Poetry from Joan Beebe

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Night Sounds

Sleeping soundly without a care,

When suddenly I heard a step on the stair

I arose from my bed and tried to be quiet

I was terribly afraid but thought I should try it

To find out what could be that woke me from sleep

So into the hall I did manage to creep

I looked all around but nothing I found.

Suddenly there was music from downstairs,

It sounded like a piano and again I was scared.

I decided I had better take a look and what did I see

But a big old cat running up and down the keys

A window was left open and that’s how he got in

That’s why I heard that terrible din.

So if night sounds disturb you, just think of this.

Those sounds can be funny with such a strange twist!

The Passage of Time 

Like the wind blowing here and there

Changing to barely a whisper,

Time eludes us in the passing of days.

We look forward to a lovely spring

After a cold and snowy winter.

Time passes and we awake one morning

To the warming day with its

Promise of blue skies, pretty flowers

The sun in its splendor.

Time passes and soon we hear

Summer rain, thunder and wind.

But when it is over, there is

A beauty to the quiet and stillness we feel.

Again, time passes and the leaves

On the trees start changing color.

We are now in Autumn, a kind of

Magical season with scarecrows, full moons

And children trick or treating.

There is a sunny but cool, crisp air and

You breathe it in because it pleases you.

Finally, time passes and we see snowfalls,  enjoying

The first one as it seems to sit on the trees in a dazzling light.

Pine trees are a picture of such natural beauty

Now we watch with smiles as

Families are playing with their children

And building snowmen.  Sleds are

Brought out for fun , sliding down hills,

Then rushing back up the hill to

Fly down it again and cheeks

Getting red in the cold.

Christmas brings much joy to the

Family celebrations and there is

A different sense of peace in the world

Our passage of time for this year

Is now complete.

Poetry from Will Somers

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Blue-eyed Wraith

I still remember

The helmet of coppery

Hair, shining in the sun.

I can still tell you

About the heat of the

Day, as my class

Stretched our legs

At the World War II Memorial.

I saw her there,

For the first time,

And what I thought would be

The last.

But it wasn’t.

 

She haunted my dreams

Starting that night.

A blue eyed wraith

Staring me down

Every time I closed my eyes.

I was captivated by her

Proud, defiant eyes.

Her scarlet lips

Always beckoned me closer.

Maybe I should have

Known that I needed

To stay away.

Christopher Bernard reviews San Francisco’s latest Word for Word short story production

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TWO STORIES ONSTAGE

Word for Word’s Stories

Emma Donoghue “Night Vision”

Colm Tóibín “Silence”

Z Below

San Francisco

San Francisco’s well-known drama group Word for Word, which for 23 years has been staging short stories with ever-increasing theatrical sophistication, recently brought to the stage two finely wrought tales by Irish writers about Irish writers at SoMa’s Z Below. The results were a pleasure for both lovers of literature and of the stage.

Word for Word’s cunning device is so obvious one wonders why nobody ever thought of it before: take a good short story and stage it as a play, with every word spoken by a character in the story. The opportunities for theatrical magic are patent, and potent, and taken entire advantage of by Word for Word and its talented staff.

Tonight’s embarking (I saw it on April 1st) brought two stories, one by Colm Tóibín, the comfortable, fashionable middle-brow writer (“middle-brow” is sometimes mistakenly taken for a putdown, though it isn’t; a sturdy literary culture needs a strong middle-brow culture to keep the low-brow aspiring and the high-brow honest), based on an anecdote from the notebooks of Henry James. The anecdote was told to him by Isabella August, Lady Gregory—the Lady Gregory—writer, playwright and Irish folklorist, probably most famous in this country for her association with the poet W. B. Yeats and their mutual support of the celebrated Abbey Theater, now the National Theatre of Ireland. Henry James never worked up the anecdote into a story, but Tóibín uses it to draw out a tale about an affair between the unhappy Lady Gregory and the poet and womanizer Wilfred Scawen Blunt, and her long, puzzled savoring of what seems to have been the one great physical passion in her life.

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Prose from A. Iwasa

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Excerpt from Transcendental Hobo

a memoir by A. Iwasa

Chapter 1?

I often think of September 29th, 2001 as my birthday.  It was the first time I marched in Washington, DC, and in many ways was the culmination of a process that started about three years earlier when I found out about the School of the Americas (SOA), a Latin American military officers’ training facility located at Ft. Benning, GA.  But that day in DC there were two demonstrations against the impending war in Afghanistan, and I participated in both.

I had been to protests before, but nothing I had experienced in Cleveland, OH (Clevo) prepared me for the tense and sometimes violent Anti-Capitalist Convergence (ACC) march on the World Bank, which ended with hundreds of us getting detained in the plaza in front of the building.

In retrospect, of course, the differences make total sense.  What’s demonstrating for the legalization of marijuana with maybe three hundred people mostly too stoned for any sort of serious shenanigans, or participating in a so-called solidarity rally while people on the actual front lines are breaking unjust laws elsewhere?

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Synchronized Chaos April 2016: Escape Artistry

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Tony LongShanks LeTigre a k a “GlamorTramp” here, guest writing this month’s editorial letter for the April 2016 issue of Synchronized Chaos! After a few years as a regular contributor, Cristina asked me to help out with editing duties this month and possibly ongoing. We have in mind a site makeover and enhanced graphics for the near future, as well, so stay tuned for the further evolution of this longrunning international literary webzine!

After mulling over this month’s theme, I sensed a lot of pain, longing for escape in various ways, yearning for the past and for people of the past (our former selves as well as others), the arrow of time that points forward and leaves us often looking mournfully backwards — all of this no doubt reflecting, or enhanced by, the seemingly endless strife that threatens to eclipse the better world we hope the human race can get to!

This month we have inquiries into the nature of poetry by one of the most acclaimed and dedicated American authors working today, Christopher Bernard, and of mathematics and its relation to philosophy by my humble self.

Michael Robinson graces us with three short poems that express yearning for his deceased mother, “dreams of peace without the sounds of gunfire or the cries of death,” and a sepulchral longing for death and escape. His lean lines bristle with dark emotion, inspired also by systemic racism as related to black folks in particular, drug addiction and related dolors of street life.

Nowadays it seems that humans are our own worst enemies much of the time, but an essay by Rui Carvalho covering Alejandro González Iñárritu The Revenant (2015), a film concerning “a frontiersman on a fur trading expedition in the 1820” who “fights for survival after being mauled by a bear and left for dead by members of his own hunting team” (per IMDb), reminds us that there was a time when humans struggled with nature and its animals as much or more than with one another. The theme of The Revenant, as distilled by Carvalho, is that “Life is like a tree: although a branch might be lost, the important is to realize the tree remains strong as long as the trunk remains firm and supports all the other branches.” Carvalho illustrates his review with original artwork, as well.

While others cry into their pillows and long for yesterday, Kristen Caven keeps things lighthearted and upbeat with some retail therapy in “Take a Walk in My Scarpa.” Her ode to the material luxury of Italian leather also raises the interesting issue of language and the dissonance it can cause when a word doesn’t sound the way we think it should.

Joan Beebe, on the other hand, finds that the best things in life are free, like “The rising and setting of the sun,” as she titles her poem celebrating our celestial mother, the way the Sun nourishes us (and never more so than on the threshold of spring, which I for one am very much enjoying right now in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.A.!)

K.C. Fontaine confers upon us a melancholy painting in the form of a poem, “Slow Suicide,” about a Pakistani painter whose studio is “a shrine to her lost self,” which seems to express a desolate present moment colored by nostalgia and regret.

Finally, we have a prose poem from Bangalore by Aditya Shankar about travel and the mingled pleasure and loneliness of traveling, with reference to art work by painter  Abanindranath Tagore, which again expresses a desire for sanctuary, to be safely holed up in control of one’s creative endeavors, and the fine image of home as “a museum of achievement.”

Cristina asked me to choose an image to accompany this letter. I went to the website of the New York Public Library, which recently released 180,000 new digital images from their archive into the public domain, and searched the term “escape.” I went with a racially charged image, as you can see above. The harsh reminder of our not-so-distant past seems to me necessary in light of recent and ongoing events pertaining to systemic racism, police brutality and non-accountability.

Sorry to be so dark… I really believe we’re going to come through all this into a better world! Getting there is just going to be a challenge.

Poetry from Michael Robinson

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Dreams beyond the Grave

Many dreams drift from cloud to cloud. Dreams of peace without the sounds of gunfire or the cries of death. I watch the moon as it sinks behind the horizon, and I wonder, when will my nightmares of living in the inner-city end? Watching the peacocks’ feathers blooming, I lie quietly in my grave — and peace has found me.

*     *     *

Black Boys II

Angry at life and angry at a system that keeps them incarcerated to a promise of a life without body piercings and tattoos; but hope is lost from a life spent avoiding the police. Mothers addicted to crack cocaine lie upon urine-strained mattresses. Some escape this life, and climb and climb and climb, and finally reach the safety of the mountains. And it is there that love flourishes; there that sanctuary is found. Beyond the stars that glow at night. A soul no longer thirsts for the safety of home: no longer in the heat of the streets.

*     *     *

Mother II

I want to send flowers to my mother, but she has passed away. I would like to visit her her grave and let her know that I have finally found the better side of life. There is a place on earth which reflects heaven. No longer do I cry into my pillow.

*     *     *

Essay from Rui Carvalho

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Cinema Critique: The Revenant by Rui M. Carvalho (28 March 2016)

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Inspired by true events, The Revenant, a movie directed by Alejandro Iñárritu, is an example of a film whose trailer alone makes us feel it has a significant message to transmit. Visually, it might be considered almost a new genre of western, which we might call the “frozen western.”

The sentence “I’m not afraid to die any more, I done it already” surely creates on us a deep first impression, expressing the idea that there’s no turning back: only a landscape in front, and a shadow behind the speaker. This dramatic first impression is further emphasized by the contrast between ice — dominant, mostly blue and grey — and, sometimes, small dots of fire, mostly yellow and orange. A human tragedy plays out in the course of the movie, in which divers persons confront the meaning of their lives; this being especially obvious during one of the last scenes, in which the aggressor, played by Tom Hardy, speaks with the hero (or surviving victim, if you please), played by Leonardo Dicaprio, and confronts us all with deep questions: What is justice for? What types of justice are there and what are the ones we want? Should justice be a constructive process?

This type of reasoning is an example of what some cinematic theorists consider to be the psychological role of film: as a tool to give new significance to reality, to educate and influence the citizenry. The Guardian asserts that cinema can be valuable for children’s and young peoples’ learning and cultural experience (The Guardian, 28 March 2016). And this can be seen as a detail of a big process of civilization, which “is not linear and conscious” (Cultural Studies Now, 28 March 2016).

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