ABOUT APPLES

by Rick Gray





Yes, I heard about your bombing today.
Another improvised scrap of death
Planted inside a truckload of apples.

This isn’t about your success.
It’s about apples, driven by ordinary men
into this raped and hungry city every day.

Round, delicious things glowing yellow, green, red,
A traveling circus nourishing even beggars
Quick enough to lift the fallen.         

I have spied blue angels
Slip these wounded below burqas
And carry home your civilian dead 

And all along the muddy roadsides
People you cannot control pile them in little pyramids
Like temples to the God you hate

Who needs no prophet
or book
Only her sweet juice

And a mouth with a few real teeth
Willing to bite down hard
and chew.


Rick Gray was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie. He served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul.

SONNET 71

by David Chorlton

Stéphane Hessel, writer and inspiration behind Occupy movement, dies at 95.
Hessel, resistance fighter, diplomat, writer of Time for Outrage! and co-author of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, dies. --TheGuardian headline, February 27, 2013
Image source: citizenside

 

The interviewer opens with a reference to the title

of a book in French, in which the word

for dignity is kept safe for distribution

to a world more interested in the cost of what can be bought

than in the value of anything.

The interviewee makes his claim for nonviolence,

citing Vaclav Havel, Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev,

and his view that you can’t shoot hedge fund managers,

only convince them of a fairer way. His vocabulary

includes the words conscience and justice,

learned during his time with the Resistance.

What kind of a world shall we leave behind?

the interviewer, a man fifty-seven years old, but still

just a boy to the older man, asks, and we’re tuned

to a vision of trust returning, of living with nature

rather than in conflict, of refusing the ideology

that markets will solve any problem, and (here

the audience applauds) of welcoming immigrants.

The conversation turns back to Buchenwald.

We were Europeans there. The interviewee

escaped by taking a dead man’s name and being helped

by a German. We must become good Europeans again.

He was one of three survivors. We have to think about the others.

He says improving the world is a pleasure,

not a moral duty. The next question is to find out

what makes him lose his temper.

When I’m accused of being anti-Semitic for supporting Palestinians

(applause). He says we must be as patient

as we are passionate, that we don’t need another

revolution like the ones that let us down,

but radical reform. Nineteen forty-four, arrested

by the Gestapo, believed to be important as a spy,

he thought his life was over, his body

already giving up, but the spirit had a mission

and he recited Shakespeare, noting the line

to keep inside his coat:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

 

 

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and still sees his surroundings with an outsider's eye. This helps his writing projects, which include a new poetry collection, "The Devil's Sonata," from FutureCycle Press.

SOILED CANVAS

by Jerome Betts


Oil in seabirds death identified --Press Association, Feb 6, 2013

Birds found on Chesil beach have been taken to the RSPCA's West Hatch centre near Taunton. Photograph: Geoff Moore/Rex Features. Image source: The Guardian

A painter's boast, one long past day,
Beside his Guillemots and Spray:
‘Such are the touches I can give
That when they’re caught in oil, they live.’

This week, his grandsons found the sands
Left grease and feathers on their hands
And told small children asking why
That when they’re caught in oil, they die.


Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, and has contributed verse to LightenUp OnLine, New Verse News, Per Contra, Snakeskin and Tilt-A-Whirl, as well as numerous print publications.