Would you cry tears of blood, Or perform like a well-rehearsed actor on stage Acting the script down to each pause and sigh, Rolling your body like a prayer mat laid out in sorrow, for eyes to behold?
Would you stay longer beside my grave when footsteps fade away, Or would you offer prayers for the soil to welcome me with open arms then walk away too, like I was just another chapter You never meant to reread?
Would you tell tales of me like stories with imaginary characters less complex but easier to decipher, Or would you erase me like written text with chalk wipe off the board As if my existence is a myth?
Would you tell them we once shared something sacred, Absurd in the belief that we’re two sides of a coin even death can’t do us apart
Would you sit amidst my dirge gathering, and when prayer rises from unfamiliar voices skyward, Would you utter Ameen in silence, hoping each word finds me somewhere beyond reach where time no longer exists and my troubles finally cease?
Would you tell them they lived a library of words Sitting on the edges of your lips, some tucked in between your teeth that were meant for me but never saw the light of day?
Would the things left unsaid between us make you vigilant at night like a culprit at bay, Flinching with every reminiscence of me?
Would you stay with my mother after my Janāzah, Sit beside her in silence when words fail, And when she speaks of me with trembling lips, Would you try to picture me Somewhere in a garden where words can’t express, Where peace grows like wildflowers so she can smile knowing her son is with his beloved?
Would you tell them I once loved you Like the very breath in my lungs? That I chased you Like a shepherd following his flock Not out of routine, But because without them, He simply cannot live.
Or will you confess our parting was the cruelest lie That I became the echo that no cave has withstood? Tell them my love remains a phantom on your heart, the constant pressure that your spirit has missed, a quiet, deep longing that proves we never really died?
Abbas Yusuf Alhassan is a poet and a dedicated student of Fisheries and Aquaculture. Passionate about creative expression, he shares his work with a growing literary audience on Instagram. He has co-authored two anthologies: *Life and Death* (SGSH Publication) and *If Only Words Were Enough* (Al-Zehra Publication). Abbas values the art of learning and unlearning, continuously seeking new ideas and perspectives. While he studies life underwater, his soul resides in verse and stanzas.
Find him on Instagram: @Itzz_Abbasssss
Facebook & X (formerly Twitter): Abbas Yusuf Alhassan.
Another of my ideas concerns farms, but in a different way. This involves promoting an ancestral cultivation technique, which the Celts first used in Europe, but which has been largely forgotten since the Middle Ages: animal fallows.
As their name suggests, animal fallows, also known as grassy meadows or green meadows, are an agricultural land management technique that involves using fields left fallow for cultivation to graze livestock, particularly sheep or cattle.
Livestock grazing on fallow land helps renew it and fertilizes it by living there, so that soon, the meadows used in this way will be of even better quality than those left as only fallow. We gain from it: in natural fertilizers, in biodiversity, in soil mobility, for the soil is turned over by the animals, and from the livestock’s point of view, of course, in fodder and land usable for pasture. This is what our ancestors did. As I told you, it has been forgotten, and yet, having seen it done on land belonging to my family in Ariège, in France, I can guarantee that the results are surprisingly successful.
The principle of setting aside cultivated land is universal, even mandatory for farmers in many places, and yet these animal fallows I’m talking about are almost never used anywhere. So, this is good advice I want to offer farmers, which will help them revive their fields, which we know are tired, often impoverished by modern farming techniques and the various chemicals we use today.
While I’m talking about farms, I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you how much good I think about permaculture. Permaculture is a farming technique invented in Japan in the 1970s. It consists, primarily for market gardening, of using nature itself and the combinations of plants, including flowers, and crop seedlings, as well as the composition of the soil, to ensure an abundant harvest of vegetables and fruits or cereals, without using any fertilizers or pesticides, just letting nature take its course, so to speak, from what we have sown.
A permaculture food plot, for example, greatly contributes to the biodiversity of a local ecosystem. It’s particularly good for bees and pollinators. I recommend it to every farmer!
And, still talking about nature, I wanted to discuss with you an idea that is particularly close to my heart: the fruit forest.
Here we are again very close to permaculture, with this concept that designates a forest, perhaps a woodland, like so many in our country and around the world, where humans, through their labor to plant or graft fruit trees, allow wild fruits to be harvested in all seasons.
Let me explain: it is very easy to plant fruit tree seedlings in a natural wooded or forest environment, or to graft them onto host trees in the same locations, so that they will bear fruit in the desired season. By varying the species, for example, this can allow an entire forest to be abundant in fruit all year round.
Obviously, it will take a lot of human labor at the outset to achieve this result, a bit like maintaining a full-scale orchard. However, natural rhythms, and the wildlife that inhabits the area where we work, will help farmers and allow the penetration and even expansion of crops in the environment. Once the goal of a fruit-bearing forest is achieved, what benefits will there not be for its owners, first of all, to have an abundance of fruits that continue to grow by themselves almost in all seasons, for their own consumption, of course, or for market gardening, or even for their livestock, or even for the views of the game that this will bring to their land! What benefits will there not be for local biodiversity, for the flourishing of the flora, and of other tree species in particular, thanks to the insects and birds that it will bring, and finally for all the wildlife that will see a new pantry! The entire forest will benefit. This idea is close to my heart. It is particularly easy to envisage in France, where we have so many forests, hedgerows, and so on. And it will be equally so in all temperate wooded areas.
No doubt, it will seem a little utopian, then, for me to call on you to create a “forest of abundance” in this way. That being said, once again, the realization of this idea is very easy, locally at least. Anyone with a wood could achieve it in a few years of work. So, for a result that is understandably so profitable, we might as well get started and do it, right? I wanted to advise this to you!
Time changes with the wind but we still push petals round and round
going in circles.
In circles.
Cards are played. Cards are held.
Secrets are kept.
Secrets are known. We earn things. We steal things.
Mostly, we stumble. We stumble into living.
But life, the life we lead,
has little to do with living.
Look at the sea, how beautiful it is! It exudes so much feeling.
Like dreams. Like sweet dreams that dance at night.
They dance at night. But become just dreams just dreams in the daylight.
Guarda il mare, com’è bello! Trasuda così tante emozioni.
Come sogni. Come dolci sogniche danzano di notte. Danzano di notte. Ma diventano solo sognisolo sognialla luce del giorno.
One more step. The last step.
The heart hungers while the mind mingles with all that is false, yet true.
One nail then another, then another. How swiftly we unfurrow.
How swiftly we become what Gatsby said, “Of course you can.”
As the spirit leaves your body.
Mentre lo spiritolascia il tuo corpo
Philip received his M.A. in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published six books of poetry, Three novels, including Caught Between (Which is also a 24-episode Radio Drama Podcast https://wprnpublicradio.com/caught-between-teaser/) and Three plays. Philip also has a column in the quarterly magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.
Her parents told her that marriage to a carnival barker would never work out, but she was a seamstress, and the carnival needed one, so that was that. They toured the country together as carnies for over 40 years, he touting the acts, she mending the pants.
When they finally retired, due to age and, frankly, a change in public taste, they settled in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and became enthusiastic Yoopers.
“You smell of regret,” she told him. He sniffed the air around him. No odor of regret, as far as he could tell. Sure he had his share of regrets, don’t we all, but nothing he thought was noticeable.
“We don’t always notice our own odors,” she told him. “That’s what friends are for.”
“One chicken panino,” the man ordered.
“One chicken panini?” the waiter asked.
“There’s no such thing as one chicken panini. Two chicken panini, yes.”
“Whatever you say,” the waiter replied, and a few minutes later returned with two chicken panini.
Two homines erecti were divvying up their take after an exhausting day of hunting and gathering. “Same time tomorrow?” one of them grunted. “Sure thing,” the other grunted back.
A single shoe was lying in the middle of the crosswalk, a Rockport World Tour walking shoe, the left one, tan nubuck, size 10.5, extra-wide, my size, I discovered when I picked it up. I looked down at my feet. Both were securely shod in size 10.5 extra-wide tan nubuck Rockport World Tour walking shoes. But the lost shoe, or should I say found shoe, was in much better condition, like new, I’d say, while mine had seen better days, a little dirty, heels worn.
Should I take the shoe? But what would I do with it? If I wore it instead of my current left shoe its quality would become a liability. I’d walk with an uneven gait due to the difference in the heels, and it would show up my right shoe as a sad old thing on its last legs. So I couldn’t take the lost shoe—it wouldn’t be practical unless there was hope of finding its right sibling.
Should I do that, roam the streets looking for the other shoe to drop, like magic, into my field of vision? No, that simply wouldn’t be practical. So in the end I just let the shoe drop back to roughly where I’d found it. And that’s why we can’t have nice things.
Peter Cherches’ latest book, Everything Happens to Me, is winner of the 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Humor/Comedy.
