The Wind
Wind is a part of earth.
It is so important for us.
It flows over the world.
It's a great gift from the god.
When it flows over the field
It blows my mind.
When it blows over the paddy field
And the plants blow in the wind
It gives a great pleasure in my mind.
When it blows over the field,
The farmers start singing in his own mind.
When the kites fly in the wind.
It makes happy my mind.
When the birds fly in the wind
I want to fly like them.
When the clouds fly in the wind.
It makes happy my mind.
When it blows over the field
I want to blow like it.
And want to explore the world.
Don Bormon is a student of grade 8 in Harimohan Government High School, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh.
The Descent
Li-Young Lee says every poem
is a descendant of God
unless it’s not good enough.
Then it’s just this
flat fart on the face of flatness.
God’s got better things to do, like bowling.
He never loses at bowling,
a perfect strike,
and heart attack, long covid
culling the bad pins that are bad
from the holy ones crowned
in lane grease. The rest shuffle out
into the alley behind the alley
which is hell or close enough.
They play bad smooth jazz
and clap on the beat like a stick figure
as the angel of angels turns away in embarrassment.
Poems like couch lint
hacked up by couch cats
excess, unnecessary and pungent
litter the face of the abyss
drained of sacredness. They are not even true
but they exist,
defiant in their inconsequence
like Nerf twinkies or Nerf rat turds
or rat turds made of twinkies
or twinkies made of rat turds.
They transcend transcendence
like Job made of twinkies
crying out to heaven
on his ash heap of corn syrup.
Eventually he descends.
Anatomy of a body
I am a devotee to grief.
And I fear, nothing weighs more than my country's shadow.
I section my body into two parts.
Loss;
I hold this home the way loss holds an orphaned child.
Beneath my neck, I have concealed all the places I have ever found comfort.
Darkness;
No one understands what I carry except me.
Who holds a shattered thing and find beauty?
Forgive me, if this poem refuses to sit well in your throat but
since inception, nothing in my country has ever sat well with me.
Still, I try to unrobe myself.
Beyond this picture, I try to grow wings.
I try to fold myself in between happiness.
Because Maa once said " Light needs darkness to shine".
Rainlessness
The earth has already been covered with rainlessness
Like the brick burning fire - the world is getting hotter
The intense black clouds rising in the sky with a great hope of joy
It's likely just getting started to pour but in vain lost in a moment
Clear all-the bright sunlight heating land, leaves, crops, waters and the body of us
Experience is so bad-like the depressed people in the slum
Suffering from all their rights- deprivation played by nature
Natural peace how far it is
Do we count it from our inner and from outer?
The rainless tendencies prevail all over
Natural weather has been withered with the ideals of humanity
No love, no peace of mind, boiling and firing the wind
Inundating the resides, firing the forest by the waters and land
Nature is the best justice - signed on every inch we run
The scattered old torn leaves the every single part we believe
In epidemic, the rainlessness - never ever thought.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
26 July, 2023
The Beat of Love
Mind travels, mind rests
Mind sleeps, mind dreams
The raindrop falls on the leaves
The birds take bath flapping the feathers
We dance on the deck reflecting the waves of the ocean
The sun beams on all the evening
Soon after the world covered with the sheet of darkness
The glowing bird flies on the eyes
My lips play on your lips embracing
And a sky stars glitter on smiling over face
Stirs the cells, the blood the shinning laugh
Always runs through the soft weather
The wind is filled with breathing, the heart's beat of love.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
27 July, 2023
Priceless mother
I will spread in your bosom
You are my inspiration
I dance like a nightingale
Mother without a wide world
If so it's optional
If possible
I was taking him to Hajj
YOUNG AMERICANS
They’re cherubs compared to me
and their eyes are ten times as bright.
They can hold an audience
while I’m merely walk by alone.
And see where the sunlight falls.
Not on me. On them.
They’ve a lot of life ahead of them
and a big space to live it in.
They’re seeds and I’ve been reaped.
They’re nimble and look at me –
as sluggish as a terrestrial gastropod mollusk.
Their hair can be tousled but never hostile.
And for all their pulled faces,
they can’t quite disguise themselves.
They wear their colors large – red, white, blue.
I go about in shrunken hues.
They worship laughter.
They’re known to sob.
And the losses, no doubt, have started.
But they have years before
deaths and heartbreaks
take on an accumulative effect.
They’ll be me someday.
They know it but they don’t feel it.
For they don’t waste their feelings.
They know better than to use me
as an example.
ANNOYANCES
A dangerous curve
black and gleaming with oncoming cars,
a leaf daubed in late season snow,
that common quick embrace and parting
seen on many a sidewalk –
an earth unfit for babies,
an afterword disguised as breath,
aging, that damnable hourglass,
and ambition, yours, mine
and everybody else’s –
the lack of a comics section
in the New York Times,
and, among my grieving,
the death of certain trees –
people who won’t leave me alone,
burnt-out bulbs, anguish,
the disorderly dissolution of a life,
someone looking at me
as if they already know what I’m about to tell them –
anything that’s tissue-thin,
or comes in a white box,
or is a device whose purpose
is not immediately clear –
scraping fingernails,
wills that leave me nothing,
all of the useless things
that are so cheap and plentiful,
a handful of dirt versus an abstract painting –
the agony of denial,
the diffidence of guilt,
diaphanous desire.
drinking to the health of the dead,
dripping taps
and everything else that reminds me of time
the necessity of ingratitude,
the constant exodus of old friends,
the vacuity of famous people,
anticipation that’s derailed by bad weather –
the inability to discern
the constellations
inventions that I get no credit for,
worst of all, the comforts of anxiety –
signing off – not annoyance –
I really am signing off.
NEWBORN SON
On a moonless March night, a man was pumping
a handcar through dairy country, inspecting the
line between Eumundi and Cooroy. He’d been
a cane cutter and a sawmill worker, served in
the Air Force with the 2nd Airfield Construction Squadron.
And now he was a railway ganger, carrying
out his duties in a world of invisible fences and fields,
a man who liked a beer, fishing, and a flutter on the races,
had many friends, a young wife, three daughters
and a newborn son. And a newborn son. A newborn son.
Unknown to the man, a station hand waved a banking engine
through, down that track toward the man who didn’t see
it coming until it was too late. The man was killed.
He was 35. And that was it. Poof. Nothing. A couple
of faded snapshots. One professionally done photograph
of the man, his wife, the three daughters. It was taken
before the son was born. He’s in uniform. The women
wear simple dresses. The family is not wealthy.
They live in a rented house provided by the railway.
The picture is undated but roughly three years before
the son is born. The newborn son. The newborn son.
Six months old when the man is buried in the local cemetery.
There’s little left of the man’s story. The ones who would
know are all gone. The wife is dead. The daughters have
passed away. The son, no longer newborn, is left with
that photo, a clipping and nothing else. The son writes.
Ghost stories sometimes but the biggest ghost of them all
is never mentioned. There’s no connection. The man
can’t even haunt. And the son never felt his absence
because he never knew his presence. He was born
into all he knew as normal. At a point where his recollection
begins, he is telling people, “I have no father.”
Curiosity creeps up on him but not sadness.
By the time he’s old enough to understand,
the wife doesn’t mention the man. She’s moved to
the city. She’s worked a series of low paying jobs to provide
for four children. The son is happy enough.
He’s no longer newborn. No longer a newborn son.
NEWBORN SON
Family is just what you get, he figures. If there’s no man,
then there’s no man. If no one teaches you to hammer
a nail or fish or drive a car, then there’s always poetry.
And there’s these four women in his life, all older,
the daughters more like mothers to him than sisters.
People say he looks like his mother. No one mentions any likeness
to the man. Years pass, years when his name is never brought up
the once. The daughters marry, move out. The son travels.
He too marries. New generations put the man in his place,
a place so deep in the murk of family history, he can never be found.
And if there’s a man at all, it’s now that son. In fact, it has
been for such a long time. Ever since he was newborn. Newborn.
He’s all that’s left of the household he was born into.
He has no children, no newborn of his own.
He sits in his study, his home thousands of miles from
where he was born. He tells himself now it’s time to write
a poem, the poem, about his father. But there’s no way into
the man. The facts are old and they’re dry. So he writes of himself
instead. The newborn son. The newborn son. The newborn son.
But born to who?
TO ALL THOSE IN OUR ESTIMATION
Hear this,
when it’s dark out, we start blessing people,
crossing over the river on a dimly-lit bridge,
or looking out a window at where street-lamps cannot reach,
hungry or just having eaten,
saying thank you to a Stop sign,
or running water in the sink.
After the unexpected deaths,
the dour hospital visits,
the cancerous news on the telephone,
we owe something to the living,
pass it on silently,
as the road narrows
or the plates sparkle as they dry.
Watching TV,
we leave spaces in our concentration.
Crawling into bed,
we don’t sleep without remembering.
Even in our dreams,
when the subconscious scrambles
people and lives,
we beg them stay there,
do what they do,
we need them.
Hear this,
there’s nothing to hear,
not with the sheet up to our throats,
and the blanket spreading over us,
just a quiet we go on with,
just a quiet that holds them here.
FROM MY VANTAGE POINT
In the dark, you have no hands.
No shield.
Not even eyes.
You’re a funeral procession
in all but breath.
At the same time,
I am the hammers in my head.
The day’s exchanges.
The rampaging bison in my memory.
And, as always,
the staccato drumming of my heart.
This is what we must make sense of.
This is what we’re dealing with
when we lay ourselves down to sleep.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Sheepshead Review. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and California Quarterly.
