First, the announcements.
Our regular contributor Rui Carvalho invites readers and contributors to submit poetry to the next annual Nature Writing Contest.
Our contest, Nature 2025-2026, is a new opportunity that we, as organizers, create to reach the rest of the world. Every Contest is a challenge for authors participating and to people that make it happen. This year we invite all authors to write poetry about:
(i) Flowers;
(ii) Trees and wind;
(iii) Water;
(iv) Nature Conservation;
(v) Turtles;
(vi) Love for people and nature;
(vii) Hope and Happiness.
Rules and submission information here.
Next, the Naji Naaman Literary Prizes are now open for 2027.
Naji Naaman Foundation for Gratis Culture (FGC) announced that competition for Naji Naaman literary prizes for 2027 (25th picking season) is already open. Prizes will be awarded to authors of the most emancipated literary works (in content and style) aiming to revive and develop human values.
Literary manuscripts (thoughts, poems, stories, etc.) of 40 pages at most, in all languages and dialects, typeset, with the curriculum vitae and an artistic photography of the author, should be sent to Maison Naaman pour la Culture (by e-mail: info@najinaaman.org) before the end of January 2027. Manuscripts written in languages other than English, French, Spanish or Arabic must be accompanied by a translation or résumé in one of the aforesaid languages. Prizes will be announced before the end of June 2027. Works (in full or in part) published in the free of charge prizes’ yearbook will become (only for the aforesaid publishing purpose) the property of the publishing house.
Laureates will bear the lifetime free of charge honorary title of member of Maison Naaman pour la Culture (MNAC).
Now for our current issue: One Sky, A Thousand Windows.
What strikes you first, reading through this chorus of voices, is how many different things a single species can hold in its heart at once. Here are poets and scholars, memoirists and critics, from Uzbekistan to Serbia, from Bangladesh to Greece, from America to Ukraine — and each one is looking out at the same sky through a different window.
Open any one of them and you find a whole world.
I. The Trouble with Names
Milena Pčinjski begins with a complaint that cuts to the bone: society reduces people to titles, professions, categories, ready-made identities — and in doing so, misses the whole person standing there. Shah Jehan Ashrafi knows this firsthand; her speaker loses her established identity and is forced into anonymity, hardship, social invisibility, but refuses to disappear. Mustafa Abdulmalek Al-Sumaidi writes about the sheer burden of selfhood, the dissociation that comes from carrying a self the world keeps misreading. And Blue Chynoweth, in poems built from fractured family memory and deliberately disrupted language, suggests that even understanding where you came from can feel impossible — ancestry, motherhood, America, all shards you try to reassemble.
Türkan Ergör’s piece is a philosophical poem on what it means to be human during one’s finite lifespan. Elmaya Jabbarova’s poem celebrates the astonishing growth of human knowledge while affirming her belief in the divine.
Shovon Ahmed, a 23-year-old Bangladeshi entrepreneur, outlines his career built on defending truth and human dignity through digital reputation management and by co-founding WikiGenius, a verified online encyclopedia aimed at combating misinformation. Raxmatullayeva Dilnavoz Ziyodulla kizi discusses possibilities for the use of artificial intelligence in Uzbekistan, Yusufjonova Sabriya highlights both the promise and the drawbacks of our reliance on digital technologies, and Nilufar G’ulomjon qizi Hamroqulova outlines what she sees as human skills that artificial intelligence cannot replace.
Duane Vorhees searches for a self that is not simply prescribed by pain or history. Dr. Shpresa Fundo Gjergji offers an allegory for the quiet, difficult work of knowing yourself — and discovering that the stability you once searched for outside was inside you all along. Mark Young’s artworks explore geography, identity, movement, and the instability of belonging, as if to ask: can you ever really settle into a name? And Patrick Sweeney’s pieces move between everyday tenderness and barely managed dread — the voice of diaspora poetry that holds multiple worlds, multiple languages, multiple selves in one throat.
Shah Jehan Ashrafi returns to the theme from another angle: the tension between serving others and losing yourself in their reflections, and the quiet, profound longing for wholeness. Alex S. Johnson’s interview celebrates Molly Marie Kent’s creation of The Supreme as an exuberant act of self-liberation — using metal, sexuality, fantasy, occult symbolism, literature, and community to turn personal identity into art and art into a shared space of empowerment.
II. The Water That Will Not Be Held
Maja Milojkovic compares love to water held in the hands of fate. Water cannot be permanently contained — it finds cracks, escapes, falls, flows, and eventually rises again. Dr. HC Rozalia Aleksandrova sees water as more than a physical element: it is a symbol of life, consciousness, purity, and universal love. And Mahbub Alam compares tears to ocean waves, showing grief not as weakness but as an active, cleansing force — water that washes rather than drowns.
Love arrives in many forms across these pages. Nidia Amelia García celebrates the love of a special cat — the small, steady presence that asks for nothing but your lap. Priyanka Neogi highlights how being loved and treated kindly can transform a person’s inner life and motivate them to grow. Menda Vreto’s poem concerns compassion, empathy, and the lasting impact of small acts of kindness. Milka J. Šolaja writes about the purity, vulnerability, and intensity of unspoken love — some emotions so profound that saying them aloud can never fully capture them.
Katica Protić depicts the emotional aftermath of being hurt by love yet still hopes for human connection despite her fear. Philip Butera traces a transformative, unfulfilled love — someone who reshapes the speaker’s identity so completely they become unrecognizable to themselves, yet the relationship never solidifies into mutual possession. The speaker is left suspended in a state of permanent longing. Egamnazarova Shahina Shakhriyor qizi’s poem is about being sought but not yet seen and trusting that a sudden meeting — whether with God, with a loved one, or with one’s true self — will come in its own time, unforced.
Hani Al-Fahham sees love as a candle that burns the self into immortal wax — the beloved is both the fire that wounds and the snow that conceals. The speaker falls endlessly through myth, memory, and the mundane, from the ancient sorrows of Layla and Othello all the way down to boxes of milk and cheese from Denmark. Sayani Mukherjee describes love as a spiritual and creative force — overwhelming, inspiring, and painful — and the poem itself is the speaker’s offering, their gift back. Elisa Mascia casts love in the language of sacred waiting and cosmic reunion. Jacques Fleury contributes a sensual and elegant love poem set under the Caribbean sky.
And then there is Valentina Pavlović, who sounds a warning dressed as a love poem: love’s window does not stay open forever.
III. What Survives
Ahmed Miqdad expresses the horror and sorrow of a civilian losing his entire family in a sudden wartime attack — the kind of loss that breaks language before it breaks the heart. Eva Lianou Petropoulou knows this: her poems illustrate how tragedy can strip language of its meaning, and how we have to go looking for it again, word by word.
Saeed Koushan asks what survives political violence. Not buildings. Not records. But gardens, seeds, slow gestures, nicknames. Quiet dignity outlasting the wreckage. Christopher Bernard’s seventh installment of Otherwise is a moral fable about the awakening of conscience, the necessity of resistance, and the power of forbidden stories to prove that another world is possible. Tetyana Hrytsan-Chonka transforms personal images of Ukraine — eyes, hands, water, birds, flowers, dawn, children, the earth — into symbols of a wounded but still living homeland. Anil Kumar Mishra’s poem offers an indictment of how humans consume what they claim to love, especially nature.
Ken Poyner’s pieces use absurdity, dark humor, and miniature fictional worlds to examine social boundaries, inequality, repression, and human desire. Wanchen Cao describes the pain of victim-blaming after social rejection and mistreatment. Others break you and then call you broken; they load you and then avoid you for being heavy; they hollow you out, and then say you are empty and therefore unworthy. Raida Jirjees’ book review reads Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale not as a bawdy medieval comedy but as a moral anthropology disguised as farce, where the jokes are partly on the audience. Fhen M.’s Dante-inspired poem does a deep dive into the corruption and damage caused by lying. Sushant Thapa urges us to not weaponize religion, but instead use faith to inspire us towards reason, self-awareness, and the capacity to choose better.
Abigail George traces apartheid’s violence through blood and bone — surfacing as rage, addiction, loss — and asks whether art and memory can turn that inheritance into something bearable, even luminous. Tiago Pereira’s dense, symbolic poem reads like a mythic narrative of loss, guilt, and missed intervention. MK Kuol’s poems examine power, dependence, and the meaning of rescue—but from opposite moral perspectives. Amb. Dr Tomasz Laczek laments humanity’s trajectory toward self-destruction, balanced by a glimmer of hope for redemption. Aziza Xasamova meditates on despair at human cruelty, arriving at a quiet, religious trust that darkness is not final — it is simply the necessary prelude to a justice only God can deliver. The sun goes down because it must rise again.
Soumen Roy traces a solitary inner journey from confusion and frozen grief, through a farewell and a moment of perspective, toward a hard-won peace where the self merges into something limitless. Abstract Kojwach writes a raw, poetic elegy — a meditation on grief, estrangement, creative legacy, and survival.
Other writers assert personal and cultural dignity and survival through literature. Nurillayeva Parichehra Baxodir qizi’s essay argues that literary devices shape the meaning, emotional intensity, depth, and rhythm of Uzbek writer Abdulla Oripov’s poetry. A. Iwasa reviews Olympia Books to Prisoners’ minizines and their work to bring literature into the hands of those who often lack access to it. Umurbaev Rustam Shakirjanovich’s writing highlights strides Uzbekistan and other nations are taking towards gender equality. Mahfuza Sharipova illustrates how Pirimqul Qodirov’s Ona Lochin Vidosi presents Timurid women as complex, influential human beings rather than merely beautiful princesses or wives of rulers.
IV. The Weight of a Day
Noah Berlatsky humorously captures the cycles of frustration that can derail an entire day — the small absurdities that accumulate until you don’t recognize yourself. J.K. Durick explores the unglamorous nature of grown-up struggles and the lack of any roadmap for how lives will unfold. Delsa López Lorenzo sends up a metaphorical poem about unfulfilled creativity, sacrificed dreams, and the conflict between artistic or spiritual aspirations and material pleasure. J.J. Campbell’s poems paint a portrait of a speaker worn down but still watching — failed by family, by the economy, by his own body, by the American promise — and he carries an exhausted clarity about all of it. Paul Tristram’s poems share a tough-love spirituality: no sentimentality, no magical fixes. The voice is weathered, direct, unsentimental about human pettiness, and deeply committed to growth through pain, honest self-confrontation, and the slow, grueling work of becoming whole.
Bill Tope’s short tale of adolescent sexual exploration shows us what love isn’t before illustrating sincere caring. Olive Springman explores a similar theme, highlighting the contrast between the romantic myths people are taught about love and the awkward, accidental, imperfect reality of desire and human connection. Brian Barbeito writes about watching versus doing, artifice versus sincerity, and the strange call of older, physical ways of making things — all set against a backdrop of rain and remembered books. Dr. Rozalia Aleksandrova argues that poetry is not merely art but a tool of spirituality — a medium through which humanity can learn harmony, wisdom, and corrective ideas. Yeon Myung-ji’s piece is a surreal meditation on imagination, transformation, desire, and the mysterious process by which ordinary life becomes poetry.
Anthony Ward offers a lyrical, stream-of-consciousness meditation on fate, free will, time, and mortality — the great unanswerables that shadow every ordinary Tuesday. Mesfakus Salahin weaves together a paradox: that love, beauty, and death are not opposites but inseparable companions. In Tanja Ajtic’s piece, life’s an endless cycle of death, renewal, repetition, and transformation, with each morning a fresh reincarnation. Eleanor Hill’s poem suggests letting life in through the cracks — the moments we didn’t plan, the mess we didn’t clean up, the love we feel even when we think we haven’t earned it.
Dr. Jernail S. Anand’s essay suggests that neither following imagination and passion nor reason and practicality will give a person all they need to navigate life. Rather than suggesting a blended approach, the essay suggests that may not be possible and offers sympathies for the human condition. Alan Catlin contributes a dense, allusive poem that moves through collapsing layers of American mythology, culture, and language.
V. The Body, Home, and the Land
Yashin Ortikov Kahramonjonovich discusses the importance of careful observation in diagnostic medicine. Rustamova Sevinch Shuxrat qizi describes ways to detect and prevent preeclampsia.
Nilufar Anvarova celebrates the crisp and colorful beauty of fall while acknowledging the impermanence of the season and the decay it represents. In Shannon Scoates‘ poem, night’s a mystical, nurturing force using silence, moonlight, stars, and nature to soothe troubled hearts and restore inner peace. Ananya S. Guha’s piece weaves together time, memory, loss, and the commodification of innocence, using the natural changes in the fall month of October as a central symbol. Zlatan Demirović’s piece is a reflective poem about old age, memory, lost youth, and the mysterious relationship between time and existence, told with the force of the Mediterranean maestral breeze.
Ibrahim Honjo works through a series of contrasts — between the natural world and human nature, between beauty and brutality. Sava Wallaert’s poem is about being stranded in a season of emotional and spiritual drought, the world stripped of color, water, and meaning, and to see things finally start to turn at the solstice. Christina Chin’s haiku uses gentle descriptions to celebrate the beauty of both natural and artificial flowers. Marian Dziwisz offers a defense of the rowan, a tree the speaker feels is undervalued in poetry compared to more “classical” trees like the linden or willow.
Graciela Noemi Villaverde meditates on love of homeland, belonging, memory, and the intimate relationship between a people and their land — the way a country can live inside you like a second pulse. Munisa Azimova celebrates the strength and resilience of the Uzbek people. Saidqulova Nozima discusses the early poetry of G’afur G’ulom, one of Uzbekistan’s most important twentieth-century writers — poems of energy, progress, industry, patriotism — and defends studying an early, ideologically marked collection not for its polish but for what it reveals about the roots of a major literary voice.
And so we arrive where we began — standing under the same sky, looking through a thousand windows. The voices gathered here do not agree with one another. Some celebrate technology; others mourn what it takes. Some speak of love as water that escapes no matter how tightly you hold it; others speak of it as a fire that consumes. Some write from the wreckage of war; some from the ordinary frustration of a Tuesday morning. Some have learned to bend under the weight of grief; others have learned to stand straight under the weight of joy.
But listen to what they share: every single one of them insists that there is more to being human than the categories we are given. The titles, the labels, the ready-made identities — these are the windows, not the sky. What matters is what happens when you look through. The old man on the Dalmatian coast, stirred by the maestral breeze, remembering a youth he cannot hold. The woman who refuses to disappear. The entrepreneur building a tool against misinformation. The cat asleep in a lap. The poet who discovers the stability she was looking for was inside her all along.
One Sky, a Thousand Windows is not a title that tames these contradictions. It is an invitation to hold them. To read the scholar on artificial intelligence alongside the poet on unspoken love; the researcher on preeclampsia alongside the elegy for a lost family; the celebration of fall’s beauty alongside the acknowledgment of the decay it represents. The sky does not choose which window to shine through. It simply shines. And what we do with the light — whether we write a poem, plant a garden, refuse to vanish, or carve meaning out of silence — that is what makes us human. That is what survives.