An Unheard Voice from Iraq, evil echoing in Charleston

I am so sorry and horrified of the recent Charleston murders of those wonderful human beings that joined together to pray and were cut down by evil.

I went to a poetry society meeting today and the reader, editor for Atlanta Review (link at bottom) read some poems from a book of Iraqi poems, Flowers of Flame, Unheard Voices of Iraq. This is just one in the collection.

The pain of this recent Charleston assault is not just a horrible experience in the USA, it is part of a flowing thread of evil in the world when we do not love our fellow man.

Bags of Bones

What luck!
At last she has found his bones.
His skull is also in the bag.
The bag in her hand
Is just like all the other bags
In other shivering hands.
His bones look like thousands of bones
In the mass graveyard.
But his skull is unlike
Any other skull.
Two eyes, two holes-
He saw too much through them.

Two holes for ears
To let music in
The story of this skull
Is his alone.
A nose
That is just an empty gap,
A mouth open
Like an abyss-
It was not like this when he kissed her
There. quietly
Far from this place
With its clatter of skulls. bones and dust.
This place where all our questions are exhumes:
What does it mean...
To give your mother back,
On the occasion of death,
The handful of bones
She offered you
On the occasion of birth?
What does it mean that you depart
Without a death certificate?
The dictator does not give a receipt
When he takes your life.
...His skull, alone, has figured all this out-
How to multiply one death by million
To equal the county.
He is the director of this tragedy,
And as his audience applauds
It shakes the bones,
The bones in the bags,
The full bag in her hand at last.
Her luck. at least a little better
Than her neighbor, who, also,
Still goes on looking
For her bag
Of bones.

Dunya Mikhail

Atlanta Review

somewhere i have never traveled

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near.

your slightest look easily will enclose me though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands    

ee cummings

Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand

Spring is like a perhaps hand

(which comes carefully

out of Nowhere) arranging

a window, into which people look (while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing) and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things, while people stare carefully moving a perhaps 

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.

        e.e. cummings

ABOUT e.e. cummings

impossible to transcribe on a small, bare page

THE CHOICE
by Mary Karr

Once in northern England, I got a few pub drunks
to drive to Wordsworth’s house, local thugs
whose underheated VW (orange) took me
fishtailing down icy hills,

through hedgerows in an unlit labyrinth
reminiscent of the library stacks I wandered around
zombie-like each day, not composing
verses but waiting in scarlet lipstick

for the bars to open. I’d left my homeland
fleeing a man I’d faked first caring, then
not caring about, and in months of Euclidean solitude
I’d writ no cogent phrase. The notebook in my knapsack

was a talisman I carried into train stations so as not
to look like a bimbo. But bimbo
I was, and open, the bound pages were only white wings
to nap on. Near dawn, our caravan came

to a sheet-glazed window– a child’s stumpy desk
with the poet’s initials penknifed on top.
It was my first stab of reverence,
when that hunger to emblazon

some surface with oneself became barbarous
wonder at someone else. W.W.–
jagged as inverted Alps, unscalable
as a cathedral’s gold-leaf dome.

After that, grad school was a must.
There I posed as supplicant till enough
magnificence had been poured
down my throat that I could whiff

the difference between it and the stench
I spilled. When I told the resident genius
that given the choice between writing and being
happy, I’d pick the latter, she touched my folio

with her pencil like a bad fairy’s wand,
saying: Don’t worry, you don’t have that choice.
And in a blink of my un-mascara’ed eye
the intricate world bloomed into being– impossible

to transcribe on the small bare page.

(for Brooks Haxton)

WEB SITE - MARY KARR

The Lesson of the Moth - Don Marquis

i was talking to a moth the other evening he was trying to break into an electric light bulb and fry himself on the wires why do you fellows pull this stunt i asked him because it is the conventional thing for moths or why if that had been an uncovered candle instead of an electric light bulb you would now be a small unsightly cinder have you no sense plenty of it he answered but at times we get tired of using it we get bored with the routine and crave beauty and excitement fire is beautiful and we know that if we get too close it will kill us but what does that matter it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while so we wad all our life up into one little roll and then we shoot the roll that is what life is for it is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than to exist forever and never be a part of beauty our attitude toward life is come easy go easy we are like human beings used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves and before i could argue him out of his philosophy he went and immolated himself on a patent cigar lighter i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself