When the Messiah Comes poems from Aieka by Daniela Ema Aguinsky Translated from Spanish by Amparo Arróspide & Robin Ouzman Hislop

i.

La foto de mi abuela el día de su casamiento

Sé que no lo deseabas
pero lo hiciste.
El buen chico judío asignado
no resultó
tan buen chico.

Pasé tu edad
no me casé con el mío.
Lo deje ir lejos
una noche de luna
en la terraza
tomó mi mano y dijo

no me gustan las chicas
con las uñas pintadas.

Las mías
eran rojas
y dejaban marcas
en las paredes de su intestino.

A veces recuerdo al goy
de la fábrica de máquinas de coser
gritaba tu nombre
en la cueva privada de su boca.

Alegre
soprano de interiores
fósforo
en una caja húmeda
durante un corte de luz

vos empezás a irte
yo recién estoy llegando. 

i.

The photo of my grandmother on her wedding day

I know you didn't want to
but you still did.
The assigned good Jewish boy
did not turn out to be
such a good boy.

I am past your age
I didn't marry mine.
I let him get away
a moonlit night
on the terrace
he took my hand and said

I don't like girls
with painted nails.

Mine
were red
and left marks
on the walls of his intestine.

Sometimes I remember the goi*
from the sewing machine factory
he screamed your name
in the private cave of his mouth.

Cheerful
indoor soprano
a match
in a wet match box
when there is a fuse

you begin to depart
I'm just arriving.


* Goi (non Jewish boy)

ii.

Palimpsesto

Me tiré ácido
me raspé la piel
y me escribí encima.

Abajo quedaron huellas
los textos que no llegaron
al canon de mi existencia.

Que vengan los cabalistas
los estudiantes de Talmud
voy a desplegarme sobre la mesa,
una escritura sagrada.

Desnúdenme con cuidado
rastreen los indicios
discutan el estado original
de esta mujer borrada.

ii.

Palimpsest

I threw acid on myself
scraped my skin
and wrote on it.

Traces were left below
the texts that did not make it
to the canon of my existence.

Let the Cabalists come
students of the Talmud
I'm going to spread myself on a table,
a sacred script

Undress me with care
track the signs
discuss the original state
of this erased woman.

iii.

Las copas están hechas para romperse

Lo sé
desde que mi abuela guardaba la vajilla
de su abuela, en un aparador especial
que nunca se abría
por lo delicadas que eran
esas copitas verdes de tallos finos como lirios
capacidad mínima, brillantes.

Nada ameritaba
perturbarlas
de su estado decorativo
los nietos no le habíamos dado
una jupá, un compromiso, un nacimiento.
No le habíamos dado nada.

Pero mi abuela sabía mejor que nadie
que las copas
están hechas
para romperse:

van a quebrarse
mientras lavás los platos
o estallar contra el piso cuando levantás la mesa
un día que estás sobrepasada
o se le van a caer a tu nieta, dentro de veinte años,
cuando se mude sola a su primer departamento.

Van a resistir
como las personas viejas resisten
hasta quebrarse
un día cualquiera de sol.

iii.

GLASSWARE  ARE  MADE TO BE BROKEN

I know
since my grandmother put away the crockery
of her grandmother, in a special sideboard
she never opened
because of how delicate they were
those little green glasses with thin stems like lilies
bright in miniature capacity 

Nothing was worth
disturbing them
from their ornamental state     
grandchildren hadn´t give her
a chuppah*, an engagement, a birth. 
We hadn't given her anything.

But my grandmother knew better than anyone
that glassware
are made to be broken

they are going to break
while you wash the dishes
or explode on the floor when you ´re clearing the table
stressed out
or your granddaughter will drop them in twenty years´ time
when she moves into her first apartment alone.

They will resist
as old people resist
until breaking
any sunny day.

* chuppah: a Jewish wedding

iv.

                Cuando venga el Mesías van a curarse todos los enfermos
                     pero el tonto va a seguir siendo tonto.
                      Refrán Idish

Cuando venga el Mesías

y reconstruyan el Tercer Templo
no quiero estar arriba
mirando a los hombres rezar
en círculos que cantan y bailan
mientras mujeres charlan
y chicos gritan.

Cuando venga el Mesías
no quiero estar arriba
con el humo de los sacrificios
abajo los sacerdotes entran
y salen como amantes
pronunciando
el nombre sagrado.

Cuando venga el Mesías
y todos retornemos a la tierra
quiero estar en la tierra de este mundo.

iv.

                   When the Messiah comes, all the sick will be cured.
                        but the fool will remain a fool.
                         Yiddish saying

When the Messiah comes

and they rebuild the Third Temple
I don't want to be above
watching men pray
in circles singing and dancing
while women chat
and children shout

When the Messiah comes
I don't want to be above
with the smoke of sacrifices
the priests entering below
and exiting like lovers
pronouncing
the sacred name.

When the Messiah comes
and we all return to earth
I want to be on the earth of this world.

v.

Teléfono fijo

Mis papás me dieron un teléfono fijo
la línea está incluída dijeron
tenelo por las dudas
y quedó en el piso

cuando suena, rara vez
sé que son ellos
(nadie más tiene el número)
me siento en el sillón
espero tres tonos y atiendo

a veces una noticia terrible otras
una invitación para almorzar
lo único fijo este teléfono.

v.

Landline

My parents gave me a landline
the line is paid for they said
keep it just in case
and it stayed on  the floor

when it rings, rarely
I know it's them
(no one else has its number)
I sit on the couch
I wait three rings and answer

sometimes terrible news other times
an invitation for lunch

The only fixed thing this phone. 

Daniela Ema Aguinsky (Buenos Aires, 1993) is a writer and filmmaker based in Argentina. She Directed the shorts Virtual Guard, Hurricane Berta, 7 Tinder Dates, and several others. She published Amante japonés, Aieka (2023) and Terapia con animales (2022) in Argentina, Mexico and Spain, book that won The National Poetry Prize Storni in 2021. She is also the spanish translator to the California based poet Ellen Bass; Todos los platos del menú (Gog & Magog, 2021). Twitter: laglu Instagram: laglus

 
 
Amparo Arróspide (born in Buenos Aires) is an M.Phil. by the University of Salford. As well as poems, short stories and articles on literature and films in anthologies and international magazines, she has published five poetry collections: Presencia en el Misterio, Mosaicos bajo la hiedra, Alucinación en dos actos y algunos poemas, Pañuelos de usar y tirar and En el oído del viento. The latter is part of a trilogy together with Jacuzzi and Hormigas en diaspora, which are in the course of being published. In 2010 she acted as a co-editor of webzine Poetry Life Times, where many of her translations of Spanish poems have appeared, she has translated authors such as Margaret Atwood, Stevie Smith and James Stephens into Spanish, and others such as Guadalupe Grande, Ángel Minaya, Francisca Aguirre, Carmen Crespo, Javier Díaz Gil into English. She takes part in poetry festivals, recently Centro de Poesía José Hierro (Getafe).
 
 
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times ; at Artvilla.com
You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author. See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)

A Quicksilver Trilling (Inspired by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan) A Poem by David L O’Nan

A Quicksilver Trilling 
(Inspired by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan)

Once upon a time we met the platinum blonde, with a letter in hand and a brown Loro Piana handbag.
She was quiet and frantic at the same time (the obstacles of running from beautiful to damnit!)
You popped the bubbles in the hot flames,
in flamenco streets with bleeding trains 
that lead you, from the whistles to the cheating rainfalls.

Now, she’s as quiet as the storm swept flower.
Now, she’s an atomic bomb in the heart of desire.
She’s as damaged as the ignorant meal to the fiery belly of a carnivore.
Meeting the vagrants are as easy as meeting you she’d laugh to herself.
Maybe, she’s just a little deaf when the city shakes in a quicksilver trilling.
A little blind when the joy begins to fade from a celebration to just a thronging. 

So, you missed the thrills of the small crowd now.
That city took your bravery and your crown.
It’s hard to be superficial in your walk.
The thrills of a million helicopters circling down.
Your heartbeats, a quilted bundle of wires.
In the Hollywood hideaways the public does watch with pinkies up in a permanent smirking 
shadow.
Hurry up to snap a picture of her durable nucleus falling apart.
Behind the bars, to the many alcohols and elixirs falling straight down the cold rocks.
Her beautiful monuments showing the crackles now,
and the drinking of the sweet fruit tree has become a little thick in the dust cloud social ball.
Maybe she’s just a little deaf when this city shakes in a quicksilver trilling.

Maybe, she’s a little thirsty when the water is sealed from the dams to her  willing lips.
This blessing is just a disguised curse when she’s dressed up for another Judy Garland downward
spiral. 
I’m starting to rethink this shadow looking at his shoes, playing little Mr. Socialite and wearing a
Poor man’s Bruno Maglis blues.
I’m standing here holding your golden cup catching the feathers of your golden goose,
and a shriveled-up ticket to the sacrifices you make at Tiffanys.
My culture lies behind the ropes holding the inside of my head.
To play lover and not to play dead.
So you can play elegant and hip for the artsy coffee shops.
They can spell your name in the drink and your heart melts, and you finally feel like a somebody.
So you tip the baristas and joke about the rats.
They don’t know art, don’t have MFA’s and haven’t been bought their gardens to thrive.
I just watch the fakeness leave your timid hazel eyes. 
And you try to adjust in the restroom and cry, I hear you in there weeping like a saturnine 
coyote.

There are a couple of genuine fools, 
Walking around pretending to be the rules of cool.
They folded under the pressures of rebellion, but they are beginning to wonder my darling.
They are wondering exactly how many canvases you have put your brush to.
Since you tell them all you’re so smart and like a branch.
I’m just this poetic clown stuck with oversized t-shirts and a smile of a stripped screw.
Don’t worry he’ll pay for this free meal at this simpering Italian restaurant.
Then he’ll be on his way back to the job of being a wonderful muse when the art professors 
aren’t calling you.
Never to share a true linen of a sunrise together. Tell me exactly what art is when you don’t 
Know the art that is a natural weather.
Oh, perhaps. Just perhaps, she’s a little deaf when the city shakes and is shrilling.
A little more quicksilver trilling.

The sunrise is a little overbearing. I can’t see the canvas from the golden glare I’m wearing.
Operation, a colorful tornado on a disco floor. We’ve got weak legs dancing.
Drunk and the quick pills are mixing.  And you’re a drunk and grinding against the pistons.
More strangers trying to keep from pissing. They want to call you up for a night of your 
skin glistening and introduce you to a hypodermic waterbed.
You forgot me behind the trees. A little dirty when you have to sit and plead.
You have nothing you really need, but everything you want is in the halos of that river.

Well, those birds wake up a little earlier than you. And they seem sick without the worms to 
chew.  There isn’t a masterpiece for them to view.
You went right into the darkness with your colors and your strength. 
Frail bones fail frail forests.  Simple supernatural spells bring crumbles to a magic mountain,
The journeys are hard to walk when the valleys and the lakes are droughts for the scrawny to 
swim in.
Maybe she’s a little deaf when the animals stopped howling.
The wind is full of heat and rain is even melting. Around the curves the body is sealing.
The city is shaking to a quicksilver trilling.

From the windows, we used to see the clarity of the glass.
Now it’s a little oily and hell is seen through the overcast.
It’s a holocaust, razor sharp raindrops with teeth that bite, just like a brand new disease.
The queen must hide from the flee. Our humanity isn’t built anymore on heartbeats.
Sometimes humanity is built from cardboard signs. Hold a little higher and ask for a prayer.
Ask for a shave of cool air to save you from a Tinseltown cataclysm.
So what does the wonder girl do? When she goes from pretender to blue to the shrew?
Does she realize her hair wasn’t always so cute?
Does she realize the geniuses are all crooks?
Does she feel the jazzy palm trees have always been a little plastic and fake?

Much like the hypnotized starlets in the platinum blonde destruction game.
Oh, maybe she’s a little deaf from the chess game that keeps yelling checkmate!
Maybe she’s been blinded by the hysterical cut-throat authority waifs.
Maybe, she’s just part of this jealousy, a vanish haze they thrown on you to make you a product.
A little pill sick and when the city keeps shaking.
Tiny slits of cracks in this quicksilver trilling.
Now, she’s as naked as a blurry mirror. 
Now, she’s feeling as pitiful as a stuttering preacher.
Now, her art is less of a picture that hangs above bountiful nouveau vanity mirrors.
Her art is the magnetism that pulls the moon through her evening veins.
Her art is when the clouds move in and pulls the curtains of stars over her delicate frame.
Maybe she grew tired of her ears constantly ringing.
Loud masochisms and feminine leeches luring and lingering.

A city shook to pieces in a quicksilver trilling. 

 
 
 

 
 
 
Bio:
David L O’Nan is a poet, short story writer, prose & lyricist, an editor living in Southern Indiana. He is founder and lead editor for Fevers of the Mind Poetry, Art & Music. He has edited & curated anthologies under Fevers of the Mind (7 volumes) since 2019 in addition to anthologies inspired by and dedicated to Leonard Cohen (Avalanches in Poetry & Before I Turn Into Gold), Bob Dylan (Hard Rain Poetry: Forever Dylan), Joni Mitchell (The Blue Motel Rooms Poetry & Art) Tom Waits (The Whiskey Mule Diner), The Poetica Sisterhood of Sylvia & Anne (poetry & art inspired by Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton), On the Highways with Many Miles…to Go! (poetry & art inspired by Jack Kerouac, Townes Van Zandt, Miles Davis, Langston Hughes, etc), Waltzin’ Through Rusty Cages (inspired by Elliott Smith & Chris Cornell), The website is
 
www.feversofthemind.com
 
He also has solo works “The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers” “The Cartoon Diaries”, “New Disease Streets”, “Our Fears in Tunnels”, “Taking Pictures in the Dark”, “Bending Rivers: A Collection”,”Lost Reflections” (micropoems), “Before the Bridges Fell” (2022), & “Cursed Houses” (2022) his work can be found in several litmags and books.
Twitter/X is @davidLONan1 and for Fevers of the Mind is @feversof and Facebook is the
Fevers of the Mind Poetry, Arts & Music Group.

The Gypsy Sea Poems by Sterling Warner

Gypsy Sea

Sunrise: necks stretched out like hungry clams
lurch for the Ibuprofen emperor 
whose numb fingers wave loners to café chairs—
rivet them to sticky alligator seats, bottom sides 
textured with chewing gum madness; daydreams
pull life’s canopy over sand and foam,  
seasick tides lick each empowered undertow
sheer bag luck burlesques diffident efforts, 
tête-à-tête conversations revealing 
epiphany-like promises through opaque glass.

Nightfall: along the coastline, bonfires blaze
bodies gather, mouths breathe desire, minds re-imagine; 
moving between cosmic and material worlds,  
cleaving mustard greens like an armful of roses,  
a gypsy mystic dances like a whirling dervish
toe-ring magic fractures limestone bones   
unbrushed by feet for millennia 
bangle bracelets and silver cymbals rouse
ever vigilant, sleepy-eyed centurions
stand guard over her Technicolor Roma.

Sun-up: astronomical dawn signals nocturnal closure,
dancing legs and burning feet cease
rhythmically rocking shellfish strongholds;
dense auburn moss calmly spreads its way south  
wraps a tranquil riverbed in nature’s sheath
guides an Arabesque estuary toward a
salt water fiord, lateral moraine, where
nourished sediment dwellers burrow home
high tides pull ashes, bathe shorelines 
littered with seaweed, driftwood, memories.

Grace
For G. M.

Grace leaned against parked cars 
at midnight, full crow moon rays bathing 
her body in luminescent grandeur. 
Poised. Seductive. Her touch extended
over an embankment like sprouting 
foxtail seeds resemble ballerinas that float
on the breeze and hook into dog paws 

Fragile. Elastic. Insubstantial. Like bubbles 
blown from hoops that burst unpredictably, 
Grace’s rainbow brow sought barn owl benedictions
waved goodbye to the summer solstice
welcomed the autumnal equinox—a September song
that harvested her deeply planted thoughts 
and sowed them in fields of winter wheat.

Wind passed through cedar branches, eclipsed 
Grace’s mantra of green card foreboding 
added frivolity and enhanced shorter days
and nights both waiting for December
to push back twilight’s rays—scatter them
in the upper atmosphere—brighten evening skies 
warm Dawn’s fingers on the rising sun’s heels.  

Wistful Lulamaes
For Audrey Hepburn

Tiffany windows display silver platters 
reflect morning light like vintage mirrors 
as pedestrians hide behind Oliver Goldsmith sunglasses,
dressed to the nines like Holly Golightly
pose then study its Manhattan showcase framed 
by granite walls on Fifth Avenue & 57th Street.

Disguised as stylish escorts, men and women peer
through double-pane glass, appreciate excess & exotica 
in equal measure, ponder fleeting holographic images 
of John the Baptist’s head etched sterling trays
murmuring silent prophecies, portend gentle greatness 
& Big Apple panache for life beyond Sodom’s avenging angels. 

Truman Capote’s phantom emerges from Central Park shadows 
wears a white suit & hat, moves forward like a garden snail, 
maintains a two-block buffer, his high-pitched voice mingling 
with car horns & cabbies where rainbows end announces 
breakfast availability to Broadway street singers, Soho artists, 
moon river enthusiasts, New York tourists, huckleberry friends.

Magyar Sleeves

“The Colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.”
 									—Claude Debussy

Grooming themselves 
    like cats, bat pups clutch 
    onto their perch upside down, 
    loosen artistic digits  
    emerge from slumber 
    in hollow trees, cave mouths, 
    attic eves & rocky crevices.
From inverted roosts, 
    they drop into flight mode 
    as membrane covered forelimbs 
    navigate ultrasonic waves 
    & echolocation identify 
    evening canvases to paint 
    with wings like a brush & palette.
Moonlight colonies undercover 
    zig-zag through mist & gnat clouds,
    rising from depths of stone lined wells,
    leave watercolor portraits 
    during witching hours
    as children trick or treat 
    wearing bat capes & cowls.

 
 
 
 
An award-winning author, poet, and educator, Sterling Warner’s works have appeared in literary magazines, journals, and anthologies including Danse Macabre, Poetry Life and Times, Ekphrastic Review, and Sparks of Calliope. Warner’s collections of poetry include Rags and Feathers, Without Wheels, ShadowCat, Edges, Memento Mori: A Chapbook Redux, Serpent’s Tooth, Flytraps, and Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poetry & Fiction 2019-2022—as well as Masques: Flash Fiction & Short Stories. Currently, Warner writes, participates in “virtual” poetry readings, and enjoys retirement in Washington.
 

 
https://www.amazon.com/Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poetry & Fiction

Afterlife. A Poem by Debashish Haar

 
 
 

 
Debashish is a machine learning scientist, who has been published in literary magazines several
times across the globe, including Poetry Life & Times, where he was interviewed twice.
He is currently contending with a severe writer’s block spanning a decade, when he has hardly
produced any publishable content. He is also losing emotional connection with his own work
gradually, and spends more time to edit/tighten his old poems than creating any new content.
 

The Kingdom of Chaos Poems by Scott Thomas Outlar

Silver Primroses & Golden Strigiformes Planted by the Curb

Carrying your own 
          dead body
                back to its grave
      in a dream
                 then happening upon
          an expired owl
                              stricken & smashed
                        in the street

Ominous signs
        along Five Forks Trickum
            birth into
                patterns of indigo 
                                  & scarlet wildflowers
                       
Spirit animals
             taking a dive
       before rush hour fevers
                        commence
        
    learn to sip
              from the parched throat
        of roadkill brunch

eating the 
        organs
   of our own
               totem


Stomach Lining

I came to eat the lies you coin

and serve them back half bitter
across the divide of tables turned

I didn’t ask for this evil eye

it was forced down my throat from the jump
been begging for a bulimic leap ever since


Spells of the Stoic Pewter 

& I will
        set you (free) here
    to be made safe by the wizard / window
                                                 (fly, birdie)
               black obsidian
                     gray of mind & beard
             wise & dangerous
                     streaked/laced down the middle
                                    balanced of accord
                                           (harmony 
                                                  & likewise
                                               rhythm)

you are the melody of a soft glow


Lament of Prey

Hello to all the hawks
who have yet to have their fill,
& the vultures, too,
waiting for what’s left over.

Spoiled minds & spoiled hearts
lead to spoiled guts,
but it seems to be
that’s what nature intended
in this twisted realm
of divided time & space.

Dog eat dog
isn’t even the worst part;
it’s flesh unto flesh
in the fire.

Goodbye to all the dreams
that forgot how to conquer,
& the visions still
yet to crystallize in cancer.

Rotten bones & rotten marrow
flow in rotten rivers,
but that’s the taste
acidic blood delivers
when signs of sickness
flash neon & electric in the night.

Tail chase tail
isn’t the end of the story;
it’s a snake that never sheds
the fade to black.


Kingdom of Chaos

We don’t want your money,
just your soul
on a silver platter
served to order
for our warm feast
while we spit out your raw famine.

We don’t want your respect,
just your energy and time,
just your mind
numbed
to the frequency
of propagandized pestilence.

We don’t want your love,
just your heart
bled dry
as every vein
withers in the winter wind
while our chalice remains
ever full to the point of overflowing.

We don’t want your vote,
just your faith
that such a course of action
can actually influence
the order in which our puppets
dance to a song of chaos
upon the public stage.

We don’t want your salute,
just your obedience,
just your hands
kept where we can see them
while your feet continue marching
to the drumbeat of our wars.

We don’t want your laws,
just your land,
just your culture,
just your customs,
just your heritage,
just your traditions
snuffed out
beneath the global kingdom
collectivized
at our command. 

 
 

 
 
Scott Thomas Outlar is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. He now lives and writes in Frederick, Maryland. His work has been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He guest-edited the Hope Anthology of Poetry from CultureCult Press as well as the 2019-2023 Western Voices editions of Setu Mag. He is the author of seven books, including Songs of a Dissident (2015), Abstract Visions of Light (2018), Of Sand and Sugar (2019), and Evermore (2021 – written with co-author Mihaela Melnic). Selections of his poetry have been translated and published in 14 languages. He has been a weekly contributor at Dissident Voice for the past nine years. More about Outlar’s work can be found at 17numa.com

Mapplethorpe, Lethe, via crucis, Poems by Krystle Eilen

Mapplethorpe

after Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait, 1980

half youthful, half emaciated,

he reflects the epicene
and the languishing.

his head is all shock and flurry;
his mouth a toothless brevity.

half Madonna, half Antinous,

he reflects a decadent flower
both wilting and transcendent.

his eyes suggest a having seen,
two eternally startled interims.

a princely pauper
whose aspect reflects that of
a parched orchid culled
too soon.

published in Hive Avenue Literary Journal


Lethe

i am a winged thing flailing,
driven into my bovine body, and
back into my savage infant soul.

in the beginning, nature
conceived another deadweight,
and i find myself stillborn.

i am forever waiting to
open my welkin eyes
and outwit the brute.

i want the earth wrested from me;
i want no longer to acquiesce to
the stranglehold of gravity.

i am forever looking forward to
eclipsing the round
seared by fantasy.

published in Hive Avenue Literary Journal 


via crucis

            i.

to behold paradise
god must be heaved up,—
for to become seraph
is to gouge the eye out.

            ii.

always at one remove
is to be found divinity,
otherwise effaced
by twin identity.

            iii.

riven apart
by mimetic sparagmos,
man is condemned
to die on the cross.

            iv.

to shed the serpent’s skin
is but to reiterate its meander,
for conquest precedes
the bind of surrender. 

 
 

Krystle Eilen is a 22-year-old poet who is currently attending university. Her works have been featured in Dipity Literary Magazine, BlazeVOX, and Hive Avenue Literary Journal, and are soon to be published in The Orchards Poetry Journal and Young Ravens Literary Review. During her spare time, she enjoys reading and making art.

Poetry. Five Sonnets from Richard Vallance

Image: Keats on his Deathbed. Artist Joseph Severn.

I saw a sparrow

for Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I saw a sparrow in the snow,
who hovered by a boy nearby;
It swayed a little to and fro,
small wonders they, small wonder why.

The boy, the flautist all alone
amidst the misty spruce around
where snow was so serenely sown,
played tremolo the fairest sound. 

The little sparrow lingered there,
the boy, the flautist of her soul;
Iʾll never tell wherever where
they warbled to attentive snow.

If anyone found a place so rare 
would there have been anyone there?
 

I found a soldier all too fair

for all the fallen in the war in the Ukraine

I found a soldier oh so fair,
an apparition in the vale;
oh there were reasons for despair
to see a face so ghastly pale.
 
I listened for the faintest breath,
a hint of colour on his lips,
but was confronted with a death
the setting sun could not eclipse.

I lingered there and wept a while;
the poppies seemed to mourn him too.
I heard a thunder from a mile,
where clouds assumed an ashen hew.

A wounded straggler passed me by;
oh how I feared he too would die!  


Listen oh listen!

Listen oh listen! ... the tanager trills!
... he arrays the blue spruce with feathers as light
as gossamer fronds the forest just thrills
to veil in his voice lost in the moonlight!
However whoever alights on this place
may find my tanagerʾs warbled refrains
leave en passant over teal leaves the trace
of whose emotions? ... whose tremolo strains?
Is this the rare moment April declares
the seasonʾs rife for my chanson, the song
the sunrise with cirrus so silently shares?
... only I, tanager, knew all along.
Were I the sole tanager of your desmesne,
well, Iʾd be voiced in your glass of champagne!


The poetry of Keats

Keats on his deathbed, Joseph Severn

John Keats on his death bed, by Joseph Severn

For W.T.

The poetry of Keats is replete with death:
an owl more ominous than a blue moon
had hooted sans merci til his final breath,
as he passed away in a fitful swoon
before the sky was flush with fading blue,
before ambrosial roses withered, strewn
before the autumn breeze all too wanly blew  
to the long-lost score of some mournful tune.
As if the nightingale could warble love
might I implore you if her song recalls
as quietly as would a cooing dove
our barren prayers before the wailing walls; 
  I too recall my all too cherished friend,
  who wasted away to an ill-timed end.


Huskies Mush!

I'll slide my sled from the frozen-in stream
towards the lake where snow rolls down me, blind;
me sled is all wedged in by me husky team,
whose hunger drives em wild with single mind.
They lunge, they'll lunge in vain. What? Can't break out.
Me lungs could bust with frost I'se just gulped in.
Me lips all blue, I'se stiff with icy doubt. 
Me dogs, all panicked, tangled, yelp chagrin;
I grits me teeth, jerk hard the sled, and hear
that cursed ice cave! “Come on! Bust loose!”, I yell,
“Mush!”, snaps the whip! Aw, we'se gotta break clear!
“We'se broken out!” Them huskies dash like hell.
Did we break loose? Those snapped up rapids yawn
behind us as we vanish, good as gone. 

 
 
 
 
Richard Vallance was a frequent contributor to the earlier issues of Poetry Life & Times, from 2001-2008, where several of his sonnets and rhymed poems appeared, and where he was the resident poetry critic of the Vallance Review, which featured reviews of sonnets and rhymed verse by some of the world’s most famous historical sonneteers and poets.
 
Richard Vallance has also been featured from time to time in more recent issues of Poetry Life & Times, Poetry Life and Times (artvilla.com), from 2012-2018.
 
He has also been published in several other international venues, among others: Decanto Poetry Magazine/Anthology (Sara Russell, ed.) – no longer in publication The Deronda Review, Neo/Victorian Cochlea, The Deronda Review – Home, Sonnetto Poesia ISSN 1705-4524 (25 quarterly issues) SEE:
Sonnetto poesia. | Bibliothèque et Archives Canada / Library and Archives Canada (worldcat.org)
 
Richard Vallance is also the Editor of a multilingual anthology of sonnets. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes = Le Phenix Renaissant de Ses Cendres – Anthology of Sonnets of the Early Third Millennium = Anthologie de Sonnets a: Vallance, Editor-In-Chief Richard: 9781460217016: Books – Amazon.ca

Beyond the Limit & Tyne Cot. Ekphrastic Poems by Jan Theuninck

 

BIO: Jan Theuninck (born 7 June 1954) is a Belgian painter and poet. Although born in ZonnebekeBelgium, and a native speaker of Dutch, he writes in French and occasionally English. His painting is abstract, falling somewhere between minimalism
 and monochrome expressionism.
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