Author: poetryfest

Inside the ivory tower
We sit and wait for a prince
To come and cut the story short
Or maybe just our hair
While our hands grow scissors.

Bio: Diana Radovan (www.naturewriting.net), the author of the hybrid memoir Our Voices (2022), is a Romanian-born poet and Best of the Net nominee living in Germany. Her poems have appeared in Wild Roof Journal, Poetry Breakfast, Dog-Ear, Arc Journal, Feed, Wax Poetry and Art, World’s Best Poems Vol.1, Headline Poetry and Press, and elsewhere. She is currently looking for a publisher for her first poetry chapbook. Follow her on instagram @dianaradovanwriter.

The poet’s glance traverses the distance between Heaven and Earth, and back again.

As imagination bodies forth, the forms of things unknown,
the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and name.

With the distant storm, comes the poet’s vocation: To share with brethren the divine truth of Being.
History opens with the seduction of Holy Word.

As Demigod, between the time of Earth and Heaven, the poet is thrown, alienated, and beholden to art’s task.
In the emptiness of the night, singing the song of Fate unto others,
he foretells what is yet to be.

Bowing to Nature’s Omnipotence, in the presence of Helios,
his soul is consumed by the white light and heat of a thousand suns.
Struck and blinded, he is driven to madness.
The receiving and giving unto others exact a high penance.

“I would gladly turn homeward,” laments the poet, “for what harvest but pain have I reaped?
Can I return to the gods of my childhood and expect the same peace as before?
Can my art balance life’s suffering?”

Poetizing is a striving for atonement, a longing for a purified return to the hearth, to the feast,
in communion once again with the gods at their banquet table.

The poet’s song relives the ancient, torrential event of history’s eruption,
when Kronos tore from the womb of Mother Earth and language usurped the reign of Chaos.

Awaken us, poet, we who slumber, give us laws and give us life!
Venture into the eye of the storm that rages of the clashing of World and Earth,
where light and shadow dance over victory and defeat, blessing and curse, master and slave.

The poet creates, but his letter kills,
suffering the legitimacy of aesthetics, his sprit to spirits gives vigor and new life.

A Fire divinely gleaming wells up for you, poet,
and with great pain, yet quick with desire,
you hurl yourself headlong into Aetna’s furnace . . .

And once again the cries of celebration resound and the aroma of sacrifice permeates the aether.

Gladly, did not love restrain me,
deep as you plunged down,
I would follow

To the places that you are going don’t bear my ashes.
Cast faces of mine all your pasts,
Hurl from the peaks of new life that you are strolling.
When you passed from the arid valley,
If the pens that you distilled from my books had been dried,
You can get ready to say your last words maybe.

Let my bones not sprout again any way
To the morning of each stars that slipping.
And let none of deaf hear again
Screams that had been massed in my bone marrow.
The sorrow nights that created from my ashes of your fire
If any time return to you,
Any of ashes from the fire which you burned
shall not be given to you

I want the swallow with stones have been passed
From the cities that you already passed.
From the nineth city as you didn’t mind
From the tenth one why you mind my name
I want first you gathered shall be driven away,
The sounds of nights remained with me shall be sow then
To the earths that you tread on,
However to not take any ways with my dead foots.

Let none of children look again to the sky.
My voices that had been lost shall be hammered
To the forehead of life if it had been remained
The voices which even if the blind don’t wish to hear.
Even if just one passenger shall not come
From to Sina desert to Taif or from Tuva to Tih.
No man shall come from the distance of every corner of city
To the warners of your tribe
I hope The morning shall be nearer.

The people in Araf shall not go
To at most one paradise where smile has finished.

And if any time you decide to return back
Eventhough after you obviously see the hell,
Deliver the lamed dead
That I found it your eyes every dawn
First for the sake of my deads which you sacrificed your life
If you can deliver it to remaining colors of life.

I’M NOT HIDING MY FAT SHLONG
THERE’S NOT MODESTY IN MY ERECT DONG
THEY TELL TALL TALES, ANCIENT LEGENDS EVEN
STEPHEN HAWKING HAS DESCRIBED THIS PHENOMENON
GOING ON AND ON AND ON:
DANIIL SAFONOV’S
HUMONGOUS DONG
HIT THE BONG
MY DICKHOLE’S THE POINT OF ORIGIN OF THE RIVER MEKONG
A RIVER, YES, THAT’S HOW NATIVE TRIBES
DESCRIBE MY SEMEN
EVEN LINES OF METH, BUT THAT’S NOT RIGHT FOR ME
I DOSE IT LIKE A SCIENTIST, NOBEL PRIZE WINNER
DOCTOR BIG DONG
GO AHEAD SNORT THE LINES, LAB ASSISTANT,
I’LL STILL BE DRILLING
YOUR UNDERGRAD ASS
ALL EVENING

For some, as dawn breaks, there is new hope.
A hope of life, of change.
With prayer’s existence, the heart awakens and is not yet dead.
For others, the light is scarring and endless.
As the day slips away, one by one,
The chest pounds unevenly, falling upon deaf ears.
That first ray of light sears the blood red lids
As they crackle open, dredging up the past and the present.
That first warmth sends chills of freedom and security
Shooting all through the icy, crimson veins.
Peeking through the thin, fine hairs, a blurring tear forms.
Not from pain, but from life.
The ears perk as the songs of the uninhibited
Winged warriors pierce the beaten flesh.
The bones remind of the darkness before.
With the first small movement on the man-made floor.
The emptiness becomes numb as time draws out.
With the knowledge of need but the reality of drought.
The pupils peer around as the shadows grow long.
Seeking familiarity, a lone face in the many.

CRUMPLED AND DISCARDED THE PAPER BEGAN TO UNFOLD

INK BLACKENED WITH FEAR AND SORROW

A LIFETIME IN THE STROKE OF A PEN

A PRISONER OF THE STORIES TOLD

FAMILIAR WORDS SUSPENDED IN TIME

THEIR DISTANT ECHO STILL RINGING CLEAR

NEW MEANINGS BEGIN TO EMERGE

EACH TEAR EXPOSING THE LIGHT BENEATH

SOMEHOW THE PATH NOW SEEMS CLEAR

NO LONGER A PRISONER OF THE STORIES TOLD

Ups And Downs
But It Didn’t Have To Be That Way
Just To Understand You
I’ve Been Here With You My Whole Life
Son
Family, dude….that’s what it’s about inside and out
I took everything to try to make things better
I tried to share my successes with you
I ignore nothing you did because I have to keep living
So do you
Just don’t take it out on anyone like you took it out on me
I’m not a slave to your sickness
Neither are you.period.
Get better.love you and I’m always here.

We thought we surely knew
What’s good and bad, and true.
But study will dispel
Those lessons learned so well.

Indeed, they were so clear–
Those truths that we held dear.
So hard, as days grow long,
To gather we were wrong.

Reality is not
As simple as we thought.
The public do not know
The truth behind the show.

The media declared
That we should all be scared,
And hate the souls who crawl
Behind the prison wall.

Fists raised above our head,
We’re quick to damn and dread
Those buried in that lair–
Condemned to perish there.

This beaten path we tread
From fiction we have read.
Most versions fail to tell
That prison life is hell.

Most stories never said
That prison’s dark and red,
And souls who try too hard
Die quickly on the yard.

These teachings never told
How youth turns rarely old.
And hearts, afraid to beat,
Are ruptured in defeat.

The masks men use to sell
Indifference to their hell
And protect them from the glare
Of those who do not care.

Truth, too, dies in the yard,
For honesty’s too hard.
A mask, the devil’s hood,
Hides any hint of good.

Those convicts, to be sure
Deservedly endure
Good measure of our scorn
For evil they have borne.

“Impossible to see
They’re anything like me.”
Becomes our trite refrain
To vindicate the pain.

But faces behind bars
Are not so unlike ours.
Where hopes turn quick to sighs—
Dreams murdered by their lies.

They live in senseless strife,
This irony of life:
Hate spews with every breath,
Lest decency bring death.

I wonder now aloud
To patrons who are proud
To banish to such graves
This lot of kindred knaves.

Did they who lie within
Commit the greater sin?
Or we, who cast their fate
To graveyards groomed with hate?

Empty pages
become the opposite
on the materialisation
of words
Trying to get to neutrality
in between 1 and 0
the non existence of binarity?
Futile efforts to capture reality
or giving it a life?

A field of dancing poppies,
with Morphine visions we kissed. Whispering of dreams together, through trembling lips.

Wandering in sleep’s nightly breast, I called to the future,
at my behest.

To come from the far country, Where we could grow.
And the seeds of this love,
to be so quickly sown.

On lover’s night,
I soared over the trees. With a voice of the wind, I hailed to thee.
“Oh blooming star…
…how like the flower of the sun.
Your radiance warms the barren landscape, of my soul.”
Retrouvailles, Retrouvailles

The rain fell,
and I longed to be inside you. When the first sound of thunder, rang of prophecy true.

In harmony with your orgasm,
I kissed the rain from your eyes.

My fingers through your drowning hair, your breasts decorated by watery skies.
In those fields of poppy, With your back arched…
…a reflecting pool, Finger’s swimming,
to pleasure’s battle we marched.

I could taste you,
the rain falling between your lips.
My tongue deep, twirling in your waters, between your moon and enclosed hips.
And as we finished,
drowning in the last of dream’s tears…
…I knew at that moment, For all the years.

That would come to pass, you would be by me.

In our field of poppy, each morning to rise,
as you the first dawn I would see.

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