Neven Dužević
Southwest of the center
Southwest of the center is my neighborhood
I went to school there and had a start
There was also a cinema there
After the second shift
I had time there
He imagined her and me in the last row
All the movie scenes themselves
But those are old days
More or less, only on the same route
Only the Tram knocks
He only hides his name
What was and is no longer
They still walk there
My dream mates
Boys lost in the years
They are looking for Peter Pan
They talk about drinking
Ribicija and black maca
Southwest from the city center
It's Trešnjevka...
The status quo sews faulty seeds but the tramps and vagabond hearts are the beauty of wild reeds. – Sebastian Malcolm Francis, Trail Walker by the Feral Ferns
Prologue
‘You can’t say it that way, and have to stop saying it. It’s grammatically incorrect.’ But I said the truth, which was, ‘I won’t stop, and lots of people talk that way. Real people.’ And it was left at that. The rains rained and the month that usually held snow on the ground, snow that had travelled through the winter sky, had little or none. Everything about the world was strange and much was troublesome…wars, disasters, inflation, and myriad other items besides.
Tires
The man was upbeat and liked his work, his movements fast and confident, his gait sure and steady and somehow wholesome. He had working hands and a good physical and spiritual heart. How many people had he helped by the sides of roads, and often in inclement weather? Is someone like that not like an angel? Truck and tire, jack and machine, work clothes and the world rains and rains. Electric light splashes upon one million puddles. The man moves in the world and the words he uses are direct and meaningful, for there is nothing superfluous about him. Good aura. Good people. He is good people.
Coffee
The lady has to walk through all kinds of weather to serve coffee at the edge of town. And how to navigate such a world in storms and cold? Heavy coat at least. She is calm. An adult but wise somehow like an old lady that has seen much. Her hands handle the counter surely and swiftly and perhaps she knows people better than a psychologist so-called. Outside the rains are tears across windows and the unthinking ones leave their garbage, because they think the world is only for them. It doesn’t make her jaded though. Everything is taken in stride. That portrays maturity and a type of self-actualization. Everyone is treated equally though she must have her favourites and not-so favourites even amoung the regulars.
Dancer
It’s not complicated. That one left the ambitious world and danced literally on shores. The waves lap, ancient oceans blue green turquoise and sometimes calm, other times tumultuous. To be in the body and feel a true and honest and inspiring rhythm is her goal. Rocks and sands, the clouds and sometimes birds, watch on. Integrity and hard work, and the years pay off in a particular sense. It is and isn’t second nature. Like many or all arts. She has gifts and can hear some inner music but has to honour the calling. And does.
Furniture
They asked him to leave college because he wasn’t academically like the others. All he wanted to do was learn to help bigger groups of marginalized people, but the world demands more. ‘Right now,’ he said, ‘I live in this neighborhood and people know if they need help with anything, like moving say, that they can ask me.’ He fell out of his seat once and it was because he was tired,- but people laughed at him. I tried to be his friend but lost touch in time. I wonder whatever happened to him. The world in those parts was cold and though every building could not have been grey, every building felt grey. What a world they have built, I thought to myself as I saw it all, so empty of warmth, so devoid of joy and naturalness.
Canine
That dog was rescued from a far away place, another country, and had a missing leg, its front left leg to be exact. But what heart it had, and one could tell that it had adjusted to its new life. Its owners took it on great walks and sometimes it met and played with other dogs. There, the world was not complicated. Trees. Skies. Good dirt trails. The wild birds went over the tops of the tree-lines. There was a different, a sanguine energy that stayed even in overcast weather. That energy was amidst the stones and ferns of the valley, the deep wild red sumac of the upper paths that waited always, in and about the little streams and also with the evergreens proud and reliable, plus the birch trees, always full of character and nuance, full of spirit and soul.
Epilogue
The rains stayed for days and even souls not prone to reflection sometimes gave pause and looked out windows. The news of the world was not good, yet there were still good people. Industrial grates received the water from the streets. Past the towns, beyond the old solitary church with its weathered and worn bricks, was a little cemetery surrounded by trees. The stones were faded and sometimes the names could hardly be read. One day those people were also alive and thriving, perhaps smiling and planning their day. But now, time had taken much. There was one marker that spoke of a man. I had bet, with that area being so rural, that he was a farmer of some sort. The cars and trucks out there on the roads beyond went and went and went,- tending to the business of the busy world alive. I think the farmer man must have been a salt of the earth type. I bet he was good people.
~I always say that I never get tired of saying that life is given only once! Make the most of this life! Search for new discoveries, open up new aspects of life, use your opportunities to the maximum! Don't ever put a barrier on yourself, be free, take big steps towards your goals, after all, we will all die one day!
So why do you sleep a lot and why do you find fault with others without making the most of it? What is life like? Or those who slander themselves by thinking about you to the point where their brains reach? Show me what God has actually made you capable of! Don't give up on the words of these trivial people!
Saturday night
she wears her
pressed-flower face
which came first
her madness
or her art
behind me
phantom shadow
with a fist
round faces
built of cubes
featured in
rectangular galleries
with oval windows
I tell complete strangers
about my pain . . .
climate despair
Swiss-cheese memory . . .
glimpses of past weddings
some of them hers
Roberta Beach Jacobson
Indianola, Iowa, USA
Bio: Roberta Beach Jacobson (she/her) is drawn to the magic of words–poetry, song lyrics, flash fiction, puzzles, and stand-up comedy. Her latest book is Demitasse Fiction: One-Minute Reads for Busy People (Alien Buddha Press, 2023).
Moonset
Moonset; dawn dawning
On a silent world; no birds
Sing in the stillness reigning.
The wind has closed its mouth
On the tremulous leaves of trees
Marching across the horizon.
Moonset; the flowers sleep
In their silent fragrance, deep
In the disappearing shadows
As silver darkness dawning daylight
Reclaims a yawning world, with
Golden rims in the eastern sky.
Moonset; golden sun rising
Greeting a new day; new dreams
Form as the fading tranquility
Of the night slips into oblivion.
The sweetness of night’s beauty
Softly steals into the gold of day.
For the Long Ago
Loving you for the long ago.
Being with you; forever courting
Your impeccable character;
Your intrinsic manner; classic
Silhouette; perfect form; your
Incomparable beauty, your
Mystic capacity for creating
Memories while showing
Your undying love for me;
Loving me each day; each year;
With a love that never ceases
But goes on, for the long ago.
Annie Johnson is 84 years old. She is Shawnee Native American. She has published two, six hundred-page novels and six books of poetry. Annie has won several poetry awards from world poetry organizations including; World Union of Poets; she is a member of World Nations Writers Union; has received the World Institute for Peace award; the World Laureate of Literature from World Nations Writers Union and The William Shakespeare Poetry Award. She received a Certificate and Medal in recognition of the highest literature from International Literary Union for the year 2020, from Ayad Al Baldawi, President of the International Literary Union. She has three children, two grandchildren, and two sons-in-law. Annie played a flute in the Butler University Symphony. She still plays her flute.
Exploring Love, Spirituality and the Black Experience in “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, a Book Review
[Excerpt from Fleury’s book: Chain Letter To America: The One Thing You Can Do To End Racism, A Collection of Essays, Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Multiculturalism]
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all the things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
So begins Zora Neal Hurston’s epic story about an emotional and spiritual journey of self-discovery. Through my incessant study of literature and the craft of writing, I have learned that what grabs a reader right from the onset of a story is by having a fully formed voice and vision that prepares us to go along for the ride; that we will be transported elsewhere to another reality.
In honor of Black History Month, the historical inauguration of America’s first Black President and Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to offer a dichotomous exploration of variant thematic ideologies of love and Black literary contributions to American culture and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” allows me to do just that.
“A graduate of Barnard…, Zora Neal Hurston published seven books—four novels, two books of folklore, and an autobiography—more than fifty shorter works between the middle of the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean War, when she was the dominant Black woman writer in the United States. The dark obscurity in which her career then lapsed reflects her staunchly independent political stances rather than any deficiency of craft and vision,” writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the afterward to Their Eyes.
Hurston, whose life spanned between the years 1891 and 1960, was a novelist, folklorist and anthropologist. Her fictional and factual writings of Black Heritage remain unparalleled. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is Hurston’s most highly praised novel and is considered a classic among the best of Black literature.
Their Eyes recounts the story of Janie Crawford’s burgeoning selfhood through three marriages with loving empathy and stinging urgency. Janie, who is described as “fair- skinned, long haired and dreamy as a child” advances in years to anticipate better treatment than she actually receives; that is until she has an unexpected encounter with an amusing, smooth and fast talking younger roustabout named Tea Cake, who entices her into an emotional and spiritual journey that will change her life forever. He proffers to her an opportunity to see herself and life through his eyes without being regrettably adorned with the formerly disparaging labels of being “one man’s mule” or another man’s wallflower through her previous two marriages.
Over the course of the story, the character of Janie unfolds, as she will learn that she does not have to succumb to living a life ripe with rife, acrimony or maladroit romantic dreams. Towards the end of the story, the reader will learn in Janie’s words: “two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh themselves. They got tuh go tuh God and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh themselves,” since her character struggles with the incessant panoptic surveillance and potentially spirit crushing criticism of her neighbors.
Every good writer or story-teller has to have motif and Hurston’s Their Eyes is swimming in a crystal clear blue- eyed sea of symbolism. In Their Eyes she uses an overworked, underfed and tormented mule to illustrate the dire living conditions of her main character Janie, what she endures on her way to spiritual, emotional, and physical freedom and awakening. Her depiction of Janie’s life of strife serves not only to demonstrate essentially the mistreatment of Janie as “one man’s mule and another man’s adornment”, it also attests to the meager living conditions of women, that is to say in terms of oppression and maltreatment, during her time period. Since she died right at the cusp of both the Civil Rights and the Women’s Equal Rights Movements, Hurton’s Their Eyes would go on to achieve greater respect and acknowledgement as an indispensable part of Black literature.
Also in Hurston’s novel, I was particularly enthralled by her use of Black vernacular speech (i.e. go tuh God…livin’ fuh theyselves…) to chronicle her Black female characters’ coming to the best of their being or emerging consciousness. In his afterward, Henry Louis Gates offers a keen observation of some of the most indispensible key elements regarding the deceptively simple trajectory of Hurston’s story. He writes that “The Charting of Janie Crawford’s fulfillment as an autonomous imagination, Their Eyes is a lyrical novel that correlates the needs of her first two husbands for ownership of progressively larger physical space (and the gaudy accoutrements of upward mobility) with the suppression of self awareness in their wife. Only with her third and last lover, a roustabout called Tea Cake whose unstructured frolics center around and about the Florida swamps, does Janie at last blooms…”
In other words, towards the end of the story, Janie did not find love and happiness as presumably defined by her first two husbands by the often superficial veneers of status and ownership of fancy property, ironically she found the bond of love, God and community living by a swamp with a mere unrefined and uneducated vagrant whose only means of sustaining Janie was through a daily dosage of love, laughter and whatever he could muster with his bare hands to put food on the table.
Therefore in honor of Black History Month, you will find that in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” concurrent themes of Hope, love, and an affirmation of Black Heritage are enough to make you want to put Their Eyes on your reading list this February.
Jacques Fleury
Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian-American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self” & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Amazon etc…
He has been published in prestigious publications such as Muddy River Poetry Review, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him here.
The heart of the poet
The poet's heart does not want evil
He seems to consider the enemy as a friend
Turns bad into good
Best wishes come true
The poet's heart does not want evil
He doesn't chase an elusive dream
A wish becomes a goal
If you live without a purpose your heart does not want separation
So that tears don't flow from these cups
No one should suffer the pain of separation
Let them endure every pain with patience
The heart of the poet advocates goodness
May this bright world become heaven
May all good intentions be answered.
