Poetry

a poem
by One of Us * * * ah,
waiting to see your eyes.
But fog has grown thicker and tragic for you
Spread by the masters of lies. Human and monster — it’s our mix,
Look at your eyes in the mirror.
But it’s a mortally masterly fix
To get us all frozen in terror. All made to repeat what the liars…

by Otto Blüse
original translation from the German by Kaiser M. I WALKED A path of deep sorrow
And God’s grace appeared to be miles away. When I was greeted by a tree at meadow’s edge.
And at once, bright the land became again. Oh tree in spring! I lifted my tired head,
And a thousand bees hummed, pollinated…

Ashley M. Jones In which we meet the Pote Loryut of Alabama by Douglas Mercer THE RENOWNED David Sims recently said that when it comes to Blacks, the costs are too great. And the bills keep rolling in. Now Alabamans, for four long and grueling years, are going to have to listen to a blimp-like baboon tell…

THEY SAY you fell in the terrible fray
Which lasted from morning until the next day.
You lay there, among the pale bodies. I can’t believe that; I see you once more:
Your proud gestalt, golden mood evermore.
I feel them, all the dear memories. The day you came home I was faint, I was happy.
I basked in…

by Andrew Hamilton AT THE TIME of his death in 1962, modernist writer E. E. Cummings was the second most widely read poet in the United States after Robert Frost. William Carlos Williams ranked Cummings and Ezra Pound as “beyond doubt the two most distinguished” contemporary American poets. Pound titled…

Gorman by Douglas Mercer SHE’S YOUNG and she’s jet black! She’s beautiful! — that is, if you like that Lower Paleolithic look. She’s Black and she’s a poet! Why, she’s the Black Shakespeare! Better than Shakespeare really, because he’s a dead…

A quintessential Yankee poem by New England’s quintessential Yankee poet by Andrew Hamilton DISCUSSING Robert Frost’s collection Steeple Bush in the New York Times upon its release in 1947, poet Randall Jarrell devoted the bulk of his review to quoting and summarizing just one poem, “Directive,”…

by Ray W. JOHANN Wolfgang von Goethe devoted half the Eighteenth Century
To a whole new approach to reality —
Nature is alive, not a bloodless mechanical toy
Or a bland, empty black void. Sinnlich-sittlich was this thinking man’s dual expression
To suggest outward form linked to inner…

by Snow Shadow A rat is a rat.
You cannot say that,
In the Day of the Rat. You cannot defend yourself for what you say,
This is not a game we play. But you can call a bat a cat.
You can say that. You can call a dog a frog,
Tell a bear he is a hare. But you cannot call a rat a rat.
No. You can never say that. The rats can all…

IF you’re going to try, go all the way.
Otherwise, don’t even start. If you’re going to try, go all the way.
This could mean losing girlfriends,
Wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind. Go all the way.
It could mean not eating for three or four days.
It could mean freezing on a park…