Magnapoets Free Verse and Form

An Invitation To Cry by Eliaz Cohen

   

To you the good loyal soldier who on that day the day of the order
will approach our dwelling:
I will run to you with open arms I will run I will embrace you and lead you.
In front of the entrance I will take hold of your collar, I will tear it to
the place where your heart is
Enter, sit with us, the mourners, taste the round pretzels
like the children who even now are tumbling on the rug like
fate, again houses in Etzion are turning pocked and hollow
Silently we will walk at the end through the rooms of the house:
Only I and you, my wife, and the walls remember quarrels and loving
lines that were written and erased as though burned in the book of life.
In your eyes, my good soldier, I will see a tear, our friends stifle
their crying, wrote the poet in 1948, perhaps now it is permitted to cry
and if there were more time
we would lie down in green pastures and play again
the hide-and-seek games of
The Song of Songs
you, as my love, I as the beloved, and you, soldier, in the role of the watchmen
and I would take you running above the cemetery -
to here, in an hour of great favor
I heard the allah of the muezzin
as though rising together with the praying of yehudain
here one can prophesy, here
if only we had more time
in a whisper you ask: have you packed? as though there were in this world a bundle
which can contain yearning
You stop the stream of tears. We go out for a breath of air on the porch
here I prepared a little corner to write the unfinished novel
now from the fig tree in the yard the last leaf falls
everything is filled with symbols you say
you fall on my neck, weeping bitterly
my good, loyal soldier, now at long last it is permitted to cry.

 

translated from the Hebrew by Larry Barak

Artistry(Margarita Engle)

The glassblower begins

with sand and fire

he ends wherever he chooses,

his breath shaping orchids,

swans, dragons...

Only the child given scraps

of paper or silk

has more freedom

to simulate

the end of the final day

of creation.

The child invents flowers, birds,

ships, a mask.

Even the busiest adult

pauses to imagine

a smile.

Moon in the Window

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Dorianne Laux
from Facts about the Moon, W.W. Norton

For You My Boys (Mukul Dahal)

For you my boys
I am this far.
shaking hand with
sea wind,
nodding at
the shower
that falls unalarmed,
and planting my feet
into an alien land.

You
two balls of my love
made of flesh
and blood and bones.

For you
I am filling
the pokets of my mind
with silence.

For you
I will not see
how you grow.

For you
I will not have
pleasure to draw you
to my bosom,
my nostrils
blessed with
the smell of your tender head.

How much joy
I would have
to see you pass through
time each moment!

For you
you will not
find me near you
to cling to me
and put a demand
of a day out,
icecream,cola,...

For you
you will not find your papa
at home when you're back
from school

For you
I have chosen
to miss my living
from moment to moment
with you.

My boys

you may ask

like my

two moist eyes

that have just blinked

away some drops of tears:

I am at such a cruel distance.

Is it really for you?

27th Sep, 2007, Swansea

copyright mukul dahal

BY THE HOUR...awakenings, too late - by Nick Zegarac

“Whores make the best lovers…
technically speaking, of course.”
He ponders alone,
in sweet bundled repose,
imagining the trickle of sweat
from his burning forehead
wiped clean as a thousand tongues
their supple sticky juices
changing chemistries mingled
with passionate acrylic finger tipped scars,
proudly displayed
across his arching back.

“Their eagerness to please…”
he explains to no one,
“…for a modest fee.”
- pleasure per cost distilled
more blissful than truths
or that filthy harlequin
promised romances
strung like beads
tightening about his tickling parched throat.

How thoroughly satisfying then?
How now?
To pry these dead memories
self professed
the boulevardier cut adrift,
impaled and pricking
on the sour gnash of repayment.

Thrust into the dry filthy crust of dawn
lucid and cold
with prying eyes
and probing inquiries –
a different sort,
into each deep sunken crevice
starched over by a frosting of saliva:
dire price tag
coughing up wish fulfillments
for compassion only,
any hint of warmth,
or perhaps
- merely death
and a soft Dresden arm
to lay upon these corrupted entrails,
trading insatiable needs
for  the dull prick
from a physician’s needle.
“Technically speaking…of course.”

If you would like to read a photo enriched presentation of this poem, visit Nick's poetry blog at:http://poetisthenewblog.blogspot.com/

Migratory Birds by Elisha Porat

 

Over the lighthouse of Stella Maris -
two hundred pelicans in flight.
Heavy air today. Slowly they flap
over the graying sea, over
the greening mountain rocks,
an arrowhead pointed North.
Head to tail to head they lock
in the pattern, secure
in this structure. Suddenly
feathers are scattered, the line
is broken from fear of the whirling
chopper descending roof high,
desperate to find the bright
square, the tightened center,
the landing platform
of Rambam, on sea.

* Rambam: a big hospital in Haifa, where army in the North are treated.

translated from the Hebrew by Elain Magarrel.

photos taken and copyrighted by Haim Melman, rony, and ogolan

Murder in the Ubiquitous, A Tango (J. Armstead)

They die all around us,
every moment
of every day,
the slaughter of the Hopeful,
optimistic innocence
expressed in a glance,
a wink, a longing gaze,
the eyes have it,
the pursuit of passion,
plotting the death of
loneliness, ageless,
the dance begins.

The bodies
start to stack
like cordwood.

The smile starts the fire,
eyes sliding over a face
across a crowded room,
the milonga begins,
song of expectant passion
spinning against the clock,
the avatavistic
baring of the teeth,
naked exposure, risk,
greeting to a stranger,
part laughter, part predation,
all magnetism and
caminar of fluidity,
parading counter to one another,
flirtation, making small dibujo
sketches, circles around
a heart you seek
to hold captive.
The prey is slain with
a kiss and a whisper.

The world stops, corte,
and two hearts stop beating
as lightning chains them
together, impassioned amague,
a threat of wild heat, and
the dance resumes, abrazo,
a slow, timid embrace becomes
a twirling, spinning
pirouette that hides the cutting,
hides the slicing of the knife,
promises broken, lies told,
secrets uncovered,
faithlessness revealed...

Boleo, the bleeding body of
new love is thrown and then
snapped back, hands still linked
as death approaches, passion still
fueling the fiery meltdown of
nuclear hearts, again embrace,
again a pause, the world drops
from under your feet, barrida,
the music returns, the eyes flash,
the smile dazzles,
the killing blades
rip deeper,
the heart pumps its last
and then becomes still.

Bodies everywhere,
slain by sentiment,
a small cosmos of
rose-petal slaughter...

The music fades.
Hunter strides gracefully
away from broken prey.

They die all around us,
every moment,
each an eternity,
of every day,
each an Armageddon.

A smile smoulders
in the dying flames...

--- fini ---

Image: courtesy of Dreamstime Photographic Stock, by bg_knight: dreamstime_881565

The Watermelons of Kakun by Elisha Porat

At times it is a sweet treasure, dewy, green
opening at night in the fields of Kakun;
at times it is a bloody treasure seen
sprouting from the reddening earth;
or the humps of a camel team
swinging to and fro, moving up and down.
There, these many days I dream:
diving in my slumber as my ears fill
with the sound of bells ringing in the long-necked beasts.

Bloody land moves under me, shifts,
clinging to me like an unwanted gift:
I hear the yellow-toothed mouth emit a grunt,
I see hands hastily cleaned of the hunt,
swelling in the night, dribbling in the heat
transparent bubble-like objects that grow green and sweet.
Perhaps my fears these many days will be expunged,
the ones that reemerge from forgetfulness, not fazed
even after so many many days.

Translated from the Hebrew by Cindy Eisner

NO LONGER HER OWN by Nick Zegarac

The baby came first,
but love did not follow
into the once happy abode
of passion’s sway.

She spat disdain,
her insults aplenty,
and found no comfort,
hidden amusement,
silly quirks
or swagger
that had charmed her to ruin.

…and cried no more,
the vain glorious remnants
of forgotten virtues.
Each silent wail
the torment of youth
chained,
every thought looped
with a safety pin
belonging to no one,
but that concrete bundle
new flesh.

Mindless and squirming,
teething, gurgling,
fatty arms stretched upward
toward something she had no desire to give.

She would run!
She could hide,
the greedy moon
of her reflected desires
eclipsed in one puff of exhaust,
pulling from the drive,
rounding the corner
no vista of freedom undefined,

Alas, never to be,
once that tiny pink car seat,
rocking empty against the back,
caught her bleary, crazed
and fate-less eye.

Don Juan, Cyrano and Tristan by Aristi Trendel

The moon look’d down; she looked up

it was love: Don Juan, Cyrano and Tristan

moans of pleasure to Selene

voice-to-voice, being-to-being

Love, he intoned

with all the might

of his endless quest

through the night

He praised her breasts

he praised her belly

the knight of lust drank

to the memory of her Agean Sea taste

Letters piled up

myriad paragraphs of love

poems soared

deep in purple prose

Gnosis and knowledge, healing love

the whole heaving lot

upon his Promethean shoulders

fell the naked man’s burden

Narrow shoulders, bearish nape

mind aflame

Don Juan, Cyrano and Tristan

three in one

In the cold, starry night

a half-moon low in the sky

just like a lower lip

ignited by a kiss

Under the flame-spewing moon

in the most tender night

he voiced up

his umpteenth declaration of love.