The Orange-bellied Himalayan Squirrel
How charming - it makes the world spell-bound
O Himalayan Squirrel, Red-bellied Squirrel
How you do all the things charming
How you do all the things shining to the eyes
How you do all the things, sitting on the branches of the silk cotton tree
How you bring out the cotton from the cotton fruit
How you gather all in a certain place
How your brain acts on how to beautify the other side
I know you don't, all meanings of the cause, but you do
How your brain is fixed on how to make the nest warm
How all together the cotton matches the long line catkins of the land
How it shines with its red belly in the morning sun
On the branches the sunny morning opens the door
The heart that never felt such a wonder
The love and beauty, no greed for power and pelf
A resort to live forever
What the eyes experience here, will ever come to an end?
O sacred Orange- bellied Squirrel
I see you and the heart always dances
The heart throbs for the new passion something for love and sex
We need the figure of the belly as red as the sign 'Love'.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
05/12//2020
The Pheasant-tailed Jacana
The doves, the kingfishers and so many colorful birds
Flying and calling over head in the silent resilient place
Charms the hilly atmosphere around the lake
Smile over the breeze, wiggling the lotus petals and leafs
As though I am going to rise from a deep deadly sleep
Drinking the water of Lethe in Hades
How the world of love made by the two
The male and the female pheasant jacana
How they live on in this watery leaves
How they come close to each other
How the female lays the eggs and fly to the other
Leaving her mate behind she must have her desire fulfilled
Infatuated by again builds her love palace with
Lays her eggs as before in every case
How the male hatches the eggs and breeds the chicks!
Of hatching and fostering the chicks
What a wonder a sense of love and faith to each other!
And responsibly set from above!
To every each other - father, mother, sister, brother, lover and beloved
From one corner of the world to the other we always wander for something new
A doorway to the novelty of thought and light
O breeding male pheasant Jacana,
What you leave behind for us?
I think and observe the responsibility for the new generation.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
06/12//2020
Sculpture Fight
Now the whole world is threatened in fear of corona
A rush of flame burnt all over
What's going on outside?
Indulging on or falsifying the commons
The party against the government
An excitement among the audience in Jalsa (Gathering at night for Islamic speech before the audience))
Not that people like to hear but nothing to do without listening
As they are sitting before the speaker
The argument against establishing the sculptor the speaker breaks the silence of the night
Shouts as loud as he can for not to establish any more in the country
The great man for whom our heads bow down in respect and honor
That person people recognize him as 'The father of Nation'
He is our great leader Bangabandhu Shiekh Mujibur Rahman
Violating the rules of maintaining the social distance
A group of people come out with a procession
Without knowing what the sculptor meant for
A seduction for holding the country instable
Some miscreants broke one of the Bangabandhu's sculptors in Kusthia
While people are dying and being affected daily
In every second corona swings around
Can't shake our hands; kiss on face, advance for lips into lips
Love flows on heart to heart only spiritually
Doctors and nurses have no time for rest
Day and night on duty for cares and treatment
Creates a remorseful condition of earth
Some are counting their profit
Some are repenting on loss
O heart, O diversified heart here you cry and cry
There you rejoice on falsifying or forging fortification
Dying in one side line after line
The fight we see head to head, hand to hand on the other.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
07/12//2020
Playing Hide and Seek
You play hide and seek
In the world -Love and Trick
I know the intrigue, a wonderful battle field
My journey over the mountains and hills
Through the oceans and the trees
You play hide and seek
I know but dive so deep
No cause why you play this game
No claim why I die and feel sick
I know I love to die
A touch of pain and joy
I like to rest on it, my sweet retention
O my sweet dear, my loving sky
On the ground in the starry lit I lie down
You cuddle and fondle on
I feel like maddened in excitement
Feel fresh as morning light
You play this hide and seek
Overflowing joy the whole night - kissing and missing in plight.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
08/12//2020
In the Abyss of Forgetfulness
Light turns into darkness
Darkness is now more lovable than anything else
Light appears to be dark cloud
We fall into this play of light and dark
Nothing comes out of this ghostly dangerous but heavenly saint
O lament, hidden in the light
Charming in darkness
Love regenerates in the abyss of forgetfulness
People humble and fumble
O danger lies in the bushes, the poisonous snakes.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
08/12//2020
It looks at the various happenings in the world as mirrored in politics, relationship and family. As Muriel Rukeyser said: “Our universe is made up of stories, not atoms”, The World We Live In tells the experiences of people and how their stories explore politics, family, friendship, and love.
This five-chapter short story collection contains the following stories “Daniela Has Changed!” “Dad Loves Me”, “The Order of the Day” and “See Life In Your Own Way.” Chapter One explains how Daniela was on her way to being a troubled teenage girl, but a heart-to-heart talk with her parents made her turn over a new leaf for the better. They used their stories to change her completely.
Chapter Two tells the story of six-year-old Jack, whose father, Mr. Phelps, divorced his mom, Jane, on grounds of infidelity. Because of not being able to see his mom, Jack poured out his displeasure by beating and bullying his classmates. Mr. Phelps made a sensitive subtle decision based on the reports of Jack’s behavior from the proprietress, Miss Dean, to make Jack a good boy. He succeeded by doing the unusual…
Chapter Three narrates the plight of Carlos Alberto at the University of Nassau in the Bahamas. Popularly called ‘The Conspiracy Theorist’, his ideologies caused a lot of attention but the school authorities took a drastic measure to halt the activities of his group. Carlos was arrested and after a while, he was released on grounds of good behavior but only to discover that he was rehabilitated. He returned to his native Bolivia to go through a life-changing situation…
Chapter Four recounts the story of a young man, Micah, whose frustration got the better of him. But with ‘stern’ encouragement Floyd, his friend, he wrote an award-wining rap song, ‘See Life In Your Own Way’ for rapper P.R.O who went on to win The African Lyricist of the Year award.
Chapter Five unveils the literary experiences of a young Australian, Martins. Through determination, persistence and his belief in his own success, despite countless manuscript rejections and discouragement from his friend, Charles, he went on to become the first literary ambassador to the rest of the world. Martins’ undying quest to become a successful literary icon was motivated by the success of a certain author he read about on the internet…
Ayanda Billie, nihilistic bees and the albatross keeper
You’re fog. You’re a psychoanalyst. You’re a cell,
a wilderness that knows to formulate the razor sharp
reckoning of night feeding, swimming in the abyss of
the lake with your tongue of grief and I look to your
future and the steps you have taken with tokenism, with
certainty. I find this stressful. I have taken to write
in detail about the snakes that meditate in the sun. Let
us wait, demonstrate a force for good. The day must
need repair. You navigate the game world. I consult the
gravitas of the day, the utility of humans, the function
of wildflowers. What do you know of the arithmetic? Of Jung
and the leaves of rubbish stumbling before you? Can
you fix that muck? Poet, I want to make the world better,
set you a task, reconfigure the aims of the world in
front of me. The phoenix burns us. I don’t want to think
of mindless conjecturing. All I see are problems worthy of
investigation. I want choice. Poet, what is pain, the subject
matter found in the atlas and the voiceless rabbit, the
rusty nail at the bottom of a bucket, the concept of suffering
branching out in seismic overdraft. The light has gone cold, chased
out. Random driftwood is found at the end of the sea.
I am waiting for the monster to eat me in the darkness.
The birds shriek in the backyard in need of the moonlight
that tours around the world. The shroud is inspired
where it meets the horizon. The sun bends in its despair
and I put it back together. Its strange continuity. Its
neurology is not working right. We must kill it. The rough
spark. Do you know what the appropriate response is?
To meet the braver hypothetical. Look at the miserable
sharks. See how they ably count sheep in this hard life.
I admire the albatross keeper. I take the windswept eagle
sham, my common humanity, Adler’s school of thought,
the potential for power, the positioning of the elk’s turning
point, the function of nihilism lecturing to the milk-fed
vision of the universe within me. Tell the truth in your ignorance,
the poet tells me from his university extracting laws, order
from energetic chaos. I am religious. I obtain functionality from
nature’s plant sap, unfurling the tragedy from the finite road
that knows its determining limits. I don’t know if you
have nerves, the capacity for bliss or joy, the character
that makes up the abstract me is something that is undefined.
To care for egoic self. Achebe, Soyinka are champions.
We push ourselves out against the world informed by the
unknown code in genes. I search for footprints in the river.
Mzi Mahola, spiritual warriors and poetic choice
I am alone. I stand alone. I achieved it. I am excellent.
But poets, what do you believe in? There are days when
I am not myself. When I speak terrible Czech. Mouthing,
‘I need you’. The trajectory shifts. I find arrows in
my right hand. My sister is not here. I testify my heart out
but nothing clicks. I adjust the turning point of my behaviour
accordingly. The day is bitter. I wish to gather branch
to me, to find ample loyalty in Christian fellowship and
do you still have faith, poet? You see teeth, I am not
young anymore. People have left me. I am undone. Radical
achievement is a mountain, but I am standing in the
strategy of the valley not caring about my pain. Milan
Kundera is bemused; I am the outsider frightened of
my future. I need help. Feel around. Find the words.
but the poets here are social animals. Spiritual warriors
with a key in their left hand that will unlock creativity.
The party has left. I am a dying poet, but you are alive.
You are the exit out of this planet. I have been betrayed
by non-meaning. The goal tangles. Look for the specific
yonder. Life is an imperfect funk sprawled across the
landscape of wilful ingenuity calculating potential. Thrive!
But only if you dare to find the truth. Cowardly deceit is
staring at me, communicating its progress but the apt
rubbish, its captain, the morality of the community’s aims,
responsible sharks in a flock of suits can be found there.
There is a coral bead in my mouth, grief in my head, tragic
basics that keep me up at night, but I keep walking
ahead of time, mall rats, crowds of people carrying birds.
You are not me. I don’t write as you do. I am critic.
You are wise. I am undergraduate and apprentice. You are
masterful. I am green shoot, Canadian prairie, rural and
jungle, Alberta, the mighty river fixed up with stars. My light
is growing dim and I no longer have the capacity to speak
happy. I want nothing to do with gravity. I can’t get a
firm grip of it. Into the river. Into the narrative glut. I am
fish. You are genius. Nihilism corrupts me. I know of
malevolence, brutal natures, and the clouds are ignorant
of bliss. Look at where I am standing solitude. I am a
school of bright volunteers making headway. I know what
torments female poets. We want meaning, calling. Poet you
feel the joy, you pursue deeds, tidings manifest beneath
your pen while I cut away sustenance with unformed
loneliness. It doesn’t matter what I believe, there’s choice.
I am severely depressed, in pain but understand the aim
of life, making stupid plans, implementing fixed success.
There’s a poetic choice in ceremonial life, in modal suffering.
The Ghost Trolley: A Tale for Children and Their Adults
By Christopher Bernard
Chapters 14 and 15
Chapter 14. Conflagration
The fire had spread like an angry flood while they were trapped in the shed. It was now a tempest of flames, the sky above it darkening into a forest-green twilight. The guards had escaped. A gale of scorching wind tore through the camp, picking the children up and pushing them over the ground as though they were no more than rag dolls. Flames shot above them high as church spires. The fire was like a living thing grabbing, devouring, crushing as it marched through the camp, stepping from tent to shack to barrack. This part of the camp was like a city under siege. The smoke billowed into a towering black cloud that turned half the sky into night.
They stopped and stared at the fire in awe. The intensity of the heat was turning their faces red. Then, seeing a break between two arms of the fire, they made a dash for it, Sharlotta grabbing Beely and little Johja by the hand.
Little Johja stumbled and fell and Sharlotta and the others had to stop.
“Where Mummy?” shouted little Johja.. “I want Mummy!”
“Crying stop!” Sharlotta shouted back.
But it wasn’t little Johja who was crying. It was Sharlotta, the tears falling uncontrollably down her face. Her sister had only said what she, too, was bursting with inside. And the enormity of the fire made the unthinkable possible.
What if their parents were already dead?
But she mustn’t break down now. Now she had to hold on to herself, not let herself go to the emotions going on in full tantrum inside her, or they might never get out of here. She felt as though she were being wrenched in two; she was leaving her childhood behind, it was disappearing down the wells of her little sister’s eyes. “Mommy we find! Promise I! Promise I! But we no can stay here. To where Mommy is, we must go . . .”
Little Johja stopped wailing and stared up at her sister with a look that said it wanted to believe her but wasn’t sure it could. Petey and Beely stood waiting. The younger boy looked like he was waiting to see if Sharlotta had stopped her tears before starting a crying jag of his own. At least that was Petey’s thought.
“We’ll be burned to a crisp if we don’t get going!” he said, truly enough.
Then Sharlotta heard in the distance behind them a small voice crying out.
“Wait! . . . Wait! . . .”
They turned and peered through the smoke blowing in waves between them and the distant shed.
The owner of the voice appeared as abruptly as an apparition out of the smoke.
It was Blue Moon, bruised from her struggle with One Eye and limping on one leg.
“Are you all right?” she demanded, in her froggy voice.
They nodded bedraggledly.
“Whatever happened to . . .?” Petey asked.
Blue Moon shook her head impatiently.
Sharlotta, feeling grateful but confused, wanted to ask the Korgan girl why she had rescued them, but there was no time.
“I know a way out of here,” said Blue Moon. “But you have to follow me. We have to move fast. The fire’s burning the whole camp.”
And she dashed off, limping, without waiting for their response.
The four glanced at one another, but there seemed to be no alternative. Blue Moon was unaware of the need to find and rescue the children’s parents.
“What are you waiting for!” Blue Moon cried out, looking back at them, then hurrying on.
“But we have to . . . !” Sharlotta was beginning to call out to Blue Moon when there was a hollow whoomp! The four looked behind them to see the shed collapse in a fiery ball. They instinctively dashed after the Korgan girl as she ran down a row of burning tents toward an iron tower they could make out in the distance.
Korgans roamed about, dazed and frightened; too absorbed in fighting an arm of the fire thrusting deep into the camp and destroying a home tent or some part of the Korgan military machine, or just trying to escape, to even notice the fleeing children.
The children passed the charred remains of tents and shacks, overturned carts and trucks, even something that looked like a tank, gutted from the fire and with its gun askew, looking surprised.
Lying abandoned along the roads were dead draft animals – an armadillo-like creature the size of an SUV (Petey thought), and the flattened hippopotamus-like creature with the howitzer on its back, which they had seen before, and a magnificent-looking beast, a sort of camelion, part camel, part lion, probably used for display by generals and kings in parades.
There were swarms of rat-like creatures with two heads, dashing in mobs from commissaries and food depots where they had lived in relative safety, and the children stopped briefly, clinging to each other (except for Blue Moon, who stayed ahead and watched them with impatience) to let them pass, the rats squealing frantically. Every so often, in the distance there was the sound of a massive explosion as another ammunition or fuel dump blew up.
Petey was a little frightened by what his little match had made happen. Though it was helping them escape a fate worse than burning, he promised himself he would never, ever, play with matches, not ever again, no sir, no ma’am, if he ever got out this alive, that is. Not ever! Cross his heart and hope to die if he ever says a lie! Well, ever says a lie again.
Blue Moon pointed toward the iron tower, which they could see through breaks in the blowing smoke.
“I know a way out near there!” she shouted.
“But without our parents we not leave!” Sharlotta finally got out. She had been waiting to say this until she was sure they had an escape route.
“Your parents?” Blue Moon asked in astonishment. “But where are they?”
“They be behind a wall in the trash dump,” Sharlotta’s voice seemed to dip, remorsefully. “Where the fire start.” Then she continued, more assertively, “You remember! With your brother you be there, shouting at me two hours ago! We might be then again captured! Did you see what they do to me father?!”
“He’s not my brother!” Blue Moon said, petulantly. Her tone was immediately apologetic. “I’m sorry we nearly got you captured, that was before I knew it was Orgun Ramora who was after you.” She paused, her eyes veiled with anger. “I would do anything anything to stop him.”
“But we must save me parents,” Sharlotta insisted.
Blue Moon considered for a moment.
“All right, there’s no time to argue,” she said. “I take the others to the tower, and we can all meet there. You have to be careful, because it’s at the edge of the military parade ground, and there are likely to still be lots of soldiers around there. The trash dump is over there.” She gestured toward the east, where a dauntingly high wall of flames loomed, belching smoke across the afternoon sun. “They may not even be alive.”
“Not say that!” Sharlotta shouted.
“I’ll go with you,” Petey said suddenly.
The two girls looked at him, as though only now realizing he was standing there, right next to them.
“Okay,” Sharlotta said.
She gave Blue Moon a doubtful look before kneeling down to Beely and little Johja, who, their faces smeared with a paste of mud and ashes, stared gravely at her.
“I go to get Mummy and Deddy and bring them back here, so you must to go with . . .” She looked up at the girl. “I not know your name. I think of you,” she said, ingenuously, “as Blue Moon.”
Blue Moon looked at Sharlotta a little shyly, she thought.
“My name is Miua. But you can call me Blue Moon if you want.”
“All right.” And Sharlotta turned back to her brother and sister. “Follow Miua . . . Blue Moon . . . to that tower,” pointing toward it, “and to meet you there I bring Mummy and Deddy.”
“Promise you?” demanded Beely, looking at Blue Moon with a deep frown and a suspicious stare.
“Promise I,” Sharlotta said solemnly, crossing her heart in the supreme gesture of honor, more powerful in the nation of childhood than a hand on a Bible in adulthood’s court.
Little Johja put her fingers into her mouth dubiously, but seemed to know there wasn’t much she could do: she had tried bawling once, but it had had no appreciable effect. So maybe silent compliance would make Mummy reappear.
Sharlotta hugged each of them. She might not find their parents, they might be dead, she might not see her siblings again. Fire, she knew, was soulless as the wind, ruthless as a cornered animal, unforgiving as an offended god. She forced her mind to focus on finding her parents and bringing them to the tower and escaping with them all from the camp: nothing else mattered, nothing else existed. Anything after that was a blank.
“Good be. What Auntie Blue Moon say, do.”
“She not my auntie!” protested Beely.
“Argue not! Now go.”
Blue Moon awkwardly took the little ones by the hand (something she had never done before; her hands were more used to being used as fists) and, when the result was not an instant explosion or a lighting bolt from the sky, the three gave each other abashed looks.
“We be going,” said Sharlotta.
“Good luck,” said Blue Moon, in her froggiest voice.
And Sharlotta and Petey started running toward the east; the girl looked back only once, to see Blue Moon, with her little limp, carefully leading Beely and little Johja, who was looking back resignedly at her older sister, toward the skeletal silhouette of the tower.
Chapter 15. The Spell
The two ran straight ahead, then around what looked to Petey like a collapsed clam bar surrounded by shattered oyster shells, then zig-zagged through a series of little baby fires, then all the way around a great burning army barracks, all the time slipping like a thread through the last fearful remnants of Korgans still in that part of the encampment, many wandering aimlessly as if in shock: a young Korgan woman stumbled by, crying out the names of her lost children; an old Korgan man with a mustache hobbled on a cane across their path, trying to decide what direction was safe, tears of bewilderment streaming down his face; a young soldier stalked past in an awkward marching step, clutching his weapon as though it would have any effect against an enemy as ruthless, cunning and pitiless as fire.
Sharlotta felt twinges of pity for the Korgans as she and Petey ran past them. Yes, they had long been her enemies, and had done her people much harm, and they would kill her if they knew who she was, but, after all, they were subject, just as she was, to suffering and joy; they were vulnerable, living creatures – vulnerable (she suddenly realized) because they lived.
But she had no time to consider this just now, so she tucked the thought away in the back of her mind, to brood over once she and her family were safe.
At one point she and Petey met a fork between two lanes; the one on the right narrow and twisting, the one on the left straight and broad. A public clock stood above the fork, still functioning amidst the mayhem. Petey looked up at the clock (he had always been fascinated by clocks of all kinds): its curious face had four hands and was divided into 22 units, rather than the 12 he was used to. Petey peered wonderingly at it, and finally figured out what time it was: 15:73. Which was certainly an odd time for a clock to read.
“Come!” Sharlotta said impatiently. “We no can wait here!”
“But which way should we go?” asked Petey, gaping indecisively between the two paths.
Sharlotta stared at the paths for a moment, then up at the clock, then, despairingly, made a decision and led the way left.
But after a hundred feet of smooth broad lane, it suddenly turned into a warren of dead-ends they were lost in for long minutes before they finally clambered out at the edge of the trash dump. It was barely recognizable, most of it burnt out, charred black and still smoking.
A heavy silence lay across it like a sleeping animal.
Twenty feet away from them, they saw the collapsed wall where they had left Sharlotta’s parents.
The children stopped.
Petey was the first to move. He crept up to the wall and slowly peered around it. He glanced back at Sharlotta with a frightened look in his eyes.
“No!” Sharlotta cried out, running up.
There, huddled up at the base of the wall were two bodies, miraculously untouched by the flames. Sharlotta’s mother lay on top of her father, as though sheltering him from the smoke and fire.
“No!” Sharlotta cried again, kneeling by them, then throwing herself over them. She buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. “She still warm!” She felt for her mother’s pulse, then the pulse of her father, whose eyes were still open, staring up toward the green sky. “They still alive ago few minutes. They just died! They just died!” the young girl yelled hysterically.
“If only we had taken the other path, we might have gotten here before . . . !”
She let out a wail of despair.
Suddenly she stopped. Petey stood near her, staring at her in a kind of reverence at the intensity of her grief. He felt helpless, wanting to help and not knowing how.
She looked up at him. The girl’s tear-stained face held a question in it. And in the question was a hope.
“You see time on the clock?” she asked, in a trembling voice.
“Yes,” said Petey. “It said 15:73.”
“And you see seconds?”
“No.”
“You can guess?” Her face was pleading.
“Um – how about 15:73 – um – 28?”
“You think you guess how far from here the clock is exactly? I mean, exactly?”
“No,” said Petey, “not exactly.”
“You might guess?” she asked, even more desperately.
Petey was at a loss, then said the first thing that came to mind.
“A hundred sixty-seven feet and three-and-a-half inches!”
“What are ‘feet’ and ‘inches’?” Sharlotta asked.
Petey gaped at her. How was he going to explain that?
“Never mind!” she said, muttering to herself afterward, “Maybe it work.” She turned back to Petey. “And direction exact?”
Exact this, exact that! Is the girl crazy? Petey thought, irrelevantly. Well, all girls are crazy.
He looked behind him with a shrug, in the direction they had come from, and saw the iron tower in the distance. It was as good a guess as any.
“There!” he said, pointing.
“And what you thinking at that moment exact?”
“I was thinking,” Petey said, bewilderedly, “what a strange time the clock read . . .”
“Okay,” said Sharlotta. There was a tone, half of hope, half of despair, in her voice. “Now, that thought think right now.”
She grabbed Petey by the hand, closed her eyes, seemed to think hard, then muttered a long string of words under her breath, opened her eyes again, pointed toward the tower, and shouted, “Shantih otherwise there!”
And a moment later, Sharlotta and Petey were back at the fork between the two lanes, and the clock face above them read 15:73, and the second hand was just passing 28.
“How did you do that?” cried Petey.
“No time! Quick!” And Sharlotta dashed off into the twisting paths to the right, with Petey right behind her.
The paths immediately turned into a labyrinth, and Sharlotta was for a moment certain this had been a mistake, when without warning the maze opened out into a small, shadowy space, and Sharlotta, to her amazement, saw she was standing behind the far end of the collapsed wall: her parents lay, not a dozen feet away from her, in a faint on the ground.
The children ran up to them, Sharlotta grappling her mother and pulling her off her father, and her father started to cough uncontrollably. Sharlotta violently shook her mother, whose head wobbled groggily.
“Mummy!” Sharlotta shouted. “Mummy!”
Her mother moaned, her eyes flickering open. “Sharlotta?”
“You suffocating each other! Just in time we get here. You . . . die! You die!” Sharlotta began crying hysterically.
“Sharlotta, sweetheart. I here, not dead, I . . . be fine . . .”
But all Sharlotta could say was “You die, you die!” as she wept in her mother’s arms. Her mother embraced her, kissing her on the head.
“But where be your father?” her mother asked.
The father had stopped coughing and pulled himself up against the wall.
“All right I be, love,” he said. “Sharlotta, darling, you all right be?”
Mark Blickley grew up within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Scholarship Award for Drama. His latest book is the text-based art collaboration with fine arts photographer Amy Bassin, Dream Streams.
Robert Funaro is a New York-based actor best known for his work as a regular in The Sopranos where he created the role of Eugene Pontecorvo. Recent credits include The Irishman directed by Martin Scorsese and a recurring role as Lt. Bricker on the hit Showtime series Ray Donovan. Film credits include American Gangster directed by Ridley Scott and Not Fade Away directed by David Chase
Joe John Battista has been involved in over 100 plays and musicals as an actor, musician, songwriter, and director. As a professional photographer, he covered the United States Wheel Chair Team at the Special Olympics in Korea. For six years he was Artistic Director at New York City’s 13th Street Repertory Theater. Since the recent closing of that historic theater, Joe has assumed leadership of the 13th Street Repertory Company.
THE BOMBING OF THE BERLIN ZOOA SUITE IN EIGHT PARTSPRELUDE1948
Lion tails cartwheel through the smoke.
Landing softly on the Screaming Platz.
Zebras.
Black White.
Red.
The earth vomits its crust and
Yes.
There are secrets to be kept so open wide.
Such Beauty.
Eyes clouded glass like watered milk.
When it was over the sky wiped its chin.
Everyone Loves The ZooA Poem by Mila RothSurvivor and Witness ofThe Bombing of the Berlin ZooBERLIN ZOOLOGISCHER GARTENNovember 22, 1943Father Ernst MuellerMitte Borough, BerlinSunday MorningThe 22nd**********
See them kneeling.
Kneeling before The Altar.
Kneeling like those they have shot.
They take their Christ on crackers.
Their Wehrmacht lips opening as one and
I can see Hell in their mouths.
Bless you my Child.
I say.
Let us Prey.
Joram FuhrmannA Jewish Boy of NineThe TiergartenSunday Afternoon
***************
Halten.
Don’t move.
They will not see you.
You will not see them.
Slapping and screaming.
Lightning and Skulls.
Mama.
Papa.
We will love you forever the Zoo Joram the Zoo.
Run run soil your pants.
The sky is full of veins.
Rank with animal fear.
Joram falls to his knees and cries.
Cries for the life he knew.
God delivered the Torah.
And went back to a world of sleep.
Mila Roth and Anna BergAnimal AttendantsBerlin Zoologischer GartenSunday Afternoon***************
Hunger.
The Great Beast.
Meat.
Only squirrels.
Mila: “Adept with the stone we have killed them all!”Anna: “No. They have gone to the East. They will return when it is over.”CameroonMale Black LeopardCage 159Berlin Zoologischer GartenSunday Afternoon***************
The concrete is cold.
Unyielding.
Gone the touch of earth.
Propelling him across the Savanna.
He had killed at will.
Carcasses.
Mapping his journey of pain.
Thirty steps to the left.
I am Iron.
Thirty steps to the right.
I am Death.
I will break free.
I will kill everything in my path.
Father Ernst MuellerThe Blessing of the AnimalsSunday Evening*************
All the pets have been eaten.
Fat Goering.
Full of Spaniel.
Only the Zoo makes sense.
Holy Water for Hippos.
Wafers for Wolves.
Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow.
A Droning of Bees.
High in the Sky.
Praise Him all Creatures Here Below.
Flesh.
Grays and Reds.
Claws.
Hooves and Heads.
Joram FuhrmannSunday Evening*************
Shock.
Screaming Metal.
Earth Rock Iron Wood.
Joram.
You have blood in your ears.
Your legs.
Bone and gristle.
Something is wrong.
Deep in the chest.
Close your sweet eyes.
It’s just a brief rest.
I shall go to the East and will return.When it is over.Mila Roth and Anna BergSunday Evening*************
Shock.
Screaming metal.
A troop of monkeys fall shredded.
The bombs no interest in Who.
Anna staggers to the nearest cage.
Flames.
Coils of smoke.
Feeling her way she opens the gate.
And now it’s Too Late.
Now it’s Too Late.
Cameroon.
Leaping to freedom.
Pausing to rip out her throat.
Such Beauty.
Eyes.
Clouded glass.
Like watered milk.
The Living and the Dead********************
Shock.
Screaming metal.
The earth buckles.
Vomiting her crust white hot.
A cage blows open sucking Mila inside.
A pair of dead Zebras.
Breaking her fall.
Black White.
Red.
The ground is littered with animal dead.
Mila.
Peering through the bars.
One of the bodies is moving.
She sees the Collar white as his face and she cries.
Pray for us Father.Now and at the Hour of our Death.
The Priest lifts his head.
His eyes are huge and see nothing.
The Jackals are first.
Blue meat in their jaws.
Mila.
Hearing the tearing of flesh.
Knowing it’s part of the deal.
The Priest at the end of the meal.
Everyone loves the Zoo.
That will never change.
Post Calamity
By Raquel Silberman
What lurks behind the spine of disaster?
stiff standing behind a
vertebrae tree
blinks in the dark of it’s
shadows,
apparitions of its grief
when disaster walks away
watch the darkness shrink.
glimpses of bone in a flock of silk
flip a penny and watch it
sink
when koi swims by,
it feasts
becoming just another shiny scale
plotting by my feet
A mess to clean.
drapes strewn across power line
sputtered with forgetful ink
dense is the mind by virtue of
limit
What is disaster if not
a moment to
think
