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PoetsWest Selected - a page for poetry and essays(Authors retain copyright to all poems and writings posted on this page.) POETSWEST ONLINE Poems by Yearn Hong Choi, J. Glenn Evans, Christopher J. Jarmick, Lyn Lifshin, Jed Myers, Charles Portolano, RaynRoberts.
Brazil Poems by Yearn Hong Choi Iguacu Fall The sound of water falling made grandeur of Bach's music. Small black birds flying between the bridal veils, They were finally baptized and provided the most sacred service To the Lord In this world. Yearn Hong Choi ********** Hunting for Crocodile After the darkness, We set sail our canoe to the black river. One aborigine standing in front of the canoe lit His flashlight at the edge of water and jungle trees Once in a while, while sailing. After 20 minutes,< He spotted red eyes. Then, he walked into the water and grabbed a baby crocodile with his hands. A three-year-old crocodile was presented to 15 modern men and women for their closer and personal look. They touched and the crocodile skin, so soft and gentle. Then, the reptile was sent to the water in the black river. At the moment, we saw the most clean and blue sky and a galaxy of shining stars, The firework of hyacinth in front of us. In our memories of the Amazon, Such beautiful stars would always sparkle as diamonds under the moonlight. Whenever our ladies go out for shopping, The baby crocodile will come out from the crocodile handbag. Yearn Hong Choi ********** Green I could not see any other color at the Amazon Than green. Indio's naked bodies and tattoo on their bodies Were hidden in the green jungle. The civilization should be green forever. Yearn Hong Choi ********** RIO de JANEIRO A Portuguese ship crossing the Atlantic Eventually sailed to the river. It was January.> So the explorers named the river As Rio de Janeiro, River of January, The most beautiful name in Portuguese. (The River was later found as the Bay). Rio de Janeiro became one of the most beautiful ports With its granite rocks which distinguished The inner sea from the outer sea. The Korean explorers could name Rio de Janeiro As the Han-Yeo-Soo-Do,* A waterway from the island of Leisure Mountain to City of Beautiful Water In their South Sea. *Han-Ryo-Soo-do: The sea from Hansando Island to Yeosoo in Korea's South Sea. Yearn Hong Choi ********** WAR AGAINST TERROR The president is not guilty of getting into a War And not guilty at all Of the death toll Of the US soldiers in Iraq. The son of a rich man He dodged the Vietnam War. An imperialist's ignorance and arrogance Are equal to the cruel terrorist's extremism And cold blood attacks on the World Trade Center And the London railroad stations. I don't see the difference Between the terrorist and the imperialist. Stop the War! It can be much easier than starting a war in Iraq. Going to war and getting out of the war Require one president's final decision. But the president who dodged the Vietnam War Must not know how to make that decision. Alas! After the president's declaration of victory, More than 3000 US soldiers have been killed. How many more will be killed before the end of the Occupation? No one knows how many innocent Iraqi citizens Have been killed by the insurgents. The president does not know the tragedy of the USA, But I know it. Yearn Hong Choi Yearn Hong Choi, the founding president of the Korean Poets and Writers Group in the Washington DC area, has published one poetry book, Autumn Vocabularies (Writers' Workshop, 1990), and four poetry books in the Korean language. His poems have appeared in the PoetryUSA, PEN International, PoetsWest, dIS*orient, Mildred, Wyoming, Washington Post, World & I among others, and were translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil. He edited Mother and Dove, Korean-American Poetry Anthology (Institute for Korean-American Culture, 1997), Surfacing Sadness: A Centennial of Korean-American Literature (Homa & Sekey Books, 2003) with Haengja Kim, and Fragrance of Poetry: Korean-American Literature (Homa & Sekey, 2005). He read his poems in the US Library of Congress in 1994 and 2003 as an invited poet. He published his poems in the Hyundae Munhak, the most prestigious literary magazine in Korea during his college days at Yonsei University. He reviews Korean literature for World Literature Today.
WAR OR POETRY Indian wars we raided a village Killed all men women and their little nits Not poetry just followed orders Spanish American War we blew up the ship That gave an excuse for war We paid them $15 million for their land Not poetry we just followed orders American Civil War we burned their homes Traded for tobacco, joshed across the creek Then between us we killed more'n a million Not poetry we just followed orders In the Great War we filled each other's trenches With blood corpses vermin and trench rot Not poetry we just followed orders Second Great War we learned how to kill Not one on one man to man But found it cheaper wholesale Not poetry we just followed orders Korean War we took their hills And gave them back Kill Kill Kill and called it a draw Not poetry we just followed orders Vietnam got hot after Tonkin Killed their leader Others took ears for souvenirs Not poetry we just followed orders Iraq we made war a business Some got rich others just died All in the name of war on terrorists Not poetry we just followed orders But the world doesn't know who are terrorists Do they bomb with planes or bodies Some say don't write poetry about war Others say war is poetry J. Glenn Evans J. Glenn Evans is the founder and managing director of PoetsWest and author of three books of poetry: Window in the Sky, Seattle Poems and Buffalo Tracks, a history of Sweden, two local biographies, and two novels: Broker Jim and Zeke's Revenge. Widely published in journals and anthologies. Recipient of 1999 WPA Faith Beamer Cooke Award and 2003 Seattle Free Lances Outstanding Writer's Award. Member of Washington Poets Association and Academy of American Poets. Listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World. Produces and hosts a weekly radio show of poetry and stories on KSER 90.7 FM.
Poem Starter # 500 by Christopher J. Jarmick Instead of asking, "Is that poetry?" or worry that poetry is being damaged by young people who scream out too many words, with imagined discipline. . . Ask instead, "Where is Poetry." NOT JUST ANOTHER DRIVE BY . . . ETC. Not just another drive by, delivered in less than 30 minute Poetic Promise I promise not to dull your senses through perversion of language-- though I may surprise or even shock you from time to time. I won't abuse your trust or gullibility like politicians who sell hypocritical concepts and bastardize words like freedom. I won't always tell you what I think you want to hear. I'll paint with words using unclean brushes; not covering my mistakes, not touching up. Hopefully an authenticity emerges, helping you to see things with more clarity or at least differently enough so less of life will be taken for granted, feared, cheapened or wasted. Imagine how your last hour might be in a movie, in a song, if we were to make a dance of it, or in a poem. Imagine your next ten minutes. Christopher J. Jarmick ********** Poem Starter 750 by Christopher J. Jarmick And when someone asks you, "Why Poetry?" Quietly shrug and without condescension answer: "because". If that doesn't satisfy, and you see this in their eyes say with all the sincerity you can muster: "Poetry is everything." POETRY IS EVERYTHING -- Parts 1 & 2 1. Poetry gives voice to love: pure, passionate or lustful and a voice to loneliness too. (ask Emily Dickinson) Poetry invents its cadence, twists inside the soul, exists even without rigid form. (ask Walt Whitman) Poetry immortalizes, romanticizes, the poor, the wealthy, a triumph or tragedy (ask William Shakespeare and William Blake). Poetry dramatizes, humanizes: history, war, heroism, cowardice, life (ask Robert Browning and Randall Jarrell) Poetry popularizes, re-defines shifting truths and can be skeptical and reticent. (ask Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost) Poetry blends experience, re-frames little moments of life through each of our senses. (ask Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams) Poetry spellbounds readers, entrances, shocks, amuses and excites listeners, (ask Theodore Roethke, and Gwendolyn Brooks) Poetry finds the musicality of language, the lilt, the dash, the movement of words (ask John Keats, William Butler Yeats and Alfred Lord Tennyson) Poetry perplexes, challenges, informs, mystifies, conjures, defines (ask Ezra Pound, and T.S. Elliot) Poetry captures lightning in a bottle, memorializes, blends languages, cultures (ask Kenneth Rexroth, and W.H. Auden) Poetry speaks of race, racism, borders, and boundaries, limitations and blindness (ask Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and Etheridge Knight) Poetry never rests, it anguishes, antagonizes, hides between unbearable pain, wails (ask Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas) Poetry rages, bellows, rants, yells, spits, breaks rules, get messy (ask Allen Ginsberg and Muriel Rukeyser) Poetry offers temporary balance, refuge, makes life bearable at least for a while (ask Anne Sexton and John Berryman) 2. Poetry confesses, tells secrets, dares you to respond, talk-back (ask Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop) Poetry dreams, politicizes, unites, demands attention And can not help but romanticize about all of it. (ask Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Pablo Neruda) Poetry partnered with art or photograph, makes a picture say 1000 and one words (ask Denise Levertov and Frank O'Hara) Poetry experiments, translates, feeds upon itself, and educates (ask Robert Duncan, and Philip Larkin) Poetry enriches music and defines generations (ask John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, Cole Porter, Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller, Carole King, Hoagy Carmichael and Bob Dylan) Poetry dances with humor and wit, is rascally, sublime, renewed and is our friend (ask Dr. Seuss, Ogden Nash, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shel Silverstein and E.E. Cummings) Poetry is everything. Copyright © 2005, 2007 Christopher J. Jarmick Christopher J. Jarmick has been hosting weekly and monthly poetry readings in the Seattle area for over 8 years. He was born on the East Coast and spent several years in Los Angeles working on Emmy winning documentaries for PBS and producing segments for television shows like HardCopy, Enertainment Tonight, and many others. His novel, The Glass Cocoon, co-written with Serena Holder was published in 2001. He published his first poem ina national magazine when he was 12 years old and continues to have poems published in newspapers, magazines, literary journals and on the web. He also publishes essays articles, interviews and film reviews. He is the former executive vice president of the Washington Poets Association, the current President of PEN Washington and board member for PEN USA at Antioch College in Los Angeles. His day job is as a financial advisor with offices in downtown Seattle.
SOMETIMES IT TAKES SO LITTLE there was the one who took in a diabetic skinny stray, that was enough for me to want him. Or the one whose parents knew Dylan Thomas, had him as a guest. He hugged the blues. That one held me, stained me with that darkness, played Sea Sea Rider as he told me he had just heard two new folk singers in the city, Baez and Dylan. Storytellers seem to get to me. And the ones with a leg lost in Nam, that will do it. I was a door mat to his voice, knocked my knuckles raw trying to get thru to him. I never felt safe until he was dead tho his grave has followed me south. He is probably spinning magic under this first new snow at Arlington Cemetery. And what can I do with another man I'm haunted by who writes such small emails I can imagine whatever I want out of them but now I'm knocked down by his stories. Sure it is icy and dicey and I'm walking a tight rope walk over spiked glass but when he writes of mesquite and cedar, the perfume of agerita blossoms in starlight I twist from the one who wants to keep me in his bed. I'm Texas bound under curly hair in search of this exotic with his dogs, rough hands and gun in the cold of January, ache for shimmery heat a coast away by stories I have no clue where they'll end. Lyn Lifshin ********** THE STEERAGE Stieglitz Photogravure My father tells us about leaving, how on the night they left he had to bring goats next door in the moon. Since he was not the youngest, he couldn't wait pressed under a shawl of coarse cotton close to his mother's breast as she whispered "hurry". Her ankles were swollen from ten babies. Though she was only 30 her ankles were swollen from ten babies, her lank hair hung in strings under the babushka she swore she would burn in New York City. She dreamt others pointed and snickered near the tenement, that a neighbor borrowed the only bowl that was her mother's and broke it. That night they left, every move had to be secret. In rooms there was no heat in, no one put on muddy shoes or talked. It was forbidden to leave, a law they broke like the skin of ice on pails of milk. Years from then, a daughter would write that he didn't have a word for America yet, that night of a new moon. His mother pressed his brother to her, warned everyone even the babies must not make a sound. Frozen branches creaked. My father shivered at men with guns near straw roofs on fire. It took their old samovar, every coin to bribe someone to take them to the train. "Pretend to be sleeping," his father whispered as the conductor moved near. His mother stuffed cotton in the baby's mouth. She held the mortar and pestle wrapped in his quilt of feathers closer, told him he would sleep in this soft blue in the years ahead. But that night in steerage, he was knocked sideways into the ribs of the boat so sea sick he couldn't swallow the orange some one threw from an upstairs bunk tho it was bright as sun and smelled of a new country he could only imagine though never how his mother would become a stranger to herself there, forget why they risked dogs and guns to come Lyn Lifshin Lyn Lifshin was born and raised in Vermont. Holds a B.A. in English from Syracuse University and an M.A. in English from the University of Vermont.
THE CYCLONE How can we know the roar and press of all that wind and water mounting higher, harder, till it tears our homes apart, tears us from one another, throws us hard against the road, the rocks, cracks our bones like teacup china, floods our lungs with salty foam, and leaves us crushed, drowned, or lost in mud and ruin, when we aren't the ones who've gone through it? We don't know. I want to and I don't. There was the hurricane up the east coast- must be fifty years ago. I watched standing on my father's armchair, hands gripping its back, eyes up to the window. I saw that fat mottled bough of the sycamore across the narrow road shear from the trunk, could not hear any creak or groan for the torrent, saw the branch crash on the chrome front of our black Buick, then blown past that, catch on a swaying telephone pole. But all the brick and glass I saw stayed intact. The mad orchestra cursed the houses-wires fell and wavered like crazed snakes on the shaking hedges and sizzled blacktop. The lights failed, and as the dark came, we lit candles, Mom told us the tale of the Johnstown flood, we laid extra blankets on our beds, and slept well. I don't know the Burmese coast at all, its vast exposure to the Bay of Bengal. The windstorm here two winters back blew loose shingles off our roof. My neighbor, who'd built a house, took my ladder and some spare composite out of my garage and hammered down some patches- the new roof came last summer. The most I know of a force that can tear open a life is a word or two out of the mouth of a woman I knew, thirty springs ago- it was true she'd been with the curly-haired guy up the road the night before when I couldn't find her. We stood on the dry sidewalk outside her house, under another large sycamore, as an inside storm rose-I couldn't hear her any more. Some cold power poured into my chest, followed my chilled blood into the hollows of all my bones and blew them like flutes, a dissonant moan through the channels of marrow, the skeletal tubes tempted to shatter like crystal to the internal wail, but not an audible whimper out into the still evening air. That's all the cyclone of sudden despair I know-though all the surround, the Tudor houses, the tall broad trees, stood as they were, as we did. My torso turned, my legs walked me to my car, the fingers of one hand found my keys. My arms and eyes ferried me safely home. The ground under the feet of countless Burmese is stripped bare-the mud must run with blood and fresh disease. Sons and mothers and sisters of thousands, numbed and terrified survivors, must stand more naked before the great face of chaos than I ever have or hope to-I don't want to know. But the exposures I can recall-mostly that one blow of cold aloneness through my bones- call me to wonder. What little I've had to learn, it's held my tongue just out of the flood of anger, I can't tell how many times. I'll see a shimmer of dread in the eyes of my child, my partner-the start of a tear, and remember the cyclone in here, in this worn body. I'll try, or hope, or pray, to offer back to the earth the stirred force, to ground, to the ocean of atoms we rise up from-let love gather and send the anger home to its hidden furnaces, where the terrible winds begin, where the waters take their churn. Each of us must come to know enough of the storm in us, let the world come whistle its wild song through the small instrument given, once before death. Otherwise, the air in the reed of self will stay dry, stagnant, won't belong to the breath of life. Jed Myers 5/12/08 Jed A. Myers THE AMERICAN WAY As the lining of our pockets grow empty, we quickly forget about the rockets that we indiscriminately drop on innocent Iraqis. Got to get the new blue-ray, iPod, and the newest fads, got to keep our kids dressed to kill, it's a tough world out there; So get out of my way there's a big sale today. Out of sight, out of mind, I don't have the time to care what's going on somewhere else in this wild world. I'm worried about paying my mortgage, keeping my job that I hate, getting up earlier to face a boss I despise for he constantly tells lies, so don't tell me of the woos of others far, far away. I work longer and harder for far less pay, knowing that the powers that be keep it this way on purpose. Hey, get out of my way, it's Sunday I got to go off to pray, Luckily, In God We Trust. Charles Portolano ********** LEAVING THE LIGHT BEHIND Driven I am to desert my vehicle by the side of the road and make my way into Indian Territory to be touched by the spirit of the wilderness Deeper and deeper I walk into darkness of the desert leaving the bright lights far behind as I walk silently into the barren wasteland I journey on searching for what I am not sure, but I do know what I am leaving behind, as my cell phone shatters the silence I shout out, a war call, to free my mind from being so connected with the destruction of our good earth, searching for the spiritual in the everyday In the name of progress I throw this device far away from me, as I start to run from the bright lights that steal the fading stars from the night sky I run as my lungs burn with the desire to breathe in clean air, taste pure water, hear the long gone call of the coyote on the evening wind Finally I am forced to rest, settling myself, in the long shadow of a giant saguaro, looking up and out into the night sky, arrayed with countless stars In the warm, strong glow of a full white moon, two coyotes call to one another from far away hilltops, I hear my heart proudly beat against my heaving chest. Charles Portolano ********** DECEMBER 29, 1890 Massacre : the violent, cruel, and indiscriminate killing of a large number of people or animals. Who could have known, have told, on this day in 1890, that the massacre would occur, point-blank, at the edge of Wounded Knee? Since Sitting Bull's death, now Sioux Chief, Big Foot, would step into history. The trouble brewing for months, the White man ready to arrest Big Foot, disarm his warriors, then send them off to Oklahoma for dancing the Ghost Dance, to live free or die, now that their free-roaming life taken from them, gone, the buffalo gone, now a life of confinement, far from their ancient, ancestral burial grounds, on the White man's Reservation, dependent on White Indian Agents for their very existence. Surrendering their souls, for gone is their way of life, with that sudden, single gunshot in the freezing morning gloom, sending the Indian Braves scurrying for the few hidden rifles; under orders from their officers, the blue-coat soldiers fired volley after volley zipping through the unarmed camp. Who could have known, have told, on this day in 1890 that nearly 300 braves, women, and children would have their lives taken, cut down in the cross-fire, slaughtered like the buffalo on the open plains, as they tried to escape into the nearby ravine, under the cloud of gun smoke the blue-coats killed 25 of their own in the frenzy of friendly fire? Who could have known, have told, on this day in 1890, that when the smoke cleared, their teepees burned to the ground, and the shooting finally stopped, that the White man's final "battle" at Wounded Knee would silence the Collective Spirit of the Native Americans, ending 350 years of the White man's war against the Indian Nations? Charles Portolano Charles Portolano
RaynRoberts' response to the tale of Hell freezing over, as explained by a Chemistry Student In Response to the News that Hell Has Frozen Over Well that explains all the homeless demons with head colds
"We thought we had something special
Dreadful stuff like that. I don't think I'd survive an hour in a body or soul that Good,
It's a thankless job and thanks to that devil forsaken pacifist Gandhi RaynRoberts, a poet who writes about peace, war, political and social issues was born in Jacksonville, NC and is a long-time resident of San Diego and a graduate of the University of San Diego where he studied English Literature and Religion. He recently spent several years teaching in South Korea. He's published three books. His latest collection, published by Poetic Matrix Press in August 2006, is Of One and Many Worlds. The Fires of Spring, a collection of Buddhist poems, is reviewed by editors at The Golden Lantern and Poetic Voices. In 2006 he was included by Evolving Editions in their interfaith understanding series Illuminations. His work appears in the printed anthologies: The Book of Hope and The World Healing Book from Beyond Borders Press ~ In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief by Foothills Publishing and Sherman Asher and The Philosophical Library of Escondido California's New Anthology entitled Paths. He is widely published. He toured the country in 2003 to promote a collection of experimental and traditional forms, Jazz Cocktails and Soapbox Songs.
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