Sto pesnikov in pesnic v samoizolaciji – Poezija, pesmi, knjige, literatura na portalu za književnost in mišljenje. Društvo slovenskih pisateljev.
Zahvaljujemo se vsem, ki so našo stran podprli z všečkom!
Verižna pesem, ki jo je spisalo 100 glasov iz 47 dežel v obdobju samoizolacije …
Curator: Ioana Morpurgo
AIRBORNE PARTICLES
– a collective poem (spring-summer, 2020)
Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deeply. (Hafiz, C14th Persia)
From your chin drips not blood but wine
As outside the birds warble:
The World is ours now.
In quarantine you have words.
So, cheer up oh Hafız for you had no world but words
Even if nobody understood what you wrote but the birds. (Gökçenur Çelebioglu, Istanbul, Turkey)
I hear the kestrel and the koel calling in streets
emptied of screeching, braking cars. The stoplights
blink red, tapping out a virus alert.
Might that be a coded verse from you, Hafiz,
a password to a gate that we could each open
in our different scripts, our separate solitudes? (Ranjit Hoskote, Bombay, India)
God stays on the internet watching the human insomnia
as the subworlds in the computer drift at extreme speed.
Nights are carbonized as all nights,
meanwhile days are sweaty because of utopias and lifebuoys.
Give me the perfect word to match in a poem for everybody,
give me the new language for sharing seclusion. (Ruxandra Cesereanu, Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
Is the tree alone
with its shadow cast by the moon on the humming earth?
Is the moon lonely up there
when the waves wash the back of a whale?
Solitude is an etude with an attitude
to find the cosmic WiFi emitted from Buddha’s router. (Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, Yokohama, Japan)
I look out the window down the dark stairs
towards the frozen shadow.
I’m on a journey
that questions the walls,
a journey that is
the silence between two thoughts. (Elisa Biagini, Florence, Italy)
Running out of the room to the empty balcony
Running between the walls of my mind, are my gym exercises for today.
Collecting the letters from my brain into silent words is my weapon.
Now I can join the revolution
ready to fight the invisible coronated dictator. (Menachem M. Falek, Mevaseret Jerusalem, Israel)
Friend, which revolution do you speak of?
Surrender! Inti biss Inti biss – only these four walls
speak your language. The ceiling sound-proofed
against kestrel and kite,
the codes Coptic, undecipherable –
Look – the floor swells in the wake of a rubber boat – (Abigail Ardelle Zammit, Lija, Malta)
Rubber made of fossil blood that noble creatures
Were juiced for by ignoble critters who drive limos
All around a planet’s nightmare doomed to last
Very little days and few disgusted oceanic crusts
Cut open for the rubberletting and the sailing glitter
Of a prow that no prowess provoked but a stern necromancer (Pedro Larrea, Forest, Virginia,USA/Spain)
So would you prefer to be out there than in? Whose brain
would you choose for a night like this, Hafiz — whose madness
to hold close, closer, whose voice to twist into your own as the water in the pipes turns
slowly in the walls, as your eyes learn to peel back
this thin ceiling, seeking kestrels, but always finding
these strange eyes blinking back? (Alice Miller, Berlin, Germany/New Zealand)
Blinking seems to be all we can do
in the wake of the last boat that has left, sailing
into a cruise ship graveyard, bodies stacked like makeshift
hospitals, miracles ventilating in cities where
nobody gets tested, so nobody stays positive. Hafiz,
what do you see when you are gasping for air? (Marc Nair, Singapore)
And when the last boat has left
you sit there like a letter in a misspelled word
circled with red by the proofreader. And you see
a long red arrow stretching from you
to the place you belong. Which is now a blank space. (Kārlis Vērdinš, St. Louis Missouri, USA/Latvia)
Filled spaces divide like cells; everybody is gardening. Everybody
is clapping, each clap dividing into another clap.
A new meme circulates of kestrels
delivering advice from a podium.
You crack open the last tin of Strongbow
and tilt its huntsman’s arrow towards the sky (Nicky Arscott, Llanbrynmair, Wales, UK)
But in our current sky
you are just a stranded cloud
an ulcer wounding the blue
Alone now in this Limbo
wear the rags of memory
reap nature’s rage (Vasilis Pandis, Corfu, Greece)
In thousands, migrant workers march home — hungry footsteps on empty highways
accentuate an irony — ‘social distancing’, a privilege only powerful can afford.
Cretins spray bleach on unprotected poor, clap, bang plates, ring bells, blow conches, light fires
to rid the voodoo — karuna’s karma, infected. When shall we sing our dream’s epiphanies, Hafiz?
My lungs heave, slow-grating metallic-crackles struggle to escape the filigreed windpipes —
I persist in my prayers. I’m afraid of Him. Hope, heed, heal — our song, in present tense.
(Sudeep Sen, New Delhi, India)
Happy beings are extremely dangerous. So let us be happy –
let us sing under the happy sky which crushes us so tenderly,
let us dream our most beloved dead,
let us be what the sky dreams of when it feels as fragile & desperate
as the humans it crushes. (Radu Vancu, Sibiu, Romania)
We push back the walls
And erase the tally marks
And build a window of words
With a view of the sky’s beating pulse
We fill our lungs with life
And we dance over the veins of Death. (Roja Chamankar, Austin Texas, USA / Iran)
Self-isolation is a question of growth
as flowers on the mountain surrounded by stones look for a hole in the ground.
Compare Socrates, who never left Athens,
John Climacus with his Ladder of Divine Ascent
or Christ on the Cross embracing all the world with his outstretched arms.
Self-isolation is when the purpose of vertical is a support or fate.
(Tsvetanka Elenkova, Sofia, Bulgaria)
Lines up and down, lines across, guidelines and headlines
turn me against the handle to my own front door,
converge on a garden gate I no longer fully trust.
Even my shoes are not above suspicion. I’m careful,
out shopping, to step between the airborne particles.
Socrates, Hafiz, Christ let this be over please. (Horatio Morpurgo, Bridport, England, UK)
And yet back home I find an unexpected form of belonging
as I glance, smilingly, at my own face at a virtual party
with my dearest friends doing the same:
sharing, together, our most intimate smile –
the one usually reserved
for the mirror’s eyes only. (Juana Adcock, Glasgow, UK/ Mexico)
There was an outer world once. A school for my emotions.
They believe what they’ve learned there not from me.
I don’t introduce them to my friends – they don’t know how to behave.
If I had kids maybe I wouldn’t become obsessed with emotions.
So I sent them to my lover on Sundays, they like how she cooks. (Efe Duyan, Istanbul, Turkey)
Would you play Ticket to Ride with me?
It is a game with blue and red and yellow little trains.
I see the river Mississippi from my train. Now I see the river Ob in Siberia, and the river Ii in Finland.
All equally far, all equally alive. I read about rivers, I read about water.
I see a spider between two window panes. It sees me here in my room, it sees the birch tree outside.
Light green. (Riina Katajavuori, Helsinki, Finland)
I look at my unemployed hands, which stopped working
Real became more real, more touchable
Like an old song, scent or angular form from “then”
Still feel between now and “then”, between all security lines
Drawn here last night. It looks like a distant constellation
From my steamy window, from my dock (Radek Kobierski, Katowice, Poland)
There is no “then” or again
only many versions of “now” in this futureless frame of existence.
If all my nows could be measured for meaning,
hold it against the last litre of detergent
study the brand I trusted, to wash my hands of
the memory of purposeful touch. (Melizarani T.Selva, Subang Jaya, Malaysia)
But there is no such “detergent“ that can clean collective memory of freedom, in this “Waste Land“
turned into a concentration prison, where freedom of movement has working hours
and people are imprisoned in special camp-quarantines .
The virus of fear is released from the speakers and it spreads (“dramatically”) fast through social media,
patrols in front of the building entrances like guard dogs between the barracks, in the “past”.
Our “today” and our “tomorrow” are what the gods of propaganda will announce.
(Dejan Matić, Belgrade, Serbia)
Time – stilled, yet so elastic. Were you to ask me
what day it is, I might fumble, uncertain of
what you mean. Was April the cruellest month?
Now the gods of propaganda would have us believe
tomorrow’s “the day” – urging us to resume, repossess, redress,
when there’s still so much to undo, unleash, unlearn. (Nadia Mifsud, Lyon, France / Malta)
What day is it then? Go on. What May is it that comes, what may?
What surrender, what crush of river whine, what orchestral yawn?
More whatever blessed Bulmers then [thank god the Dizzy Hunter delivers] and
Let us aloudly wonder What apple swells inside to grasp the elasticity of desire?
We know who knows nothing, who knows the sound of one hand clasping
A bouquet of hemlock… Listen… the door handle turns for thee. (Greg Koehler, Texas, USA)
The blackbirds in the yard are on their second clutch of eggs.
The pigeons, sparrows, and blue-tits strut, skip and flit as becoming
to their size and station. Inside we have a prime minister
perched on an invisible branch. He speaks to us alone. This is your yard,
he tells us. Workers return in the cold wind. They too are invisible. (George Szirtes, Norfolk, UK)
Mid May already the sun is not the same
Eighteen bodies in pieces on the railway tracks
Too hungry to walk simply fell asleep, deep is this night
A freight train runs over, Corona still far behind
A girl child is born on the roadside, the mother still walks for another twelve miles
(Savita Singh, Delhi, India)
we need not stay
return with me to the Garden
birds there sing a different tune
teshuvah! they sing, return
beloved, surely You hear (Gabriel Rosenstock, Dublin, Ireland)
I will be gulping chilled water from the palms of my hands
tap water which I savour
and drink on and on and savour even more
and through this comes my awareness
to the flavour of reality
and the ephemeral (Zadok Alon, Mevaseret Jerusalem, Israel)
We can still find the time to read a hundred or so books
Burst into song about fifty times
We might still even find time to meet
And kiss in front of everyone
What do you think – if we did all that
Would the 22nd century come any sooner? (Olja Savičević, Island Korčula, Croatia)
Don’t believe what you think
This small world that lies inside you is too big to fail
Looking for borders you will never cross
Because there is no end and no beginning
You are floating, so swim (Michaël Vandebril, Antwerp, Belgium)
And nothing’s too small—
a midnight touch, a healthy kick inside the womb, teeth in your mouth, a bowl of steaming rice.
Say it: Gratitude. Cut your loneliness with its song.
The cotton sheets, roof, your breath… even this pen on its last stretch of ink.
(Sholeh Wolpé, Los Angeles, USA)
Profound is solitude in two glasses of wine – a ruddy horse and a white horse.
Nothing is as it seems to be, when you have it all and no one to share it with.
Soon it will rain and the doors will be shut – those inside are in, no others will make it,
Two glasses of wine, a black horse in the jug – I now have it all, but no one to share it with.
(Arian Leka, Tirana, Albania)
After the rain I look ahead in the field.
Suddenly, I’m no more alone:
a butterfly waits for me, in the grass.
I look at her, waiting she keeps quiet,
without flying – so that nothing changes
on the other side of the planet. (Nuno Júdice, Lisbon, Portugal)
The sky is grey, it’s going to be a rainy day. Enjoy it like a blossoming honeysuckle shrub. Long curly branches stretched out to the sky in prayers. It will soon be Pentecost. Get rid of fear and loneliness. Enough of this exile. A breath of fresh air. A good walk in the morning. Happy feet, happy heart. My mask is smiling broadly. Yes, I’ve put a smile on it. My smile for you, passer-by.
(Doina Ioanid, Jilava, Romania)
Even if the air is transparent as memory and if new subtle birds haunt our minds, our exile is stubborn as never. It taught us to cross the savage rivers at any moment through stormy or peaceful weathers, darkness or yellowish visions. We have a secret labyrinth that communicates with the earth beauty,
where animals, trees and human beings are elusive. No way to impose us social isolation, we are present in any breath of life. As we are invisible to those who guide us into distress, we can dance nude and bright as thousands of suns. We can share the sacred fire of our feet travelling silently from one to the other. (Michel Cassir, Paris, France/Lebanon)
In the cold spring, cut deeply into this Pennsylvanian hill by the lake,
I crouch in front of the cast iron wood stove, just like he did
in the six months he had here.
Now it’s me and the fire, and the action unfolding in flames.
One hardly needs permission to be by oneself.
Now I have it. (Irina Mashinski, LordsValley, PA, USA/ Russia)
it’s early in the morning and empty streets,
soldiers, police, check-points, all tension
my dog has no sense for isolation, we try to escape
slowly we smuggle to the park … and the forest behind
deer are watching us curiously, pheasants, rabbits,
we are calm … finally (Brane Mozetič, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
children with swift feet jumping from behind
the bushes, we entirely forgot the children
not even six years old, playing: I-wanna-be-a-virus-too
wearing surgical masks for no other reason but
’cause everyone does;
and still: they are not scared, they sing through the fabric (Andrea Grill, Vienna, Austria)
of etiquette. it has entered my dreams: again and again
I retrieve my hand from the hands of friends and strangers
when we accidentally forget the rule of no handshakes
and I wake up feeling the touch of human skin
lingering in my palm like the unwelcome memory
of an old embarrassment (Sjón, Reykjavík, Iceland)
Known men, unknown vendors, their itinerant bounty fills my open sacks. Deranged by sudden
beauty, I want to weep or kneel, to thank each person thrice. Lalu. Abaji. Kallappa. I have forgotten
the sequence of obedience. I stand too close, hold too hard. At noon I am the only walker along un- bridgeable gaps. What changes hands is the crush of notes, the currency of lines. Ripened fruit.
Bitter gourd. Amaltas all over the roads, blood all over our hands. They crowd me, each dying, alone. (Sampurna Chattarji, Thane, Maharashtra, India)
Loneliness, my friend,
are you still here in this old house with me?
This morning I walked into the empty room
and saw your breath disappear from the window (Arjan Hut, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands)
My friend, we are always alone without loneliness –
molecules of a total human being. The Great Hack
has closed and opened our arms-doors, but what disappears disappears
to reappear where the sound of things is deep
like backbone of buildings, which press
with roots the earth and the void, void and earth (Maria Grazia Calandrone, Roma, Italy)
45. lately I’ve often had the same bad dream
my elderly mother disappears disappears
to reappear where the sound of things is deep
come here my son – she tells me – to hear the spring
to smell the flowers in my garden
I can’t, mother – I reply – because I’m wearing a surgical mask (Ivan Hristov, Sofia, Bulgaria)
46. we try forming an opinion or at least ourselves around it
but it keeps slipping through our fingers like every
distance and fact and number and heated speech given by the
lack of presence – punctuation divides us seamlessly while
sourdough is the only one learning everything about us
by seeing what giving up truly means (Csilla Hajnal Nagy, Istanbul, Turkey/Hungary)
47. I walk alone under the setting sun –in a memory–
feeling the touch of tar, receiving the fading light.
I caress my children in their sleep, miles away, I sing for them.
I’m learning how to access other consciousness in the distance.
Deep and ephemeral is the cup of solitude.
Hafiz, wake up: the gods of propaganda are upon us! (Nuño Aguirre, Spain/Pretoria)
48. I swear these rooms are eating me
night by increasing night, out there
creeping in at the keyholes and lintels
till on the day that dawn arrives,
the sky’s door at last ajar, I’ll not
have the strength to push it open. (Jane Draycott, Oxford, UK)
49. Now that old fraud Time is in your custody.
Soon the rain comes free as if uncuffed
from a madhouse. The shadows of books
frown from thronging shelves. This solitude
is a prayer too loud for God’s pity. Try
to swim in it, out of view of the angels. (Alvin Pang, Singapore)
50. dreamt that I was a dog
on tiptoes, softly licking your lips, neck, ears
in the morning my phone was still on
You were sleeping in it – wet and blessed
I found your name and jumped into stanza 20
and promised myself never to go back in my empty bed (Madara Gruntmane, Riga, Latvia)
51. a pale image of yourself inside this eye
with the bulb fully focused on the wall
hanging mirror’s neat reflection while
certain thoughts’ noise humming ears
are stereo-typing bit by bit on this key-
board merged in a stark solid solitude (Alessandro Mistrorigo, Venice, Italy)
52. so solid, my dear Hafiz, that
on this slow and never-ending Sunday,
Beauty sits by the window
in her gold and silk and satin clothes
and desperately weeps
because no one will see her. (Maria do Rosário Pedreira, Lisbon, Portugal)
53. Yes, she then knocks at my door,
dressed in so many words, so many lines.
She knocks like the wind from the north-east.
But I do not open – I’m not allowed.
I rest against the very thick walls that surround me.
I waste my life dying. (Immanuel Mifsud, Ħaż-Żebbuġ, Malta)
54. I will be beautiful for the rest of my life after this. I will be
dangerous, I will be. The voice of a two year old says, Many things have died. He speaks of the badger rotting into the river, the flat mouse in the dandelions, the cat who didn’t cross the road and the baby crow, soaked and still in a rock-pool. But this is not what the world hears.
We hear foreign winds against our eardrumbs, in all their raging tongues,
today. And we hold ourselves, knowing that death is in every breath.
(Siân Melangell Dafydd, Rhos-y-Gwaliau, Wales, UK)
55. The wind is the breath which carries the birds
that are verbs reminding us in mid-flight:
The words we speak are most foreign to us
if we isolate a wordless self from ourselves (Yiorgos Chouliaras, Athens, Greece)
56. for forty days and forty nights. I keep vigil in my study,
circle in square, persevere at my desk, translating my efforts
at annihilation into coherent verse. My Beloved remains elusive.
I crumple yet another parchment and feed it to my lion –
eater of tongues and intransigent lovers. The peacock lays its head
in my lap, dressed in so many words, but I am not distracted.
(Mustansir Dalvi, New Panvel, India)
57. Our bodies display the wounds that tear up the world
Our bodies pray stigmatized by the pandemic
We breathe only thanks to the breath of trees
We greet the day thanks to unquenchable hope (Margaret Saine, Los Angeles, California)
58. We’re surpassed by the truth about ourselves,
this sum of big and small dark moments.
Our tongue-tied mouth reaches for the world
serene in its otherness. Silence pulsates. Spring is
cracked open like an orange by the feeble fingers of a child. (Alen Bešić, Novi Sad, Serbia)
59. For still more silence that pulsates.
What doesn’t kill you, just hurts, it was said on the news.
I ask myself if I believe that.
I’ve stood in the rain so often that it starts to feel real.
That silence that pulsates. All the vacancies connected
like a puzzle with an image of a nurse. (Mathura, Lelle, Estonia)
60. At first
wherever sleep caught my eyes
I made my bed,
now my dreams no longer return
alone I weep in an empty grave,
restless. (Eric Ngalle Charles, Leckwith, Wales, UK/Cameroon)
61. Two little girls
on two neighbouring dacha plots
jumping up and down on their trampolines
throw longing glances at each other
across the fence. (Marina Boroditskaya, Moscow, Russia)
62. Through the wooden slats that make good neighbours
All the better to love them like thyself,
But I shun neighbours like I shun the Self
Extracted by these magnet hands,
In wind-up scraps and broken code,
offered up, what remains: a light that walks. (Jordan A. Y. Smith, Tokyo, Japan)
63. In the empty streets,
hearts pull echoes between lights,
and witness silence
surrender to love (Nathalie Handal, New York, USA)
64. to blue for the blue Pacific
and time once again to sing:
an angel gave me this crayon
I think I glimpsed
his wing (Bill Manhire, Wellington, New Zealand)
65. cling or cry on paper about past chances lovers cities or foes
the different stages: first suspicion of a fuckery too massive for any haiku
second flashes and shadows of missing letters
third isolation equals privilege (what kind of wisdom is that?)
and listed losses form an improvised wave
to soften todays terrific edge (Robert Prosser, Alpbach, Austria)
66. On this terrific edge I stand
Waiting for a lifeline
As birds in my ceiling
sing hope in my ears
So, dear Hafiz, I won’t
surrender my loneliness so quickly (Nnane Ntube, Yaounde, Cameroon)
67. I see your eyes bottomless, welling up
: solitude hanging letter by letter, crawling
towards your tender mouth, your chest.
Salt. Taste your yearning body
swinging, crystals crunching, shining.
A yawning desert, violet. (Simone Inguanez, In-Naxxar, Malta)
68. The desert in faraway lands, black drums, a dry tree trunk.
The old solitude – naked, damned, evil.
The city in a new land, gentle violins, a shiny silver screen.
The new solitude – cozy, blessed, fresh.
In me, around me, for me – solitude, unavoidable.
Wanted, no matter dead or alive – wanted alone. (Milan Dobričić, Belgrade, Serbia / Lübeck, Germany)
69. Desert means a thick yellow illumination.
The tip of a knife that crawls down the spine of the quotidian –
we accepted it as the taste of this summer.
Our breath is an owl in the betel plantation. (Subhro Bandopadhyay, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India)
70. The days unfold inwards as outwards
and I keep my eyes on a tiny spider
outside my windowpane, I strive to be
as lonely and persistent as I weave my web (Francesca Cricelli, Reykjavíc, Iceland/Brazil/Italy)
71. Solitudinal air through the window grills—
a form of speaking to unspeak. You flap
the curtains closed, open—all this daily
expanding and contracting of lung, of breath.
Inscape to outscape: private then social,
the world bending on its one grazed knee. (James Byrne, Liverpool, England, UK)
72. It was a time to stare at the mirror
–the veil of travel blown away by static days –
skulls and wings reflected, the poem
struggling to surface, clinging to the frame.
Then prayer crossed the sill of pain, unlocking
phoenix’s cage, to free the word from solitude. (Zingonia Zingone, Rome, Italy/Costa Rica)
73. The Białowieża Forest flourished under Göring’s control.
All canvases are perpetually quarantined.
The past has never been before.
When the people are gone, God his possessions regains,
the Maasai believe in Kenya.
No one’s life is safe beyond the prison bars. (Yordan Efftimov, Sofia, Bulgaria)
74. I found out today that the collective soul can be woken up
by crystal clean rain drop over the birch’s arms raised up,
yet in our village all birch trees grow into whips
and people drink more and more, not being able to soothe their thirst (Inga Gaile, Riga, Latvia)
75. every night, I dusted the wings that were commended to me,
the dream of flying one day, to see the glory of the souled ones
from above. then my mom used to come and check my fever,
saying “you have returned your body my child” and she’d cover me (Selahattin Yolgiden, İstanbul, Turkey)
76. I wander deserts
In search of you, Oh Hafiz.
Dust particles enter my eyes
Surf my tears.
Yet I won’t surrender so quickly
To find the words that decipher my loneliness. (Ro Mehrooz, Rohingya, Myanmar/Bangladesh)
77. gale of glittering wings
a tongue flicks the tulip’s eye
scent and sight unbind
I was alone in the crowd
this solitude thrills with life (Waqas Khwaja, Atlanta, Georgia, USA/Pakistan)
78. Heat in an attic room, and the nights already
drawing in — how will we remember
this year when it was more convenient
for summer not to come, and yet it did?
As still as in a desert, time
glides seamlessly from March into July. (Richard O’Brien, Birmingham, UK)
79. Butterflies and flowers forget
the flow of time, July
or March, feasting or
flaunting nude, but not nude,
unfazed by millions of
human hermits ad interim. (Meifu Wang, Taipei, Taiwan and Seattle, USA)
80. Not aware of time, waltzed above a stream,
flapping its wings, free from the screams of cities,
then rested on a beam in the garden’s splendour of sunshine and of song
like a bird in a nest pecking at spilled seed,
with wings that kiss the petals of flowers,
of beauty and freedom, more precious than gold. (Ayo Ayoola-Amale, Accra, Ghana/Nigeria)
81. The truth is – I can’t cancel time, can I?
It feels now as an odd form of happiness
Not being able to move, to speak, to touch.
Frankly, we all desired it, deep inside.
Amid writing this a ladybird came,
Spun on her tiny toes and – flew away. (Miroslav Kirin, Zagreb, Croatia)
82. There is no time only clocks. No beginning…this poem began before I was born…
No beginning…this poem will keep speaking beyond and be spoken until…
My Oglala Sioux friends (‘’the original people’’) believe that a person doesn’t die
Until the last person who can remember anything about that person dies
‘’If there is enough blue in the sky to patch a man’s pants it’s going y be a nice day’’
My dead mother continually says her dead mother’s grandmother says when we see.
(Craig Czury, Wileks-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA)
83. It’s better to think deep, not far
and not lift up mine eyes unto the hills
when I live on the plain
or page through the days as though
they were nature descriptions
delaying the plot. (Agi Mishol, Kfar Mordechay, Israel)
84. I like to sit in the room with an open window and be touched
by the breeze; not your touch but still welcome in this strange
disquieted world. It’s June, past solstice, the year already looking
towards its end as we all do, from the moment we’re born; who
can we trust now but old friends: water, light, breeze. (Jenny Lewis, Oxford, UK)
85. they said tomorrow was another day
but tomorrow is today
and no one can breathe
it sounded like a joke at the beginning
July was far away but today is July
where are we going to ? (Djimeli Raoul, Kwanzaa, Cameroon)
86. I asked myself three things: “If I am not Hafiz, who am I?
If I am only Hafiz, am I not chopped liver? And
Why eat one etrog now, when
Adjusting for inflation, I could eat ten tomorrow?”
But Hafiz answered me, “You, my friend, are a deep fake
Created in the image of God. Now pass the etrog.” (Zohar Atkins, New York, USA)
87. Coming from the islands of Bob Marley’s rising sun,
Etrog would not be enough. Perhaps a drag on ganga would do.
But a quiet walk in the woods wakens senses.
I hear trees speak and birds whistling in choruses.
And Bob Marley, the companion, in my head, says,
“don’t worry about a thing, everything’s going to be alright.
(Althea Romeo- Mark, Basel, Switzerland / Antigua and Barbuda/ US Virgin Islands)
88. No nightingale sings afresh in a post-crimson-rose world because there is no mankind, oh Hafiz, only cruelty has survived these scorched human ruins. Civilization, insulated by empathy, encapsulates the dying trees and plastic paved sees with words and nothing else.
So, shall we seek past the whomping, through the whamming, beyond the whacking waves which will follow in exploring the wuthering paths of pre-post-continuous confinement, my dearest Buddha? Or will you, dearest Buddha together with Hafiz, both just hum static noise at the moon via a bad WiFi signal?
(Philip Meersman, Jette/Brussels, Belgium)
89. Hafiz, your body was used to the practice of fasting. And Buddha knows,
when we hold our breath the next one tastes like a banquet. Sleep,
a fast of light, but who knows solitude when the internet
twines itself between our eyelids, feasts on our intent, as we hunger
for each other, desire elsewhere than in our bodies. We
click on links: our nerve ending. Numb, we carry on.
(Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (aka Amamoo) , Johannesburg, South Africa)
90. And on: where the calendar hurtles we follow
With stubborn attempts to keep life in one piece,
Engulfed by the bleary gestalt of events
But moved in these wilderness days to be thankful
For bumping of elbows, unwavering neighbours,
And medical science, that art of Apollo. (Andrew Wynn Owen, Oxford, UK)
91. An old woman leaned on a windowsill,
sticking her nose out for the first time this spring,
and a dog in the middle of a deserted street –
the outside and the inside
the lost and the unfound
are looking at each other in the rays of early May. (Ostap Slyvynsky, Lviv, Ukraine)
92. So the island without sea views
Sees around the wandering mutt
(Visitor in her waters), waters
Visible: hers in part. But then, again,
The island that has no ocean views, the
Long-standing vexations regarding beach access. (Alex Wong, Cambridge, UK)
93. Orchids outside my window used to pretend they were dead
Each time someone tried to touch them
But no one touches them now
Sun’s going down, and dead flies pile up on my verandah
I want to go somewhere but there’s no somewhere
Just this place where the landscape mimics the irreverence of an island
(Maung Day, Yangon, Burma/Myanmar)
94. The person in this house, their island a black hole. We try
and break the suction with noise from our side. It is not solitude
when you can’t find yourself. The memory of
touch outside reach. Let’s sit once more,
follow our breath. Hold, hold this, hold each other,
before the rest of what comforts us too goes somewhere
(Olumide Popoola, London, UK/Germany/Nigeria)
95. And not knowing we bought entire islands
From the supermarket in case solitude left behind
The products of our everyday – here’s money,
Quickly put gel on it; here’s lack of change,
My impervious normality, the warmth of sanitising decay.
(Jèssica Pujol Duran, Fremont, CA, USA/Mataró, Catalonia)
96. And in the middle of the mouth as if it were, in the middle of these months,
fear and contraction of the unexplored, Hafiz, now again,
coming from nowhere, the crystallised flower of the unexpected.
Then we descend towards the encounter, from everywhere,
without anticipation, together,
at this intimate moment of the real, in parsimony.
(Pedro Serrano, Montreal, Canada/ Mexico City, Mexico)
97. On the beach, few lights
just a slight movement
everyone in silence
with their loneliness.
Maybe this sand temple
is only inside me ? (Stéphane Bataillon, Montreuil, France)
98. I have seen the kestrels hover over long summer grass
between Tempelhof’s decommissioned runways and the kite-surfers
who ride the air above decaying temples of aviation there
but now I’m grounded down south in a fine winter prison the size of three islands
where sand whispers tinnitus in my ears. Better to share bird words with Hafiz
than tune in to the unilateral declarations of Ozymandias (Chris Price, Wellington, New Zealand)
99. Grounded down deep in this soil, the philodendrons
resemble us more than any bird will ever do,
even as we venture out to do some shopping,
no longer possessing mouths or wrinkles,
and so we wonder –
will our veiled faces grow a new leaf? (Marie Iljašenko, Prague, Czech Republic)
100. I traffic elsewheres for breath
each wing feather – a razor blade
my shadow cuts deeply across the sea of voices
kestrel of loneliness
gripping hope tight in my claws
to feed to my young and yours. (Ioana Morpurgo, Bridport, England, UK/Romania)
Friend, whatever you are, you must not stand still:
One must from one light into the other spill. * (Angelus Silesius, German/Polish poet)
*English version by Gabriel Rosenstock; original language – German
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