Category: Uncategorized

WAR Poem: DEATH DOES NOT APPEAL (TO THE GENERAL LEADER), by David Avila

A young man sought war
But he was turned away,
Because war was sought:
“Death does not appeal
To the general leader,
After the horror;
Go now and make peace
For there is much more to life,
Than ending it now,
The pain of your youth
Will ease up and subside soon,
Do not rush head long
And cause suffering,
Outlive your parents’ lives
And give to the world
Do not speak of me
I will not feed fantasy –
Let love and peace live,”
Rejected, he lived,
Picking up the scattered
Pieces of his mind,
T’ was only later
Having lived and loved,
That he understood.

ALLEGORY Poem: Rain, by Fionnbharr Rodgers

When clouds die, we dance
Space for our songs to be born
Til evening; new scorn.

Now in this tired nursing home, there’s a rainbow sitting crooked in a chair. Sick with venom, wrought in black and white, fed on little silver teaspoons tempered in cask-aged despair. Faded photographs flit beneath his eyebrows, of the blue skies he sprinted through as a child; til he sought a palace under any roof, when the clouds came home and the water spree’d pure wild. Here now comes Nelly, the neurotic nurse, half-wrapped up in her horoscope, with her secondhand needle of the patient’s dope. She breaks the wasted skin, and pours a hearty feed of ersatz sunlight round his wimpy-growing bones. He breathes in a happier gulp of dying, and for a shadow of a stillborn second he’s back in that blue sky baby home .

FREE VERSE Poem: My Wife Might Have To Go To Hospital, by Declan Taggart

So aware am I now of the constant risk to life
A fragility that’s causing fear to ripple through me
So much so that I don’t know how I lived in such parity to my necessities
Now I find myself obsessing
Constantly I am aware and unsure how life so often goes on
Furthermore, those that live do so seemingly without fear of the ever closing only inevitable
Fears existing within the confines of existence itself and not the ceasing.
I think, though, that it may not be death that I fear
For that is certain, but the potential spontaneity of it
That without a clue or a warning or even a backing track or an audience
A life that feels so full can suddenly dissipate
How do I come to accept the literality of ‘everything is temporary’?
Surely there’s a right to mourn what will once be lost forever.
Love will cease
The laughter
The meeting your eyes that crinkle
The only way I cannot cry is to temporarily forget
I still hope the waitress catches me in my emotional moment and finds my tenderness attractive.
Maybe to avoid this fear, I could spend my whole life in the temporary inside the temporary
Where death will not do us part because there is no one for me to part from.
They ask if I’ve become more aware of my heartbeat recently
Yes, I say
Every day
Not because it beats faster, but because I know what it represents
Though they look at me as if I’m not making sense
But what I want to say is how can I not, when I know that when that’s stops so do I,
What you’re asking is ‘do you ever make sure that you’re not about to die?’

HORROR Poem: What Lingers in the Dark, by Megan Derrick

I’m being followed—
by a creature more horrendous than you could ever imagine.
If I stop, it will seize me.
I see it lurking out of the corner of my eye,
lurking, waiting to pull me into the abyss.

It doesn’t only haunt the dark moments.
It was there when I started my new job,
a shadow beneath the stairs.
Even in my happiest moments, it remains.
When I dare to smile, it creeps closer.

Sometimes, it catches me—
and the agony is beyond comprehension.

It will never leave me.
I must learn to endure it, for it is stitched into the fabric of my soul.
And so, we must coexist.
Perhaps, in time, its sting will cease to paralyze me.