Raising Awareness of Global Concerns through a Marriage of the Arts
To illuminate this time and space we all float in.
Image: Not Far from the Truth by Richard.
Welcome to The Abstractaphy Initiative
a place where artists and writers come to express their thoughts on the state of, and future of, the planet and its inhabitants. This website is an artistic project designed to raise awareness of global issues, foster appreciation for the world we live in, and promote thought towards new ideas for action in the present that will positively impact the future.
We accept virtually every kind of poetry known to humanity and will even accommodate translations if accompanied by an English version. We also accept art that addresses the above goals.
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Last 10 Posts
By Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
His hut hidden in the rainforest from outsiders, the last known member of an Amazonian tribe is found lying in his hammock covered in feathers. Decades earlier those greedy for the tribe’s land and resources murdered almost all his kin with poisoned sugar. Like a keepsake wedding suit, the funereal garb of brilliant bird feathers reflects planning and preparation, readiness and ritual. His death is a harbinger of the accelerating annihilation and disappearance of untold numbers of cultures and peoples—not unlike the mass extinction of other species—due to the cumulative effects of deliberative and systematic human activity.
gone
one by one bye one
time flies
The Babylon Sidedoor (October 2022)
The Last Survivor of an Uncontacted Amazon Tribe Dies » Explorersweb
Last Member Of Indigenous Tribe Dies After Years Of Solitude
Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Hagia Sophia, the magnificent complex in Istanbul, was built in the 6th century as a Christian church, then repurposed as a mosque in the 15th century during the Ottoman Empire. Under Ataturk, founder of the secular Republic of Turkey, it opened in 1935 as a museum, before becoming a mosque again in 2020.
prayer rugs
beside Doric columns
bending the same knee
Ever reminding us of Christianity’s and Islam’s shared historical origins, the syncretic amalgamation of mosaics depicting Christianity with soaring minarets is an enduring testament to the power of art and architecture to reflect our common humanity in the face of cultural diversity, conflict, and change.
Xmas cacti bud
in Ramadan
shared roots
The Babylon Sidedoor (December 2022)
Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
August 2024. Afghan women must veil their bodies completely in public—faces included. The Taliban muzzles women, forces them to devolve into cells of silence. No speaking in public. No singing and reading aloud from inside their houses. ‘Na Fatima Ahmadi. Na Ghezaal Enayat. Na nas.’
Imagine Afghan women creating a dialect of defiance and resistance. Linguists among them help to make up a ‘she’ code, a fundamental grammar of clicks and whistles, squeaks and squawks, taps and slaps—covers from other inmates, other species. Over bread ovens, wash tubs, and clotheslines mothers and daughters, sisters and co-wives encrypt their plots and plans.
molted white feathers
speak
colors of noise
Drifting Sands Haibun #31 (March 2025)
Debbie Strange
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Prune Juice, Issue 41, December 2023
Debbie Strange
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
World Haiku, Number 17, 2021
Debbie Strange
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Haigaonline, Volume 21, Issue 2, August 2020
By Patrick Trombly
New York
Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA
I remember my mother telling me how she felt on the frigid night in 1953 when Stalin died. A little thaw of hope. When she mentioned it years later, I was only a young teen growing up in a free country, so I didn’t fully understand. But more than seven decades after that historic event, with ice thick on the streets of our cities and a chill in my bones—I know.
pale moonlight
falls on the road ahead . . .
and on my hearth
wild goblin flames
are dancing
Jenny Ward Angyal
My Books
Inkstone Poetry Forum
The Grass Minstrel
Caroline Giles Banks
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
She knows how to swim. She does not want to swim.
Her hesitation is more than about wet hair. Her gut
feels the diasporic trauma of her African ancestors’
relationship to water.
time-space conundrum
Before 2015 the watery graveyard of hundreds of
slave ships in the Middle Passage was a murky void.
Maritime archaeologists with the Slave Wrecks Project
now explore the ships. Divers—many of them Black
women and men new to scuba diving— touch the wrecks,
bring up mud, wood, iron objects (kettles to cannons) for study.
the past before
Linking these finds to historic records, the teams name
the ships, map their points of origin in Africa, and locate
the slave owners’ plantations. They find and interview
descendants of the formerly enslaved. The Slave Wrecks Project
is more than the history of the slave trade and its material artifacts
It memorializes slavery’s contemporary legacy.
a future behind
Drifting Sands Haibun #32 (June 2025)
By Anna Cates
our tattered flag sinks
the flagpole melts into
a molten puddle . . .
Red October—let’s hope
we don’t live to see it!
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