Project Type: The BeZine, Jan. 2017, Vol. 3, Issue 4

Now That Anything Can Happen

Now that anything can happen

While the moon looms closer than it’s been since my birth

Shall I be the lunatic to them, or they to me?

Now that anything an happen

While we bicker about who’s fault it is

Shall I be able to listen to the heart that beats inside those I could despise?

Now that anything can happen

While we act or don’t act at preventing another Reichstag, this time in this country.

Shall I be visible with slogans, or invisible, while speaking our words of hope

In secret places, safe from harm?

© Greg Ruud 11/11/16

Righteous Anger

You’re mulling over the word “indignation” in your mind.

Stop asking yourself whose fault it is

What difference is yours or theirs indignation going to make

Stop all the repeated speeches the DJ in your mind wants to put on next.

Just listen, you know the truth is in there

A current running deep beneath the thin ice of your mutual retorts

Listen to that flow!

Leave your victimhood skating on the surface

The comings and goings of this silence leaves you speechless

When you imagine that you have stopped caring

You will hear the skater wanting you to hear him clinging to

The thin ice of his point of view

Is this you or another arguing with you?

It makes no matter.

For you are streaming now beyond your own depths

With a caring and listening you have never known.

It is as if a dear friend has just corrected you and in your “embarrassed

anger”, you are redeemed.

You still have righteous anger towards the outright lies that less friendly people

volunteer compulsively.

But you are free now to listen deeply

With a caring and listening you have never known.

Greg Ruud 11/21/16

Goat Herders

dsc_0192Two redheads selling white male privilege

bestsellers in the United States and Oz

hitting number one toiling hatred

orators of propaganda and loathing

pinning their fear on the lapels of the vulnerable

bit like yellow stars of old

patches of fabric with no starry night beauty

no promise of kindness on the mistral

just bitter cold of a stone floor

heart whipped with icy stares from redhead believers

believers who struck a match on misogyny and racism

schoolyard bullies who never grew up in search of parents

believers afraid of change, too selfish for humanity

it’s easier to hate than love

easier to blame than accept responsibility

easier to deny the truth in reality’s eyes

easier to wallow in mud puddles of self loathing

and search for scapegoats

© poem and illustration, Dianne Turner

Waiting

I’m not waiting for ageing or changing,
for growing,
restoring, or
recreating
the mask.

I’m not waiting for structures to collapse
and reform
and reshape
and remake
themselves
from the ruins.

I’m not waiting for the revolution
in thinking,
in acting,
in feeling,
to happen
when the walls finally fall.

No.
I’ll dig the tunnels.

Then I’ll wait.
Wait for you
to scramble through
to greet me
then we’ll be away,
through
with our waiting.

© Lynn White
First published in Fragments of Chiaroscuro, July 2016

Separate Development

We must develop separately, you and I,
you on your side, me on mine.
The wall between us
unscalable,
impenetrable,
unfathomable.

They built it so.

We must undermine it, you and I,
you on your side, me on mine,
Burrow beneath
the rocky foundation,
scratch away,
one stone at a time.

Wall fall down.

©Lynn White

First published in Art Of Peace Tyler Poetry Anthology – ‘Intertwined, Poems of Shared Endeavor, September, 2015

Leaving Aleppo

The first clutch lands on al-Ajami street,
flattens the whole souq.
We cling to each other beneath the table.
Her nails pierce my skin.

When the bombs stop we emerge
like hatchlings. She watches her belly,
rocks it, bids it quicken.
In the street people lie broken.

We do what we can: lug stones,
keep the dogs away.
The sun dips. We light oil lamps,
make love quietly, talk of the best way out.

In Benghazi, militiamen beat us,
take our money. We reach a fishing village
near Al Nakheel, hide behind tamarisks.
The boat is late.

At sea the engine judders, misses beats.
Lights on the shoreline die.
The moon whispers. We dare not move,
a crewman’s boot the edge of our world.

© peter wilkin

Here and Hereafter

img_3638i’ll have none of that, you see
none of the exclusivity of clubs
with their business of foundations,
divisions and the self-satisfied
whole-hearted embrace of conceits,
moth-eaten and self-righteous,
the mythopoeic and parabolic
spelled by men into stone and dogma,
the collision of sacred language with
parochialism and that left-over tribalism
exploding into disdain and violence . . .
how is it that vision ends and lunacy begins?

lead me instead to that inchoate space,
between saint and sanctity, soul and spirit
bequeath me into the great yawning
where my mother thrives as Khoas unquelled
where my father shines dressed in anarchy and
my sister sips tears from the wan cheeks of sages,
 . . . . . let us begin again

© Jamie Dedes