Three Poems by Nolo Segundo

 

                          

GETTYSBURG, REDUX 

 

 

Now the happy soldiers 

Go to fight again the battle, 

Marching bravely forty abreast 

With heavy muskets shouldered, 

Yelling their cries of pain and glory 

As they face the cold cannon 

Barking like a pack of mad dogs. 

 

Down they go in ones and twos, 

And sometimes in little bunches, 

Collapsing together as though 

Put to sleep by the fairy dust 

Of long forgotten dreams. 

 

Both sides feel the urge 

To kill, to step the victor 

O’er their brothers’ bones. 

Grown men playing—yes 

Even perhaps a bit silly—but 

Maybe, just maybe, 

Some of them are unaware 

Of their own anguished deaths 

There on that sweating day 

Not really so very long ago. 

 

At seventeen I went to that town 

To talk of my education and  

In the warm afternoon 

I meandered mindlessly  

Amidst the boulders named  

Fearfully for Satan’s lair. 

There suddenly, terribly, 

While walking between two 

Of the giant stones, my body 

Shuddered, an awful shaking 

That shook me to the core  

Of my soul, but then I did not yet 

Know we never die only once.

Sacred Things 

 

Every human heart is a church, 

A sacred temple, a holy mosque, 

And God is found within  

In measure to its love. 

 

Some say 

There are no miracles: 

Look around, I say, 

And then see— 

A fat baby laughing,  

A new cloak of silken snow, 

A heart beating 90 years, 

A mind seeing inside…. 

 

What is an orchid 

If not a miracle? 

What is love 

If not the wonder  

Of the universe?

SATORI 

 

 

From where are born 

These little dreams 

Made only of words? 

The secret part of 

My myriad mind? 

Or someplace much, 

Much deeper, far  

Beyond form, 

Beyond time, 

Beyond even God? 

 

 

I know not—for  

Each comes like  

A solo songbird 

Suddenly sitting 

On the sill of an 

Open window,  

Singing its brief 

Song just for  

You while you 

Try, try hard 

To recall it all 

And share it  

With a tiny  

Slice of this 

Vast world. 

 

And if you  

Can catch  

The song, 

And seed  

It into a 

Poem, then  

Another may 

Dream and  

Dream and  

Dream….

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L.J.Carber, became a widely published poet in his mid-70's in over 140 literary journals/anthologies in America, Canada, England, Romania, Scotland, Portugal, Australia, Sweden, India and Turkey. A trade publisher has released 3 book length collections: The Enormity of Existence [2020], Of Ether and Earth [2021], and Soul Songs [2022]. These titles like much of his work reflect the awareness he's had since having an NDE when as a 24 year old agnostic-materialist, believing only matter was real and so death meant extinction, he lept into a Vermont river in an attempt to end the suffering of a major clinical depression. He learned that day the utter reality that poets, Plato, and Jesus have spoken of for millennia: that every sentient human has a consciousness that predates birth and survives death--a soul. A retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, and Cambodia in the mid-70's] he's been married 43 years to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman.

 

 

 

  

    

 

 

 

 

Two Poems by Lynda Tavakoli

 

AFTERTHOUGHT  

 

Tell the displaced they will find a home,  

if they do not die while walking. 

 

Tell the maimed that in five years’ time 

they will have learned to crawl again. 

 

Tell the buried they will only live 

inside the beating hearts of those remaining. 

 

Tell the orphaned that the sympathy of others 

will never heal their loneliness. 

 

Tell the abandoned they may one day 

be remembered for their fortitude. 

 

Tell the starved that skin and bone 

has satisfied its own hyperbole. 

 

Tell the missing they are simply numbers now, 

lost within the ether of statistics and conveniency.     

 

Tell the children you have not forgotten them 

when their images have ceased to occupy our TV screens. 

  

Tell whoever wants to listen that the world is surely lost 

if the dead are but an afterthought. 

 

 

 

 

   

WANT 

 

 

A silence of drones finds solace in an empty sky, 

and below, 

     hope.

Lynda Tavakoli lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, where she facilitates an adult creative writing class and is a tutor for the Seamus Heaney Award for schools.

A poet, novelist and freelance journalist, Lynda’s writings have been published in the UK, Ireland, the US and the Middle East, with Farsi and Spanish translations. She has been winner of both poetry and short story prizes in Listowel, The Westival International Poetry Prize and runner- up in The Blackwater International Poetry Competition and Roscommon Poetry Competition.

Her poems have also appeared in The Irish Times, New Irish Writing. Lynda’s debut poetry collection, ‘The Boiling Point for Jam’ is published by Arlen House and includes these three poems about the different aspects of war.

 

Four Poems by Fred Johnston

 

ABSURD NOSTALGIA FOR A BELFAST SUNDAY

 

Where to find a Belfast Sunday –

I used to know it by the bells of St. Donard’s

And the whitewashed freeze of the outside loo

The black runny heap of coal by the yard wall

After rain; a chained-up resentment of playgrounds

 

I used to know Sunday by its absences

No kids, no gabby women in the street

The spaces that were left were deep as Sunday

Was deep and stretched like canvas over

The edge of the world into Monday -

 

A day as brazen as any other now

It’s transitioned, changed address

It’s not there stiff as rock between Saturday

On the terraces and Monday school -

It used to be Lowry, now it’s gone all Jackson Pollock

 

THAT’S ALL

 

On a clear blue night my father and I leaned on the balcony

Listening to the Singer sewing-machine prick of automatic weapons

Carry over from the far side of the city

Under Black Mountain where the council estates lived.

 

 

WEATHER

 

The radio’s rancid with weather warnings

We’re not talking

The garden is demolishing itself wind-blow by wind-blow

 

This is a fruitless, flowerless season

No good can come of it -

There are terrible things in the world; there is our silence.

 

EDITORIAL

 

My uncle waited until he was seventy

Before running off with a scrupulously respectable woman

Who lived a few doors down

Whose small front garden took a prize every year

And one more blemish pushed through our family’s skin

We sat and rearranged our lexicon

So that our conversations would never include her or him.

 

Fred Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951. His most recent collection of poems is 'Rogue States,' (Salmon Poetry 2019.) For some years he worked in journalism and in the mid-Seventies, with Neil Jordan and Peter Sheridan, he founded the old Irish Wtiters' Co-operative (Co-Op Books.) In 2019, he received an Irish Arts Council Literary Bursary to complete a new selection of short stories. Recent work has appeared in The Spectator, STAND, The Dalhousie Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Temenos Academy Review, Dreich, among others. He lives in Galway on the West of Ireland.