All Entries in the "Poetry" Category

Dragonflies Steven Schroeder

After rain, dragonflies
shimmer eye high
over a footbridge,
sprinkle sun
like holy water on
every morning pilgrim.

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Compulsory Military Exercise Steven Schroeder

Early morning, three
go slow against a sleepy
river of child soldiers
marching to someone’s idea
of a good war. The driver
of a small car honks
at every one as though
he thinks the sound will
make them turn
and say no,
but they flow
like water
around a rock
that has fallen
into the stream,
and he moves on
at the pace they set.
Another, in an SUV, is accustomed [...]

Love-Song Badri Narayan

Moon’s collar
and star’s button in my shirt.
Brumous feet of a gazelle running on the back of hills
in my shirt.
Desire to meet the gold-haired girl
in my shirt.
Ire of fathers
and discontent of the guards of society
in my shirt.
Romance of a summer-evening
and the excitement of autumn
in my shirt.
Bands of seasons
in my shirt.
Yes my dear! Drums of clouds
in my [...]

Faith Badri Narayan

I am mortal
but the book that I write so meticulously
is more mortal.
I am mortal
but my photographs kept in this album
are no less mortal than me,
penned down over so many years
these diaries of mortal-me
are even more mortal –
and how fleeting is my faith
that I would take these along beyond time.
I order my statues in my own [...]

Spare the Air Day Iris A. Law (USA)

San Francisco breaks out in carnival colours.
It seems the whole city has turned out
in spontaneous celebration. Even the sun is jubilant,
dancing over stuccoed walls and crooked wire fences,
splashing hipster one-stories with lipstick pinks and sky-stone blues,
mixing them in against the stubble of the sunburned hills,
a mural as colourful as the people now crowding onto [...]

Airport, T-Minus-Four Hours Iris A. Law (USA)

Having eaten my apple and returned my book to its dust jacket,
I sit, staring straight forward, keeping time to the bump
of bags rolling over linoleum as the light glances off the aileron
of a passing plane, slips across the face of the woman sitting beside me.
She is slumped forward in sleep, newspaper pressed to her cheek
like [...]

Bones Iris A. Law (USA)

If I slipped my hand
up under the strong curved
lines of your ribs, or trailed
my palm along the jut
of your coal-black thigh, would
you notice its warm pressure,
feel its remove from your fleshless
existence, collagen and keratin
startling against your naked bones?
A small boy chases a girl around
your cordon, clinging and dodging,
patella and tibia the axis of their whirling [...]

Currency Joel M. Toledo

I don’t anymore get impressed by sudden things
like thunderclaps or surprise birthday parties.
What I had wanted to say that September,
increments of sunlight bursting open
the hearts of surrounding children, is that
I wish instead I have grown old knowing
how to fish, for example, or to swim.
I walk into bookstores and feel
so much ache in their finish
and in [...]

Heart

I don’t anymore want melody
with its want for pleasing and pattern
and why should I have it lilting in the background
when consoling relatives? My heart
is forged for frailty and failure.
I am accepting this now: its many vessels
leading to sorrow, its southpaw stance. I pin
a right hand over it at times, out of duty or
earnestness or just [...]

Disparate Trajectories Inara Cedrins

I consider legends of the constellations, lovers
that revolve around each other perpetually
unsatisfied. That brief time we shared a room
you’d smile in your sleep, turning your face
toward me. You were disarming.
Our connection was tenuous and fragile
as the bonsai bought in China,
crushed into my camera bag, carried
through Mongolia and Taiwan,
smuggled past Customs into the country.
Across a black [...]