November 2009

VOL XVII, Issue 11, Number 199

Editor: Klaus J. Gerken

Production Editor: Heather Ferguson

European Editor: Mois Benarroch

Contributing Editors: Michael Collings; Jack R. Wesdorp; Oswald Le Winter

Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Evan Light; Pedro Sena

ISSN 1480-6401

INTRODUCTION

Nessa O’Mahony 
      Ailwee Fern

CONTENTS

April A.
   1. The Voice Of Despair
   2. Nothing Else Counts
   3. Reflections At Four In The Morning 
   4. Heartless-can-be?
   5. Every Single Evening's Plot 
   6. A Desperate City 

Duane Kocke
   LAURENTIAN LIBRARY
   PHENOMENTAL APPEARANCE
   THE FICTIONAL WORLD THAT MOST
      PEOPLE LIVE IN THEIR ENTIRE LIVES
   LOVE, IF AUTHENTIC, IS NEVER
      THE SAME AS ANYBDY ELSE’S LOVE
   PHENOMENAL RESPONSE
      TO THE ONTOLOGICAL SUBJECTIVE

Joseph Farley
   A Toast To The Founding Fathers 
   Agincourt In Spring
   In Praise of Ear Plugs
   Tick Tick
   Friday Night Starts The Party

Roger Taber
   THE YELLOW BALLOON
   HELMAND
   A FEELING FOR PEACE AND QUIET
   WHERE NO BELLS TOLL
   MISSING, BELIEVED KILLED
   GOVT. HEALTH WARNING: PICKING FLOWERS CAN BE DANGEROUS
   LAST POST

POST SCRIPTUM

Nessa O’Mahony 
   Aerial conflict
     Brookwood, 5th June 2007

INTRODUCTION

Nessa O’Mahony 

Ailwee Fern

300m down, so deep
that drips grow, 
have all the time 
in this dark
verticle to rise,
to fall, elongate into
waxy stone, calcify.
We stop
where the guide
places us,
admire the bear pits,
the mineral sheen
on walls, the way
the cathode lights
the stream falling
through a crack
above, so much
quick silver
falling.
In the halogen glow 
we nearly miss
the one, small
green frond
sprouting from
a ledge above,
its chlorophyll
vivid against 
the cave wall.
The guide
disapproves,
explains
the science
of spores
falling through
grikes 900m
above ,
of timer lights
that simulate
the god-given.
He would
eradicate, we demur;
taking our miracles
where we find them.

April A.

1. The Voice Of Despair

Triangles of half-open doors
Reveal all the truth that is hidden:
Just condoms and cans on the floor,
Black papers with verses, forbidden -
Unfinished remakes of the song,
Deprived of the right to speak loud
Of wicked intentions gone wrong -
Erasers have muffled the shout.

The only illusion-proof mind -
A poet, the voice of despair,
Sincere, the one of this kind
Throws verses far into the air
Right there, in a dirty old flat
Among once great talents, now rotten.
They all have deserved more than that,
But even their names are forgotten. 



2. Nothing Else Counts

The streets are embraced by this threatening night,
She's sunk in his warm, not yet sober embrace.
They promised each other that things would go right,
Yet all their hopes stand for counting days.

The morning will frown - one desperate kiss,
The sign of unfortunate parting for two,
Will cease their dwelling in ignorant bliss,
Or blissful forgetting, whatever is true. 

The well-known words in a new undertone
Of whispering voices are fading away.
The morning will frown, and she will be gone;
He'll vanish in sleep till around midday.

They'll meet when the streets are embraced by the dark.
With no place to go, to never be found,
With lives half-forgotten, with nothing to mark.
But they have each other, and nothing else counts. 



3. Reflections At Four In The Morning

All days are the same: morning, city, the crowd.
Life's not going forward, it's moving around.
And masks of all shades on those ignorant faces,
A few made-up stories in cheap street newspapers,
Sluts looking like stars, dirty queens of attraction,
Gross idols of so deceptive perfection
Are doors to the mind of the crowd, so hollow -
They hear the call of the dumb and they follow.
Now passion means lust, now freedom means violence,
Stupidity prospers. It's due to your silence!
The weak ones are searching for someone to blame,
The helpless would trade for a minute of fame.
A couple hearts broken don't cost a damned thing;
The hopeless romantics would give anything -
Despite having nothing - for love, non-existing.
We've made up this concept, as something is missing.
Believe it or not - I can cope alone!
I never wished someone to call me their own.
It's such a delusion that having you here
Will help me get over this common old fear.
What's frightening? Solitude? Fear itself!
I hide beside you when I fear myself!
But it is much better with you than the crowd
That never goes forward, that keeps going round. 



4. Heartless-can-be?

I'm wild and sometimes even heartless-can-be,
I'm fond of collecting illusions to ruin,
I'm breaking the rules life has written for me,
"Create to destroy" best describes what I'm doing. 
I'm scarily dangerous, silently loud -
A walking disaster you'd better ignore,
The pain in the neck of a desperate crowd.
But I'm like a magnet - you'll only want more.

You'll figure me out, you'll get to the core -
One beauty, two fears, three dangers - it's me.
You'll enter my heartspace and close the door
For anyone else who I wanted to be.
My truth was denying devotion and faith,
And now you've proved right the opposite true.
A chain of mistakes is the sign of my days;
My strength will forgive me - it led me to you. 



5. Every Single Evening's Plot 

I closed the door of my dirty old flat,
I went outside for a short evening stroll.
I bought some cheap hooch and a condom instead.
I'd only arrived when I heard a phone call.
It was so persistent, so deafening loud.
Who failed to forget me? I wanted to know.
I took a deep breath for a desperate shout,
Picked up the receiver: "Hello! Hello?"
Just silence. An error? Wrong number? Or what?
A quick thought of you. Stupid me! Would you care?
I started to feel all the spirits I'd bought
Dissolve in my blood, neutralizing despair.
In less than an hour my neighbours arrived
And asked me for something they needed. Okay.
I gave them a condom and bade them hot night -
I wouldn't have sex for some number more days.
I spent the next hour listening to moans,
But envy and anger were still neutralized.
I'd made through the day, and I'd done it alone.
The neighbours calmed down. I closed my eyes. 



6. A Desperate City 

Hello to you from the gray gloomy city, 
Where crowds unconsciously worship despair, 
Indulging in dangers of constant self-pity 
With naive belief in the world's being fair. 
They have no trust in a man's inner power, 
And fortitude sounds like something unknown. 
They have no poets, just ones of an hour, 
Who drown at once in the thoughts of their own. 

With greed they consume plain illusions for dinner, 
And dress them with lies when they serve the new dishes 
To those so-called "pathological sinners" 
Who find someone else's delusions delicious. 
They have Friday liter-mates rather than friends 
To mark that the week of no favor is ending, 
But even with glasses of spirits in hands 
They look worse than misery. Are they pretending? 



Duane Kocke


LAURENTIAN LIBRARY

Here, with her, close, watch DVD,
The steps of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library,
The unique curves undulate, thrill.
The marble window above that cannot
Be ever opened or even seen through
Is a wise commentary on our unwise lives.
I believe I love her, but do I experience
Love when we are together. Do I really
Know what a feeling of love is. Is it this
A fantasy or reality. My unconscious knows,
But this wise part of me speaks in an unknown tongue,
Never tells me anything I can understand.



PHENOMENTAL APPEARANCE

It does not matter if the sky as observed
By men with mechanical instruments
To augment eyes is not blue, but a wave length,
That the orange pumpkin popping out of
Twisted and entangled veins making a green mass
In not orange, but a wave length, and what
Is designated “pumpkin” by a singular language
Is an unknowable thing in itself, all
This information is trivial, designed
To entertain by related persiflage dull minds.
What matters is the way the sky
And the pumpkin phenomenally appear to us.



THE FICTIONAL WORLD THAT MOST
PEOPLE LIVE IN THEIR ENTIRE LIVES


Most people prepare their minds to fictionize
Through imposition of unfelt and extraneous
Information, thus they never experience the properties
Of any thing. A rare few experience his or her
Experience of the properties of things.
Most people have never had an experience,
What they had was other people’s experience,
And these slave mentalities destroy
Their experience by substituting a concept
Derived from an account of other’s experience.



LOVE, IF AUTHENTIC, IS NEVER
THE SAME AS ANYBDY ELSE’S LOVE

Do not confuse my love for her
With anybody else’s love,
For no two people can love the same
Unless it is a false love,
A copy love, not a personal experience.
Perhaps, she has never experienced my love,
But substituted a popular belief, a copy love.
There is so little authentic love in our world,
But an abundance of pretended loves.
Authentic love, my love is socially a danger to myself.



PHENOMENAL RESPONSE
TO THE ONTOLOGICAL SUBJECTIVE

Blue arabesqued rays overlap
The dark silver edges of holes
In amorphous, shape-changing clouds,
An orange oral’s tip atop a horizon
Of mountain top jagged forest darkness,
So we discover it is the time
That agreement designates as evening.
We feel, we agreed, epistemically factual
In an ontologically subjective state of being.



Joseph Farley


A Toast To The Founding Fathers

Reading the history of the early years of this nation
the dreams and compromises wrought in lasting words
by men enshrined in America's pantheon
it is good to remember in that time 
Harvard gave each student a ration of porter
and that ale and wine were on most tables.
There were those who fell down drunk
in the muddy streets and lay there 
until the authorities dragged them off,
but most were content to just be slightly tipsy
while mounting horse and plowing field
and designing the government that rule our land.



Agincourt In Spring

Grass grows tall upon the fields
raising up rows of green spears
until the grounds keeper mows
and levels the land, then all is hush
and fallow and cold once more.



In Praise of Ear Plugs

Some mouths should not open, 
if they do hold your ears.
Shrieking beasts will not stop
until someone's brought to tears,
Harpies haunt Greek legend,
targeting human faults,
nagging to destruction
our fragile mammal hearts.
The TV is white noise.
A six-pack dulls the mind,
familiar anesthesia,
drowns out a barking hind.



Tick Tick

The doomsday clock
ticks closer to midnight.
Time to break out 
the champagne
and have a last dance.
If you can't stop
the end of the world
you might as well
enjoy it.



Friday Night Starts The Party

Five o'clock is almost here,
time to run and grab a beer.
If we drink and dance enough,
Monday may not seem so tough.
We'll cloud our minds
and forget the week.
On Saturday we will peak.
Sunday night will turn us meek.
Monday morning always comes
but our ears still echo with the drums
and the riffs from hot guitars
from good times spent in rockin' bars.



Roger Taber

 
THE YELLOW BALLOON

We were just children 
playing with a yellow balloon,
our mothers calling us home
but you let go of the string
and it took of into a purpling,
we children following
We were just children
chasing after a yellow balloon,
our mothers calling us home
but we could not hear
for the sound of our laughter,
desire for adventure
We were just children,
reaching up for a yellow balloon
beyond either reach or ken,
as if a mind of its own,
losing all sense of direction,
crying out for attention
We were just children
left to watch a yellow balloon
burst by a passing sea gull;
no sound of a bang,
only tiny bits of sky fluttering,
heaven disintegrating
Children, chasing a yellow balloon
last seen in pieces over Afghanistan



HELMAND


Between mountains and desert sand,
where bombs laid and bullets fly,
an ill-fated province called Helmand
Trying desperately to understand,
a soldier sees close friends die
between mountains and desert sand 
Under resourced and undermanned
the soldier wonders why…
an ill-fated province called Helmand?
How come, fighting for a foreign land
(poppies in a storm’s eye)
between mountains and desert sand?
No choice but fight in a foreign land,
hear the politicians cry…
an ill-fated province called Helmand
Shaping a better future for humankind,
(no matter the cost, we must try);
Between mountains and desert sand,
an ill-fated province called Helmand



A FEELING FOR PEACE AND QUIET

On old Memory Lane, all is quiet
for those who fought a war to end war
so we may make our peace with it
Among cries of the fallen, a shout,
(At ‘em lads, at ‘em, that’s the score!)
On old Memory Lane all is quiet
They bore old age, faces firmly set
to do them proud who had gone before
so we may make our peace with it 
We will always be in their debt,
dead and wounded on a foreign shore;
on old Memory Lane all is quiet
We must never even try to forget
those whose freedom’s colours wore,
so we may make our peace with it
War, war and still more of it yet;
on the landscape of love, a weeping sore;
on old Memory Lane, all is quiet
so we may make our peace with it
 


WHERE NO BELLS TOLL

There is a wood
where we played as children
and bluebells grow
When you came home
after seeing the rape of Zimbabwe
we picked bluebells
When you came home
from the killing fields of Iraq
we picked bluebells
When you came home
from the poppy fields of Afghanistan
we picked bluebells
When you came home
telling of monks beaten in Tibet
we picked bluebells
When you came home 
from the line of fire on the Gaza Strip
it was in a coffin
There is a wood
where history plays tricks on us
and bluebells grow



MISSING, BELIEVED KILLED

I looked up to you with love and pride
For all the fine qualities you’d nurture
but on your last leave something died 
That first time you went to war, I cried
while you but longed for adventure;
I looked up to you with love and pride
In Iraq, your worst fears chose to hide 
behind finer aspects of human nature 
but on your last leave, something died
In Afghanistan, you fought side by side
with the bravest, a born again warrior;
I looked up to you with love and pride
You saw friends killed or injured, tried
to see hell as part of a bigger picture… 
but on your last leave, something died
You seemed to take it all in your stride,
even carrying coffins on your shoulder;
I looked up to you with love and pride
but on your last leave, something died



GOVT. HEALTH WARNING: PICKING FLOWERS CAN BE DANGEROUS

Love is a flower growing wild,
left alone yields fine shoots;
London, Washington, Kabul, Baghdad
found tugging at its roots
Love, in habitats custom made
for the doves of peace;
London, Washington, Kabul, Baghdad, 
up for regular target practice
Love is nature’s first wild child,
our privilege to dry its tears;
London, Washington, Kabul, Baghdad, 
feeding on its fears
Love sows the seeds of creation
in a common earth;
its wild beauty our hell and salvation,
potential for rebirth
Politics and religions but spread
prejudices, impose conditions;
London, Washington, Kabul, Baghdad, 
well orchestrated divisions 
Among the heart’s greater terrors,
home grown egos 
 


LAST POST

They shot me down on foreign soil
and the first sound I heard was a child’s cry
at the moment of birth 
and I wished the child and parents well,
that they would see a kinder end 
than me, wracked with pain, no less so
for knowing I would never see
either homeland or loved ones again
yet had done my best (can anyone
do more?) and had no regrets but one
about fighting a war like this…
A continuing absence of peace
They lay a black cloth over my face
so I should not see comrades close to tears
for the worst of fears
we put behind us who fight such wars
as we don’t always understand
but do our duty though it be in a land
as far away from the pub 
on the corner of our street as heaven
from hell where they all but meet
here in Afghanistan…
A continuing absence of peace
They put me in a box and closed the lid
so I would not feel the tears of passing clouds 
on the journey home
or hear the strains of the Last Post
acknowledge me gone
nor see the flags lowered as silent crowds
line the streets of a small town
taking me to their hearts as if I were one 
of their own, as they have done
for others like me, making our journey 
less lonely for this…
A lasting empathy with peace
The first sound I heard as they lowered me
into the earth, was a child’s cry at the moment
of birth and I wished the child
and parents well in a kinder world than this
that saw me fight to save it 
from a hell of its own making, no less so
for centuries of tradition
and a culture of oppression seeking
to break free while keeping faith 
with its finer principles and (far) kinder
ways than this…
A continuing absence of peace
“A good person, worthy sacrifice, fine soldier...”
Too late, I cannot hear

Nessa O’Mahony 


Aerial conflict
Brookwood, 5th June 2007

All morning I’ve been watching
squadrons of coal tits,
blues, the great black and yellow,
dart to and fro from the feeder,
returning with crops full 
of sunflower hearts.

Fledgings inflate on the crab-apple,
flex wings, gapes clamorous as they
bump each other, test weight
on each branch, each leaf, wait
for their parents’ ministrations.

They move, en masse, to the silver birch.
Suddenly a commotion in the beech hedge; 
a gatling of caws as two pied beauties
wrestle each other; I cannot be sure 
if the skirmish is a smash and grab
or just a domestic, over-spilling.

A battalion of small birds zoom,
protests mosquito-whines 
as they attack both flanks.
Clumsy amid terracotta pots
I mediate, clap hands, add 
to the cacophony.

They disperse, leaving one scalp:
a feather, black and white-tipped,
spirals to land.

All poems copyrighted by their respective authors. Any reproduction of
these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is
prohibited.

YGDRASIL: A Journal of the Poetic Arts - Copyright (c) 1993 - 2009 by 
Klaus J. Gerken.

The official version of this magazine is available on Ygdrasil's 
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