PSALMS 22:19

After Shedrack Bulus


To the tongue that cradles on wounds,
every poem holds a hammer against my 
body. Which means, this body lacks a body, sometimes, it is a garden & other times, it's a flower — Perfect paradox saying; the things I once admired now plague on me. Maybe, this is how a body translate to a graveyard. Again, cast me to a river & I'll comeback a sand, scars & death close dialect engulfing a body. Every morning I trust my knees for 
Grace, but bleeds still flaunt out of me like a spring bee. & these scars too renders me a sacrificial lamb. Tell me, what mouth will remember me & still gospel how to read a poem before a congregation of grief?. The priest said, Son, learn how to build a tower for your scars. Perhaps, I remember— even the Bible pulled pigs out of a body. Say, to nurture a body for moths. Grace tarry & everything ends in science. At least to saviour a body. I, a rotten flesh hunting for hope at feet of a round rope. This poems breaks & clouds this body to a dust. Lord, won't you undress me to a butterfly? Now that blood still wets my knees on breaking tarmacs.
____________________________________________________________________________________________

I CHRISTENED MY BODY A HOME

At night,
I briefcased my unbelief into the 
esophagus of my stepmother. Nothing
defines a boy more than grief. & I, too.
My body have cocoon myriad lightless
stars, which often deduced me to a prosaic equation, I mean something poor devoid of brilliance— Emptiness filled 
me to the edge, & I bend like a crayfish. 
Which is to say, my body still clings on rotten roses. I lost a sight of myself, & my cousin is now an acronym mouthed by birds. Tell me, In what way can i unbuilt this body?. Perhaps, this poem is modern. Here, everything labyrinths to a requiem, grief, bullet, or whatever can murder. & say, a rose fading to a scar, My shadow bounced back at me. My body shriveled to a room with sharp shards. All wanting to cut & open me to a naked wound. Yesterday, i met God in the flickering of a crescent, I wanted to split this body before his presence, To unfold my soul to a faith. But, here, not everything bring peace. So i relinquished my simulacrum to the mirror & christened my body a home.
___________________
Anderson Moses, nicknamed (Son of Moses)  is a poet from a small village in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. He's a student of History and International studies. He's works have been published/forthcoming in Brittle paper, Nantygreens, Eboquills, Arts lounge and elsewhere. Apart from writing, he enjoys snapping images.

Seasoned ritual

What these lights exclaim—
a commonplace of forms 
in pronouncement of death.

They wander untruths 
hollered foregone
of a solstice
established 
a season of touch.

Their dross is predicate 
to a remonstrance performed;
shaping as best 
that fathom of force cultured 
from specks unjustness shines
on bathed nights lacked their lustre.

(Here a life extolled; there
a dream extinguished).

Now so foreign we’re
stepping over the timed-in chants
to fend for places consenting 
rest from 
what reasons that ask it
of celebrations intolerance begets,

that is how to exercise rhythms
their shod worthiness proclaimed
in the sudden redux of antiphons 
once scant now abundant.

We trail in our responses,
aligned to make delicate
the occasion we’ve met,
clutching our tapers so that
light, too, does not
more easily perish.




Window shopping

Cut figures shaped waxen
mirror intentions formed
of haphazard strolls down streets 
love ill-mannered pretends them—
some ticketed green 
of truant devotions come back this
garden of delights popular in what’s hoped for.

Most of it’s distracting, full of 
stops and contrition
unripe statuary tends
those whose lives unfold
in service to lost ancestors.

But Time will come them who favour
this will to remark it—
we’re selves left as are to own devices
happenstance if birth
then recession cemented along
lines that dock us of valuables given.

Ready or not we wouldn’t have it
that smile half-shaped for the crowd to mumble,
a relic ambulating distance and emotion
the window gives toll to
as we gather and shop in the know
of what it’s wrought
an age post-capitalistic of booming abundance.




On a reading of Melanie Klein during lockdown

Projected selfhoods applaud 
affirmations to the bone;

deep their solipsism broods
the selfishness they’ve caused

if wrapped around is a gift
their Others’ not wanted

but of loans disposed 
to hearts who contend them.

They ride along 
such subtle devotion

its violence that prospers
raw conditions suffering made norm

as Life is its truth when
pretensions implode 

and grumble the heresies
politeness helps form

in softness mere cover
what tensions belie.



Avatar

Legitimate runs can’t handle 
circumstances of commotion.

They get wind of escape through 
worlds our falsehoods outmoding
as the real less tangible is speculated

more worth than this 
daily plot thick 
with the uninitiated.

But here: 
burnt-out traces of corpse
project drop-offs
the mainframed redoubt-in,
lost to bigger cause 
inhuman as much
the next one proposes
some new god its hereafters
the digital allots of 
when embraced extensions 
regulate newness pulled-out from 
deathbeds their visions
that commonplace of norms
our postmodern living.

Monotony gone
deposits best colour
this mutiny 
about us.

Juneteenth

Such a heart wracking event
Bloomed yellow, green and red streams of gladness
Ribbons around a geographic pole
Unbridled dancing, hallelujahs.

Once long ago when Texas was the last remaining stronghold of the Civil War
black people toiled resigned in its fields
Rattling horses
Cleaning homes
No one the wiser
Not most whites
Not blacks.
The imbalance of nature hummed nicely
As planned
Though thoughts, wild thoughts
Caromed with force and vigor around the cranium of mind. 
What color is freedom?

What crack whackery brought that lone horseman to the capital
His mount dusty, riding
Sweat stains lining his neck and pits
Didn’t ask for water
Tied up his hoss
Delivered his message:
The General is coming! 

On Sunday, June 18, 1865 General Gordon Granger marched
1,800 Blue Coats into the island city of Galveston, largest in Texas,
Critical seaport. 
On Monday, June 19, Granger issued General Orders No. 3.
Lincoln told him, “Better read it out loud,
Some of them don’t know how.”
In fact he read it several times around the city
At the market
At the Osterman building, Union Army headquarters
Over by the judiciary
Down on the wharf . . . 

Two months previous, when Texas finally capitulated and was annexed by the Union 
Granger took troop command of the District of Texas. 
His first official act, read General Orders No. 3:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
Another day at work in the life of a career soldier.
A life-changing event for 250,000 enslaved black people …
Didn’t know they had been freed two years earlier.
Why so many?
By the time General Granger assumed command of the District of Texas,
the Confederate capital, Richmond, had fallen, 
the executive mentioned in the order – President Lincoln – was dead, and the 
13th Amendment abolishing slavery would soon be ratified.
Is it possible to have a second independence?

But the slaves weren’t free.
The ex-Confederate mayor of Galveston flouted the Army, 
forced the freed people back to work, 
In point of fact, after New Orleans fell to the Union Army in 1862, 
slave owners in Mississippi and Louisiana and across the South effected their own trail of tears, a re-enactment of the Middle Passage, drove
150,000 slaves on a march to Texas, 
Deemed the best place to work the economic engine of slavery.
Build America.

Galveston was a hop and a sneeze from the Caribbean slave-trading islands
Privateers and smugglers used it as an outpost for their operations. 
As long as the Confederate Army had control, there was no way to enforce Lincoln’s order.
What turns black to red?

Freedom came to Texas slaves two years later when the Confederacy finally surrendered
Time enough to harvest two cotton crops 
When is free, free? 

Spontaneous celebrations broke out among the freed slaves
Churches and homes, picnics and barbecues 
What is the inside of red?

The color red became prominent
Partly because it is the color of blood and
Partly because it was a color of spiritual power among the Yoruba and Kongo peoples,
Shipped to the Caribbean and Gulf Coast long after the slave trade was outlawed in1807.
Red, a cultural reminder of the roots of the enslaved –
Barbecued ribs in red sauce,
Red velvet cake, red beans and rice, lemonade with fresh strawberries,
strawberry soda bottled and shipped from Milwaukee.

When does emancipation become freedom?



~ Sandra Rogers-Hare                              

The Last Seed

My family
glass & rust
fragile & corroded
crumbling at the touch

Erased history
shame & tears
we continued on our path

Sins elude the breakwater
ocean swallowed all
a repentant crossing

Meals eaten in silence
prayers said in fear
no one dared to question

The last tree has fallen
I am the last twig
sheltering the last seed




No One Left to Hear

Talk is cheap. Always cheap. Counting pennies for a dime.
Actions play the mime, refusing to recite their lines.
I buried a crucifix once, hoping to grow some faith.
The ground opened up to swallow me. Hair tangled in 
knots like a fist pulling out roots of truth. Lavender 
speaks in soft whispers. What colors do you hear?

Pennies tarnished and pitted. Chatter, chatter, chatter.
The asking price for a word is an entombed relic.
The cost of life, caged by lies, trapped without a voice. 
The prefix of time sits on shoulders of thought, 
not able to utter a syllable. Bound by convention,
it sinks deeper beneath contrition, buried along with my cross.


I Ask the Sky for More

Standing still, alone, upon the hill / above the clouds.
Dreams turn red / they burn through time.

Time practices its lines over, and over, but cannot speak;
muted to all who would listen / its tongue severed. 

I ask the sky for more / it does not answer.
Thunderous silence fills my head.

I stare into white light / blinded by your brilliance.
I stand still, alone, upon the hill / above the clouds.

You were so beautiful / your eyes so green.
You slipped through barriers of reality.

I climb even higher. Stars reach out to take my hand.
They dance for joy / I join the dance.

The end is near <I am ready>.
Stepping off the galaxy, I fall into your vacuous night




Finding the Truth of Who I Am

there is no roof	only a starry expanse
reaching ever further
	beyond the dawn of man

we trip over words 	light as feathers
always searching for truth

in the timelessness 	of tomorrow
	ideals do not equate
as yesterday draws us back 

I was such a fool
	turning my face away
		reality played its little ruse

a thousand years 
	passed through our fingers
riding imagination	back home

time does not change
	who we are
		unless we deem it so 



The Curse of Green Eyes

Greed festers in my veins / seeping through my pores.
Wanting what I cannot have. Always seeking more.
Born with green eyes / the curse before me came.
Helpless to my fate. Desire was my calling / envy 
was my name. I craved the peace I could not have,
even that I wanted more. Nothing was for nothing, 
and everything was less. Time passed and light 
dimmed. Of memories, I have none. One emotion 
remains, the tireless pursuit of what I cannot have. 
To the very end of hope, a lust fills my soul. To 
quench the mighty thirst that bore me through this 
world. To calm the fire and know quietude just once.


Gateway to Hell

Standing at the gateway to hell.
There is no going forward / no going back. 
Paralyzed / afraid to breathe. Encircled 
by a fire of hate & apathy. One small 
move, and we topple over the edge. A 
devouring vortex of horror sucking us in. 

Four years of uncertainty / two years
in captivity. War caps off the dread. 
Fear of annihilation if we step too far.
Where do we turn / where do we go?
Darkness closes in all around. A world
trembles. Can hell be far behind? 

Beyond our reach / behind our knowing /
lies a place where we play games. 
Games of life and death. Foreboding 
stillness awaits the eruption of truth.
A truth that stands alone. We are the
makers of our own hell. 
We pave the path we trod. 

War and Love

The world is exposed to this hammering 
And moulding the golden or silver necklace
How beautiful and brightening!
Everyday every moment the fighting people bleeding and dying
How pathetic the role played!  
Although we perform our duty from both sides
No caricature, no specialty before-after
So touching the heart of others
How loving the scenery of land and waters
On the other hand the little bird flapping its wings 
Gasping for a little chance to live 
In the world it's very hard nut to crack
The destination of peace and love.

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
28/05//2022

Water Crisis

Bangladesh is a land of rivers
But they are crying for water
If you cross them in summer or winter
Its only knee touching once twenty years ago
It was full to the brim
I live in subconscious
I die unconscious
Dryness covers up my area
Dams, dams and dams that tears the heart 
The world is open for all
But some are victimized by the barriers in waters and land
Can you imagine the problem in the subcontinent?
I live in subconscious
I die unconscious
At times when water flooded us to the place 
Can you imagine?
  
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
28/05//2022

The World Attacked By

The world is attacked one by one
One by one -Corona Pandemic, Russia - Ukraine fight
Israel - Palestine fight, China - India Fight
Fight against hunger and plight from country to country
We, the commoners try to get free from the clutch of the spoiled brains 
Control the markets for high rise price of the necessary commodities
Standing before the shop look so high around the sky
Eyes turn so big and red bright!
And all seem to be dark at the time of paying the bill
Fight within me on the land, in the ocean, hills and the place
Where the children are learning their lessons at the institutes
Only fight and death - death and fight.

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
28/05//2022

Immunity

All fades away! Hi immunity
Lost your power of moving in body
Just like the shooting star in the sky
Twinkling once goes out of sight
But we do have belief
We must stand side by side so close
Its patience that permits us to exist here from time immemorial
Day by day our immunity dims away adding the earth 
One day I must see you with our loving desire
I must run from one to the other-the loving bird
How maddening the love between!
O love, my dear love!
Immunity must be regained one day in us. 

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
30/05//2022


Risk

While swimming on the pond at my high school life in seven or eight grade
I take risk of him for holding me on the back
Spread my hands on water
But within a minute or two I get tired
Finding no way I wanted to escape
The more I want to escape the more he wants to hold me so tight 
At last I stared my journey again on water 
Crossing the middle part of the pond
At reaching point to the other side two or three yards left
Losing all my strength, we began to take water
Just at the moment a black boy standing on the bank jumped on 
Robust and strong enough to support us from going under water
We revived, but the moment still I remember at times to take my shelter in love.
   
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
30/05//2022

D. Nurkse is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently A Country of Strangers  (Knopf, April 2022), a "new and selected." He has received the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Whiting foundations. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review and many other venues, and has been widely translated. He has taught poetry at Rikers Island and served a term on the board of Amnesty International-USA. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College and collaborates with Zephyr, his visionary dog.

Mary: Welcome to Synchronized Chaos Magazine, Dennis. A Country of Strangers is wonderful and very moving. I loved these poems in so many ways: in breadth, depth, and height; in subject; in beauty; in richness. This collection, which is a "New and Selected," brings readers thirty new poems and over 150 poems drawn from eleven of your previous books. How did you choose the poems for such a rich collection, one that spans well over three decades of your work? Did you pick your favorites? Select according to a theme?

D. Nurkse: I’ve worked hard all my life in this poetry labyrinth, and all the prior collections left out a lot. I’ve learned to have a Zen attitude. If a poem has intensity, it’s because a lot of companion poems were left out—it's representing more than itself. So the selection process was pleasurable for me. My editor Deb Garrison had her own thoughts but was very flexible: it was a good situation, I had a check on my impulses but didn’t feel constrained. My books tend to be thematic, and my first impulse was to preserve each theme and keep each collection distinct. Deb was more granular, thinking about individual poems.

Mary: What changes did you discover in your writing? How have you changed as a poet in the past thirty-five years?

D. Nurkse: Maybe I’ve gotten worse? I was a hardworking kid, for sure. But I have done books recently that are speculative, approached the poem in a way that’s more open to other voices, sui generis structures, themes like marine biology that weren’t always part of the poet’s palette. We’re all struggling with a permanent crisis—the world is imploding, the universe squeezing itself back into a dot of sound byte. How do we deal with that? How do we live with disaster without investing in it or denying it? That’s the background. In the foreground, poems take so much time to write that you’re not always conscious of style, just of endless trial and error. Judgments are for the critics who have detachment.

But there’s another side to your question: what did writing help me discover? Often, I found the poem taking the other person’s point of view in an argument, being tolerant of an adversary, being curious for no motive. Poetry is more generous than I am.

Mary: In the poems in this collection, you seamlessly combine the personal and the political, demonstrating compassion and understanding for those who protest injustice, and the poor and oppressed who cannot speak for themselves. For example the first poem in A Country of Strangers, “Order to Disperse,” is dedicated to your students and takes as its subject protestors facing armed troops. What makes it remarkable is that you simultaneously reflect on the beauty and fragility of life in lines that are lyrical and deeply poetic. In other words, your poetry is often political, but never didactic. How do you accomplish this?

D. Nurkse: Mary, you’re too kind. I really believe all our lives are political. But I deeply believe in the autonomy of the poem. We as a species don’t know ourselves. We’ve been organizing ourselves with the same brain capacity for 30,000 years, and all we’ve come up with is a handful of male narcissists with the ability to destroy every sparrow and butterfly in the world. I really believe in poetry as a thought experiment: a decoy self that channels its own emotions and creates a mirror in which we can see ourselves, maybe, at least for a blink. It’s important that that decoy self doesn’t have to be righteous, anti-bourgeois, and infallible. Otherwise we just intoxicate ourselves with our own convictions and we end up being Communist oligarchs or the kind of Christians who couldn’t forgive a mouse.

Mary: How has your family history influenced the poems in this collection? For example, I understand that your parents immigrated to the United States from Estonia in the 1940s.

D. Nurkse: My family history has been a huge influence. My parents both came through trauma and never visited that on me for a moment: that’s an immense accomplishment, and I will honor them for it as long as I breathe. They met on a boat out of Portugal in 1940, escaping Nazi Europe, and their lives have a sheen of precarity, contingency, that becomes more meaningful to me as I watch America now. There was a lot they wished they hadn’t seen that they didn’t want to talk about. That double negative made me a poet—the sense that there was another story behind people’s everyday words and actions, and it was full of danger.

Mary: How has your more recent, personal history influenced your new poems?

D. Nurkse: I’ve had several moments of deep sickness, those times when life is like a low door you have to duck way down to pass through, and you don’t know what’s on the other side.

Mary: There are mystical elements in your poetry that don’t lend themselves easily to words, yet somehow you find words to express them. Have you been influenced by poets from other eras and other countries? By poetry in other languages? By walks in the forest?

D. Nurkse: Walks in the forest, yes. Poets in other languages—Michaux, Apollinaire, Lorca, Alberti, Jimenez, Cendrars, Gabriela Mistral, Anna Swir. I taught in prison and inner-city schools, and there was a lot I could learn from the kids there. A little African American girl in Topeka, Kansas wrote “I’m just about average/but no two mirrors/show the same me.” That’s mysticism.

Mary: One of my favorites is the title poem “A Country of Strangers.” In it, you write of refugees from the “nation” of “Sheol” with its “limousines and shanties, padlocked granaries and empty fields, live wires strung in the rain,” and “our country” which is “poor too” and where “every inch of the border is sealed.” Could you tell us something about the circumstances that inspired you to write this poem?

D. Nurkse: I think you have ideas and graphic images: two very different sources, for poetry. I had the images in El Salvador—people uprooted, with their possessions sewn in canvas sacks, kids trying to save a pet. And the meditational idea is just the bemusement that we all die, and yet death doesn’t unite us as a species—we each feel it happens to everyone else. It’s a poem about “othering.”

Mary: Do you have a favorite poem in this collection?

D. Nurkse: “Caligula.”

Mary: Here is “Caligula."
 
                         Caligula
                                                             After Suetonius
Caligula ordered the night city illuminated.
Every stoop, porch, or balcony was a stage.
He made the senators dress as prostitutes--
tight silk skirts, paste-on eyelashes.
Up to a matron to wriggle into a boy’s shorts.
Marcus Severus, one-armed veteran
of our labyrinthine border wars,
had to hobble into the amphitheater
armed with a plume, and attack a lion.
A plume _ We were fascinated.
We were all players, who was the audience?
The Emperor chose me, me, me, and me,
and slept with us. He was passive 
as a bedpost, but listed his demands 
in documents we had to sign in advance.
Slaves--who had been stockbrokers
or insurance agents a moment ago–-
carried triremes on their backs to Rome. 
Sails billowed above our seven sacred hills.

Would it ever end? We were enthralled.
Every breath was a saga
when you long to skip to the finale.
We no longer washed, brushed our teeth,
or picked a scab–just him, him, him.
It was Cassius Chaerea who killed him--
that silent tribune he called ‘pansy.’
The Emperor lay on his golden bed.
We were mesmerized. All we could do
was compete to reconstruct the portents: 
headless chicken racing all morning,
kitten born without eyes, huge cloud, 
tiny cloud, cloud like a fist... 
For a few hours the Chronicler
listened and scribbled, but soon
he grew bored, we bored ourselves, 
so began Caligula’s slow death--
Caligula who so often said of a captive,
‘make him feel he’s really dying.’
Now we’re helpless as always,
faced with twilight, a child crying, 
birdsong, the breeze, our seven steep hills.

Mary: Why is it your favorite?

D. Nurkse: I think it speaks to authoritarianism, the temptation of our age, without letting the public off the hook. Why do we allow ourselves to become spectators?

Mary: Thank you, Dennis. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.  

Anyone who would like to buy a copy of A Country of Strangers is invited to click here for a direct link to hard cover, Audible, and Kindle editions of this remarkable collection of poetry by D. Nurkse.

The Song That Keeps Us Alive - Breathing

six feet in St. Moses' graveyard 
are bodies lurking in silence 
housing a voiceless nostril

Covid-19 & Ebola have muted many nostrils
in my country/Mama Liberia
her streets are soiled with many bodies gunshots & rapists stopped from singing

living is hard
this means: we're to teach our nostrils how to sing 
the same song repeatedly for longer without stopping

in the beginning
God implanted in us this song
in a way, our lungs will hold us alive for much longer

& in this world,
it's a sin not to sing - breathe.

let's get practical;
pause this second,
straw in a bundle of air 
hold it in your mouth & nostrils 
& blow it out gently; 

this is another way to let out your pain

& this is how we sing,
                             this is how we breathe.