Cosmos

Then Cosmos spoke: 
“I have no end.
I have no beginning.
Nothing gave birth to me.
Nothing will bring an end to me.
I am everywhere.
I am all that was, that is,
all that will be.
I am Eternal Being
and Perpetual Becoming.
I am peace and I am war.
I am hate and love.

There are two roads to find me:
withdraw to the depths of your mind,
the darkness where nothing outside you enters,
and there we shall meet
and be One.
For you and I are One,
and have been for eternity.”

“But, Lord, you say there is a second road?”

“Yes. Look at a stone,
a flower, a leaf, a cloud,
and let it fill your mind
until your self has disappeared,
and stone and flower and cloud
fill you as though you were not there.
And there you will find Me,
and you shall know peace.”

“And when I am weary of peace,
and hunger for thrill and deed?”

And Cosmos smiled his deepest smile:
“Then you will find Me
in flexing body, ingenious mind,
in conquering will.
I am the god of tenderness,
and I am the god of power.
I am changeless stillness
and endless transformation.
Nothing is lost where I am,
nor is there any death:
there is only sleep
in dream’s eternal city.
All things I am.
Everything am I.”

Then the voice vanished in darkness
and silence of the night,
and I listened and wrote down
these words lest I forget.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a co-editor of Caveat Lector. His collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of “The Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two books for children – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia, from the series “Otherwise” – are now available.

Shopping



A sky of pigeon gray. The sun a beautiful stain.
Air without a breath. Crowds in motley,
cheerful, insouciant: no one is worrying
too much. A little girl
falls and cries out, her white shoe
behind her on the sidewalk. But her mother’s there:
no tragedy, just a few small tears.
I can smell oil, leaves, soft pretzels, grass.
The day moves like a parent
trying to carry too many presents.
Several fall, and one or two are definitely lost,
but, surely, there are more, many more, where they came from.


_____

Christopher Bernard’s collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two “tales for children and their adults” – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia, the first stories in the “Otherwise” series – will be available in December 2023.

An Ode to My Appendix

O you useless thing! excrescence waggling
at the dead end of the bag of anatomy
that sits like a judge’s wig on the maze of small
snaking intestine, waiting there like a bandit
to trap the unsuspecting on their long journey to the sewer,
and then inflate out of all proportion to sense or nonsense,
cause earthquakes across the belly’s terra firma,
send waves of fever to cloud the imperious mind,
and bring the mighty down over an undigested tomato seed!

O rag of flesh! O slippery traitor! O itchy little Finger of Fate!
O miserable reminder of our weakness and God’s power!
One cannot get rid of you soon enough! 

What a miserable twenty-four hours! Convulsed at 7 pm,
to the hospital next day for hours of tests,
then off to the ER, in suspense among a fluttering crowd
of nurses, MAs, doctors, surgeons, new patients,
then spirited to pre-op and OR, in suspense awaiting the outcome
of two emergency caesarians (women and children first!),
then, the last thing before going under, a glance
at a big clock showing ten minutes to midnight . . . 

No one still knows any reason
an appendix was ever there in the first place. Some say
it had something to do with the “immune system.” I say,
if that case, it was made to help immunize the world from the likes of us!

No, you are probably just one of God’s little jokes: 
to give idle surgeons something to keep their hands busy 
when they don’t have anything better to do on a Friday at midnight.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two “tales for children and their adults” – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia – will be available in December 2023.

“ ‘Dead’ woman bangs on coffin during her own wake in Ecuador”

—Recent headline in an English newspaper

By Christopher Bernard

It is so dark. Ay Dios!
What is that smell above my head?
I think it is candles. Yes?
Why so? And there is singing?  

No, it is sighing,
and moaning and weeping.
I think I hear
little Perdita with her husky voice.

My foot itches but I can’t reach it,
my arms are all wrapped up!
I can hardly move!
And what am I doing in a closet? 
    Graciela really needs to clean it out,
it smells of mothballs and bedbugs.
And what is it doing on the floor?

Am I dead?

But where are the angels?
Unless they are the ones weeping.
Or maybe they are devils,
and all their tears are lies.

If I am dead, I think it is very 
    uncomfortable.
My butt hurts! They really need to 
    consider adding a cushion.

I remember Beata’s face look 
    suddenly scared.
We were gossiping away – “When will 
    Teresa have her baby?
How is your niece in Nueva York?
Why did Alejandro do that terrible thing?” 
– in her kitchen? in my kitchen?
Ay! My memory is getting so bad!
Then suddenly nothing.

But I heard something fall.
Then I was asleep, yes?
But such dreams!
Such shouting
and rushing through the streets!
I thought I saw a bit of sky.
I have not looked at the sky 
    since I was little.
And there, there it was . . .

It is quieter now.
And the smell of wood is restful.
I think there is a door close to my face.
What will happen if I knock on it?
If only I could move my hands!
I think I will give it a kick.
My feet, they seem free.
Si! I could give it a big strong kick!
Even an old lady can give a 
    strong kick if she wants.

I will give it a kick,
and maybe it will open.
And then maybe I will finally see
whether there is a heaven or not.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Topic 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two children’s books, the first in the “Otherwise” series – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia – will be published by Regent Press in November 2023.

After Reading a Play by Aeschylus


Torn by the god
between the rocks of the Aegean
and the high wave of the Caucasus,
she falls on the black glass
of the stage –
Io, beloved of Zeus,
driven across the world,
maddened by jealous Hera;
turned, grotesquely, into a cow.

Prophecy lies:
there is no end
to the voice of her suffering.

The god’s love is the storm
of the ten thousand eyes of Argus.
He is blind as the sun
in its munificence
moving across the air
exalted after pleasure.

Humankind
is a child of water made of stone.
Their pain is darkness and silence.
The mouth of a hero
who knows everything and nothing
buzzes with gadflies and ashes.

Yet the woman’s cry is the daughter of generations.
It reaches us, gnarled in a distant wind.
It echoes long in the canyons of time.
It does not allow forgetfulness
or peace
in suffering traced 
in a poet’s words
wrought of gossamer and iron.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two children’s books, the first stories in the Otherwise series –  If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . (serialized in Synchronized Chaos under the title “The Ghost Trolley”) and The Judgment Of Biestia – will be published in November 2023.

Trump in Chains

It is well posed,
one must give the devil credit:
defiance shouts, frozen in fury,
at the top of grievance,
as petulant as it is silent;
the furious eye, triumphant in mockery,
disdains the camera and, through its harsh lens,
you.

But there is no gratification.
A dull ache, sequela from a blow,
taken long ago,
swells in the soul
of even the most opposed
when faced with this
humiliation.

No: no gratification,
only sorrow
at this portrait
of the folly of mankind
at war with itself, nature, and the gods,
taken in the bowels of a southern jail.
There, but for the grace of the devil,
go I.

Christopher Bernard's collection The Socialist's Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the "Top 100 Indie Books of 2021" by Kirkus Reviews. His two books "for children and their adults," If You Ride a Crooked Trolley . . .  and The Judgment of Biestia, the first in the series Otherwise - will be published in November 2023.

Whose Body

It’s half past July.
The trunk of the backyard tree
lies beneath your hand.
A smell of moss
crosses the yellow wood.
It was the wind broke it,
the wind in the night.

See the ladybug. She works her way up
the bare stump
like a tiny VW,
anxious for her children
in the burning house.
A worm pokes a blind head
above the cracked ground.
The ferns pretend 
to be asleep.
Beyond the fence, the willows
are grave in stillness.
The sun blinds the eastern arc of the sky.

It holds its breath.
Even the stone beneath your knee.
Then it crosses the silence
on great wings
toward the future.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet, critic and essayist. His poetry collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2021. He is also a founder and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His children’s books If You Ride a Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia will be published this fall and featured in Kirkus Reviews in November.