reaching toward a sky that has forgotten the toxic haze.
We were blind sculptors,
carving cracks in the earth’s skin,
extracting gold from its bones,
without hearing the lament that rose from the roots.
The ocean, a shattered mirror of plastic,
reflected our indifference,
its creatures, stars drowned in the abyss.
But one day,
the echo of a dying hummingbird
pierced the glass of our deafness.
We saw the moss wither on the edge of the stones,
the sun, a pale coin amidst the smoke.
We were reborn, not from maternal wombs,
but from urgency, from transparent guilt.
Each tree planted, a silver thread on a damaged loom,
each river cleaned, the pupil of an ancient god regaining its sight.
Now, the bees, tiny goldsmiths of the air,
dance over fields that don’t smell of chemical lament.
The mountains, wise guardians of memory,
rise up, green scars that tell of our redemption.
Our hands, once weapons of felling,
are now architects of nests,
tilling the earth with the respect of those who sow a future.
Conscience, a beacon lit in the fog of oblivion,
guides our steps toward the embrace of the wild.
This is the time of the second chance,
where the jaguar’s roar is not a legend,
and the whisper of the wind brings the promise of skies without ash.
We have learned that life is not a loan,
but a symphony we must protect,
each note, each being,
indispensable.
We have been the castaways who found their shore,
not building new ships,
but repairing the only one we had:
this blue, vibrant, and fragile home, that breathes with us.
GRACIELA NOEMI VILLAVERDE is a writer and poet from Concepción del Uruguay (Entre Rios) Argentina, based in Buenos Aires She graduated in letters and is the author of seven books of poetry, awarded several times worldwide. She works as the World Manager of Educational and Social Projects of the Hispanic World Union of Writers and is the UHE World Honorary President of the same institution’s Activa de la Sade, Argentine Society of Writers. She is the Commissioner of Honor in the executive cabinet in the Educational and Social Relations Division of the UNACCC South America – Argentina Chapter.
children die and we buy phones children work in mines in africa to mine cobalt for mobile phones. do you have a nice mobile phone? i do and will update it soon. children work in mines in africa and are forced to slave for pittance. as a kid did you have to work in a mine? i never had to either. children die while mining cobalt for nice new mobile phones: children die and we buy phones. Buy. Phones. Children. Die. (repeat).
a petrol and planet hypocrisy fill it up again and again places to go and roads to drive on. full tank in and exhaust spews out into the air it goes and blows. and yes we go to fossil fuel rallies for we care about our environment. we limit plastic use and love the trees and always recycle our rubbish. but again and again we fill up our car as we have all those places to go. so is care for the planet and fill it up a petrol and planet hypocrisy? you tell me as i know nothing (but i do know what i’m feeling).
Stephen House has won many awards and nominations as a poet, playwright, and actor. He’s had 20 plays produced with many published by Australian Plays Transform. He’s received several international literature residencies from The Australia Council for the Arts, and an Asialink India literature residency. He’s had two chapbooks published by ICOE Press Australia: ‘real and unreal’ poetry and ‘The Ajoona Guest House’ monologue. His next book drops soon. He performs his acclaimed monologues widely. Stephen had a play run in Spain for 4 years.
Archaic Torso of Apollo
After Rilke
He has no head. He has no eyes
to pin us with his godhead. But his torso
is itself a gaze in which there grows
from inside, like a covered lamp, a fire.
Without that rising surge, divinity
would not ravish you, nor would a lip
trace the gentle curve of thigh and hip
to the shadowed center of fertility.
Without it, the stone would seem a broken thing,
chipped, cracked, dead, a stone,
and would not glisten like a wolf’s dark mane,
and would not from its remnants blaze and singe
you like a god. Of all its parts, there is not one
that does not see you. Your life must change.
So alive that you forget you’re running out of time.
Not today. Not tomorrow.
But someday, grief shows up one morning and just moves in.
And love?
Love stands by the curtains.
Not handing out comfort to everybody.
Just watching. Waiting.
Seeing what you actually need.
This isn’t a biography I’m trying to list its dates.
This is just a heart that kept going after it got broken.
A soul that figured out the ground is cold,
But still decided to sit in the chair anyway,
Behind the curtains.
This isn’t really about the chairs or the curtains.
It’s about how still you learn to be,
To sit in your grief without letting it crush you.
Like no matter what cracks underneath,
That chair holds.
Except, death…
We call it the uninvited guest,
A weight that settles in the hollow of the chest.
Death is the one crack that swallows everything.
No sounds.
Just a hole that takes the sorrow and the love both at once.
But here’s what I’ve learned:
Death took the person,
The creative mind,
The talented hands.
But it didn’t take what they left behind.
Grief teaches you something If you let it.
Not right away. It beats you up first.
But eventually,
It shows you how to pay attention.
How to hold things tighter without squeezing too hard.
How to sit in the quiet and still find something worth making.
Maybe we don’t get over it.
Maybe we just learn to build around it.
We take the loss and turn it into something.
A poem, a meal, a small kindness,
Or a minute of patience we didn’t have before.
And when the poem forgets it’s a poem
And becomes a room,
It becomes a room where loss finally takes off its coat.
Where love doesn’t just visit anymore,
It sits down to stay.
Where grief and gladness walk in together,
Like they always do, and for once,
They don’t have a single thing left to ask.
Except…
What does the poem say about us?
It says we are the ones who need it.
We’re the ones who take these little black marks,
These little arranged scratches on a page,
And we make them bleed.
We make them bleed with our own blood.
We make them sing with our own throats—
The ones that get tight.
The ones that crack.
We make them hold everything we cannot hold by ourselves.
And then… somehow… we can.
Because we are the creatures who build bridges out of breath.
We are the ones who go looking for our own faces in the ink.
We let the poem teach us death.
Not by lecturing.
Not by explaining.
But by showing us how to live.
And it’s not about filling the hole.
It’s about learning to live around it.
Knowing it’s there.
And still… still creating.
And maybe, that’s enough.
Amina Kasim Muhammad is a Nigerian writer and spoken word poet with a deep passion for storytelling. She finds herself drawn to the way stories can transport readers to different worlds and how ideas can be shaped and shared through the power of writing. Valuing her pen and book as essential tools of expression, she is also an advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Amina is an active member of the Minna Literary Society (MLS) and Open Arts Kaduna, where she engages with fellow creatives and contributes to the literary community. Her work has been published; one of her poems appeared in Synchronized Chaos Magazine. You can connect with her on Instagram: @meena_kasim.
Each afternoon, between Gomer Pyle and Big Ten Theater, the pantry door opened to a small altar and a humble gray amphora, the cookie jar Grail of my Oreo eucharist. My arm disappeared into the dark, wide mouth womb eagerly to the elbow. My small fingers fished for six. There was a compulsive comfort in the number, and with blackened teeth I’d sit before the TV transfixed in ritual, gulping a glass of Nestle’s Quick.
After Mom stopped cooking, cleaning and comforting, after Dad lost the house, the business and confidence, after thrown curses, clothes and coffee, a hysterectomy, psych wards, divorce, therapy and thirty years, my mother sent the forgotten vessel on some well-intentioned birthday errand. She’d glued the broken lid to contain the cargo of my childhood pain. For a while it was on exhibition, an empty antique sitting upon a shelf. I brushed my teeth obsessively after each occasional cookie.
Today I’ll reap and rejoice in a quiet little catharsis. With hammer and shovel, I break and bury the jar in my backyard. Today, I can see my wounds as a sliver slices a finger. What I once thought brought solace, now appears brittle and sharp. Blood fills my hand and drips wet, warm and sticky into the earth. This new grave is moist, fertile and sweet.
Saint Francis
I was canonized, or nearly so, in Ogunquit, Maine last summer on vacation. At dawn, along a granite edge, a collision of continent and ocean, gazing at the Atlantic’s implacable crush upon the shore, I sat in a deck chair cupping a croissant and five-dollar latte (no vow of poverty quite yet).
However presumptuous, a passing fantasy, I thought of myself as Saint Francis. Ridiculous. (On my pilgrimage, a tourist charter to Assisi, I only recall the charming Giotto frescos there; no birds congregated in the basilica; however, I wasn’t paying attention.)
I wasn’t blessed with a martyr’s beatific vision, no celestial seraphim. I was more attuned to inconsequential sparrows flitting about my feet in unassuming feathers, in browns, grays, the drab shades of friars’ habits. Unlike the brash gulls, sparrows, humble, timid and admittedly and prudently so, were terrified of the sea.
My Fioretti: I’d like to believe they gathered for my sermon, my wisdom, my eloquence. Surely, I would allay all fears; so, I mimicked their small chirps, but they cocked heads skeptically.
Graciously indifferent, they skittered, too busy with pecking and scratching, a miracle they listened at all.
Weapons
When Vietnam took all the boys and splayed them on the evening news, a boy, like most boys emulating most men, but especially in uniform, I was smitten with TV shows on World War Two, diluted versions without the gore, without the complications of falling red dominoes.
After failing at catch, Dad tried again in a trifecta to win my affection. Dad fashioned a wooden machine gun (my deadly 30 cal.) to mow down Nazis in Normandy. Keenly, I provided the “rat-a-tat-tat.” However, screams and morphine were not included.
Dad built a cannon from a board and a pipe, artillery on wheels pulled behind my tricycle, a barrage devasting for the Hun. However, my little howitzer was mothballed, rusting when I began riding a real bike. Undeterred, Dad bought more lumber.
Dad spent hours (I was not around) on the envy of all the other boys. An ace over France, I sat in the cockpit of my Spitfire shooting Messerschmitts from the sky. However, trouble was, it lacked altitude. I never left the driveway, never wore my parachute.
Dad was on yet another sales call and I was home alone when I took a hammer to my grounded fighter. After the crash, it never flew again.
Before I Die
An artillery shell stirs my flesh with mud and soldiers divide my limbs among dogs. Just before I die, I’ll taste the softness of my beloved’s lips and a ripe, sweet, summer peach, not bitter plastic tubes or pain-killing pills. I’ll listen to the house finch and the wren but not the television getting in a final commercial, nor one last bit of Mozart’s brilliance.
My body glides in perfect, choreographed grace over steering wheel, dash, through windshield glass, my blood painting car hood and pavement in sweeping, expressionistic gestures. Just before I die, I’ll gaze upon a pale blue sky filled with the warm light of morning. I’ll not look up to a clean, white ceiling and harsh fluorescents flickering; I’ll inhale the humid breath of Spring or the pungent decay of October; I’ll not smell disinfectant on cold stainless steel.
I’ve lost my speech; my right side hangs as limp as a nursing home prick, but I manage half a smile when I’m told my heart has worn too thin. Just before I die, I must hold something in my hands: my grandchild’s face or my son’s graying head; I’ll dance one last time upon the forest floor amidst Mayapples and sassafras; my feet will never reach the clean tile beneath an iron bed.
Why is it so difficult for us to say “no”? It’s an interesting question. Throughout our lives, we often believe that we are living for ourselves, when in reality, we may be living under the expectations of others without even realizing it. Naturally, we all have our own needs and desires, but so do the people around us.
If we fail to set boundaries with others—if we cannot say “no”—we will continue to live under their demands. This is not just an unfortunate situation; it can be deeply harmful. Let me tell you this: learn to set boundaries with the people around you, even if they are very close to you. Until you define those boundaries, you will gradually become a prisoner of others’ expectations, because they will always continue to demand more.
Only when you stop living for others will you truly begin to live for yourself. I once read in a book: “If you consider burning in fire to be natural, you will turn into ashes and come to believe you deserve every suffering.”
Be courageous. At this point in your life, your primary responsibility is to be able to say “no,” not to wait passively like a sacrifice. Never forget this. Living under the pressure of others’ expectations will only harm you and slowly extinguish your self-confidence.
