Tag: poem

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

Shadow Cycles, a poem by Sheikha A.

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

“What use will money and wealth be to those who possess them when the rivers and land are poisoned, the seas devoid of life and the air polluted beyond tolerance?” Luke Eastwood, The Journey: Exploring the Spiritual Truth at the Heart of the World’s Religions

Autumn falls on lids
of summer as brown kohl;
dust sticks to formica – dim
laminates – dreary clouds

not heavy enough to pour,
sun sleeps without sheets,
stars bulge like heat-wombs
ready to expel – air bites

like bugs-scratched land;
necks of trees on blade of axe,
green silky bands of crowns
shorn – barks planked, piled

with their withered parts; dry
weeds irrigate soil’s uterus,
roots stoned like cracked clay;
dusk smudges like mascara-

tears, rooms bleak from
smog – homes invaded by
carbon – moon drowns in
a sea of smouldering char.

© 2019, Sheikha A.

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

En Gedi, a poem by Michael Dickel

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines
En Gedi — Wadi David Photograph ©2015
En Gedi — Wadi David
Photograph ©2015
En Gedi

Even lizards hide from this scorched heat.
Tristram’s grackles pant in the shade of skeletal acacia.
Fan-tail ravens float on rising currents like vultures.

David hid from Saul in the strongholds of En Gedi;
along the wadi now named for him, waterfalls
drop warm water onto maidenhair ferns into tepid pools.

Any stippled shade provides shelter from the scathing sun
when hiding from midday heat or close pursuit:
Tristram and Iseult, David, seek shade, ferns, sparkling droplets.

We escape, fugitives from kings
into what little shade we find, wade
into green puddles of desert water,

for brief respite, solace,
a bright glimmer sliding down
an eroding rock face.

Michael Dickel read En Gedi at the Interfaith Eco Poetry Slam in Jerusalem on 30 June, 2016, sponsored by the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development. Here is a video of him reading it.

En Gedi Digital Art / Poem ©2014-2016 Michael Dickel
En Gedi
Digital Art / Poem
©2012-2016 Michael Dickel

This poem originally appeared in Michael Dickel’s book, Midwest / Mid-East and is published here with the poet’s permission. It first appeared in The BeZine on July 15, 2016.

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

Off Season, a poem by Leela Soma

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

Off Season

a summer in spring confused flora and fauna,
a summer suspended early, flowers
buds deep in earth, interred as autumn reds,
gold scarred dead leaves of burnished browns
a harvest of fruit and berries unoffered

glaciered infernos, carbon foot on planet
Earth fossilised, horizons blink in wild rage as sun,
Moon and stars dip into the sea,
neither morning nor night
a midnight within a midnight.

© 2019, Leela Soma

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

Cushion Moss, a poem by Myra Schneider

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines
A cushion plant growing on Mount Ossa, Tasmania courtesy of Bjørn Christian Tørrissen under CC BY-SA 3.0 license

The sad paragraphs in the paper offer
no answers but they fade a little once I’m outside
although there’s rain in the air and the sudden sun
silvering naked twigs as I enter the park
doesn’t last. I’m in the copse where rooks
are flapping in quarrel as usual, when it stops me
in my tracks: moss cushioning a fallen tree.
The green fabric is so vibrant it’s almost luminous.
It awakens grey branches and untidy brambles
emerging from clots of darkness. Hard to believe
this green is natural but no manmade process
could possibly create such soft brilliance.
It’s not water meadow green, not nettle green,
lime green, olive, not glossy laurel,
not intense Lorca green. It’s a green spawned
by the damp bedded in rotting logs and deep
leaf mush, a green that’s been so mothered
by light it banishes lightlessness, a green
more potent than the science which explains it,
a green which fills my mind, feeds my arteries,
a green that urges: never give up.

© 2019, Myra Schneider

Acknowledge to Envoi Magazine

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

Windfarm, a poem by Leela Soma

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

Dotted like a navy formation, moving like a flotilla,
the waves deceive the eyes, spinning like dervish.
Our planet- green and beautiful may vanish.

Offshore, the white blades against the blue sea,
clean energy, harnessing wind, God given and free.
Will no birds soar towards the azure sky?

Under the noctilucent clouds, a lifetime of night
passed; the antemeridian promise, now made light.
Watching the destruction, holding on to a chimera

Inevitable as anaretic hour unfolds the truth of the sutra?

© 2019, Leela Soma

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

Being Greta Thunberg, a poem by Linda Chown

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines
Thunberg in front of the Swedish parliament, holding a “Skolstrejk för klimatet” (transl. School strike for the climate) sign, Stockholm, August 2018 courtesy of Anders Hellberg  under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

to be like Greta Thunberg
you must become yourself
completely as though there
were no prison of skin to stay inside
no ego to say don’t try
no doors to close
the kind of bravery that moves
lives is not second hand
it is the ultimate it’s like an
we can do it trip
the magic liberation of person
we’ve been dreaming for
the closeness of fish in water
pure semiosis and pre-verbal closeness

© 2019, Linda Chown

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

Becoming Plastic, a poem by Myra Schneider

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

 


  
This infographic shows that there will (predicted) be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050 / courtesy of Thomastastic under CC BY-SA 4.0 license

The morning starts with a tiresome battle to slit
and peel skin that fits smoothly as a seal’s.
It’s encasing two tubs of vitamin capsules

but my fingers can’t find leverage and anger
blazes as the sleek containers continue to cling
in their see-through wrapping like inseparable lovers.

Nowadays, everything arrives cosied in plastic:
sultanas, tissues, pears, jumpers, knickers,
the mattress that was tricky to manoeuvre upstairs,

those newly-erected six-storey flats I scanned
yesterday as I walked over Regent’s Canal, each
swaddled in the stuff as if it couldn’t cope with rain.

In the night I dreamt I struggled through a wild sea
to an island of unrotted rubbish and weakling palms.
A sound of laboured breathing rose from the debris

and I knew plant roots underneath were striving
to survive. A dead grouper stared from a pram
which had lost all its wheels, someone screamed.

I turned, was just in time to see a woman
on a bed with legs parted and a midwife plucking
from her womb a baby sheathed in plastic sheeting.

© 2019, Myra Schneider

Acknowledge to Acumen magazine

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

Approaching the City by Bus, a poem by Urmila Mahajan

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines
Dense smog blankets Connaught Place, New Delhi wili hybrid courtesy of  Lokantha https://www.flickr.com/photos/wili/295189351/  under CC BY 2.0 license

A painted watercolour sky is
pristine clean in the early sun
smudges of fiery gulmohur chase
the sprawling hills into a blur of dust
A vital landscape seemingly unspoiled

Intricately coloured country birds
perched on highly strung power lines
preen and warble warnings as
the disintegrating farmer meddles
with the earth, sealing their lives

Smoggy frames come hurtling
with purple plumed skies
billboards flash urgent signs
that smash into a million excuses
which keep us from listening

to the eloquent eucalyptuses
whispering the same tale

repeatedly

in an instinctive language
we all recognise

Instead

we choose to watch the scene fade
like a memory crumbling at the edges
like a last goodbye

© 2019, Urmila Mahajan

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

The Memories of Trees, a poem by Melissa Rendlen

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines
A young red pine (Pinus resinosa) with spread of roots visible, as a result of soil erosion courtesy Emery under CC BY-SA 2.5 license

Summer predawn looms long,
grey creeps, lightens,
promises a sun slow to come.

Loon cries give way
to the call of song birds,
as the reluctant day dispels the night.

Sunlight on water creates it’s own magic,
awakens attention to the moment,
even as the past drips like dew

from trees whose memories
reach back, before
my grandmother’s birth.

Will their future outlast mine,
or has our presence ended theirs?

© 2019, Melissa Rendlen

Posted in Environment/Deep Ecology/Climate Change

The Faint, a poem by Iulia Gherghei

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines
This image shows one consequence of forest clearing in the Amazon: thick smoke that hangs over the forest. / Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon – NASA Earth Observatory / public domain photograph

I didn’t write for sometime
Didn’t feel the urge to do it
Overwhelmed by the reality flow
The muses fainted
The cracks from the floor swallowed them
Another layer of dust lavishingly spread at my feet

 

Vacuum, void, nothingness
Powerless, exhaustion
Mainly, emptied and knocked down by the atrocities of these times
The bad news are followed by more bad news
Fake or true, an instrument of manipulation
The muses got swirled under this tsunami wave called reality
No wish for survival left
In their foggy eyes I saw the doom
With the next wave poetry will leave too
The curtain of smoke from the Amazonian forests will envelope slowly our poetry buds
The lungs will succumb in desperate attempts to form a rhyme or to keep the rhythm in this intricate nightmare
The muses, already dust under our paved ways, can’t save us anymore
They donated us the last amount of oxygen
Their last breath, already
We are left intoxicated with our egoes
We will fall, one by one as the trees of that far away forest did

© 2019, Iulia Gherghei

Posted in John Anstie, Poems/Poetry

New Year

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

Same Rivers, New Waters …

Last year passed the golden glove
You know, the one with a fist of iron.
She wanted no more of it. Nor I.
Those glossy, glittering, glistening,
shining products of a golden age
had lost their sheen and the age of
growth and worshipping at the alter of
God. Demands. Profit. … is so last year.

Meanwhile, in the town, at Star Books,
reading over our tax-free coffee,
batting ideas on who could pay the bill
and how you make your money work,
if only we had some …

Consumption was her daily bread
and the disease that strangled
generations, who died of terminal debt.

The improper death of innocents,
but where is their misplaced virtue.
Are they free of blame … still free?
May be no more, and yet we must
pay due heed to plant the seed of hope.
To fight for nourishment forgone.
It might have been the will of the people,
but, for folk who step into the same rivers,

ever newer waters flow …

© 2019 John Anstie

JOHN ANSTIE (My Poetry Library and 42) ~ is a British writer, poet and musician –  a multi-talented gentleman self-described, at various times as a ” Husband, Family man, Grandfather, Father, Son, Brother, sort of Musician, Singer, Amateur photographer and Film-maker, AppleMac user, Implementation Manager, and Engineer”. He has (variously) participated in d’Verse Poet’s Pub and as a player in New World Creative Union as well as a being a ‘spoken-voice’ participant in Roger Allen Baut’s excellent ‘Blue Sky Highway‘ radio broadcasts. He’s been blogging since the beginning of 2011.

Recent publications are anthologies resulting from online collaborations among two international groups of amateur and professional poets. One of these is The Grass Roots Poetry Group (Petrichor* Rising. The other group is d’Verse Poet Pub, in which John’s poetry also appears The d’Verse Anthology: Voices of Contemporary World Poetry, produced and edited by Frank Watson.

* Petrichor – from the Greek pɛtrɨkər, the scent of rain on the dry earth.

Posted in Poems/Poetry

The Protagonist

Posted on by Jamie Dedes

I am a beacon of hope,
on a wet and rainy day.
While forming a shelter
from heaven’s tears
and clouds subject to decay.

I am always on hand,
where ever droplets can be found,
so take me for granted
because I’ll always be around.

excerpt from sunburst published by xlibris

© 2005, Laura Minning

LAURA MINNING (BRC Art & Poetry) began writing creatively at the age of nine. She’s become an award-winning published poet and author since that time. All in all, she’s had one-hundred and nine individual poems, six articles, four books, three short plays and one piece of prose published both in hard copy and on-line. Her work has been featured in publications like “Literature Today”, “Amulet” and “Slate and Style”.

Laura received her first Editor’s Choice Award in 1993 for “bronx zoo” and her first International Merritt of Poetry Award in 1995 for “introspection” by the National Library of Poetry. Poetry.com recognized her work a decade later by granting her the title of International Poet of the Year.

Laura’s artistic accomplishments have been equally impressive. She’s had one-hundred and three original pieces exhibited and fifty-six images published. Her work has been displayed at venues like the VMFA Studio School, Trenton Free Public Library and Barcode.

The Barcode exhibit featured thirty-six pieces of Laura’s artwork during the month of February in 2016. Four pieces were sold over the course of opening weekend, and the exhibition was sponsored by Bacardi.

As a person with low vision and blindness, Laura hopes to inspire other creative people to never allow anything to hinder them from reaching for the stars and accomplishing their dreams If you were to ask her about her creative successes, she would tell you that the difficult is but the work of the moment, and the impossible takes a little longer.

 

 

 

Posted in poem, Poems/Poetry

O Jerusalem

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

I run from your city streets
where the Laws are too bright and hot,
the Shadows too hard, sure, possessed.
I run into the cool shade of your forest,
taking refuge like the birds.
(There are no knives in the forest.
Blood is shed here only as it must be shed.)
Not for bathing, drinking, celebrating.
The boundaries of wooded shade are deeply threatened,
Jerusalem,
as blood replaces even the rain,
as Laws turn into blood.

Originally published in the Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies, 2017, Vol.12, Theme: Earth/Psyche  (The poem refers to the genuine threat of losing a forest in Jerusalem city proper)

© 2019, Judy Capurso

JUDITH CAPURSO  writes and works in the Catskill Mountains.
In and out through waitress, musician, wife, parent, librarian, poetry teacher, caregiver, script reader, archivist, she continues to “stumble along between the immensities”.
Posted in Poems/Poetry

..the burning… a poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher

Posted on by Jamie Dedes

My apologies to Sonja and to readers. This poem was scheduled to appear in the March 2019 issue of the Zine, themed Waging Peace. Somehow it dropped out of the line-up. It’s an excellent poem and I know you’ll find yourself touched. / J.D.

he said the flames

came over the trees.

behind the buildings.

bombed the buildings.

so do not wonder why

i don’t play soldiers,

lay them down to die.

he says that i will not battle,

i am no good at it.

too peaceful. i can play

hospitals.

© 2019, Sonja Benskin Mesher RCA UA
Sonja Benskin Mesher‘s (sonja-benskin-mesher.net) is a woman of many talents including Asemic Writing. You’ll find samples of her Asemic Writing by rummaging around HERE. Sonja’s bio is HERE.
Posted in poem, Poems/Poetry, poetry

revisioning, a poem

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

“Every day brings a choice, to practice stress or to practice peace.” Joan Borysenko, the author of A Woman’s Book of Life 

a shadow walking
in the quake of my steps
a tattered pad and pen,
old hands taking notes,
random thoughts and
oddly paced prayers,
misspelling the past,
scribbling the future in
lines dim, ungrammatical,
lacking any cadence

in a waking moment,
i amend the notes, seize
the present, edit history,
writing complete sentences,
grammatically precise,
organically composed,
a latter-day revisioning

© 2018, Jamie Dedes

LAST CALL

For those who weren’t able to share their work in honor of 100,000 Poets and Others For Change – or even fave pieces on theme (Peace, Sustainability, Social Justice) by other authors – YOU still have time to do so but toMORROW is the last day. Instructions in the post explain how to share your poems or other art … check it out …

Posted in Poems/Poetry

Metaphysical Matters

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

The door resembled a strawberry,
a scraped bloody red nontheatrical access.
We paused, checked for cameras
recordings or real dogs barking nothing new.
My wife is a nurse and burdened,
determined to help if such a thing is classifiable.
Her client, Rosa, was happy to see us.
She smelled of lavender,
an air freshener stuck to her bathrobe.
My wife checked Rosa’s blood pressure.
Medications taken daily and duly checked off.
Rosa interpretatively made us a cup of tea,
half dancing her way to the kitchenette.
Her son would occasionally visit
to look in and sleep on the couch.
He wasn’t well himself and couldn’t help.
We ran a bath and Rosa was soon cleaner by a week.
Rosa didn’t know the day or the date,
but she could pronounce Ricardo Montalban
then enthusiastically rise to her feet.

© 2018, Colin James

COLIN JAMES has a book of poems, Resisting Probability, from Sagging Meniscus Press. He lives in Massachusetts………..direct link to SMP titles
Posted in poem, poetry

Facing the Music

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

I had hoped to not find death again,
Until it was my turn.
Perhaps the music will one day
Fall on my deaf ears.
I had played that tune before,
When I danced to a different song.

Donut Dreams

I dreamed of donuts
And falling through the middle
Of a donut, floating in hot coffee
Into the twilight zone.
Light filters in and the darkness disappears
As I inhale the decadent smells of morning,
Breakfast awaits.

I Saw Death

I saw death,
It lay there, not moving.
There was no blinking.
Inwardly, I screamed.
I saw death with its paleness,
Long fingers,
Wire icicles-
Frozen in my memory.
Donut Food Fight Delight

On Friday nights,
Donuts fly, in my kitchen.
Boston Cream, jelly filled
And powdered donuts are lined up
On the table.
Our mouths are covered in powdered sugar.
Jelly sprinkles are everywhere.
Our faces are stuffed
With creamy goodness.

© 2018, Mary Bone

Poet Mary Bone

MARY BONE has been writing poetry since the age of twelve. She has had two books of poetry published and is working on a third book. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including Oklahoma Today Magazine, Our Poetry Archive, Literary Yard, Spillwords, Poet’sGig, The Homestead Review, The New Ink Review, Whispers in the Wind, Poetry Pacific, The BeZine and numerous other places.

Posted in General Interest, poem, Poems/Poetry, poetry, Sustainability

Autumn milkweed

Posted on by The Bardo Group Beguines

When I die, bury my body
amid a pile of leaves,
then go home.
Plant clematis vines along fences,
fill the rest of your yard
with only native flowers
that will desire compost—
tend them lovingly,
as though you had cared for me.

—Michael Dickel
©2007

This poem is in the forthcoming collection of Michael Dickel’s poetry, Nothing Remembers.

Originally published online in: Abramelin: the Journal of Poetry and Magick. E.V. 2(1) Winter (2007).

Thanks to Tereza Joy Kramer for helpful comments and edits.