The garden in November

By Doug SylverSeattle, 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 …

This time

By Doug SylverSeattle, 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 WitmerTokyo, 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…

Help

By Robert WitmerTokyo, Japan lightimprisoned in diamondsthe dark mine a dollar a day windblown sand –children in ragsstaring as the boat recedes orphans at the stoplighttogetherwe roll up our windowswintera bent spoonin an empty potshoe polishthe toxic smellof unemploymenta few starsfewer leaveshis cardboard homea rainbow ribbonon a rich man’s skytree stumpsoutside the new megastoreempty shopping cartsfor the homelessyesterday’s snowunder a naked treea homeless woman awaiting springold nails squeakingin shrinking woodcampaign promisesthe populist’s campaigna loud speakerdistorts the platitudesair raidour last loaf of breadblackens in the oven a child’s balloondrifts awaythe wall crowned with broken bottles First published: Drifting Sands Haibun, Issue…

Once Bereft

By Robert WitmerTokyo, Japan What would the world be, once bereftOf 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…

Bleeding Skies

by Florence HeyhoeCounty Down, North Ireland bleeding skies children playing  in mine fields

Predators

by Florence HeyhoeCounty Down, North Ireland predators  on the web  trafficking 

As Einstein would say 

By Diana WebbLeatherhead, 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 boxbetween 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…

After the Bomb

By Theresa A. CancroWilmington, Delaware, USA after the bombin each window shardreflected stars First published in The Bamboo Hut, February 2024

First Day

By Theresa A. CancroWilmington, Delaware, USA first dayat rehabchild's pose

Open Carry

By Theresa A. CancroWilmington, Delaware, USA sliver moon --in the dead of nightopen carry

In a Glass Bowl

By Tish DavisConcord Township, Ohio, USA so manyso far from homewinter rain I’m an American in China working to restart the supply chain disabled by the worst flooding in Thailand in half a century.translating work instructions—the universal languageof the office clockAs I walk through the narrow aisle between the cubicles, a woman calls to me from one of the window-lit offices reserved for visitors. It’s one of the Thai engineers.  She’s extraordinarily petite and in her conservative blue dress, reminds me of Bemelmans’ Madeline.  After rummaging through a paper bag, she presents me with a gift—a small package of white…

Ramadan Moon

By Nitu YumnamKolkata, West Bengal, India Ramadan moon—a Gazan child’sempty plate

Nakba 2023

By Vidya Premkumar Wayanad, Kerala, India  nihilisman ice cream truckwith children’s bodies

Nectar

By Tish DavisConcord Township, Ohio, USA The African Violets are about to bloom on the sill next to her bed. She taught me how to split these plants in two and how to stimulate the roots by pouring water into the dish that holds the clay pot. Sometimes when I visit, she cuts a slit in a small square of heavy paper and then inserts a single leaf.  She always asks me to add the water to the glass jar.On this first Mother’s Day without my mom, I try to surprise this other one.  After the nurse wheels my friend to…

The Meadow

Editor's ContributionBy Richard GrahnEvanston, Illinois, USA i stand in a blossoming meadowclover, poppy, and black-eyed Susanripples of fragrance soften the breezesummer’s bouquetdancing with the cloudslight-years awayfrom the horrors of war i’m a simple child chasing butterfliessun dazzling the world aroundcomes the buzz of a bee making honeyi’m up to my knees in a field of unknownsimagination unfetteredbut, oh, so ill-equippedto see beyond the flowers to see those far-off fieldstrampled into bloodto envision men in 3-piece suitsplaying chess in marble towersthe scribes rewriting historybankers funding violenceall i see is violet and green a ladybug lands on my shoulderlike me, another passerbyyoung…

Beyond the Threshold

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USA the slow beatof an egret’s wingswhiteagainst dark oaks—earth’s annunciation vulturescradled on the windendlessly rockingthe tall pines singboth lullaby and dirge the milk-white fleshof a giant puffballbroken openunder the moonan old woman’s grief with this dropof russet inkfrom the acorn capI write nothing—the oak said it better a rift in the wingof a wild gooseflying headlongthrough gathering duskthe fate of the earth ~red lights 16:1, January 2020 Commentary on "Beyond the Threshold" by Tish Davis Jenny Ward Angyal’s tanka sequence, “Beyond the Threshold” is exquisitely crafted.   There is a subtle progression in each of the…

Limb from Limb

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USA morning lightgilding the treetopsas they fallsplinters lodgein my paperbark heart the soundof limbs being brokenas if on a wheel—bloodless the fallen hollies,the heart of pine laid bare the blunt thrustof a bulldozer,the shudderof tissues torn apart—who cries for the earth me too a box turtlecrushed by the skidder’s treadat the edgeof the leftover woodsthis barricade of spiders’ silk plumes of smokerise from the clearcutsilvery as ghoststhe sound of wind chimesbefore the hurricane may the wordsthat tumble from my tonguebe turned to moss—creep over the wounded land,bury the cities of men ~Ribbons 15:1, winter…

Gone

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USA the screamof a red-tailed hawkover the woodwhere dozers wait—my silent cry an echo the giraffeearns a placeon the Red List—Gaia’s ghosthaunts my dreams stacking stonesto build a cairn . . .balancingEarth’s bones,I awaken to vertigo fifty yearsfrom discoveryto extinction—a Pagan reed-warblersings in my heart 4% survivedthe Permian extinction,giving riseto all that lives . . .and to my flightless hope ~Ribbons 13:1, Winter 2017