Thank You For The Opportunity

But I’ve re-imagined my purpose in life
and I’m going in another direction,
neither northeast or southwest
but someplace with fewer shadows.
I was rather stunned by the antiseptic
atmosphere, the robotic recitation 
of your strategic plan.
I had a sudden vision of being trapped
in the heart of the mundane.
You scared me or I scared myself,
either way, I won’t be accepting your offer.
That tie, with the parrots, was the tip-off.
I’m liberated, if not by my unsettled
situation, by the empty hours before me, 
with birdsong. One must strive
for authenticity although that itself,
like a rogue wave,
can be a sly subversion. 


Make Me A Rothko

I do love the paint-
    ing, blues and blacks,
    the inconstancy

Separate swathes be-
    fore merging, like the brink
    of a rainstorm 

My heart in layers, too,
    revealed by contem-
    plation, slow, measured

The painting changes
    with the light, cool morn-
    ing, sullen evening

I’m attached to the colors,
    they slip into dreams, sub-
    sume my regrets

Sky of wind, like rough skin
   raked across, I, too, be-
   long to nothing else
 

The Pallid Observation of the Duo

Old people in lawn chairs
Blue-eyed infants eating peaches in the shade
The end of summer, the past become
Loose morals and abandoned rosaries
All the bits in their own cubicles
   their own atmospheres, time
   as a dizzy mistake
   before the celebration, minus the noise

Gasping in the side yard
The slurp as a distillation of sound
Winter broken in two, the future
Sins, mortal and venial plus repentance
To each a place in the sun, no
   walls, circulated air released, echoes
   of several weeks in chaos,
   anticipation, that holy moment

Water is Life

Small ponds dot my landscape

Bringing egrets, herons to my yard

 

A small stream just a bit back

Homes otters and occasionally, gators

 

Thunderstorms, however

shake my confidence in this world.

 

Wind and swirl of hurricanes

fill these ponds, streams

 

to overflowing, splashing

up into my house overpowering

 

this world with, with mud,

foul smells, no birds.

 

Not always life giving, when water

Flows in too great a quantity, we drown.
 

Talking to the Unseen Moon

Strawberry moon,

tonight hidden by haze

rich red berries

in clouds of whipped cream

remind me you are there.


Fango (mud)  (Poem inspired by Italian floods)

When a child I thought of mud

as material for mud pies or

as the residue splashed onto

and stayed on my boots

when I jumped from puddle

to puddle in a light spring drizzle.

Now I know mud’s darker nature

that it reveals from time to time.

 

Most recently, after a night

of dancing tangos

with lightning, rain, and wind,

sixty rivers, drank themselves into

drunken excess, sprawled

over their banks

drowning fields, submerging houses,

breaking off great chunks of roads

while rushing over them, full

of this fango.

 

When sun finally coaxed the

waters to recede into a more

orderly, ordinary path of flow,

they vomited up what they

had ingested on their spree,

spewed out this foul fango.

Wherever these waters

had danced in their debauched state,

murderous venomous mud,

remained.

 

I understand the nature of this mud,

this fango. Hurricane Florence

spread the same over my home.

I’ve seen it in so many places:

California, Indonesia, Brazil,

Kentucky, and now, Italy.

The news recently showed

hopeful Italian teens working

to shovel out, and to wash

away the fango but I know

its stink will persist

in nose and memory even after

the fango seems to disappear.

 

No one who has seen or felt or smelled

foul fango will ever again

think of mudpies and mud puddles

with unfettered innocence.

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She performs and writes tales featuring food, family, and strong women. Internationally published, she’s a 2021, 2022 Pushcart nominee, 2022 runner-up, Robert Frost Competition. Recent publications include MacQueen’s Quinterly and Last Leaves, Verse Virtual, and Gargoyle. Her new chapbook, Feathers on Stone is available from Main Street Rag.  

Do you think the comic scenes in Doctor Faustus are a deliberate diversion or do they have any substantial significance? Discuss.

Over-solitariness and over eating of Faustus’s tragic ending in horrible doom points towards the gross humour by the brethren of scholars leaving the former to his lifeless melancholia.
Marlowe’s pungent satirical irony is staged by turning the papal court and ridiculing Pope as a mere name. He devalues sovereignty and political activity diminishing the Vicar of Christ from the Emperor to the Duke and eventually descending to private life. It is undoubtedly
comical farce when Pope should be boxed in the ear and exclaim in sinisterish threats of damnation in the papal court palace, “Dam’d be this soul forever for this deed.

Wagner’s conjuring to invoke steward Robin who would not surrender his soul for the paltry prize of a shoulder of mutton unless it was well roasted and flavored by good sauce parallels Faustus’ conjuration of Mephistophilis in servitude of a servant. Wagner chants magical spells to transform Robin into a dog, a cat, or a mouse or rat or anything splendours of clownish comic relief.

Faustus’ casting role of a minor court entertainer or conjurer in the Emperor of Germany allegorises satire of anti papal activities to further extent of Elizabethan Renaissance Miracle and Morality conventions. In the setting of Charles V aspiration to see that famous conqueror Alexander the Great and his Paramour and the Duke of Vaholt’s Duchess’ longing for out of season grapes manifests pageantry. Faustus’ ambivalence with trifling brood of enemies
whether the clowns of Vanholt or Carter the horse courser and the hostess; disbelieving knights of the emperor. Faustus’ life is enmeshed in the trivialities and sunken beneath the
level of the clown and the horse courser.

Lastly Faustus ‘ restoration of dignity and brilliance from being a sadly tarnished magician is the happening of the last act.

“Marlowe brings in all the elements of morality play machinery; but without any of the consolation of morality vision.” Do you agree with the statement? Give reasons for your argument.
Or
Discuss Doctor Faustus as a text which embodies the contradictions of his age.
Elizabethan and Jacobean Marlowe becomes a morning star of the 1890s a harder and more gem-like Oscar Wilde because of his establishment as a religious free thinker and rebel toward
social conventions.
“Leave these frivolous demands that strike terror to my fainting soul” Mephistopheles the agent of the Devil’s disenfranchisement of evil magic and witchcraft necromancy invokes Faustus with indiscriminate self-expression. “Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude” To posses or to strive for Helen was the loftiest bliss of chivalry and heroism.

Faustus’s sweet embracing of Helen might work wonder to alleviate his tormenting suffering that do dissuade him from his vow to Lucifer by that Peerless Dame of Greece and classical paragon of beauty. “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, Burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss…Thou art fairer than the evening…hapless semele…shalt be my paramour.” Faustus is a strawman or a scapegoat for Marlowe’s demoniac longings and in this sense his character has traits of Machiavellian spirits or in other words subversion through transgression.

Give a comparative analysis of between Faustus’ first soliloquy and his last soliloquy and trace his journey from competence to confidence to damnation. Trace the development of
Faustus from a position of heroic grandeur to damnation.

Faustus as a Witenbergs’ flowering pride changes from Doctor of Divinity to a necromancer pestered by the swarm of infernal bees. He achieves pleasure upon the subjugation of all other beings for his personal gratification. Obsessive preoccupation of power for monarchising enforce his singing of the pact in allegiance with the Lucifer. Humour of monarchising through power over the forces of nature-winds, storms, air amd water, power over national
and international destinies (The Emperor shall not live but by my leave), power over store houses (I’ll have them fly to India for gold/Ransack the ocean for orient pearl); dispositions of
the continental land-masses and movements of the celestial bodies.

Vainglorious ostentations intrigues Faustus to pursue the devilish exercise by aspiring to be the shadow of Agrippa, whose shadows made all Europe honour him. If we consider this of Marlowe’s rhetorical poetic, we are reminded of the quickened impulse, evaluation of a diseased mind or enactment of a kindling or soaring imagination, of a man awestruck before a new universe of meaning
and potentiality: “O, what a world of profit and delight// Of honour, of power, of omnipotence, Is promised to the studious artisan? All things that move between the quiet poles/ Shall be at my command:”

Faustus renounces medicine and surgery to cure thousand maladies and be eternalized. Even laws to him are expounded to be paltry and petty. Faustus stoops in the divinity of knowledge for the sake of witchcraft: “These metaphysics of magicians/ And necromantic books are heavenly;/Lines, circles, letters and characters: Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires”/ Faustus is thus changed as a damnable Promethean hero of the Enlightenment. “A sound magician is a mighty God” : The deity of Doctor Faustus is not the God of Love, the Good Shepherd, but either the avenging Jehovah of the Old Testament, or his Christian offshoot, the Calvinist tyrant of mass reprobation.

“Ay, you accursed spirit, go to ugly hell” Faustus waves farewell to Mephistophilis abhorred by the repellent face of the latter in the demonic world. The fiend’s abrupt departure and his
subsequent return with Lucifer and Beelzebub at precisely the moment when Faustus calls upon Christ is, as James Smith points out an apt representation of the emotional upheaval
which the very asking of the question provokes in Faustus’s consciousness. The vain trifles of man’s souls and merely old wife’s fables of afterlife springs in the doubt of the reality of
Heaven and Hell.

Faustus as a sound magician and humanist aspirant of power fantasies travel the papal court, kingdom and dukedom to “search all corners of the new-found world” in pursuit of “pleasant
fruits and princely delicacies.” Helen, the resuscitated body of classical antique learning extinguishes clean those thoughts that dissuades Faustus from his vow to Lucifer. This hedonism and epicurean self-indulgence allegorises the Faustus cardinal sins of lechery in satire.

This damnable nature of Faustus’ ambition can be justified in the language of the critic Helen Gardner, “The great reversal from the first scene of Doctor Faustus to the last scene can be defined in many different ways. From presumption to despair, from doubt into the existence of hell to belief in the reality of nothing else. From aspiration and deity, and omnipotence to longing for extinction. At the beginning Faustus rises above his humanity but at the closing he sinks below it to be transformed into the beast or little water drops. At the beginning Faustus attempts usurpation upon God but at the closing he is an usurper upon the devil.”

Faustus estranged and suppressed humanity have risen to demand the due fruits of harvest. His hardness of heart and stiffness of mind –Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub/ the escapist frivolities of pageant of sins becomes dwindled by the cosmic forces. It is the consummation of the Puritan imagination as J. B. Steane points out “lurking sense of damnations precedes the invocation of hell”. The apotheosis of Helen is supposed firmly to be placed as a narcotic which extinguish clear his thoughts that do dissuade Faustus from his vow, nevertheless overflows the moral banks Marlowe is constructing:

“O thou art fairer than the evening’s air/
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,/
Brighter art thou than the flaming Jupiter/
When he appear’d for the hapless Semele;/
More lovely than the monarch of the sky/
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms,/
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.”/

These flames of passion so fiercely flare up is transfigures even so moral epithet as wanton. The conflict is sharp in this scene, for these lines are immediately succeeded by the Old Man:
/“Accursed Faustus, miserable man,/ That from thy soul exclud’st the grace of heaven/ And flies the throne of his tribunal seat/

Tiny Rods
After Jumoke Verrisimo 

Rain wraps eager souls in a damp embrace,
quells the perturbing mind and shuts weary eyelids close.

Rain calls to the pictures behind shut lids
& wipes them off like cleaning swipes.

Rain whispers loudly salvation songs;
“a mouth must muse melodies of fortune.”

Rain summons me to a realm where my limbs can imitate his-
insistent ardour, like a drummer’s fingers tickling over *gbedu.

Rain calls upon the east and asks the west to sit still,
forces me to repose though any boisterous force.

Whether here and there it pulls, whether piercing into a scream,
rain nudges on my heart a salvation song.

Yea, if I tilt my face to the raptures of splattering rain, 
each drop will come to me hastily as tiny wise bulbs. 

* A percussion instrument traditionally used in ceremonial Yoruba music in Nigeria.





#Memory is how What is Left Unsaid is Said

we stepped forward but 
twice you reclined & we faded
like a passing wave/ 
like two ends of a scarlet, now-
clothesline apart. 

#I remember the way you smiled in my face; 
how creamy bulbs of pictures held the day in them, 
in you, I saw a me I didn't know &
this was the first evening I knew you were a beautiful…

did you say we shouldn't be strangers? But
 we can never be 'knowers' either/ maybe 
our memories are too seeped 
in red/ each film vivid still/ 
even as one, two, three, we count in many…

#I remember the warmth of you beside me, 
the scents and sweat after each race with a ruby rubber roll, 
I wished I could press my head on your taut back, 
this was the first evening I knew you were a pleasant…

I have you hinged on my memory's (ies) hints/ 
you have written your name with ruby ink/ 
on the face of time/ like 
a tombstone/ 
here lies the adoration that never was/ 
should the moon forget to smile/ another show of broken bravado I despise…

#I remember the letter that had your heart, 
each word kneaded by the same reason for 
a girl to jump at night,
 & a blazing fire that lit throes of passion,
 this was the first evening I knew you were a love…

even this night/ there is no peace that comes with it
you are a dark ink splattered on the sky/ my sky/ 
you are the sound of grief/ the tune of pain from a fluter’s flute/ 
you are a vicious remedy; a painful cure to all joy/ 
this flowing sea can see…

#I remember the times you owned me as a writer owns his thoughts,
you wrote the world to a stop, asked it to bow at your pen,
 tradition is but a worship of the dead, 
this was the first evening I knew you were a happy…

you said we shouldn't be strangers/ when time 
sojourns against us/ but haven't you said our love 
hangs on the sky; a star unreachable &
that your heart is a coin?
I can never be the head nor the tail/ & I will never…

again, the night you broke the mirror-
it was at midnight, the sun was sorely in slumber
the birds- corpses of the night 
& the stars cheered in silence 
you became my silent song & I became a distant merry rhyme. 
this was the first time I knew you were a painful…

a lover isn't buried too soon in the hades of memories/ 
this heart cannot call you a stranger/ but 
when my lips seek to muster the memories of passions had/ 
you cease from being a friend/ because 
my heart may turn into a racing car/ & my belly- a blooming garden/ 
even if I tried.

 these creamy bulbs must now close
 the warmth must be put off
 the words must be rubbed out
 the songs must embrace stilled lips
 this is the story of you 
and I- who are 
neither lovers
 nor strangers
 nor friends
 nor foes…

Damilola Oyedeji (Ariella) is an educationist, a creative writer, and an advocate for self-discovery and inclusion. As a poet, she has learned to navigate life through hope’s compass. This is evident in the thematic focus of her works. She is currently a fellow of the SprinNG Writing Fellowship.

the escape velocity of panicked sparrows




nearly all of me sitting with the sunny low-hop clover 




how the green of the forest waits 




a tall man standing in a field of radiant canola flowers




the deep night loss of hard geometries




cosmos dizzy with raindrops and breezes




out of the sun beneath the pines a change of scent




one less croquet player today




getting didactic with the pigeons in Takinosawa Park




a praying mantis born with her dukes up




the farmer's hands on his hips stretching back




apple blossoms eloping with the breeze




another boy has discovered a rainbow in an oil slick




back up pen after back up pen my arithmomania

Ecological culture is the foundation of the future

Nature is sacred meat for all living beings on earth. Nature feeds them, clothes them, protects them from heat and cold. In turn, a living being also loves nature. This love can be considered real only if it can be combined with the feeling of protecting nature and increasing its resources. In the recent past, we pretended that we love nature, but we forgot that we are responsible for its preservation. This irresponsibility has created a new science known as “Ecology”. The word “Ecology” is derived from the words “eko” – home, dwelling, “logos” – science, and it is the development of measures to prevent environmental destruction and the factors that cause it. explores the basics of exit knowledge promotion.

It is the need of the hour for a mature person of the new century to be able to show the elements of ecological culture. Ecological culture is an in-depth knowledge of the environment, a sense of protecting nature, caring for plants and animals, rational use of natural resources, and their reproduction. is a high indicator of practical activity aimed at grieving.

A person who can reflect these qualities can be called the owner of ecological culture.

Do not allow excess water from consumption to flow from taps, do not pollute water bodies, do not throw garbage around.
  Keeping places tidy, not breaking seedlings and flowers and planting them, taking care of animals, taking care of birds, turning houses and alleys into flower beds are the simplest manifestations of ecological culture.

In the current period, there is an imbalance between man and nature, scientific and technical development and the environment, society and ecology. All this puts the question of further improvement of ecological culture.

It is known that everything in nature is harmonious. And the person who is making good use of scientific and technical achievements is breaking this harmony, treating him cruelly. Improper use of natural resources: water, land has changed the ecology. Improper planning of agricultural crops, excessive use of chemical fertilizers have a negative impact on soil fertility and human health. Toxic effluents from factories pollute water bodies, primarily causing harm to animal and plant life. The smoke and gas coming out of vehicles spoils the air quality. All this requires ecological culture from a person.
Everyone can enjoy nature. But this does not mean love for nature. Love for nature begins with understanding it, understanding its beauties, and entering into a relationship with nature.

On the other hand, nature nurtures feelings such as observation, sensitivity, and tenderness in a person. This is manifested in a person in two ways: in relation to nature and to himself.
Zahiriddin Muhammad Babur described what he saw and experienced, the nature, wealth, animals, plants and people of the places he visited, and the customs of the peoples. It has many ideas related to earth, water, air, various natural phenomena. Babur respected and valued people who knew the country and always consulted with them. In particular, he paid attention to the breeding of flowers, decorative and fruit trees.

We leave to future generations our spiritual and material wealth, the nature that existed before us and our attitude towards it, that is, our ecological culture. Ecological culture means not only not to harm nature, but also to contribute to its restoration, beautification, and prosperity, and to fight fiercely against those who plunder the environment.

Mamatkasimova Sitora Bakhtiyar’s daughter was born on May 8, 2000 in Mirzaabad district of Sirdarya region. One of the active students of Gulistan State University. His creative works are published in the anthology “Parvoz”, on the international site synchchaos@gmail.com, in the republican magazine ” Creators”, in the international magazine “Raven Cage” of the German state, in the international newspaper “Page 3 news” published in America, Thailand, India, Canada, Australia. , published in the international anthology “Charming pearls of Uzbek amateur poets and writers” of the state of Moldova. Currently, he works as a propagandist and teacher in the 34th school of Boyovut district on creative and cultural issues.