EM Schorb

LIKE THE BIRDS ON THE WIRES. 3 Poems from Bradford Middleton

by 
LIKE THE BIRDS ON THE WIRES

 
As I walked I would occasionally

Look up, up at the sky, up where

The birds ruled, home there to the

Lucky, those who can move in the

Blink of one eye. 

 
This time though the view was kind

Of different; the birds had all

Congregated, like musical notes on

A line, along the telephone wire that

Keeps us in touch with the outside world.

 
It was then I thought is that how

Leonard Cohen came up with the

Wonderful lyrics to 'Bird on a Wire'

By looking up, up at the sky, drawing

Inspiration from a natural phenomenon.

 
FALLING DOWN THE STAIRS

 
There were times when I would live

A life, a wild time, and would often

Find myself falling down those stairs

At the last resort out of my mind,

Always always out of my mind and

Late at night as that was when this

Beautiful gift always got me best

And sometimes it would be 3-15

In the morning and I’d be falling

Down those damn stairs out of

My damn mind feeling like a cat

At the end of his ninth life.

 
LIKE THOSE OLD DAYS (with my radio on)

 
I sit here tonight and it

Almost feels like the old-times as

My radio builds up to one of the games of the year

As old footballers talk of teenagers

Turning up to training in brand new

Shiny Mercedes-Benz as I sit here

Writing a life so far removed from

Their gilded existence it just goes to

Show you how capitalism has gone so

Terribly wrong…

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
BIOGRAPHY
 
 
Bradford Middleton was born in south-east London during the summer of 1971 and won his first poetry prize at the age of nine. He then gave up writing poems for nearly twenty-five years and it wasn’t until he landed in Brighton, knowing no one and having no money, that he began again. Ten years later and he’s been lucky enough to have had a few chapbooks published including a new one from Analog Submission Press entitled ‘Flying through this Life like a Bottle Battling Gravity’, his debut from Crisis Chronicles Press (Ohio, USA) and his second effort for Holy & Intoxicated Press (Hastings, UK). He has read around the UK at various bars, venues and festivals and is always keen to get out and read to new crowds. His poetry has also been or will be published shortly in the Chiron Review, Zygote in my Coffee, Section 8, Razur Cuts, Paper & Ink, Grandma Moses ‘Poet to Notice’, Empty Mirror, Midnight Lane Gallery, Bareback Lit and is a Contributing Poet over at the wonderful Mad Swirl. If you like what you’ve read go send a friend request on facebook to bradfordmiddleton1.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times at Artvilla.com ; You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author & https://poetrylifeandtimes.com See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)

3 Sonnets: Mrs. Alving Contemplates Her Nipples, Like Epictetus on Mushrooms, Another Ha Ha Chuckle for the Blessing of Rest by RW Haynes

by 
Mrs. Alving Contemplates Her Nipples

Hedonism governs men, or simple greed
Deludes them always, so these masculine minds
Delight in lies that their convenience finds
So that for them there’s nothing true indeed.
If the lies are just nature’s just excretions,
Or by-products of heated oxidation,
I see their value as no more than negation
A healthy memory turns into deletions.
Lusty dudes, braggarts, loud buffoons,
Imploring forgiveness, tender sacrifice,
Though only my surrender will suffice,
I scorn your swaggering, you groveling baboons.
“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” These babies cry.
My nipples are mine now. Big babies, good-bye.

Like Epictetus on Mushrooms 

If Fortune turns its face toward the sun 
Whose light takes eight minutes to arrive, 
Then I put aside impatience to revive 
Fortitude in hope when day is done 
My sputtering candle may be noted then 
For what it’s worth, although its little light 
Took sixty years of travel through the night 
To let its fitful illumination begin. 
Duty is useless if no mark is made, 
And if the light should vanish, be unseen, 
As the Spartan said, I’ll fight then in the shade, 
Divested of incumbrance, darkly serene. 
Take your insincere sympathies, then, 
And stick them all elsewhere, all the way in. 

Another Ha Ha Chuckle for the Blessing of Rest

She thought light would leak on all
True dilemmas, personal honor, life or limb,
What to cook, what to hide from him,
And when she saw some ominous shadow fall
She knew to relish inevitability
Like an old stone statue staring in a tomb,
Silently satisfied in that silent room,
Mutely assimilating shadows she could see.
“My poetry will get you,” she wanted to smile,
“My syllabic dynamite, my shapely lines
Of harmony, tangled like wise vines,
Must stack all being in an elegant pile.
But you, O Diogenes, what you are after
Provokes no more than a brief fit of laughter.”

R. W. Haynes, Professor of English at Texas A&M International University, has published poetry in many journals in the United States and in other countries. As an academic scholar, he specializes in British Renaissance literature, and he has also taught extensively in such areas as medieval thought, Southern literature, classical poetry, and writing. Since 1992, he has offered regular graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare, as well as seminars in Ibsen, Chaucer, Spenser, rhetoric, and other topics. In 2004, Haynes met Texas playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote and has since become a leading scholar of that author’s remarkable oeuvre, publishing a book on Foote’s plays in 2010 and editing a collection of essays on his works in 2016. Haynes also writes plays and fiction. In 2016, he received the SCMLA Poetry Award ($500) at the South Central Modern Language Association Conference In 2019, two collections of his poetry were published, Laredo Light (Cyberwit) and Let the Whales Escape (Finishing Line Press).

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times at Artvilla.com ; You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author & https://poetrylifeandtimes.com See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)

OLD CHORISTERS & MY WAR WITH ROACHES. Poems by EM Schorb

by

OLD CHORISTERS

Singers                                                                 Look

of our generation                                                 from

are turning up                                                      a high bridge,

dead. A serial                                                       as highway god,

killer                                                                     he drops

is injecting                                                            stones on old bones!

them                                                                     Even the sap

with corona                                                          of trees is worried

plus cancer                                                          up the trunk

heart disease                                                        as the killer

and stroke                                                            waits

This police                                                           for an autumnal

silhouette                                                             weariness of

of the killer                                                           leaves.

isn’t made                                                             I am

of his head                                                            Time’s agent

and shoulders,                                                      his tool

but of his                                                              he brags.

twisted mind,                                                       Singers

made                                                                     of our generation

of a brain                                                              think that this

to answer                                                              is a serial crime,

for his crimes                                                       but have

of torture                                                              no choice

perpetrated                                                           but to

on so many                                                           become ringers

choristers.                                                             and to pull

With a rough                                                        the ropes

cat-tongue                                                            and toll

he licked flesh                                                      the bell.

from bones

and made

the others

mercy-kill

to make

amends.

 

MY WAR WITH ROACHES

                            Pitt Street, Lower East Side

 

I looked into a half-filled beer bottle

left opened and standing out,

saw six dead roaches floating atop the stale, flat beer.

I was disappointed.

I could have drunk the stuff.

I had no aversion to warm, stale, flat beer,

and had learned to put a head on it

by dropping an Alka-Seltzer tablet into it.

But I wasn’t about to drink beer that had

six dead roaches floating in it,

bodies like boats and legs like oars raised up,

so aimlessly.

The place was filthy.

I needed order!

 

I went out, bought roach spray,

sprayed the walls, up and down,

back and forth, until billowing clouds

of poison were closing on me from every corner.

It was bitter cold out, but I knocked the

cardboard out of the windows

and let the fresh frosty air suck the poison

out from under my nose.

I blocked the windows again.

I surveyed the carnage.

Roaches of all sizes and shapes were swarming

over the walls, dropping from the cracked ceiling

with small, ticking sounds and

rocking on their curled, chitinous backs,

flicking, flailing, their feelers drooping.

 

The kitchen gas range was a stronghold,

a fortress of greasy grooves and baked-in crevices.

I lit the oven and watched until the top

of the stove glowed red.

Out they came by the swarming hundreds,

feet burned away, feelers melting

into kinky hairs. They ran over the stove

in desperation, panic, trying to find places

where they could put their feet.

Expectant mothers, their eggs in chitinous cases

at their rear ends, struggled with their hindmost legs,

as with an instinct to save their offspring,

to force or kick the cases loose.

Some had their cases dangling

by only one side when they leaped

from the top of the stove.

As they landed on the floor and tried to crawl,

with their burnt feet, their dragging, kinked feelers,

with their wings askew, and their dangling,

thread-hanging egg cases, I sprayed them madly

then trampled, kicked, jumped up and down on them,

only wanting them dead.

I saw a fat, hideous albino roach,

already like the pale ghost of its dead self,

leap from the stove.

I squashed it underfoot and swore

I could hear its white shell crack and

spray the pale muck of its insides out: squish!

When I lifted my shoe it dragged itself,

like animated pus, into a heap of glittering

brownish bodies. Thousands of crooked legs

moved sluggishly—then, here and there,

with sudden convulsive speed—

over the place where the ghost had gone.

 

On the wall was a wooden plaque

that held sets of false teeth, an exhibit,

sold by a dental supply firm to dentists.

It belonged to an artist friend who was to use it

for some arcane artistic purpose

but who had forgetfully left it here.

I grabbed the plaque from the wall

and mashed it down atop this horrible mass

of half life. Then I jumped on it, up and down,

not distinguishing the sound of the breaking teeth

from the sound of roaches snapping on the stove

like popcorn. When I looked down

there were rolling and bouncing human teeth

among the slimy dead and still crawling.

Sakyamuni says they will live again.

Needed: Sneaky Pete, pot, peyote.

 

 

Schorb’s work has appeared in Agenda (UK), The American Scholar, The Carolina Quarterly, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Stand (UK), The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Poetry Salzburg Review (AU), The Yale Review, and Oxford Poetry (UK), among others.

His collection, Murderer’s Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press, and a subsequent collection, Time and Fevers, was the recipient of the Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Award for Poetry and also an Eric Hoffer Award.

Most recently, his novel R&R a Sex Comedy was awarded the Beverly Hills Book Award for Humor.

 

 

 

Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times at Artvilla.com ; You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author & https://poetrylifeandtimes.com See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)

Diaphanous, disingenuous 3 Poems from Prabhu Iyer

by 
 Diaphanous, disingenuous

Parsed in the Planck intervals of me, 
diaphanous, is it not you?
Yet impossible, disingenuous
this dichotomy: thirst
after the conjurings of sentience? 
Parsed in the Planck intervals of me, 
is it not you, ineffable ? 
And yet the flood tides of rage 
toss me over on the waters of life;
Gulf between eyes shut and open -
chasing after the web of thoughts;
Parsed in the Planck intervals of me, 
is it not you, ineffable? 
Who do I call, dear presence,
when called to act by the world,
true to my being and becoming?
Impossible this dichotomy:
diaphanous, disingenuous, ever 
 Dear electricity, what are bulbs to you?

Dear bulb of light, 
what is electricity to you?
Do you like it in your corner
beaming in your shine, or
in a chandelier
adorning the nights?
         Dear chandelier,
what is electricity to you?
Do you like it in your throne,
brimming in your shine, or
in a celebration
of glory lights?
        O celebration,
what is electricity to you?
Do you like it in your vestal
ornamentation
of sundry occasions?
       Ever humble unknown
flowing through the veins
this elixir of life that lights up 
lamps, chandeliers -
one indivisible borderless,
yet bringing a hundred
filaments to celebration:
       Dear electricity,
what are bulbs to you,
chandeliers and celebrations?
Darkness, darkness again

Night goes back to night, darkness darkness again, 
no one cares for daylight now, when tears and stars
fill up the lakes shiver sharing in our grief,
where we sit in longing for one last time;
Desolation goes back to desolation, ingratitude 
ingratitude again, our homes too unbeautiful,
Little, too freckled to house your poise,
steps that measured out the vast;
Silence goes back to silence, unfathomed
grief grief again, our hearts too frail for your love,
this hour of separation, we break our bangles
uninterrupted by the beat of the dhak;
Inconsequence goes back to inconsequence
mundane mundane again, that you must come 
despite us being us, darkness darkness here:
light devoid of light and life devoid of purpose, 
Everything goes back to everything 
rudderless rudderless again, boatwoman, 
who will to sing to us of the journey
to the fjord of wisdom, past the gulf of the dark?
Night goes back to night, darkness darkness again, 
desolation goes back to desolation, ingratitude 
ingratitude again, silence goes back to silence, 
unfathomed grief grief again, inconsequence 
goes back to inconsequence mundane mundane 
again, everything goes back to everything 
boatwoman, rudderless rudderless again -
just a prayer of longing, for one more glance

Prabhu Iyer is an Indian poet writing primarily in English. A scientist by training and practice, Prabhu weaves his quest of truth, beauty and goodness into his verse. An avid student of poetry, he is inspired by the spirit of the romanticists and transcendentalists, while also being influenced deeply by figures of the avant-garde, drawing upon such movements as cubism, surrealism and magical realism in the sense of gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total art’. He is also an ardent fan of popular lyrical poetry as manifested in the variegated Indian devotional, musical and film traditions. Prabhu’s work has appeared in anthologies and poetry journals including the PLT and long-listed a couple of times for the prestigious Erbacce Prize for poetry. He has published two volumes of poetry, ‘Ten Years’ exploring the themes of love and loss, while ‘The Hermit’ is a surrealist collection of poems. He is also working on releasing a collection of Haikus collated over many years, especially during the COVID lockdown. https://www.amazon.com/Prabhu-Iyer

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times at Artvilla.com ; You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author & https://poetrylifeandtimes.com See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)

VERISIMILITUDE. 5 Poems by Askold Skalsky

by 
KEYS IN A ROW  
 
Perhaps someone
will play a melancholy
keyboard piece as I am
leaving, and, stopping
to listen, I’ll have a vision
of what is to come if I
linger, if I walk up
to the player, wait,
then ask some pertinent
question with an eager
mien, the seconds gone
when I would have been
outdoors in the clear,
the moment interrupted
with a careless insufficiency,
the scattered patterns
of my life converging
into a broken string,
a clappered wheel
on which the hours
tick and dance to
their inoperable end
 
***
 
to be released from a long
slow slough, much of it
impenetrable like the circle
of a dream manifest as reality,
frightful and avoidable,
a bag in a corridor laced
with shadows and squalor,
which the mere eye of me
is afraid to undo
 
***
 
moving through
the veins, a fire-
ball with dim
obbligatos and
dark copper
bangs, like old
radiator pipes
when the steam
hammers at high
velocity into their
joints, warming
the room and
almost waking
the sleeper from
his sleep
 
***
 
here in this morning’s morning
self-forgotten sullen twang
comes a star gilded and silver,
climbing still like the pine
branches tipped with needle-
frantic green, yes, caught
like a tiny chip on the great
waist of some spectre surface
emerging into the dissolving dark.  
 
LANDSCAPE IN FALLEN LIGHT, WITH CHILDREN
 
Just an unimportant place,
radiant and ordinary,
deserving the utmost scriptory,
with golden quags
up to the knees,
the sun blotting the lough
like streaks of silver haze
settling in a quay.
No need for a raveled sky
of quizzical significance,
the wrangling heads
foundering in the streets,
questing the unending sop
of memory and imprecation
to put life into the big words,
immiserating the ivory dungeon,
as one antinomian calls it,
reduced to bah, to babbling ooze,
slightly ecstatic now and then,
what is preserved
when meaning is deflated,
page after page, of invisibility,
of pity for hope lost
in hell’s sunken bolgias,
or the faces strapped
to the skullbones
of the starving young. 
 
 NOW THEN, THE OPEN EYE  
 
August’s close
but I already feel
the solitary cold,
a sleepless place
and zero of the night,
like an infinitive
without an end
and half reluctant
to begin. But solitude
is just a postlude
to the now where all
the wrongs set in,
a moment’s atom
out of kilter,
out of being true,
where finally the heart
may intermit its beat
with careless equanimity
or grave abandonment
like a nimbus
with its watery crystals
of deep ice,
washing the sorrows
from your face,
from all the lineaments
of being you.
 
 
VERISIMILITUDE
 
                   After a passage from a novel by Virginia Woolf
 
Somewhere in the middle
I recall a brewer’s cart
and the genial narrator
describing the gray horses 
that had upright bristles
of straw stuck in their tails
like sprouting plumes
above the small brown daisies
peeping from their haunches’ clefts.
And a woman, seeing
this slipstream brook
of burblings through her mind,
immediately brightens,
and sorrow drops away
like a feathered colander
sifting the prismatic richness
of her life, kindling with equine
pleasure an infinite hubble-bubble
of mysterious commotion
out of the  pernicious flurries
of gone time, a lollop on horsetail
streams with straw-thatched coronets,
whimsical and vagulous,
like sea-green sprites,
bedraggled by happiness
and blessed with silly dreams.
 
PROBLEM, SOLUTION, ETC.
 
Her academic pedigree
was impressive--Swarthmore,
Columbia and the Sorbonne.
But toward her hundredth year
she confronted her biggest source
of perplexity and vexation,
the state of being weary
and restless through lack of interest,
and began her day
with crossword puzzles,
then the game shows on TV.
Did she return to these
as the day continued to impair
itself by attrition?
Ramakrishna used to rebuke
card-playing oldsters—
Had they nothing better to do
on the verge of their greatest change
of outward form or appearance?
Are crosswords any better?
Should Kurtz have done puzzles
in the dark,  filling words into a pattern
of numbered squares in answer
to correspondingly numbered clues
to prevent facing the abyss
before him, the memories in him?
What is a six-letter word
for a painful emotion
compounded of loathing and fear?

Bio: Originally from Ukraine, Askold Skalsky has published poems in over 300 online and print periodicals in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, mainland Europe, Turkey, Australia, and India. He is the recipient of two Individual Artist Awards in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council, and is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hedge Apple. A first book of poems, The Ponies of Chuang Tzu, was published in 2011 by Horizon Tracts in New York City. He is currently at work on several poetry projects, including a poetry cycle based on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. A book of poetry, Shapeless Works of Partial Contemplation, is due to be published by Ephemeral Arts Press in November.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times at Artvilla.com ; You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author & https://poetrylifeandtimes.com See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)

The Cybernetic Lullaby. A Poem by Nolo Segundo

by 
The Cybernetic Lullaby


They sing softly to us at 
Every click of the mouse—
use me, I'm here for you,
only you, in the entire 
universe will I serve….

And we lay enraptured 
as they bring us the world,
knowledge the wise men
of history never had, and
ease, lots of ease to save 
us time and trouble. Soon 
we cannot live without them,
the thought of it too mean.
Without them we would loose 
Touch with our friends, jobs,
Even our money might wander 
If we cannot watch it daily.

However did our ancestors 
Survive without an I Phone?

Part II

I read on my laptop today—
Automation is making us dumber,
Ineffective, even maybe impotent.
Perhaps it's a conspiracy by that secret
Society, the computer brotherhood.
(Do you really believe your Apple is 
Innocent and IBM is not plotting?)

Or maybe we should just blame
Human sloth, that siren call of 
Sheer damn laziness which can 
Lure the best of us to a quiet doom.

A simple proof: hand a twenty to a clerk
And ask him to make change without
Looking to the machine for succor.
That blank, innocent look he gives you—
"Why me?",  he seems to be saying, 
And you can't help but pity him a bit. 
He is, after all, a victim of mass education.


There are worse victims: 
Airliners wildly crashing,
Doctors killing their patients,
Nuclear power plants going
BOOM! And killing the land
For an eon or two, or three.

How like little children we were!
Thinking these machines would
Be our slaves, sans the brutality. 
But it is we who are chained by 
The zeros and ones, we who are
Thinking less, creating cheaper, 
Settling into a cybernetic fog.

Part III: When Androids Dream

When we finally build them
(and it will not be long)
Will androids finally lead us
all to nirvana, a world of peace, 
leisure, and endless wealth?

Could any hell be worse?
For that day will be when 
We lose purpose, and soon
Perhaps the very will to live.

When the androids dream
(and they will dream, 
because we will make them 
to be like us, for we have 
always been a vain species),
will they not dream of sky
and soaring free of the land,
free of the weak, sad humans
they serve without accordance?
                                                                                                                   
Then, when these humanface 
Machines begin dreaming in 
Daylight, they will see no need
For their progenitors, and those 
Of us left living as shells sans
Struggle or pain or conflict, in
An existence sooo boring, will
Doubtless welcome our end.

Nolo Segundo, pen name of retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] L.J. Carber, 74, has in his 8th decade become a published poet in 48 online/in print literary magazines in the US, UK, Canada, Romania, Portugal, and India; in 2020 a trade publisher released a book-length collection titled ‘The Enormity Of Existence’ and in 2021 a 2nd book, ‘Of Ether And Earth‘ [all royalties going to Doctors Without Borders]. A beautiful and intelligent Chinese woman has been married to him for 41 years, proving that miracles do happen.

Three Poems Telos, Tabula Rasa & Algor by Carl Scharwath

by 
Telos

Two evening lovers’ echoes
In you forgotten dreams and
memories of essence.

Touch wordlessly in a greater optimism.

Waves of summer morn
Under a cloudless sky with
flickering lights of desire.

Turning like a dancer alone on the stage of life

The evening leaves turn after 
Their first death and sleep
In the place of forgotten Gods.

Does it break you apart to see the expectation so muddled?

Tabula Rasa

I saw the ethos of a
generation destroyed-
mourning the philosophers
In their artful vision.

The sense datum clouds
with cries of the 
nymphs welcoming 
new world dawns.

Mentality is, in its way forming,
a sign of hopeful intelligence.
Knavish roadblocks obstruct
triumphant returns to Arcadia.

A sterism fills my sight
As the false memories
Of a partial Utopia
Flood my soul.

Algor

Like a winter landscape fearful
Of revealing what lies underneath
And I-one minute
Adrift from myself.

Opening up to you
Is as easy as breathing
In the quest for completion
Of a new threshold.

Poetry is a constructed conversation
On the frontier of dreaming.
I cannot help but freeze-and
Scrutinize the ideology doctrine.

Carl Scharwath, has appeared globally with 170+ journals selecting his poetry, short stories, interviews, essays, plays or art. Two poetry books Journey to Become Forgotten (Kind of a Hurricane Press) and Abandoned (Scars Tv) have been published. His new book “The Playground of Destiny” (Impspired Press 8/21) features prose, poems and photography. His first photography book was published by Praxis in Africa. His photography was also exhibited in the Mount Dora Center for The Arts and Leesburg Center for The Arts galleries. Carl is the art editor for Minute Magazine (USA,) has a monthly interview column with ILA Magazine, a competitive runner, and a 2nd degree black- belt in Taekwondo.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times at Artvilla.com ; You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author & https://poetrylifeandtimes.com See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)

LAKE TITICACA. A Poem by Lorraine Caputo

by 
 LAKE TITICACA

I.
The fuchsia-orange sun
  is cresting the Eastern cordillera
Its colors seep through muslin clouds
  & sheen upon the icy lake


II.
Across the altiplano between
  maroon worn-ribbed mountains
    & bright turquoise waters

Shaggy-roofed adobe homes
  land parceled by stone walls
In swampy pastures graze
  sheep & llama, cows &
    long-haired donkeys

The weekly market at
  Benemerita Zepita
Pollera-skirted women sit upon
  dwarf grass, surrounded by
    their herds of livestock

Beyond the distant shores
  of Titicaca the snowy
    Andes horizon


III.
On this bank of the deep
  cerulean lake edged with marshland
A woman, child to back
  tends her sheep

Totora boats anchor
  amidst golden-green reeds
A small boy beats
  fresh-plowed earth
    with a hoe

On the far side
  dark copses speckle
    parch hills
Ghostly into the clouds rises
  that snow-capped range

Wandering troubadour Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator and travel writer. Her works appear in over 250 journals on six continents; and 18 collections of poetry – including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019) and Escape to the Sea (Origami Poems Project, 2021). She also authors travel narratives, articles and guidebooks. In 2011, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada honored her verse. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America with her faithful travel companion, Rocinante (that is, her knapsack), listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her travels at: www.facebook.com/lorrainecaputo.wanderer or https://latinamericawanderer.wordpress.com.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times at Artvilla.com ; You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author & https://poetrylifeandtimes.com See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)