Life never forgives those who arrive too late; Time never turns its hands again. A single moment left behind Can echo through a lifetime of regret.
Do not wait for the perfect chance, For it was never meant to wait for you. Begin today with courage in your heart— Tomorrow is a promise never made.
The sun may rise with every dawn, Yet yesterday’s light will never return. Opportunity knocks but once; Not every soul will hear its call.
Let your dreams unfold their wings today, Do not let fear become your chain. For life remembers those who dared, But seldom waits for those who came too late.
Sumana Bhattacharjee is a bilingual poetry writer from India. She born and brought up in city Kolkata in a family of teachers. From her childhood she has had a keen interest in music, poetry and drama. She is a published poet, and her poems have been published in more than twenty national and international anthologies. She is a regular contributor of ezines like Glomag Raven-Cage Ezines, Spillword.com, and Cultural Reverence. She founded two online literature group, and she is working as an assistant executive editor at Global Nation Newspaper, Bangladesh. She is the peace ambassador of WHMP. She is passionate about poetry, and she thinks this is the only way she can spread her thought around the world.
Militia Vox’s story opens with a kid staring at a piano and deciding she wants in because her best friend is doing it.
“My best friend was playing piano, and I was like, ‘Oh well, I want to play piano too,’” she says. They started together; the friend drifted away. Militia didn’t.
Very quickly, piano stopped being an activity and became a relationship. “Music became a thing that was my best friend,” she remembers. “This is something that I can carry with me forever.”
Her teacher enrolled her in competitive piano guilds without really explaining what that meant. Every year she had to take guild exams, playing for judges who measured everything: dynamics, posture, interpretation.
She accelerated fast. “Next thing I know, I’m winning regional and state competitions, and then like was considered one of the best young pianists in the country,” she says.
But the more she tried to bring herself into the music, the more the classical world pushed back. “Some of the powers that be in the classical circles would say things like, ‘She plays too loudly,’ ‘She bangs on the piano,’” she recalls.
She even got criticized for how she sat: “Sometimes I would side saddle, and they didn’t like that.”
She was already chafing against the idea that her job was to be a polite conduit for “dead composers’ music.”
“I got tired of playing dead composers’ music and not being able to create more,” she says. “When I was trying to bring more of myself to the performance, I was getting marked for it.”
By the time she reached the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, the faculty basically admitted she’d outgrown them. “They were like, we have nothing left to teach you, like your art’s already way above what we’re doing here,” she says. So she decided: if they couldn’t teach her, she’d use what she had and make something of her own.
Even before that, she was already staging rebellions. In eighth grade, she put together a performance‑art piece for a talent show, recruiting friends, painting their faces black and white, dressing them in shredded tuxedo jackets, and choreographing a routine to the industrial‑leaning song “Oh Industry” from the movie Beaches.
“I choreographed this piece to it, and I sang, and everybody was like, ‘This is so weird. It’s really good, but it’s so weird,’” she says. That was the moment she started to feel the split: the world wanted her to fit, and she couldn’t.
“I always felt like I was having to fight and rebel,” she says. “This was like my villain arc because I started a strong sense of like, I can’t fit in here, so I’m just gonna go in the other direction. If you guys are gonna make me feel like I’m doing things wrong, I’m just gonna go for it.”
Her childhood environment didn’t offer much in the way of a scene. She grew up in Maryland, “in the middle of like what was a horse farm,” with no musicians around.
Her father, an avid record collector, became her unofficial curator. “He would like send me to my room and be like, ‘You’re Potter, and you’re gonna listen to King Crimson,’” she says. She’d lie on the floor, listening, trying to decode how those songs existed at all. “I’d just try to figure out like how did these people meet each other? How did they write this stuff? How are they putting this? How do they know what sounds to choose? What notes to choose?” she says.
She watched the Grammys and saw a room full of musicians on TV, wondering, “Where are you? Like, I need to be there. How do I do this?”
Her first rock concert was Duran Duran. She was a kid, her parents had to take her, and she spent the show standing on her chair, screaming at the band. “I was screaming at them and embarrassing the hell out of my parents, just screaming at the band, ‘I’m one of you. Take me with you,’” she says.
Her parents tried to make her sit down. “I was like, ‘No, no, no! I need to be where they are,’” she remembers. It felt like the old fantasy of running away to join the circus—only her circus was rock. “Same thing,” she says. “Different circus.”
The bridge from classical to rock came through a boyfriend who was putting a band together.
He knew she was an actor and asked, “Can you cry on command?” Then he handed her a line to sing: “It’s kind of like ‘Red Water’ by Type O Negative.” She didn’t know Type O Negative yet. “What’s Type O Negative?” she asked—and then went down the rabbit hole. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is awesome,’” she says.
The band asked her to join. “They were like, ‘Oh, do you want to come be in the band?’ I was like, ‘Be in the band?’ I was like, ‘Yes, you want me to be in your band?’” It blew her mind.
That band became Disciples of Astaroth, a name steeped in occult resonance. They played Boston and sold out every night. “We used to sell out. We played in Boston, and we’d sell out every night that we played,” she says. They played New York once, at the Batcave. The sound was dark, gothic, heavy, and theatrical. It was also deeply intertwined with drag and queer performance.
Disciples of Astaroth was a co‑singer band: Militia and Britt the Other Bully. Britt did drag—specifically “dark drag,” long before the RuPaul era made that aesthetic mainstream. “He did drag. He did like dark drag,” she says. “Way before Sharon Needles and these drag queens from like the RuPaul era.” He performed to Ministry and other industrial and extreme bands. “Belinda Davenport would do her performances to like Deicide,” Militia recalls of another drag queen from Beverly, near Salem.
The beauty‑queen drag performers didn’t always appreciate it. “All the other drag queens were kind of uncomfortable because it was pretty wicked,” she says.
Militia marched in Gay Pride with Britt, did drag performances with him, and shared dressing rooms with trans performers.
“I basically was raised by drag queens when I started,” she says. They taught her the importance of aesthetic and presence. “They showed me like, you know, you have to have a look, you have to have an aesthetic, you have to have something to offer in the performance,” she says. “This is how you do your makeup, like show makeup. This is how you get your glitter to stay on. You should up your look or magnify who you are.”
For her, drag queens and trans people were part of the band ecosystem. “I was so used to incorporating drag queens and trans people into our band situation,” she says. “It was weird for me to find people that didn’t find that normal. Like I was like, why wouldn’t that be normal? They have the most to say.”
After Disciples of Astaroth, she moved to New York and joined a shock‑rock band whose singer was a performance artist.
“We were featured on Real Sex on HBO,” she says. Her mother saw the episode and called her, crying. “She’s like, ‘Oh my God, you guys are on Real Sex, and you guys are like doing all this crazy stuff on stage,’” Militia recalls. Her response was pure: “I was like, ‘Well, what are you doing watching Real Sex, Mom?’”
New York’s underground felt like an extension of the world she already knew. “Performance artists are like, they have something to say,” she says. “In New York, performance art and music is also like sister friends. There’s a lot of performance artists here that are also in bands.”
Drag performers, performance artists, musicians, and trans people overlapped constantly. “They’re like the twinsies,” she says. “A lot of drag performers are also performance artists here.”
Her original band Vulgaris eventually caught the attention of Cleopatra Records. “We made an album and then we got noticed by Cleopatra Records,” she says.
They signed a deal to contribute a song to a Dead Can Dance tribute album. “We have the last track on the Dead Can Dance tribute album,” she says. But the label cut their elaborate intro without asking.
“We had done this very elaborate, like moody intro. They cut the whole thing without asking us,” she says. “We were just like, their mind was blown, and then they like shelved our record.”
The full‑length, Embrace the Empty, was a dark, Type O Negative meets My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult‑style record. “It was very Type O meets like My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult,” she says. It never got the release it deserved.
That experience fed into a strategic shift. Militia is now widely known for her cover work—especially fronting Judas Priestess, the all‑female Judas Priest tribute band—but she’s blunt about why she started doing covers. “I only started doing cover songs because my original music wasn’t getting the attention that I wanted it to,” she says.
Her first original band, Disciples of Astaroth, did get attention and sold out shows, but it was localized. The wider industry didn’t know what to do with her. Covers became a way to get heard, to leverage the power of familiar songs while still bringing her own ferocity and theatricality to the stage.
Her range—four octaves, with a taste for drama—made her a natural fit for Judas Priestess. She’s done Bowie covers, Tina Turner, Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” and more, moving across genres with the same intensity she once brought to Chopin and Liszt. She’s also collaborated with figures like Dee Snider and sang a duet with Rob Halford, the metal god himself, inhabiting the lineage of metal while refusing to be confined by it.
Identity and representation are central to her story. Militia talks openly about being a Black woman in heavy metal, a genre that has long been saturated with toxic masculinity and narrow ideas of who belongs. She’s been told to change her appearance, to tone down, to fit a mold that has nothing to do with her talent.
“Everybody told me ‘I should not be doing that,” she says. “Everybody, literally, family, friends, strangers.” We duet on the Amyl and the Sniffers’ song. “People told me I shouldn’t be doing that..” She says. “I lived it too. I related to it so much.”
Her album Burn My Crosses was misread by some as anti‑Catholic, leading to bans from events and venues.
In reality, it was a response to corruption and hypocrisy she witnessed in Catholic school, where choirs were rigidly controlled and singing pop songs “for fun” was considered disrespectful.
“Anytime I tried to instill an element of fun musically, usually shot down,” she says. She’s been banned multiple times for being outspoken, for refusing to soften her critique, for refusing to pretend that institutions are benign when they’re not.
At the same time, she’s deeply rooted in dark literature and subversive art. She’s a member of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, a detail that fits perfectly with her aesthetic.
She loves Poe, Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, and the whole lineage of artists who turn darkness into revelation. Her upcoming work includes a collaboration with 24‑7 Spyz and a solo album titled For Those Without Shadows, a post‑apocalyptic project that promises to push her themes of identity, survival, and rebellion even further.
Threaded through all of this is a refusal to compromise authenticity. Whether she’s side‑saddling on a piano bench, painting her face black and white for an industrial performance piece, fronting Judas Priestess, marching in Pride with dark drag queens, or being featured on Real Sex, Militia Vox is not interested in shrinking herself to fit anyone’s comfort zone. “If you guys are gonna make me feel like I’m doing things wrong, I’m just gonna go for it,” she said as a teenager—and she never stopped.
Three hours of conversation with her don’t feel like a linear biography so much as a constellation: classical guild exams and King Crimson, Duran Duran and Dead Can Dance, drag queens and Deicide, Cleopatra Records and shelved albums, Catholic school choirs and banned records, Judas Priestess and Tina Turner, Poe societies and post‑apocalyptic visions. What ties it all together is the same line she screamed at Duran Duran as a kid: “I’m one of you. Take me with you.” She wasn’t asking permission. She was announcing a fact.
Militia Vox didn’t simply move from classical piano to metal. She built a life out of refusing to play dead men’s music quietly, out of insisting that drag queens, trans people, Black women, and neurodivergent misfits belong at the center of the stage. She didn’t just find her voice. She forged it, loudly, and never apologized.
About Alex S Johnson:
Dubbed “The Baudelaire of our time” by John Shirley, primary screenwriter of the cult classic horror film The Crow (1994) and songwriter for Blue Oyster Cult, Alex S Johnson is a retired university English professor, author, editor and publisher with Nocturnicorn Books. He has performed spoken word with the likes of Iris Berry (Punk Hostage Press; The Lame Flames, The Ringling Sisters with Pleasant Gehman), Ellyn Maybe (Beyond Baroque; author of The Cowardice of Amnesia as edited by Exene Cervenka of X and published by Henry Rollins of Black Flag and Rollins Band); Danielle Willis, author of the cult classic Dogs in Lingerie (Zeitgeist Press) and Lambda Literary Award-winning author and retired Yale University trained pediatrician/bi rights and disability rights activist Jan Steckel. Other interviews he has done published on Synchronized Chaos, Blue Blood Magazine, Metal Hammer and Zero Tolerance, etc. include Diamanda Galas, Jarboe, Gitane Demone, Rozz Williams, Lemmy Kilmister, Ronnie James Dio and King Diamond. He lives in Carmichael, California with his family.
DID YOU GET MARRIED TO HER WHEN I WAS IN THE MENTAL HOSPITAL?
by Abigail George
Published by ZamaShort 1stApril 2026
Blurb
In DID YOU GET MARRIED TO HER WHEN I WAS IN THE MENTAL HOSPITAL? Abigail George takes the reader on the big dipper of her poetry, riding us through shocks and thrills in the carriage of her life with mental illness, a stigma she was branded with at age 16. En route, we become as Eve, but abandoned by Adam, teeth tearing apart the apple of knowledge, alone; we become akin to Lady Macbeth, trying to wash the blood Netanyahu has spilled – nothing is separable from anything else, and the language relentlessly stirs the pot of our inescapable oneness. This is a writing-witch’s brew, cooked to nourish and forever transform your understanding of mental illness, womanhood and writing.
* * *
Review
Dear Abigail
Your story, DID YOU GET MARRIED TO HER WHEN I WAS IN THE MENTAL HOSPITAL? is not meant to be an easy read. I know it took it out of you to write it, and I am not surprised by that. While I read it, I felt almost as if I were being confronted with the life that might have been mine, had it not been for … what? The two facts of your childhood that distinguish your life and mine most significantly, in my opinion, are, firstly, the fact that you were burdened with the stigma of mental illness. As you write in the 24th of a total of 25 passages, or prose stanzas, that make up this work: “It was my destiny to call stigma a companion” (The Sea.) Oh, I empathise with you saying how tired you are of the illness:
I am tired of being mentally ill, this chronic sickness, this flame, the powers that be. I watch it burn between my fingers. It tastes of Palestine. Cold stone turned into rubble. Make it go
away but it doesn’t go away. (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.)
I was diagnosed with mental illness in my 30s, but I was compelled fiercely to refuse the stigma, because my father told me in no uncertain terms to right myself, he did not want to, or could not, pay for more sessions with the psychiatrist. (I don’t have medical aid, you see.) And I had a three year-old child to look after. So, I weaned myself gradually off the meds I was told I’d need to take for life, and focused instead, fully, on having to mother, and having to be a wife. You lament that those age-old, anonymous roles weren’t for you – “I could never be wife material […] I could never raise children. Oh, madwomen couldn’t do that” (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.) These roles can indeed help, can ground us – as you, too, I think, are finding, by having to look after, to mother, to care for, your two-year-old niece, and your elderly, vulnerable father – ?
But back to the illness with which you were loaded at such a young age, as we discover in your bio that precedes your story. As I see it, this load was weirdly and unwillingly (or unwittingly?) linked into the thing you state unequivocally saved you: language, poetry. I will say more to try to explain what I mean by this, but before I do that, I want to name the second significant event that for me distinguishes your and my destinies in, I hope, mutually instructive ways: the fact that both your parents supported and encouraged your writerly gift. We learn from your bio that your father proofread your drafts when you were in your twenties and thirties, and that your mother “recognised my talent for writing early on” and bought you a typewriter, first a manual and then an electric one, wow! And this happened even though she “makes it a point never to read anything I have written”, preferring Barbara Taylor Bradford and Danielle Steele novels. Well, as Richard Bach famously observed: “Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” Still, your brother, though far from filled with joy over your life, as you describe him, nevertheless published your first book. The bitter contradictions life forces us to accept! And so: Writing was a sign from God […] it gave me a reason to live, a purpose and I could heal myself, and others. (From your Bio)
Despite the hatred and the absence of peace around you, despite the sickness inherent in the social structures of school and the nuclear family, despite the fact that your family members, teachers and peers “had no time” for you and “severely bullied” you, “leaving [you] breathless, or half deranged with all the negativity in [your] environment”, you found “a sea of wildflowers” in poetry, “a bed on which [you] could rest the vessel of [your] body.” (From your Bio) That is beautiful. The same motif serves your experience of reading: Reading, you write in Eating Rice and Potatoes with some Steadfast Patience, “is for the wildflowers in our imagination to blossom”.
You begin your story addressing your First Love. Later, in Don’t You Forget About Me, Pinky Swear Promise Me, R., you address your toddler niece, then, in We Need to Discuss Crystal Meth, Struggle, the Healer, and Forgiveness, it’s your brother you’re talking to. And in This is My Convent, you talk directly to Anne Sexton. And then, in Poem for Gaza, Songs for Me, you revert to your First Love, O. Have I got that right? Seeking a hearing, a connection, a conversation – just like any ordinary woman, like any social creature.
I like the way each of your passages, your prose stanzas, begins with a sentence full of capitals, there is something stately and leonine about that.
Years in Summer Days.
Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please.
I mean, it reminds me of the Lion in Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, the way you make the words march in, heads held high, bringing that energy of the Unquestionable Arrival of the Sovereign. And that allows, later, for the “vessel of [your] body” to claim her vulnerability in the ‘aquarium’ of your suffering, to announce:
I Don’t Know How to Start.
Or:
The Gap Between Symbol and Reality. (The final passage.)
… where the capitals seem to submerge the reader, with equal grandeur, but no longer breathing with lungs, there is almost a having to hold the breath as you write that:
The sea began screaming at me.
And:
I held the blueprint of my wound and stopped breathing.
(Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown.)
Henry Lombard calls your story “claustrophobic” in her comment, and remarks that you “prove” writing to be “a holy act of reclamation”. That is what I want to dwell on now, I mean the role of literary language and its implicatedness, as I see it, in illness, and in “the brutality” which “was the same”, whether you were at home reading a magazine “whose words hurt [your] eyes”, and “A refugee camp falls out”; or whether you were in Israel, which you discovered while your mother watered the garden, in Finding Years in Summer Days, or whether Netanyahu speaks, in Gaza is not Dead, and you squeeze blood out of stones in a refugee camp and wash soiled garments in the sea. The aroma of death, the rubbish, and decay, I need to get it off my hands. (Forgiven, but not Forgotten, it Doesn’t Matter you see.)
Now you are Lady Macbeth, and all of humanity’s horrors are yours to cleanse. And the reader is with you and it’s awful.
So, what is happening here, the way I see it, is that language is dumping itself into you, into us, via an unchecked flow of sounds and images. You write that “when it appears in the newspaper it has a beating heart” (Finding Years in Summer Days) and there is this sense of the limitlessness, the continuous increment, the boundarylessness, that dreadful slipperiness of the medium you use:
I can’t throw out my feminine energies with the past, nor with the pasta water. (Octopus Flowers in the Dark.)
Or:
Nothing grows inside this garden except the dead bodies of children, and snails who were somehow not involved in the Palestinian struggle. (Silence.)
And:
These pills fill me or are they peas? (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the Ambulance Chasers.)
The snails are actually comical in their non-involvement, a last, languid bastion of feet and feelers in Eden. Even the pills and the peas bring in the curl of a question mark, or is it a shy smile, after their shared p’s – ? But when you “fry the ham in the pan” (A New Love), I accidentally read “harm” for “ham”; and in This is My Convent I see you eat “my friend egg”, and only afterwards realise it’s a perfectly regular “fried egg”. I mean, what is happening is that the language is uncontained, or should that be untamed? The verbal stew of torment is bewildering, the fine details are so awfully human, again I gasp for breath, asking, where is reality, where is the realness of the animal I am, my connection to the wind? I want to run away and breathe an air free of language. Maybe on the mountain, who “have ears and a kind of feminine energy” (Finding Years in Summer Days)? I have to admit that I don’t have the tenacity, I don’t have your ability to live this remarkable destiny of showing the world that the word was NOT God, the word was far, far too HUMAN!
The truth reveals itself. Unlike your mother, who eats an apple “in tiny bite-sized pieces” (Octopus Flowers in the Dark), you “tear the apple apart with [your] teeth” and “deconstruct [dried fruit] on [your] tongue” (A New Love), and “Gaza falls like the neck of a wildflower falls” (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the Ambulance Chasers.)
So, you are Eve, abandoned by Adam to a fallen Eden, eating the whole apple by herself, teaching us that we have not survived the Age of Permissiveness, where the sea is language and, as female writers, we inhabit an ocean of suicidal female poets: “Ingrid Jonker’s sea” (Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown). Who can deny this fact? Yet you crave for your mother to SAY she loves you, her gifts of actions are NOT enough (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts). I was the same, exactly so, where I likewise craved to hear words from my parents that I eventually learned to accept could not and still cannot be articulated by the soft animal that is love. Is that why the following paragraph touches me so deeply?
My spirit has evolved because I loved you. On lonely nights I gather this fact of life to myself. […] What is this observation that challenges me to overcome my suffering? (I Don’t Know How to Start.)
You write, “I don’t know how to end this on a positive note, so I will end here” (I Don’t Know How to Start) – words which must surely move even the most coolly detached of readers.
And then!
Then you ask. You ask with a directness that jumps beyond words, it’s the gentle curiosity of a wild animal. Cautious, but fearless. The Gentle Curiosity of Woman. You jump, no, you pounce straight to the heart of matter (not “the matter”, just “matter”):
As a poet, as an individual, whose joy matters most to you? What is your response to loneliness?
Oh, Abigail, thank you for those questions! I want to do nothing more than respond. I want you to know, and I want myself to know that, As a Poet, As an Individual, it is The Voices of The Earth that matter most to me. And my response to loneliness is To Move. To Walk. To Extend a Kindness to Someone. To Make Something Using My Hands. Maybe then, after all, to write (By Hand). For, to be a female who writes, I have learned, I may not prioritise the role of ‘being a writer’. For a writer such as I am – and this is, despite everything I did not want and did not ask for, a destiny of choice – the act of writing must come last of all. For a woman, writing is a verb, not a name, not an identity. Then it is easier done than said.
I see your story as the beginning of The Dance Of Wildflowers In The Wind. Your wildflowers. Your seeds and your planting. For, the way I see it, your hands are clean now. From All The Work – writing and otherwise – which you have done and still do, through the summertimes of your father’s embrace, through the winters of your mother and sister and brother, through your wound’s blooms every spring (Finding Years in Summer Days) through to “the silken smell of autumn” (Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please) – a smell my nose is now hunting to harvest!
Here are fifteen poems by young Chinese teenagers. All of these poems have been approved for publication by the young poets themselves, their parents and teachers.
The collection is titled Youth & Poetry Project.
Launched jointly in the spring of 2025 by Chinese poet Su Yun and Greek poet EVA Petropoulou Lianou, the Youth & Poetry Project aims to boost international cultural exchanges through teenage poetry. Below are poems written by young Chinese writers, full of childlike innocence and unique philosophical insights peculiar to their age:
1.五月的风
毓秀小学 裴熙月（10岁）
五月的风
吹过农民的脸颊
滚烫的汗珠
闪烁着丰收的希望
五月的风
吹过环卫工人的扫把
扬起的尘土里
藏着城市干净的朝霞
1. Wind in May
Pei Xiyue (10), Yuxiu Primary School
The wind of May
brushes across farmers’ cheeks.
Those burning drops of sweat
sparkle with hopes of harvest.
The wind of May
blows over the sanitation workers’ brooms.
Within the raised dust
lies the clean morning glow of the whole city.
2.勤劳的春天
毓秀小学 宁静涵（10岁）
春天的勤劳
藏在暖暖的风里
它轻轻吹过
把花香送给大地
藏在小蜜蜂的翅膀里
嗡嗡唱着，采蜜不歇
藏在小鸟的歌声里
衔来树枝，搭起新房
藏在老黄牛的脚步里
低头耕开，一垄新泥
2. The Diligent Spring
Ning Jinghan (10), Yuxiu Primary School
The diligence of spring
hides in the warm wind.
It blows gently
and sends the fragrance of flowers to the earth.
It hides in the wings of little bees,
who buzz nonstop, gathering nectar all day long.
It hides in the songs of birds,
who carry twigs to build their new nests.
It hides in the footsteps of old oxen,
ploughing open rows of fresh soil.
3.我给月亮写诗
毓秀小学 柴舒畅（10岁）
我给月亮写了首诗
读给它听：
“月亮啊月亮……”
它边听边笑
笑着笑着
就弯了
3. I Write a Poem for the Moon
Chai Shuchang (10), Yuxiu Primary School
I wrote a poem for the moon,
and read it out to her:
“Dear Moon, my dear Moon……”
She listened and smiled,
smiling and smiling,
till she curved herself into a crescent.
4.雷雨
毓秀小学 原凯伦（10岁）
雷雨轰轰烈烈过后
小草喝饱了
太阳从云里跑出来
而它留下的水坑
成了孩子们的乐园
4. Thunderstorm
Yuan Kailun (10), Yuxiu Primary School
After the thunderstorm roared past,
the grass has drunk its fill.
The sun runs out from behind clouds,
and the puddles left by the rain
become paradise for children.
5.思念的翅膀
毓秀小学 辛婉怡（10岁）
思念的翅膀把我带到
时间的长河中
我看到了奶奶向我招手
等我跑过去
她已消失在苍穹
我摸着湿透的枕巾
把思念写进诗行
5. Wings of Yearning
Sin Wanyi (10), Yuxiu Primary School
The wings of longing carry me away
to the long river of time.
I see Grandma waving her hand to me.
Yet the moment I run toward her,
she fades away into the vast sky.
I touch my soaked pillow,
and weave all my longing into lines of poetry.
6.梦
河北省石家庄市藁城区工业路小学 苏墨琰（11岁）
妈妈
不要再说
睡醒之后我的头发乱了
那是因为梦要找一个好去处
有时候
梦会迷路
脑袋便乱糟糟的
也有时候
它会变得很小
在发丝中偷偷蔓延
但是不管怎样
茂密的头发丛林里
它总是能悄悄溜走
见不到梦的真面目
6. Dream
Su Moyan (11), Gongye Road Primary School, Gaocheng District, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province
Mom,
don’t keep saying
my hair is messy after waking up.
It’s because my dreams are searching for a nice place to stay.
Sometimes,
dreams get lost,
leaving my head all tangled.
Other times,
they shrink tiny,
creeping quietly between strands of hair.
No matter what,
amid the thick jungle of hair,
they always slip away silently,
never letting me see their true faces.
7.衣兜里的秘密
河北省石家庄市藁城区工业路小学 苏墨琰（11岁）
妈妈洗衣服
掏开我的衣兜
一颗带来好运的金瓜子
三枚亮闪闪的游戏币
五粒同学送的酸酸糖
一叠小纸条也蹦了出来
上面写着
“啊”“呀”“唉”
它们轻轻松松
暴露了我的小秘密
7. Secrets in My Pocket
Su Moyan (11), Gongye Road Primary School, Gaocheng District, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province
Mom was washing clothes,
and emptied my pocket.
A golden melon seed that brings good luck,
three shiny game coins,
five sour candies given by classmates,
and a stack of small notes hopped out too.
On them were written:
“Ah”, “Wow”, “Sigh”.
With such ease,
they gave away all my little secrets.
8.床
河北省石家庄市藁城区工业路小学 苏墨琰（11岁）
一个小角落
一棵不起眼的枫树上
搭着一个鸟窝
阳光嫌冷
秋风嫌硬
小鸟嫌小
蚂蚁嫌高
只有一片
红枫叶不嫌弃
静静地躺在那里
8. The Bed
Su Moyan (11), Gongye Road Primary School, Gaocheng District, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province
In a quiet corner,
on an unremarkable maple tree,
perches a bird’s nest.
The sunlight finds it too chilly,
the autumn wind finds it too harsh,
the little birds find it too cramped,
the ants find it too high.
Only one red maple leaf does not mind,
lying there peacefully all alone.
9.光
河北省石家庄市藁城区贾市庄镇贯庄小学 顼铭泽（10岁）
冰最不喜欢的东西
是什么
当然就是光
光打在冰上
冰不堪重负
被打成了水
水被光照着变白了
就像冰
举着小白旗投降了
9. Light
Xu Mingze (10), Guanzhuang Primary School, Jiashizhuang Town, Gaocheng District, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province
What is ice’s least favorite thing?
It’s light, of course.
When light strikes ice,
the ice cannot bear the weight,
melting into water.
The water glows pale under the light,
just like ice
holding up a small white flag to surrender.
10.贪吃的雪
河北省石家庄市藁城区贾市庄镇贯庄小学 裴晨宇（10岁）
卖冰糖葫芦——
卖冰糖葫芦的来了
一会儿
孩子们都出来了
还有一个糖葫芦
雪飘下来
买下了最后一串
10. Greedy Snow
Pei Chenyu (10), Guanzhuang Primary School, Jiashizhuang Town, Gaocheng District, Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province
Candied hawthorns for sale—
The hawthorn vendor has come.
Soon,
all the children run outside.
One last skewer remains.
Snowflakes drift down
and buy the final string of candied hawthorns.
11.黄昏
黄山头镇中心小学 张海童（11岁）
太阳顺着地平线下落
路上车来人往
我背着书包回家
买一根冰棍
很甜 很满足
鸟飞回巢穴
世界缓缓入眠
11. Dusk
Zhang Haitong (11), Huangshantou Town Central Primary School
The sun sinks along the horizon
Vehicles and pedestrians pass on the road
I head home with my schoolbag
Buy an ice stick
So sweet, so satisfying
Birds fly back to their nests
The whole world drifts off to sleep
12.夏日趣事
黄山头镇中心小学 黄震宇（10岁）
夏日趣事
就是一卷凉席
一根冰棒
一部电视剧
一个美好的心情
12. Joys of Summer
Huang Zhenyu (10), Huangshantou Town Central Primary School
The little joys of summer
are a roll of summer mat
an ice pop
an episode of TV series
and a peaceful happy mood
13.红
黄山头镇中心小学 何梓康（10岁）
这个世界离不开红
红色的太阳
红色的苹果
红色的怒火
13. Red
He Zikang (10), Huangshantou Town Central Primary School
The world cannot do without red
The sun is red
Apples are red
And anger also burns red
14.夜
黄山头镇中心小学 孙晓帆（10岁）
夜是宁静的，
因为，
每到夜里，
所有的生灵都会沉睡。
夜是美丽的，
因为，
月亮高高挂在天空，
星星还纷纷来给它点缀。
14. Night
Sun Xiaofan (10), Huangshantou Town Central Primary School
Night is quiet,
because
when night comes,
all creatures fall asleep.
Night is beautiful,
because
the moon hangs high in the sky,
countless stars come to decorate it.
15.光明
黄山头镇中心小学 罗夕（10岁）
光明可以赢过黑暗，
我们都喜欢光明。
整个世界都有光明，
光明无处不在。
15. Light
Luo Xi (10), Huangshantou Town Central Primary School
Elmaya Jabbarova was born in Azerbaijan. She is a poet, writer, and translator. Her poems from 2019 to date were published in the regional and foreign newspapers, magazines, books, websites, and anthologies. She has been awarded many certificates, diplomas, and medals. She is the department manager of Hekari newspaper of Azerbaijan. She is an honorary member of the Writers of Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyzstan World Association of People’s Creators, Honorary member of the International Academy of Literature, Art, Culture and Social Sciences of Uzbekistan. She is an Academic Appointed Coordinator by the Secretary General of Azerbaijan, Argentina. She is presented in the book Famous Personalities MultiArt – 5, Argentina. She was a member World Poetic Fraternity. She was awarded the title of Global Poet of 2023; 2024. She was awarded the title of World Poet Laureate from Azerbaijan as one of 55 poets selected by Pentasi B Friendship Poetry for 2025.
