Poetry from J.D. Nelson

Five Untitled Monostichs

january pioneer stephen tomorrow

transfiguration half-dollar

polk high a daylight coin sauce

paper snakes a panther painting

spinning plates for laundry money a scene of freezing

bio/graf

J. D. Nelson’s poems have appeared in many publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of ten print chapbooks and e-books of poetry, including *Cinderella City* (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). Nelson’s first full-length collection is *in ghostly onehead* (Post-Asemic Press, 2022). Visit his website, MadVerse.com, for more information and links to his published work. His haiku blog is at JDNelson.net. Nelson lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Essay from Salomova Dilfuza

Central Asian teen girl with long dark hair, brown eyes, and a cream colored blouse.
Salomova Dilfuza

Time is running out, cherish the seconds… Time is something that cannot be returned, it is such a priceless blessing that every second of our life is a seal of our happy days, our happy life, our hard days, our unlucky years and our sad moments. In fact, we do not appreciate the time, we spend it on unnecessary things, useless games, most of our people cannot imagine their life without the Internet. Have you ever thought? How did people live in the past, they didn’t have a phone or the internet, they were happy, they used their time effectively, scientists and great people came out in our past They were writing about time, now it’s about the phone, the Internet, but the thing that is killing us is the phone. The saddest thing is that this time will not return. Even the world’s riches and most precious things cannot bring him back. No human has been able to turn back time. You know what ? Time is more expensive than money. For example, marketing is a developing field, and famous

Story from Nigora Tursunboyeva

Young Central Asian girl standing in front of a leafy bush at an angle. She's got a white shirt and long dark hair and a white baseball cap.

Khudoyberdi Tokhtaboyev

The Uzbek people have been writing works since ancient times. They are poets and writers from its soil to its leaves. One such writer is Khudoyberdi Tokhtaboyev. His works are distinguished by the richness of humor, the skillful description of children’s lives, their unique nature, characteristics, and spiritual experiences in an extremely vivid, interesting and childlike manner. It is no exaggeration to say that Khudoiberdi Tokhtaboyev is one of the authors who brought Uzbek children’s literature to the world level. He is a typical representative of children’s literature.

    “It is difficult to write for children, so it is not correct to say that there are few people who choose this direction. It is really difficult to write to children, to get in touch with their spirit, to say something similar to the child’s heart. It is really more difficult to write as if you are sitting down with a child in front of you and talking to him. Today, there are very few, almost non-existent works dedicated to children,” said Khudoyberdi Tokhtaboyev.

    Khudoyberdi Tokhtaboyev is a real talent. This means that his works are works of art, that is, whatever idea he wanted to realize in each of his works, this idea is fully realized in each of his works. He does not talk excessively, because this is contrary to the conditions of an artistic work, he never mixes events and persons alien to the idea of the work into his works – this is one of the main requirements of artistry. To appreciate the beauty of Khudoyberdi Tokhtaboyev’s works, you need to have a very sharp taste, but the person who has an eye for what is real beauty, real poetry, considers Khudoyberdi Tokhtaboyev to be an original artist, that is, a great talent. he knows as a writer.

      Khudoyberdi Tokhtaboyev has taken a place in our hearts with his educational works. From each of his works, a person gets useful and educational knowledge. He sees his mistakes through this character and tries not to repeat them. For example:

   “My sister may be upset. I love my sister, I love her very, very much, I will never hurt her, never make her cry.”

      This excerpt is from The Boy With Five Children. Through this passage, we can see Arifjon’s love for his mother. But unfortunately, not everyone has the same love for Arifjon’s mother. It is no exaggeration to say that Khudoyberdi Tokhtaboyev wanted to explain this to “Everyone”.

    We can witness such an example in the work “Jannanati Odanlar”.

   “We can’t build a bridge without cutting it. If we don’t build a bridge, people can’t cross the stream and fall into the water.”

– Great, huh? – said my grandfather.

-Excellent! – I said too.

– If it wasn’t for you, my son, I wouldn’t have finished anyway.

“That’s right, grandpa, you couldn’t finish anyway,” I said while riding the donkey…

      Then my grandfather became very ill and lay down until winter. My grandfather Ahmadqul brought honey and rubbed it on his feet, massaged it, my nanny boiled honey in milk and drank it every evening, and my aunt used to rub it on her body with strange drugs that I don’t like.

    In the excerpt from this work, we can see how Erkachol built a bridge with his grandson in the cold despite his old age to help people. And he fell into the water several times and got wet. Because of this, he becomes seriously ill. He thinks about people, not himself. It is no exaggeration to say that Khudoyberdi Tokhtabayev wanted our young people to grow up to be well-educated, kind, perfect people with the help of these works, and adults not to repeat their mistakes.

Nigora Tursunboyeva was born on February 23, 2009, in Namangan region. Currently, she is a 9th grade student of Ishakhan Ibrat creativity school. Along with writing poems and stories she can speak freely in 4 languages: English, Russian, German and Uzbek.

Essay from Norman J. Olson

Black and white charcoal sketch of a tree trunk in winter with no leaves and a person with a sword standing in front of it. Some grass and a broken log in the foreground.
Art by Norman J. Olson

on pacifism


I guess I have just recently recommitted to, or decided I need to accept, that I am and must be a pacifist…  in this year of 2024, there are wars and armed conflicts in various places around the world… some of these wars seem justified on one side or the other and some just seem to be the result of blundering on the part of national governments…  but, the more I read the news, the more I think about these conflicts, the more true it seems that if the human race is to flourish, or even survive, we must find a way to eliminate war from this planet…

my first argument against war is always to appeal to logic…  even if one has no moral objection to the killing and maiming of other human beings in pursuit of some national goal, war or indeed, even smaller armed conflict, is seldom efficacious in resolving the dispute…  so often international affairs seem like building houses of cards based on negotiations and diplomacy while war comes in with a sledge hammer…  that simply destroys everything and makes matters worse…  

war is built on the foundation of violence and the belief that killing certain people will make nations live together in peace…  that does not work…  killing people just makes their families and friends angry and outraged…  they do not want to live in peace with the killers of their loved ones, they want revenge on them… war begets hate which begets more war which begets more hate, etc. etc. etc…  war is not an efficient or effective way to solve international problems…
my second argument against war is that it is morally backwards…  might does not make right…  and just because one nation has a better army and can kill more efficiently,  that does not make that nation more right than any other nation…  usually the things fought over are in grey areas anyway, so there is no one side that is fully right and no one side that is fully wrong…  so compromise and negotiation are the way to make sure that each side gets some of what it wants…  

my third argument against war is that it is always fueled by greed for money…  and the people who wind up fighting in the war and harmed by the war are almost never the people who wind up with the money, no matter who wins or loses…  and in trying to negotiate a compromise over things like border disputes, the only way these issues can be resolved is if both sides are willing to dial back their greed and settle for less than all the money, land, water rights, natural resources, etc… killing a bunch of people does not in any way help for any nation to put aside greed and attempt a fair and respectful resolution of international problems…

my fourth argument against war is the obvious moral observation that it is immoral for any of us to take the life of anyone else…  I believe that each and every human being is born into this life with a right to live and participate in all of the joys and pains that make up our lives…  these include a right to food, shelter and safety…  the first things usually destroyed in a war are food, shelter and safety…  it is immoral to kill our fellow men and women period…  under any circumstances, any time… and it is also immoral to allow our fellow men and women to live without food, shelter and safety…   war is always always always immoral…  war is always evil…  English poet Wilfred Owen, who knew a few things about war, called it a “cesspool…”  there is nothing glorious about it, ever…

okay, now that I have convinced everybody that war is ineffective, evil and immoral, let us proceed to the question of how do we end it…  one would have hoped back in the 1950s when I was a child, that the inventions of nuclear weapons would make war obsolete…  when nations have this horrible weapon in hand that would make any large war, the last war, because the effect of the war would be to eradicate human beings from the planet; one would think that we would look at each other and say, “let us lay down our arms and look for peaceful ways to solve international problems…”  before we finish ourselves off altogether…

but that did not happen…  instead nations kept building more and more nuclear weapons in an arms race that goes on to this day with weapons armed and ready to launch right now that would bring on a nuclear winter that would end human life on this planet and most other life as well…  this is lunacy…  it is like a person walking night and day with a razor sharp knife pressed against his or her throat…  we must get rid of those terrible weapons…  and we do that not by using them, which would be suicidal, but by education and arms negotiations…  we need to all know and acknowledge the danger we are in and make our governments destroy those weapons…  there is no harm that any nation can inflict on me that makes it morally right for me to launch a nuclear weapon….  killing one person is immoral…  killing hundreds, thousands and millions of people is hundreds and thousands and millions of times more immoral…

I am not sure how to go about accomplishing this goal but, I truly believe that military actions of every kind will not lead to the goal of nuclear disarmament… military action does not solve international problems, it always makes them worse…  increasing the hate and dehumanizing those denoted as “enemy” makes it more and more likely that an accidental international blunder or an intentional act of lunacy will send us over that precipice and start a nuclear annihilation of humanity…  

so, I advocate demilitarization of this planet…  I believe that it is the only way to prevent a humanity annihilating nuclear war…  there are so many challenges facing humanity… this planet is rich and abundant but we should be carefully tending it and setting it up to support our human communities so that all people can have food, shelter and safety… we are threatened by disease, by natural disaster, by things like climate change and ozone depletion and dozens of other threats… 

I think that we could work together to solve these problem and to make a long and healthy life easier for each of us to attain, if we could quit fighting with each other and start working together to make the world a better place for the benefit of us all…

the first step, I think, is for us all to embrace pacifism…  we must change our attitudes about military in every way…  there is nothing good about military actions…  all military action is immoral in that it aims to kill people…  that is what guns, tanks, bombs, etc. exist to do… to kill people… so we must stop extolling the warrior…  we must stop funding the military…  and we should be working with every resource we have to spread pacifism to every human being on the planet…  it is the logical, moral and decent thing to do…  we must accept that every human on this planet is our brother or sister and deserves respect and all human rights and happiness being born here should provide… and we must always remember that might does not make right…  it never has and it never will… 

Poetry from Annie Johnson

Light skinned woman with curly white hair and a floral top.
Annie Johnson
From the Mists of the Moon 

From the mists of the Moon I was born 
Avalon remembered in a silky dawn 
Riding side saddle out of the Sea of Tranquility 
Soft, soft, pale silver light riding 
Shimmering silent and still. 
Oh, soul of the pale echoes 
The forgotten dreams of waves, 
Of motion, of eddies, the whirlpools 
Of becoming will. 
Carry me golden sea horse 
Into the valley and over the hill 
Galloping against the head wind, wayward 
With wild hair flying, 
Send me cascading downward 
From bright rainbows mounted 
Atop my bright majesty, dump me 
Into the sluice of sunbeams 
Rising to meet me 
Careening homeward to Earth 
In my quickening dreams. 

From the mists of the moon I come 
Riding the waves homeward 
Alee of my dreams breaking shoreward 
In the shadowy wake of morning. 
Homeward, homeward in dreams 
Of dawn and sunshine spreading 
Like a mantle of gold 
Worn only for best-day; 
Adorned with ribbons of stars 
All dripping of midnight 
I stretch out to dry on the beach 
Of high noon reality and breath. 
From the mists of the moon I come 
Giddy and girl-like, tiptoeing home 
Long after midnight, dreamily disheveled 
Hair tangled with the taste of night 
And the songs of a lunar prom 
Lingering on rose petal lips - 
I enter the house of day 
Pregnant with moonlight. 



Annie Johnson

 

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.

Essay from Z.I. Mahmud

Examine Mary Oliver’s Sleeping in the Forest, Twelve Moons with critical commentary.


“The special puzzle of Romanticism is the dialectical role that nature had to take in the revival of the mode of romance. Most simply, Romantic nature poetry, despite its long critical history of misrepresentations, was anti nature poetry […] Romantic or internalized romance […] tends to see the context of nature as a trap for the mature imagination.” Harold Bloom’s The Internalization of the Quest Romance


“It is the destiny if consciousness […[ to separate from nature, so that it can not only transcend not only nature but also its own lesser forms.” Georey Hartman’s Romanticism and Anti Self- Consciousness


Bloomian and Hartmanian tradition of Mary Oliver’s romantic nature poetry dichotomizes the antitheses between nature and self, body and soul, consciousness and unconsciousness, subject and object, nature and culture, language and muteness, death and immortality, imaginative speaker and immature child, transcendence and immanence. The speaker of the poem recollects the mystical closeness and amity with the natural world as suggested by the ritualizes camp trip sojournings in the forest floor of the maternal earth engulfs her like “as if she feels in water”. Herein the poet laureate superimposes the visionary selfhood upon “a stone on the riverbed”; because her drowsiness is not a blankness but the labyrinthine “lichens and seeds”.

The poet and the speaker impersonate Wordsworthian philosophical mind and Yeatsian Artice of Eternity through mimetic imitation of rocks, stones and trees of Wordsworth “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”. Witches, spinsters, crones and mother nature begin to speak for themselves, they transvalue their romantic forefathers’ mythic assessments as they defy the doom of muteness placed on all these female others who inhabit masculine poetic landscapes. Mary Oliver’s poetic revolutions embody mystical consciousness and experience of renewal. From the core of the heart’s engravings, Oliver’s everlasting bonding with nature in the face of sober truth memorializes the unity of the natural despite forsaking the association of supernatural eternity; her poems follow the cycles of the seasons to image loss and the possibility of renewal. Linda Gregerson reviews noteworthily, “She is not so much moved by the works of man, and she somehow contrives to love the world more than she loves language, no common feat for an artisan who works in words.”


Gratitude and reverence of the lyrical naturalist’s ardour of romantic nature poetry proclaims testimonial “I am sensual in order to be spiritual” amidst postmodern milieus. There is a fusion of Transcendental, Buddhist and Christian imageries grounded firmly in the earth, which Oliver views as God’s corporeality. Contemporary mystic of American poetry Mary Oliver stalks the edges of the marshes, journeying deep into the forests to open her breast to the known and the unknowable “as if the edge of sweet sanity” where “wild blind wings open” to interrogate nature of the soul, about its relation to the earth, about the damage of dualism it seeks to separate soul from body, body from earth and earth from the ultimate mystery of the immeasurable and unutterable nature of God heralded by Enlightenment.

Mary Oliver’s rapture with the nature such as the creatures of the wood and the sea, birds of the air, plants of the elds, trees of the forests—this is the liturgy of living things that the poet consistently dwells with and upon the elusiveness of the never-ending rosary.

Further Reading
Janet McNew’s [St. John University] Mary Oliver and the Tradition of Romantic Nature Poetry, Contemporary Literature 1969, Volume. 30, No. 1, pp. 57-77, University of Wisconsin Press Journals Division
Todd Davis’s The Earth as God’s Body: Incarnation as Communion in the poetry of Mary Oliver Christianity and Literature, Summer 2009, Volume 58, No. 4. Pp. 605-624

White woman with short light hair and reading glasses and a turtleneck sits on a couch in front of a window holding a book and looking at a fluffy dog
Mary Oliver

Examine William Blake’s A Poison Tree with critical commentary.


“A Poison Tree” is a counter myth which expresses the Biblical narrative of the Fall as a tree burlesquing the “Tree of the Forbidden Fruit”. Forbearance of the Wrath of God is anticipated in the allegorical symbolism of the poisoned tree as poetic vehicle, abstraction of human situation [repressed anger]. “I was angry …;/…my wrath did end.” propositional content and grammatical structure clash with substantiation of adjectival noun from angry towards wrath or indignation manifested as seven deadly cardinal vices that these lyrics implied in the metamorphosis of the whole poem. “I was angry with my foe, /I told it not, my wrath did grow.”——this couplet’s propositional content concerns the intensification of emotion, a subject now reinforced by the shift from angry to wrath. The shift is mediated by the pronoun “it”, which is indeed in this lyric Janus-faced part of speech; wrath can be cultivated following the verbs “watered” and “sunned”: “And I watered it in fears/
Night and morning with my tears;/ And I sunned it with smiles;/And with soft deceitful
wiles.”——–

Wrath is watered and sunned with fears, tears and soft deceitful wiles; water’s alkalinity provides nourishing nutriment for the sustenance of the poison tree as the language oscillates between the conceptual and the phenomenal to provide a tangible equilibrium between the tenor and the vehicle. “And it grew both day and night/Till it bore an apple bright” —–herein the intense cultivation of anger culminates in literal incarnation which the poem’s conclusion is the incredible transformation despite the occurrence that cannot be gainsaid: “And my foe beheld it shine/And he knew that it was mine/ And into my garden stole/ When the night had veiled the pole/ In the morning glad I see, /My foe outstretched beneath the tree.”


Blake intends us to take the embodiment of deep malice and disdain to be the literalization of Milton’s Satanic forbearance from the forehead by the conceiving of sin. Objects become extensions or projections of the human agency as exploratorily examined in “A Poison Tree” in which the correspondence between human and the natural is […] pronounced […] “the apple bright of the poem” suggest [ing] […] a process where intense emotion repressed, because of binding social codes, is rendered into a tangible symbol.” The power of mind transcends that of the power of the matter in Blakean perspectives and poetic appreciation anthropomorphizing the inanimate and insensible to be personified symbolism of realistic living forms rather than mere poetic device of similitude.

Since […] “These poets knew that “All deities reside in the human breasts and their poetic tales or mythologies were imaginative account of imaginative reality and thus true” In other words, that the virtue of Christian forbearance is the psychological repression mythopoetically. For Blake the truth behind Genesis is that emanates anciently—and paradigmatically ——-a sneaking serpent of a man sought in the vested venture of vengeance blossoms into a fascinating macabre of incarnational narrative within
hermeneutic tradition.

Further Reading
Phillip J. Gallagher’s [The University of Texas at El Paso] The Word Made Flesh: Blake’s “A Poison Tree” and the Book of Genesis, Studies in Romanticism, Spring 1977. Volume 28, No. 2, William Blake 1757——-1827, Spring 1977, pp. 237—–249.

Text of William Blake's A Poison Tree in orange print against a blue sky background with an empty tree on the right.

Story from Oaoao Pbobo

Liza is 9 years old. She lives in a big house. She has an enormous room. She has too many toys and she has a lot of friends But Liza is not happy. She has a secret. She does not want to tell anyone about her secret. She feels embarrassed. The problem is that if nobody knows about it, there is no one that can help her.

Liza doesn’t write her homework. When there is an exam-she gets sick .She doesn’t tell anyone, but the truth is she can’t read and write. Liza doesn’t recollect the letters of the alphabet.

One day Liza’s teacher finds out she sees that Liza can’t write on the board.

She calls her after class and asks her to tell the truth. Liza says, It is true. I don’t know how to read and write. The teacher listens to her. She wants to assist Liza. She tells her “That’s OK. You can read and write if we practise and try together”.

So Liza and her teacher meet every day after class. They rehearse together. Liza works hard. Now she knows how to read and write.