Satish Verma, 16 april 2016
Heart’s ache is getting worse everyday.
May be I go out in this brutal world
Of scuttling lies to seek the one
who left the body to trace the wound.
A red hibiscus enters my room from the window
and smiles at me.
Outside clumsy blasts are ripping apart
the tranquil day.
I wrench the emotions out of the poem
for the big mouthed kindness
which sprays the bullets.
Terror strikes suddenly on the swollen ankles
We do not know the cure.
No foreign hand will help,
No foreign face will smile.
I have to go for inward journey
My lips will kiss the condemned.
Satish Verma, 15 april 2016
When glacier recedes,
Your eyes start flowing,
and by the swollen river
an island is swallowed up.
You swim from the lake to the shore
of grief to err again.
Water was your home,
water is your life.
Soft marble swells up in deep crevices
of brain, shaking the foundation of
thoughts, naked as it is.
The fog sleeps on the sea for eternity.
The wrath of sky will burn the skeletons
buried in sand.
Summer will bring the violence.
You cry for forgotten greens,
and kelp and sailing ships
full of hops.
When the hymn recedes,
your eyes start flowing.
Gert Strydom, 15 april 2016
They were tough men who believed in God
who used the holy word and the rod,
ancestors from Dutch and French Huguenot stock,
farmed with vineyards and livestock,
and our language and customs, to some odd
came from centuries that were harsh and hot,
where people herded sheep into a flock
from frontier life, where small children could cock
a rifle and could the hinterland unlock,
could fire at moving targets while at speed
but the British came to cause some amok,
destroyed women, children saw the need
to plunder, pillage, to burn, to kill, to shock
to make Christians, another nation bleed.
[Note by poet: This poem is written in remembrance of the twenty thousand (some figures are as high as thirty five thousand) innocent white Afrikaner women and children that died in British concentration camps, after their farms were scorched by the British in the Anglo-Boer war in South Africa, which includes a great grandmother of mine. For a clear picture of these atrocities read my epic poem “Through the eyes of a field coronet” which is based on the eyewitness account of field coronet JJ Potgieter.]
Gert Strydom, 14 april 2016
Lord, only in Your footsteps there is life for me
and Your life sets me free from all of my iniquity
but every day I do struggle and fall
to stay step upon step with Thee.
Satish Verma, 14 april 2016
It was not like life.
I am worried,
they were hitting the womb.
Social support for surgery.
The hills were crying.
A ring of fog was disturbing.
The elements and spasticity.
Brain leaves a trail of acid.
They were killing the genes.
For the proud generator
over the deaf and dumb
lies the chanting crown.
Terror and the battle of garden,
edge of revenge
annihilates the light!
Gert Strydom, 13 april 2016
An orange-red sickle moon hangs low
above the light speckled darkened land
while all of the neighbourhood is asleep
and thoughts do into my mind creep
when I hear great paws walking outside on the sand
and in my heart a speck of fear does grow
as if something unknown wants to from the darkness reach
and everything outside is not how it does appear
when there is a rattling at the pane and a violent scratch
and in the blue-white glow of a lighted match
an unknown black predatory form draws near
while far away the waves roll in and out on the beach.
Satish Verma, 13 april 2016
He turns, forgets the hollyhocks
tries to become human
accepts the stupidity.
When he could not help the hops
closed the door
and gave sermons.
A horny hooch
or judgement on honeydew
was tossed in dust-bin for integrity.
And deep in river
a crocodile dies
for underwater truth.
Chastity was in peril
tormented by creativity
of the underground.
Renato N. Mascardo, 12 april 2016
quiet
of daybreak torn
by a lone sparrow's trill
a matutinal song longing for
its mate
renato
12 april 2016
Nesca, 12 april 2016
There was a chance.
A little one, it's in stitches now
but it smelled amazing.
Almost like the ocean.
I aborted that chance.
For us, for all of it.
Everything just so you can
make another fake promise.
For a new chance, a new cycle.
Gert Strydom, 12 april 2016
Far too quickly time rushes on
and the happy days of youth are gone
and the company of your love does disappear
and you are the only lonely one
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