The Sea is Too Vast My Friend
The passengers gather atop the ship before it leaves the harbour. It’s a ‘thing.’ Other ships are around and I can see right away that there is competition among ship builders to construct the largest one. How something can be over fourteen stories tall and float and manoeuvre confidently I do not know. Each vessel has to wait until the one scheduled to leave before it sails from the harbour. And when arriving somewhere, it is strange to learn that no ship’s captain is allowed to drive, for some kind of insurance and international law purposes, but that a small boat drives out to the giant ship, a boat that holds a person who shall enter and take the ship to dock. But the sea. What of the sea? I am sure that nothing much changes with the sea-goers through the decades other than fashions, styles, the latest talk about the world and their worlds that seems significant at the time but is prosaic in reality. The sea is the thing, no? At night I watch it through a window stationed behind where we are sitting. I cease to hear the conversations then and notice another ship in the distance going the other way. It is large but appears small upon the vast and seemingly infinite sea. I wonder for a second if they look upon us as some of us look upon them. And if so, what do they think? And do sirens or mermaids, ghosts of sailors, or even monsters, live in and about the sea? Though it sounds silly, looking at its space and thinking of its depth then, I just don’t know. I feel fragile, like a skeleton barely put together. Do you ever feel such as that? The sea throws one back upon oneself, or rather can, sometimes. It is like a person that you and I shall never fully know. It is so vast, in fact too vast, my friend.
I massaged the beach from my scalp with hotter water then the split tips of my hair are used to. And out of fear, they coiled in tight spirals that haloed my head.
I rinsed my night of missed-busses and tear-covered phones from my burning cheeks. And rigid lungs.
From my static breath grew a stronger sob, whose rain I rinsed gone, once again.
I scrubbed my chest
with steel wool and clawing nails, and from the etches in my untouched skin, tissue lumped together forming breasts that I learned to hide.
I scraped bone from my nose and chin and from a raw skull calcified features that I learned to graze under my fingers.
From picked lips words spat whose sound I began to sculpt and worship.
I became myself in the bathroom where I deconstructed a premature body. Sprouting from the nubs of cut branches, grew a person whose sound I worship.
I grew up in an age & a country where banning books was commonplace. Authors – Henry Miller & William S. Burroughs. Titles – Lolita & Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I seem to remember that Ulysses was not long off the list; & there is a marvellous story, which I’ve never checked in to preferring to keep the memory intact, that Barchester Towers & Doctor Thorne were banned for almost a century because they appeared under the author’s name of A. Trollope.
Not that I’m against banning things. I marched calling for an end to nuclear proliferation – ban the bomb. I marched in support of outlawing racial discrimination. I believe commercial whaling is wrong, that industry should have an incredibly strict set of environmental guidelines. I believe capital punishment is totally wrong, & have written earlier of how its legality in New Zealand depended on which political party was in power until a conservative Attorney General broke with his party & said it should be outlawed forever if it could be (re)introduced on a political whim. (& a little later, I remember reading an essay by Camus – Reflections on the Guillotine? – where Camus describes his father, who was a strong advocate of the death penalty, attending a public execution & coming home totally opposed to the State taking lives.)
But never books, or movies or records, no matter how distasteful & offensive they might be.
I have seen nationalists like Ho Chi Minh & Fidel Castro basically forced into the Communist Bloc because their leftwing views were unpalatable during the Cold War. I have seen the Russians crush a revolution in Hungary, & felt it quite strongly because of the protests outside the Russian Embassy which was directly across the street from where we lived. I thought JFK was the hope of the world & mourned his death. I was shattered when later Martin Luther King & RFK were also assassinated. Mandela – happy birthday, Nelson – was a figurehead in prison for most of my life & I remember weeping with joy the day he was released.
I am ambivalent about nuclear power.
The coming of Nixon fucked the world. L. blames most of the current troubles on “my generation” – the beats, the hippies, free love, lotsa drugs, lack of censorship. There’s some truth in it, but for a different reason. I do not believe we went far enough! Not quite sure what I mean by that; but I feel that at some point we decided we’d done enough, got sidetracked or comfortable or aged, & stopped pushing. Stepped back to revel in our small achievements. Got steamrolled.
I am anti-terrorism where the innocent are killed or maimed yet I am pro-Palestine, feeling their cause is just & they’ve always had a rotten deal. Where do you draw the line? I think the U.S. & its allies are reaping what they sowed – the seeds of Bush’s arrogance; Le monde, c’est moi – in Iraq & Afghanistan though again it is the innocent who suffer. At least in the Cold War there were sides. Now, with just one megapower, there is no-one else to turn to, no-one to stand up & get in the way.
I have seen in an earlier time in N.Z. laws enacted which gave the police the power to raid houses if “they suspected drugs were there”. Up until the time someone blew the whistle, this power was used probably 50 times & only once for drugs. I watch the new anti-terrorism laws in many countries with horror. The presumption of guilt instead of innocence, & such gobbledygook! We can’t tell you what you’ve been detained about, & because of this you can’t tell us what we want to know because we don’t know what we want to know & you don’t know what we want to know & don’t know what you know or don’t know. & & &…..
I see that the trial against the last Australian in Camp Delta at Guantanamo is to go ahead, even though it has been proved there is no chance of a fair trial.
& why this rant, this scattershot diatribe? Because on the news today the Australian Government is talking about banning, outlawing, charging Islamic bookshops because they might be stocking ‘dangerous books.’
Desired Pain
When he told me to give happiness
Then I wanted-
Please, give me pain;
Make a fuss
hard as like as Sidr.
Like as an uprooted tree
with the cry of landless loneliness.
Give me sorrow;
Like as fluffy mud
in the emptiness of cultivated land-
Primitive tale which is filled with
glaireous wild smell.
Feeling happiness is meaningless game ;
Retouch of past Rafkhata.
Presented cagey happiness is blanket wrap of mourning-
So which you will give me later
Or else I wanted it before.
Aklima Ankhi, poet, storyteller and translator from Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Born in Mymensingh, Bangladesh. She has a published poetry named "Guptokothar Shobdochabi" written in Bangla.She is a post graduate in English Literature. As a profession she is a Lecturer in English.
ANOTHER SPRING NIGHT IN FARMERSVILLE, OHIO
The sun is a gong hung low across the sky,
windswept.earthdirty.sunwhipped: farmers wait inside their bones
for the horizon to rise and beat the daylights out of the sun
and call them from their long dungrows for a night.
Your chastity's a song sung slow through long nights
on muffled virginals: muting babies wailing to be born:
golden arrows, a thong-strung bow the dream night.
The night is calling: strong, gung-ho -- black hawk in flight.
(Tonight? When one earthtired husbandman works me in his hands
& periods this dry chaste day, waters these furrows hungry from famine?
But no.
Just one more wrongtongued crow in flight.)
AH! NIGHTS
Ah! Nights you were a harem
and I the unmade Bedouin too long in the thirst.
Past the black eunuch of the night
I would steal to your tent,
unarmed save the single arrow in my quiver.
I'd draw sensuously back your damascene veil
and let fly my shaft
deep into your bulls eye arabesque--
Or: you were queen of the hive
and I a drone among the honeys
getting a buzz on and doing my job
plunging among the dusky clover
trying to pollinate the skies
to flower the night with stars.
To lose my only stinger would be to die--
Or else: you were madonna
awaiting your Jealous Commanding God,
The Spawner Of The Cosmos,
Beam Of Light Made Flesh To Hold You In Your Place
(while you shook in rapture for the coming of your Lord,
i a small choirboy would steal into your unguarded churchyard
and send a solitary firework into the cathedral's secret hole
and hope it explodes high up in those beribbèd vaults
and surprise celibate fathers from their sleep).
EITHER ALZHEIMER'S OR THE LIGHTNING BLAST
Whizzdizzyingly
cruising The Moment,
arrowing past all awareness:
highway,enginewhiine,steeringwheeltrafficWorldsmuginnnngg past
while we, preoccupied, reprise Creation,
absorb Eternity and Logos, Eden/Gethsemane, Genesis-Apocalypse
and the Night the Night,
the private bleeding into the general,
and Ouruniverse proxying for ego.
Glorious cosmic fusion in an infinite minute.
(or so it briefly eternally seems in our infini-tiny microverse)
The ends of love
are but two
:your V8 plunges from the surface
and, crucified like a butterfly in time,
helpless consciousness heightened,
you hover in slowmotion witness
to the juggernaut earth's decay
just as your metal-again grille
begins to embrace solidity
or: doomed foresight eludes
as you rearend that lightless
semi-tr
MY WIFE
My wife is the flag
placed on climbers' highest crags.
My wife is the mirror
who patrols my appearance
and makes sure all is fit
and I'm vetted to grace the public.
She's the armorer
who's forged our love and honor.
My wife is the ear
who grants the pre-clearance
for my poems' weight and wit
so they're ready to face the critics.
My wife is that fire
to kindle and quell desire.
WHAT I DID LEARN
My mansard roof -- its shingles
lost so very long ago.
In Lhasa at Your temple,
at that brave school in Lisbon,
I studied my imago.
My music group's hit singles
stopped so many songs ago.
I've learned my shakes and wrinkles
but still I wait for wisdom.
Crying is foreign to me because I refuse to be weak,
but you, for some reason can bring me to my knees.
And yes, I do try to hide it, but not very well.
Now that my smile is small, it hides nothing.
Everyone can tell that deep down I am drowning
along with you, and there is no glory in that.
No, love can’t be the same, but maybe it can be made stronger..
So, I put down my pride and say with all that is in me
as I stand before you with no shame and tell you,
“I am still in love with you!”. And in my vulnerable state say,
“I don’t want to hide anymore behind this fake smile.”
“Forgive my pride and stubbornness, but my heart has suffered
much in life and it is hard to show vulnerability.”
Before I turn and walk away, I will ask you once only and then no more…
“Shall we try again?”
Hope Restored
When we met, you were in a painful state
Someone before me had stolen the joy within you
You thought she was “the one”
But she crushed you, instead
You lost everything, including yourself
She never cherished your being
In your darkest hour, she left you
I found you broken; with a sobbing and painful soul
You were in need of a pure love
It took a long time for you to let down your walls
You began to trust me, then you smiled at me one day
I never pushed you or demanded anything from you
Our friendship grew and you became my best friend
I saw joy in your life again
I rejoiced with every smile
From friendship grew love..
A pure love that expects nothing in return but a smile;
The unconditional love and respect that you deserved
All I ever wanted was to see hope restored in your life
But I ended up with far more.
Autumn With You
Autumn has always been my favorite time of year
It’s relaxing sitting in the sun along with you, Dear
The days are now more quiet like a silent bereaving
The end of a scorching Summer is readily leaving
Taking walks hand in hand, watching our neighbors raking
as the aroma of cinnamon bring memories of baking
I welcome the deep colors that amaze my eyes
as we sit on our porch and take in the trees and blue skies
Limbs slightly blow in the breeze as a few leaves fare
creating a sense of peace within me like a whispering prayer
The sky is so clear, bright stars I can see
I lean back against you with your arms around me
As we watch another sunset from our porch swing tonight
I am thankful being with you in the Autumn Moonlight.
Biography
Kristy Ann Raines, born April 9, born in California, in the United States, is a poet/writer/author, who is very versatile in her writing and internationally acclaimed.
From fantasy and love, to serious subjects such as, domestic violence, and human rights. Her passion is writing children’s books, short stories and romantic poetry. Kristy has earned many awards and has five book that she is working on. One will be published soon.
