Maka Ina, the forgotten
primal path of earth ways and feminine energies and
the rhythms of grandmother moon whirling me heavenward.

– Jamie Dedes

Turtle ~ totem or power animal representing earth in Native American tradition
Turtle Island ~ in Iroquois tradition, when the earth was covered over with water, sundry animals attempted to create land by swimming to the bottom of the ocean and hauling up dirt. Muskrat succeeded. He placed the dirt on the back of Turtle, which grew into the landmass known today as North America.
Maka Ina ~ Lakota (Sioux) ~ “maka” is earth and “ina” is mother, so Mother Earth. Earth teachings were/are considered a path to wholeness (heaven).

Milk Bottle

Rinse one and you’ll be rewarded with a winking lacery,
spherical gas masses:
globe balanced on ballooned globe,
floating fragilities,
each begging to inhabit the imagination.

Precise chambers with slanting walls come to a point
in the bottle’s depths.
Their curved roofs cling together, make
the structures definitive
as cut glass, insubstantial as castles in the air.

And these architectures shift, could be beings
poised like oursleves
on the edge of tremor. But they don’t have aspirations,
attitudes, passions,
don’t carry spiritual beliefs, a fear of death.

Soon they’ll collapse or explode in silence
and nothing will remain
but a bottle in the sink, a sill with a cracked tile,
darkening windows. Don’t
weep because you can’t re-create this weightless now .
Enter and exult in it.

– Myra Schneider

The Discovery of Grass

Grass. Photo by Nevit Dilmen

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. ~ William Blake

I saw grass for the first time today.
Oh, I’ve seen, sown and sawn Suburbia’s
mostly-green undergarment all my life.
But today it glowed upon my mind’s eyes like
a child’s first birthday present inside a shiny box.
I enjoy that infant-like discovery
of something I know I’ve held in my senses
since first I sensed. Maybe it’s
the light’s different angle reflected to this
ever-shrinking man, or this shallower air
I breathe that, say, a pumpkin pie baking
can infuse with the aroma of earthy heaven
upon heavenly earth.

Or perhaps it’s just me, searching for
something new in a life of so much now old.
Like today, the cords in the blinds
in front of me never had that figure-eight
infinity-upon-infinity existence before
my vision’s finite reach captured them here
in I’s, Y’s and F’s like this.
Such observations make me wish
for a few infinities so that I
might try discovering
the Whats and Whys of your world,
which I’ll never see, and those of mine,
which you’ll never understand.
Nor, apparently, will I.

– Joseph Hesch

Mourning Brooch

the memories have little substance
they flit and fly, pollen on the wind,
like the quick passing of a joyful birth,
the school years, the sweet trysts ~
a waving bridal veil . . .

. . . the way your love drained you
of your dreams just to fill yourself with him

. . . . . the epitaph of tears

only when yesterday becomes a story,
once upon a time, do memories
become memorial, a mourning brooch
forever warm upon your breast

Doves of Beirut

Doves were arrogant in those days
feral, territorial of ledges
I hadn’t snapped their necks yet
through grind of metal
on bone, stone
through air sharpened on greed hones
no scream left in punctured lungs
fate duct -taped to fetal nights
barricaded behind shadowed ribs
that hardly rose for a fight
underneath rubble of lord’s prayer and adhan

they pecked at concrete
heads bobbing, waiting
waiting
they knew I’d come
they knew I’d tire of walking
your curved dead -end streets

I knew those ledges well
gravel and loose feathers
wet with rain
stuck with white droppings
to my young toes curled on grit

but I knew your streets below better
lick of diesel on asphalt
grief’s iron reek in gutters rising
damp alleys breathing
breathing
the way the old do
those who’d seen the blade
cut through flesh
a sigh every third inhale
a pause before funneling
jasmine and mold laced gasps
into patched veins
tied to the stone
tied to throbbing ground
with historical claims
to the sea breeze
that couldn’t cool their burns
still rummaging for life
as they used to remember it

I walked on sweat of fig trees
on your sidewalks bleeding at cracks
when you had the pigeon for dinner
and I starving, gnawed on bones
where I’d tied my message
pleading for your unclutched claws
on my debt

I hear you like your whores younger these days
and you rather have your sons as killers
blind and foaming revenge at mouth
darbouka between their knees dropped for guns

streets mapped in bite marks
on time I served now dyed ash blond
I look away
the way the old do
eyes on the distance to your bleeding ledge

– Silva Merjanian

© 2014, poem, Silva Zanoyan Merjanian, All right reserve; poem is excepted from “Rumor,” Silva’s second poetry collection. Both Silva and publisher, Cold River Press, are donating all profits from the sale of this book to Syrian-Armenian Relief Fund

Beirut

Over there
all that happened
(and didn’t happen)
folded
packed in mental mothballs
stories fading with licked creases
some reduced and softer versions

wonder why I preserve breaths
forced through my lungs in those days
stringed around the eye of a hurricane
circling, demonic, nameless
shaking me shameless for a day

on nights when a collective sigh stings
and I can’t tell
which tale will toll for me
and which nocturnal howl
will lift the dust
through endless times
relive slivers
on a pink tip of my tongue
afraid to bite a dreamt memory
that it might hemorrhage
bleed the night

I want a dripping whiff of that afternoon coffee
instinctively bitter, solemnity and hot
ten minutes when lonely hearts
willed an arching cease fire
and time hovered among us
long enough for my mother
to build castles in my cup

over there
the man flying his doves
on the roof across two streets
remains a blur
but the doves stirring the air
in perfect shades of unison
(I had named them after heroes long forgot)
sometimes still raise dust in my room
of their feathers’ aches and plight

I believed then
I could break away
would break away

I did one day
the doves were left to die

over there
at dusk my father played the mandolin
and my mother’s voice filled all the gaps
between our breaths –
the dam that held surpluses of war
long enough for us to shed in dreams

why do I long for hell
on nights
when I can’t sieve my sigh from the wind’s eye
and I wonder if I ever broke away
from a circle named dead doves

perhaps
scent of jasmine
still smells like home
back home in the rain

– Silva Merjanian

Collateral Damage

Morning arrives charred
served on a disassembled night
its curled edges, ashes on waking eyes
no smoke in sight, no trace
where old mistakes aspirate donated lungs
burked storms under soft pillows
plump with the geese not the feather

as if a night could not satiate viscera of dreams with its cant
as if doubt drains into power pipelines as tear ducts dry
and conscience blazes in defiance fueled bonfires

had you not heard panting in medicated doldrums of their minds
had their stuttered remorse turned the soft soil of tomorrow
had you not loved only to stay alive
morning would have arrived perky and bright
and you too would have heard the finch outside
instead of the crackling of the fire

– Silva Merjanian

honey…i swear this is for the birds…

i have been
carefully
watching hummingbirds
as they
battle for air supremacy
seeking
the sweets encased
in a plastic feeder
with
the same ferocity
i must say
as humans
seeking the last drop
of deep-sea oil
human sweets
of course
being
profit margins
regardless
of species
the battles continue
i’ve
even found
dead hummingbirds
on the ground
who
in the heat of battle
flew into plexiglass walls
not
seeing the danger
like
humans
willing to destroy
not only
animal habitats
but
their own
cuz
they’re flying high
on
financial conquests
but
all the while
approaching
the earth’s
translucent walls

In Audience with the Queen

A female North Atlantic right whale with her calf in the ocean.

On the mid-afternoon boat out of Boston,
we headed southeast past lobster traps
and gliding slicks of motor fuel,
all there to run the engine that transported
tourists from flush to a good deal poorer
in the time it took to eat one meal
at Ostra or The Capital Grille.
We were still digesting Quincy Market pizza,
feeling the breeze on our bare legs
poking out from the deck above’s
meager shade, as the hot sun sprayed jewels
off our bow. Above us, a radio squawked
that another boat had spotted her due east and
we canted to port, a vee-shaped churn
of golden foam trailing behind us as we
became smaller and smaller on the
blinding mirror of sea. She soon appeared
off the starboard bow, birds circling her
as if she was a conscious island, the gray queen
sinuously weaving her barnacled weft over
and under the Atlantic’s green warp waves.
And then it was pretty much over.
The boat powered up and sped us back to the
dock in Boston, as we winced with sunburnt legs
and bleary eyes into a sun that was setting
over the city, which bloomed bigger with
each rumble and bump, each passing trawler’s
casting of wakes our way. I remember the image
of the dimming eastern distance, where I
left behind my feeling of human superiority
and all my other images of that day,
having dropped my camera over the side
when I bowed in my audience with the queen.

– Joseph Hesch

dance to life’s music . . .

there will come a time
when shadows stand above you
so dance in the light

– Charles W. Martin

Bird

after Stringed Figure (Curlew) by Barbara Hepworth

I am wings
springing from breast, sweeping back, each curve echoing
the other. Meaning is space.
As I thrust forward my wingspan unnerves you. As I soar
do you yearn to encompass my power?

See how
I enfold head and heart in flight. Map out
my hungers and dangers, the complex of my parts. Feel my weight

and weightlessness,
bone mesh, skeins of blood, speckle and lie of feathers.
You will never explain the egg
where I began, dig out the deeply bedded knowledge
that guides me through dark and light.

Hold me down
and I will rise up above the crests on fierce waters,
above the sheer of rocks, above the heave and scramble of moors.

And I will be
here, there, within you, everywhere,
my flung wingtips longing to come together,
striving to complete a shape as I pierce and pierce the blue rush.

© 2008, poem excerpted with the poet’s permission from her book, “Circling the Core,” All rights reserved; photograph, Stringed Figure (Curlew) (Version I), Brass with strings, 1956 (BH 225 A, edition of 9), copyright Barbara Hepworth

no translation necessary . . .

aunt bea
asked me
to take her
to home depot
for a couple of rugs
in the parking lot
as we left
a woman approached her
asked if she need
a house to rent
aunt bea
said
no
the woman proceeded
to tell her
why she had
to rent her beautiful home
she spoken
with a heavy
spanish accent
very rapid
and
tearful
something about her son
bad marriage
unconcerned judge
and
jail time
seemed like
her entire life story
in forty-five minutes
as she spoke
now and then
she’d switch to spanish
and then
back to english
sometimes
patting on her heart
as she spoke
they parted as friends
as we drove home
i asked aunt bea
if she spoke spanish
and
how much she understood
of the conversation
aunt bea said
no
i don’t speak spanish
and
i didn’t understand
much at all
other than
she was in deep pain
but
like all of us
she
just needed
someone
to listen

– Charles W. Martin

The Doves Have Flown

what must it be like for you in your part of the world?

there is only silence, i don’t know your name, i know only
that the fire of life makes us one in this, the human journey,
search and return, running through mud, reaching for the sun

like entering the ritual river without a blessing or a prayer

our eyes meet in secret, our hearts open on the fringe,
one breath and the wind blows, one tear and seas rise,
on the street where you live, your friends are all gone

the houses are crushed and the doves have flown

there is only silence, no children playing, no laughter
here and there a light remains to speak to you of loneliness,
my breath caught in my throat, i want to make it sane again

“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet, writer, and editor

– Jamie Dedes

An Apology from Your Grandfather

(for Nathaniel)

This poem was written last November shortly after the birth of my third grandchild, a second grandson, and the first child of my son and his wife. I put it away for a while to ‘rest’, because I felt it wasn’t quite there; that it still needed something to make it work. Three months later, following several edits and adjustments, whilst it is perhaps less like poetry and more a narrative, (and was it Leonardo da Vinci himself who said that a work of art is never complete, only abandoned?) I have decided that I should let it go. I hope my grandson, when he’s old enough, all my grandchildren and onward generations, may find some use or ornament for it, to give them perspective on their own situations, whatever they may be, and to help guide them in their journeys through life …

The countryside was flush with gold
to celebrate your arrival; the season
was in suspense, as if to make
your first tiny footprint on the earth,
amidst the clamour of a thousand nativities,
as if a gift of God for this, your birth,
a special and harmonious event.

At the cusp, where Autumn meets with Winter,
a splash of golden hair defined you;
the gilding of a perfect crown,
was like the golden fleece,
that vaunted prize of Ancient Greece
in Jason’s time, when boys grew into men
before the age of their true making.

Your first year, centenary of a date
when Europe burned with anticipation
of conflict, a bloody affair, for which
no true atonement was ever offered,
for which we feel a great collective guilt
but which, we hope, will remain
a part of history. Not your future.

Your future shall be focused,
neither on the clock that ticks,
that divides time into segments of life;
that numbs the mind with endless drudge;
that defines your living to the end;
nor shall it confine your path
to the relentless quest for gain.

It is not control that you shall seek,
but access to a pantheistic knowledge,
enabling a different class of power,
the faculty for influence over those,
who misused the privilege they have,
that we, your forebears, allowed them.
For this I repentantly apologise.

If nature no longer holds its strength to live,
to refresh itself, to recover its flush and thrive,
it will be human beings, who prevailed
on its demise, for which there’s no excuse.
Beyond mere human frailty, there seems no will
to cease remorseless greed and just survive.
But the Earth owes us a big fat nothing!

So, if my undoubted compassion
does not have wings; if I do not transform
my rising anger into constructive deeds,
in such a way to help move hearts and minds
in concert, so to invest in change;
if thus, and I’m too frail or weak,
remorse will overcome my heart.

But have I yielded to our defeat?
No. I’ll neither submit to this old foe
nor will my pen cease in my hand,
whilst ever I have breath and mind
to speak out from the crowd. I find
it sad to say that much is left to do,
which leaves an adverse legacy for you.

What do I expect of you, or you of you?
I know that I can ask, but cannot make;
I know you’re blessed with your own will,
but you will find that one thing will prevail:
the greatest force for life is family;
a force defying selfishness and greed,
which always gives us hope in time of need.

It shall be fuel that fills you, every day,
from your Stabat Mater, your Trojan Father,
whose care and energy will long endure,
imbuing you with superhuman strength,
for which there is no substitute;
that no amount of gold will ever buy.
Integrity and truth is born of this.

There is one thing I know will light your way,
’till time and tides are done and trees are gone.
This energy and fortitude, integrity
and strong desire, will all be borne
to you and, through you, to your children;
and so, through them, ancestral grace
will lead them to conquer the World!

It is the one enduring human quality
that is, more than mere emotion,
the omniscient and greatest power of all;
one word, one gift, which represents
life’s longing for itself, from me to you,
a kind of magic that will heal the World
… with pure, undying, unconditional Love.

Rooftop

I die at dusk every day
on a rooftop in a city with no name
daughters unborn to me mourn
in bruised nights’ wombs
voices I do not recognize
utter prayers to deaf trees
shaking my limbs off their leaves

a city breathing heavy with its sins
buries me in its alleys
smell of jasmine and urine on its walls
where once I cut a vein and emptied
time’s venom under blinking neon lights

there’s no distance to my pain

I’m born at dawn every day
in a sac of daylight
with an appetite to eat moments in slow bites
roll them on a dry tongue
linger on the sweet and bitter
oozing from each tick tock shortening my life

I can’t remember where I loved you in between

it is dusk again,
I look for the rooftop
I hung my fresh laundry on

– Silva Zanoyan Merjanian

Our Stories

Past Masters

(A Clarean Sonnet)

If I had ever taken note at school,
those moments often shunned by this poor fool,
of literature, philosophy and tomes
that offered us the sustenance of poems.

Be gowned, our masters strenuously plead
that sonnets and soliloquy we read
to dress our minds and feed our souls with love
of words that speak a language from above
our mundane daily toil; speak of the day
when I am moved with eloquence to say
“I understand … Oh now I understand!”

And when I feel my heart in her soft hands
I move to paint her love with words I see
embedded in my mind’s sweet mystery.

This poem was originally submitted for the ‘FormForAll:Clarian Sonnets’ over at the dVerse Poets Pub where Samuel Peralta (Twitter ID @semaphore) was teaching us about the sonnets of early 19th century poet, John Clare.