All posts filed under: Poets

“Colour” and Other Poems by Paul Casey

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Colour for T.S.Eliot and after fourteen poets The purple stole away from the skins of plums Everywhere we turned became a maze of colour I protect you with an indigo coloured whisper You curve the ends of my black and white day Coffee brown, is mole, dying leaves, dry earth But smell led me here, the smell of yellow The blue, white and red stripes of exotic confusion Moving over the green gravel of a formal grave I wet my lips and a blackbird flies out of my mouth Faces in the front row, silvered in screenlight, focus I thought everyone knew what was meant by sugar-paper blue Tyrian dyes and flax and peacock plumes Gold and yellow where the clouds crack and break away Anemone-blue mountains outlined against the pearl-grey morning Colour was first published in Live Encounters Fishapod out of Watercolour The Spring sea arrives in flailing sage, clutches lime-white soles with the early hunger of sand. Seeping, air-bound, caught on the cusp of an inner eclipse I turn to olive water. Nothing …

“Bookmarking The Oasis” and other poems by K. Srilata

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Things I didn’t know I loved (after Nazim Hikmet) I didn’t know I loved windows so much but I do – enough to wrestle someone to the ground over them, so light can, once again, flood my eyes. I didn’t know I loved bare feet so much, or walking away on them to wherever point, my heart slung over my shoulder like a sheep-skin bag. I didn’t know I loved small islands of quiet in the middle of the day, but I do – they feel like old friends. I didn’t know I loved the idea of night descending like a tired bird or birds flying in and out of rooms and poems but I do. I didn’t know I loved so many things. Only now that I have read Hikmet, am I setting them free, one by one. from Bookmarking the Oasis(Poetrywala, 2015) Looking for Light, Sunbirds I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being. (Hafiz of Shiraz) Looking for light, sunbirds …

Poems from “Barefoot Souls” by Maram al-Masri

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Sara Daughter of Sana Age 9   Why does my father beat my mother ?   She does not know how to iron his shirts properly.   Me, when I am grown up I will iron the shirts very well.   FAÂdi Son of Sonia Age: 7   You know, Mother if the giant comes during the night to beat you, You can come sleep in my bed.   I ate up all my soup and all my spinach so that I can grow up quickly and protect you.   Salma Son of Leila Age: 12   Why don’t you go to the doctor and have him give back your smile, Mother, your lovely smile?   Samir Son of Magda Age: 13   I do not remember her face, I was very small when my father carried me off to my grandmother’s house far, far away.   My grandmother did not like the one who had brought me into the world, with every prayer she would demand that God would punish her.   She would …

“Treatise on Uselessness” by Kevin Higgins

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Treatise on Uselessness after Rosita Boland Throughout my truly enormous life, I’ve never found a use for gypsies. When one decides to spend the night searching online for a worse deal on one’s house insurance, there’s never a gypsy about to help. Or when one advertises a vacancy for Associate Professor of English at Trinity there’s hardly ever a gypsy around to fill it. Or when the wedding of an Eritrean goatherd and his beloved is in crying need of a cruise missile, there’s never a gypsy available to press the required buttons and later tell the inquiry it was all a terrible misunderstanding. Despite millions ingested by social programmes, we’ve mostly failed to submerge gypsies in the internationally agreed system of an indecent day’s pay for a decent week’s work. Yet the state insists on making gypsies compulsory for those who’d rather never have to speak to one. What practical purpose does it serve for us to continue to try to absorb gypsies into what my late Popsicle -a one time Viceroy of Upper …

“Pair Bond” and other poems by Barbara Smith

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Gwion’s Birthday   Today I bought your birthday presents: what you wanted and what I wanted for you: new clothes and an Xbox game. Back across the stretch of thirteen years I reach for the time you nearly didn’t make it past your first: listless, sleeping on the sofa, an infection deep within your bronchioles, a third visit to the doctor for a letter to admit you, a sweating wait outside the room while they tried to insert a cannulae – twice – and put in a drip before your isolation on the fifth floor with a window-whistling view of the graveyard and our home beyond. It was two days before your hands reached up to mine.   The Angels’ Share (Doghouse Books, 2012) Achieving the Lotus Gait   In winter, the uphill path to Madame Xing’s is treacherous. I watch for loose stones among the grey brown gravel   and the birds are almost silent as each step quarries me, wincing on wooden pattens.   Madame unravels yards of stinking cotton from my feet …