Shaking off the winter cold that had soaked down to the bone,
Kissing a girl for the first time and feeling sane,
Staying away from strangers that carry knives and guns.
Avoiding the war when I turn 18 so that I don’t die in a foreign land,
Living in a world that grasshoppers leap high into the air
And the flowers bloom in my backyard.
Yes, I want to be a black man when I grow up.
Wondering
It was my foster mother that was my salvation. I held on to her in spirit most of my life. It was her reddish tan skin and her silver gray hair that spoke to my senses ever since I can remember. I always wanted to express my love for her by kissing her on her cheek. Yet, I was always afraid of being rejected by the one lady that meant so much to me. One day, I overcame my fear and kissed her on her cheek, and she accepted it as she had always accepted me.
A Life Lived
after Carol Frost’s: Autumn Tune
I know of losses, Apples with one bite taken out of them and then thrown into the garden for the worms. Ripening bananas turned to brown, spotted sugar. Love was a picture hanging above my bed. Ideas that were spoiled by clouds moving too fast for the eyes to see. A sore tongue that had not spoken words of peace have only known of vulgar words. Women wearing mini-skirts giving me hope that I would find the right woman. Each step I took was for atonement for lost beliefs and the world was an upside down cake.
Mahbub looks to the natural world as a metaphor for his feelings of romantic attraction and loneliness. Nature brings him peace, not because it is peaceful, but because it draws his attention out of the turbulence within his heart.
Rui Carvalho looks to nature in an entirely different way, creating a feminine archetype who’s a force of the natural world, simultaneously beautiful and strong, peaceful not through weakness but through the strength of spiritual clarity and love.
The books Elizabeth Hughes reviews in her Book Periscope column also depict the power of having a sense of belonging. The couple in Gini Grossenbacher’s Madam of My Heart, Brianna and Edward, survive serial tragedies in seamy 1800s America because of their love, Margaret Goka’s poetic subjects in The Woven Flag celebrate family and community, Carolyn Prince’s The Revelation Unlocked probes the mysteries of the Bible to encourage people to find a spiritual home through faith, and Jennie Ross’ Slicker McQuicker encourages children to welcome others who are different.
The prevailing winds, from east over the Atlantic, across gray, clammy tides, puling seagulls, their black caps and flexing, sickle-like wings, the terns’ small, quick arcs, the funny rushes and escapes along the skirt of the wave wash of the pipers hunting for small, nutlike sandcrabs. The tart briny scent, the yellow, scummy, impetigo-infecting gullies. The gray white sand grainy with tiny white and black crystals he could almost count as they separated in his palm. Clumps of salt grass covering the dunes like long green hair. The endless distant roll and crash of waves along the beach, the lulling confusion of whiteness, a serene and tranquil drama of the shore, raving and collapsing without pause from horizon to horizon.
When they met shyly in their swimsuits, the summer Christopher Pascal was sixteen and Sasha Kamenev fifteen, and their families spread their beach blankets and chairs and umbrellas under the tinkling shouts and laughter of swimmers and beachball players and sandbucket diggers and sandcastle builders not far from the lifeguard stand on the hot, white dry sand and the cool, gray wet sand along the edge of the playful lashing mindless formidable beautiful and frightening sea.
Christine Chatterton’s Courage of the Heart: An American Odyssey 1915 to 1923 is a fine book, where small town, mid-west America meets the Great War in Europe.
Based upon a real cache of letters written by her husband’s grandfather, and upon interviews with elderly family members,Chatterton has woven a tapestry of innocent small town romance and the courageous challenge of WWI, both for the soldiers who fought and suffered, and the steadfast love and loyalty of those who waited at home.It’s fascinating family portraits—a treasure trove of memories mixed with a broad slice of American life and history.
Joy, bravery, tragedy, and triumph–all play a part here, making Courage of the Heart a book worth reading.
Stubborn; As only a woman knows how to be.
Knowledgeable; As only a Goddess knows how to be.
Feminine and beautiful among the black of death,
reborn, alive, dependent on strength and not on luck.
Beautiful is your strength that gives color to the Morning.
Sunrise agape renewing Hope.
And the wind packs it, shrouded in gray dust,
that everything around him contemplates her Dance.
It is she, the Flower, who rises on the mountain,
Again, to prove that, who sowed her, was right …
To prove that a Goddess looks at us from the front:
without fear, despite the lives the wind took.
Slowly the human work is reborn in its surroundings,
but agile to the rhythm of green Grace,
it rises faster than all,
and sharp fits the future: Dull paint.
Goddess of the Morning, clothed with Hope,
dance in Grace; It balances in the air its Braid.
by Rui M.
This poem is spiritual and feminist to honor Janine Canan, a feminist writer from California.
Pedrógão is a locality in Portugal where 64 people died this June
during a wild fire.
This and other poems will be in a new book, Pieces of Hope (in English,
Portuguese and Spanish).
For more info about the book contact synchchaos@gmail.com
