Geetima Baruah Sarma, 1 october 2013
Born to our great motherland India,
We regard you as 'Father of the Nation'.
Your greatness was your simplicity,
Your life was an example of integrity.
You followed the teachings of ‘Gita’,
Kabiguru entitled you ‘Mahatma’.
Gandhiji, we love to call you ‘Bapu’,
We, the nation, pay homage to you.
[Published in ‘iBuzzle’ on 1 October 2013]
Gert Strydom, 1 october 2013
From my mother I got love that is endless,
that comes selflessly in silent sacrifice
and some people see this as insignificant
but Dad far too early was missing in death
and of him I sometime just have knowledge;
.his qualities come as a suggestion.
From mother
Discipline and zeal comes to meaning,
her steadfastness is a strange thing
in a world where people do not keep themselves in check.
I know what love is, in the forgiveness
of mother.
Gert Strydom, 1 october 2013
From my mother I got love that is endless,
that comes selflessly in silent sacrifice
and some people see this as insignificant
but Dad far too early was missing in death
and of him I sometime just have knowledge;
.his qualities come as a suggestion.
From mother
Discipline and zeal comes to meaning,
her steadfastness is a strange thing
in a world where people do not keep themselves in check.
I know what love is, in the forgiveness
of mother.
Gert Strydom, 1 october 2013
Mother, I am tired to come with empty hands to you
and it worries me that life passes so quickly
but to me you are always available
and sometimes my life is in disorder.
and I keep knocking at your door
and it is with an open heart that you are giving every thing
as never your love does end
when like a mere child you wipe off my tears.
I do not know how to say thank you for a life-time
and its only empty words that I am laying at you feet
but like you I do not know any other woman
and maybe I will always cling
to love that is honourable and sincere
and keeps guiding me to God in a world of darkness.
Satish Verma, 1 october 2013
A leached amputee
living with stumps of flawless
dying.
Round and round, blindfolded
moving in circle, drawn by rhyming
bells.
Perhaps you need to suffer
with the drunken race of
snipers.
I am in the silent valley of
barefoot secrets where moon waits to
die.
The poppies will buy the bullets,
a gift to unending kiss of
grief.
Tell every vulture on the tree,
there is endless arrival of
feasts.
Satish Verma
steven cooke, 30 september 2013
I scrawl these visions
in the light of exploding shells
and the grey sleep of a million corpses,
making my pencil the last witness
to the moments between life and death.
Truth shall guide my trembling hand
across a blank canvass that will inherit
this day’s memory of pain.
A transformation in the dark colours of suffering
that echoes the sounds of war
to a respectable audience,
taking their morning tea in England.
The epitaph of a race captured in a wooden pencil
sharing the blood of mankind
in another holy grail.
Come drink this sweet wine of youth
for it will never empty.
My pencil denied by the colours of life
creates glory on a foreign field.
The sons of mothers pose
in deaths final picture,
frozen for winter to play.
Till the heat of summer takes them away
on blue bottle wings to heaven.
A rotten imprint to torment the living.
They were once human as I remember
who came with wit and clean socks
seeking the approval of father.
All were looking for a road to be a man
but the road was a trench,
whose veins pulsated with the blood of the dead
giving birth to the shadows of tomorrow.
Shadows, shadows all is shadows
the pencil can tell no lies.
Life turned into spectres and flies
haunting the conscience of mankind.
We are no longer human beings
war in the trenches dulls the meaning of life.
Death is but a serial number and a victory
for tomorrow’s paper.
Life wasted in Judas visions for all to see.
And I who live in fear
cannot see the lines of humanity anymore.
Only images seeded in a fractured brain
whose portfolio burns in the corpse
that was once my soul.
This pencil has done its duty
The reaper can take these eyes,
eyes that see the shadows
dancing in the flickering flames of war.
A light that bears witness to my last heart beat
in the scribbles of a dying man.
My destiny foretold in my work
to spend eternity in the darkness
that surrounds the stars,
with a pencil that can draw no light.
Pass gently dear comrades from this earth,
time is the watch which knows no end.
Only the blind and the dead will hear
the last tick of this illusion.
For silence is the secret of the earth
everything dies, everything dies.
Gert Strydom, 30 september 2013
You did seep into my heart,
have made friends with my hands and body
and now that your are becoming well-known to me
between us no games do exist
as you did become a part of me.
Gert Strydom, 30 september 2013
When the sun did hang like a copper bell on the horizon
and the silence of the afternoon did come
I already was longing after you
and saw the evening-lily flowering under a silver moon
and when your car lights did turn into the gate
my whole heart rejoiced with joy
and it did feel
as if my day was empty without you.
Satish Verma, 30 september 2013
This nothingness was overwhelming.
When words fail to tell the facts,
only silence talks.
That brutal interrogation of self
to undo the decline, like a
a viper in your home.
The mortgaged glow of stoned infant
in the exiled land, brings
the exodus of shrunken legs.
A shadow survives on the debris
of frozen voices,
sluicing through the cries.
Open the stitches of night.
Death was skirting the prison.
No ropes. No ropes.
Satish Verma
Satish Verma, 29 september 2013
savage was the bond of weakness;
we were hiding behind the pain
of decline, abdicating the singed shrine
of nameless opposition, nowhere the roots
were reaching the bottom of truth, I ran
like river of life amongst the flames, you try to
resuserstate a dozing century by burning
poems, every wen fighting the jinx,
counting the tiny deaths
give me your locked secrets of fire
let me face the cold-blooded murder
in caldron of dead lips
Satish Verma
Poetry
Prose
Photography
Graphics
Video poems
Postcards
Diary
Books
Handmade
