Woke

By Matthew Caretti
Pago Pago, American Samoa

The N-word never tasted good in my mouth. Something far too bitter in it. Indigestible. Yet growing up among 1970s white rurals, it wasn’t uncommon to hear the epithet. It was never a word at home, but one cutting along the precise lines of a barber shop razor, caught on the fly out on a sports field, wrapped within damp towels at the summer swimming pool and in sync with slamming lockers along school hallways. A sound just perceptible enough.

        sunburn skies a cant of pigmentation

These days I wonder about all the rhetoric. The school board brawls and book bans. The curtailing of curricula. I wake again feeling most unsettled about the coming storm and the words we use. About how to talk to my students about how they talk to each other. I scroll through my own feeds looking for a way to connect with theirs. I want them to know unrest. To know how to get into good trouble.

        lightning strike eye silhouettes after

Critical Mass Shooting Stars Again

By Matthew Caretti
Pago Pago, American Samoa

Here the future kraken in an ancient mariner’s tale wags us again. Always some bugaboo stacking spreadsheet zeroes. Each counter-space filled with a pristine ruin.

        times new roman scrawl on Pompeii walls

Realpolitik tumbles toward Earth. Cracks a construction hardhat. In mirrored windows a bulbul studies similitudes. Some continental drift wherein a mountain wanders into itself.

        smoke forest water bombers smear it red

Slow TMZ stream into this DMZ between East and West. Dr. West reminds us in real time of the pastness in the present of it all. Perhaps this flower moon a replacement.

        each burning cross aliens alight on prayer flags

We sit alone together in this time machine, waiting. The end times or time to end the show. The letters on the marquee tumbling down. The hours long gone.

        first fireflies the rocket explodes on landing

Anthropocene

By Steve Van Allen
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, Earth

hawaiian honeycreeper
guam flying fox
bachman’s warbler
yellow blossom pearlymussel
scioto mad tom
mariana fruit bat

          Gone forever

plastic
pollution
logging
drilling
hate
asphalt
microplastics
cancer 

          Cannot leave soon enough

butterfly 
the only thing moving
this hot afternoon 

A Disease Called Power

Opinion:

By Noris Roberts
Lecheria Municipio Urbaneja, Venezuela

I will begin by pointing out that this is not intended as a partisan political statement, to attack anyone in particular or to offend. I write and declare my pain and astonishment seeing that my country is being systematically destroyed and its population humiliated and decimated. In the last years nearly 5 million people have emigrated, not because of a war, they’ve emigrated because they foresaw no future, because of hunger and lack of medicine, for not having personal or legal security and basically because they were psychologically affected for living in a permanent state of uncertainty.

Continue reading . . .

This article contains views and opinions which are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other author, agency, organization, employer or company, including the Company.

The Nature of Falling

By Rebecca Drouilhet
Picayune, MS, USA

Sometimes I still dream of those two old oaks on my grandparent’s old farm. Lightning hit one of them first and then years later, the other. They seemed to be potent symbols of my grandparents, who, ending their last days, were also ending the era of noble peasants tending rural farms. In this era of asphalt and progress, multi-lane highways dominate the landscape. Who remembers a barn full of half-wild kittens or bottle-feeding an orphan calf?

new subdivision…
a bulldozer buries
the last of the violets

vanishing wilderness…
beneath the pale moon
a snowy owl takes wing

forgetting who we are…
the cry of wild things
fading into silence

The Last Fable

By Rebecca Drouilhet
Picayune, MS, USA

At midnight the little mouse lights a flickering candle and dips her heavy quill in ink. Outside her small hovel beneath a pallid moon the ocean is slowly dying. Even here, across a chasm too wide to cross, she can faintly hear the din of eight billion people roaring down ten-lane highways. But no one hears the mouse or heeds her warning. Words appear one by one, stark and black on the ivory parchment, only to fall like tears into an infinity where the ghosts of dead forests and dying shore birds flutter briefly and then plummet into the black hole of silence. The little mouse struggles on, writing against the tide, writing of glaciers and of melting ice, of dying animals, of droughts and heat and coming storms, until at last the candle sputters out.

a new dawn
and the earth goes on
without us…
snagged on a dead branch
a plastic bag snapping

Ceasefire

By Tuyet Van Do
Victoria, Australia

ceasefire . . .
a man in the rubble
collecting body parts

First published in Synchronized Chaos, 1st May 2024

Renascence

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

No cougars are supposed to roam the Appalachian mountains.  They’re supposed to be extinct here, killed off or driven out by logging half a century ago.  And yet . . . here and there a single footprint lingers in damp earth, a wisp of hair clings to rusted wire, a blurred snapshot betrays the image of a ghost-cat slipping through shadows.

And once, echoing down the mountainside where I stumbled mile after mile over rain-slicked rocks in gathering dusk—once, a long, unearthly scream to pierce the heart. 

I utter a prayer 
into the darkness
that enfolds me—
may all the vanished ones return 
when at long last we’re gone

The Spinning Wheel

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

milkweed blooms
at the meadow’s edge
she waits
for the monarch’s blessing
under a shattered sky

one strand snaps
and the tapestry ravels—
at dusk
a mockingbird sings
the old crone’s song

soft rain falling
through a starless night
she weaves
its many-colored threads
into a shroud for the earth

~Stacking Stones Anthology, summer 2018

Evensong

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

butterflies flutter
from the artist’s brush
in memoriam—
a river of monarchs
once flowed across the sky

slow spirals
up the summer sky—
scavengers
cleansing my mind
of its dark residue

I follow a path
of spindrift oak leaves
to a clearing
where no cabin ever stood—
its hidden hearth my home

the day
closes its circle
around me
silver voices
re-enchant the dusk

to keep at bay
the wolfish dreams,
I sleep
with gentle sorrow
cradled in my arms

~red lights 15:2, June, 2019

Out of Season

By Doug Sylver
Seattle, Washington, USA

Not that it wasn’t appreciated
however unexpected
Not that it wasn’t beautiful
however out of place
Not that it wasn’t surprising
however disturbing

A cherry tree
blossoming full
pink fireworks
but in December
not even winter yet
let alone spring
another palindromic day
12/11/21
 
Haiku-worthy
cliché as it is
but Basho is walking
uphill 
while me down
and he’s taking notes 
on his cell phone
noticing the colors
nodding to them
in their sparseness
noticing my noticing
nodding to me
in my sparseness
and this far north
next door to Canada
a stone’s throw from Alaska
tanka-worthy maybe but
I haven’t counted yet 
I haven’t even written yet
 
You say I am keen today and
since the wind is south by southwest
I know a hawk from a haiku
and a handshake from a handsaw
you should see me on the
other days
and in the
other winds
then you’d agree 
perchance that
beauty happens even
when unexpected
then you’d agree 
perchance that
when everything
and everyone
should be gone
there’s always hope
for disturbing surprises
even then
and especially when
they’re out of season.

The garden in November

By Doug Sylver
Seattle, Washington, USA

Preparing it for sleep
with maple leaves in various stages of decay
a foot thick between soil so cold
and warming burlap bag blankets
with names of coffee companies 
from around the world
Cafe Viejo from El Salvador
Cafe Verde from Ecuador
Cafe Nuyorican from Puerto Rico 
 
It was a tough year to be a tomato
cold wet spring
hot dry summer
records falling everywhere
nature falling everywhere
raspberries tinged with wildfire smoke
gardening gloves tinged with wildfire smoke
my eyes tinged with wildfire smoke
 
But there were others
successes
potatoes hiding underground 
happy to be safe down there 
and squash of every shape and color
asking, like beaming children,
are you proud of me?
and the soil, the earth itself 
so permanent and 
so ever-changing
ignoring us 
with all our good intentions
and our constant need to fix
everyone and everything
and like us, 
these maple leaves
of every shape and color
in various stages of decay
laughing at us 
on our way there
laughing with me
on my way there
underneath a warming blanket
preparing myself 
as well
for sleep.

This time

By Doug Sylver
Seattle, Washington, USA

This is when the Quileute tribe
calls getting to be the time
of no more berries.

Earlier sooner this time than ever.
It has been prophesied by others
that it will last for a time 

times and half a time.
Which time, which times
which half a time is this?

What happens after it has gotten to be the time
and the times of no more berries?
And then, for half a time

when no one can taste the memories
or recall the many times of berries?

Not Somewhere Else But Here

By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan

A poem asks the reader to participate in the making of its meaning, and in this way binds the reader to the writer, while leaving the reader free to bring her own mental associations to the poet’s words and images. Thus, the poem combines a private and a public language in a process of communication. While poetry “makes nothing happen” (as Auden stated in his famous eulogy for Yeats), it can lift the veil from deeply disturbing aspects of our collective lives and in so doing ask us to rethink those troubling realties, which we often prefer to ignore, so long as we feel comfortably secure in our own personal lives. By engaging individual imaginations, poetry has the power to bridge the boundaries and divisions that keep us apart. This is not to say that poetry can improve the world on a scale that would empower the many millions of disadvantaged, mistreated, and politically invisible human beings. But it can help the rest of us to see that these people exist, and that their sufferings are real, and that we could make efforts in the real world to ameliorate the condition of their lives.

the wind picks up
a campaign poster
the hair just right

executive abusio
the warped rule
of blind mouths

wondering which way to turn the nut in charge

a caterpillar
crawls across the evening news
that orange hair

the king of clubs
trumped —
he throws his toys out of the playpen

politics
the ambidextrousness
of a dead bird

day laborer
climbing a ladder
out of the basement

pencil stub
wrinkled fingers pinch
another penny

a cold wind
haggles with golden leaves
savings and loan

a fork
in the road
nothing to eat

the cat lady’s eye
strays
each with its own name

a beggar sings
over a coffee tin
nickels counting time

no newspaper coverage
the homeless man
asleep on a bench

a homeless woman
sips from a birdbath
wrinkles in a rainbow

skin
brown and bruised –
the fruit within decays

road sign
rust
in the bullet holes

Peshawar
apples stacked neatly
as the guns

constant drizzle
a faded flag hangs heavy
over another war

fallen
into fallen leaves
toy soldier

crow’s feet
around the eyes
sunset on the battlefield

demilitarized zone
the space between
jugglers

the banker’s heart as capacious as an open-pit mine

nativity scene
behind an iron gate
the wise men long gone

tree by the wall
a solitary poem
in a life sentence

muddy field
a child in rags
sings to his buffalo

Help

By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan

light
imprisoned in diamonds
the dark mine a dollar a day

windblown sand –
children in rags
staring as the boat recedes

orphans at the stoplight
together
we roll up our windows

winter
a bent spoon
in an empty pot

shoe polish
the toxic smell
of unemployment

a few stars
fewer leaves
his cardboard home

a rainbow ribbon
on a rich man’s sky
tree stumps

outside the new megastore
empty shopping carts
for the homeless

yesterday’s snow
under a naked tree
a homeless woman awaiting spring

old nails squeaking
in shrinking wood
campaign promises

the populist’s campaign
a loud speaker
distorts the platitudes

air raid
our last loaf of bread
blackens in the oven

a child’s balloon
drifts away
the wall crowned with broken bottles

First published: Drifting Sands Haibun, Issue 17

Human rights encompasses a great deal. As stated in the Preamble to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Extreme inequality has profound human rights implications. Nearly 10% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, and over 40% live on less than $5.50 per day, thus depriving those members of the human family access to basic needs and services.  

Once Bereft

By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left
            — Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Inversnaid”

From Pangaea to the Tethys Sea our Mother Earth goes round, and round our central star appears, the Sun, traveling east to west, from Ethiopia to Hesperides, each day a blessing in this circle of life. Brought into this vital light with plants of every kind and fauna filling land and sea, fruitful, we were. And it was good.

We crept into caves to mark the walls with ochred images of creatures honored for their flesh, their spirit and being, different from our own, yet of the same.

The First Peoples made their homes, dressing their bodies, teaching their tongues, cherishing their kinship with the land.

We learned to turn the very Earth, the oldest of our gods, with plows, back and forth, year after year, reaping, sowing, wearing away the immortal, the seemingly inexhaustible land we would one day forget. And so, as our numbers rose and our cities grew and our knowledge fed our need for power, we tamed and conquered all. Or so we thought we would, quick, ready, resourceful humankind, now more human, less kind, kinship reduced to a great machine.

Our hearts cooled, the Earth warmed, we saw no end in sight. Round and round, each fight, another victory. And then we mastered space itself, we landed on the moon. What sight! The Earth in space – “a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void.” A blue dot where we are all one people, living in one world, together in our need to keep this improbable home home to all creation in all its diversity, its fragile beauty, our one and only home.

Let the earth last
And the forests stand a long time
            — from a poem by the 15th century Aztec poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin

weather satellites
go round and round
empty promises

fracking
we learn new ways
not to change

an electric car
sighs to a stop
the last glacier groans

snowmelt
plum blossoms
on a polar bear

bird of paradise
a rainbow’s love song
in a chainsaw repertoire

strip mined
our purple mountain majesties
the emperor’s new clothes

old pond
spewing toxic waste
a frog croaks

the caboose
rattles past the setting sun
dust on stunted corn

washing up
on an island paradise
plastic plates

rising tide
she lifts her skirt
to wipe away a tear

a blue balloon
rising into a summer sky
the child waving goodbye

dry riverbed
the old bridge creaks
bone on bone

First published: Drifting Sands Haibun, Issue 15

Bleeding Skies

by Florence Heyhoe
County Down, North Ireland

bleeding skies
children playing 
in mine fields

Predators

by Florence Heyhoe
County Down, North Ireland

predators 
on the web 
trafficking 

As Einstein would say 

By Diana Webb
Leatherhead, Surrey, UK

She is walking back from the supermarket, bag weighed down by difficult choices, when in the day’s last rays she sees it.

empty snail shell 
caked with soil 
the relic 

Some go to great pains, she recalls, to stop these small land gastropods from underfoot death, by moving them away from pedestrian paths. This one exited naturally, protective architecture unshattered.

tick in the box
between her fingertips 
a miracle 

The creature left its home for her to contemplate under the roof of her own small home on the patch they shared in their mutual home planet earth. 

silver trace 
one gleam of ink at the tip 
of the spiral 

After the Bomb

By Theresa A. Cancro
Wilmington, Delaware, USA

after the bomb
in each window shard
reflected stars

First published in The Bamboo Hut, February 2024