Cassandra Voices

Tag: Cassandra Voices Poetry

  • Poem: Holy Hay

    Holy Hay

    I didn’t have a chance to show you
    the sainfoin I sowed back in May,
    remembering our holiday in Spain
    where we kept seeing it in bloom
    by the road and on waste ground, covering
    whole hillsides, great cerise stains
    of what we later learned was Holy Hay.
    Back here I bought some and spread it, watching
    as seedlings appeared, unfurled nodding leaflets
    in the rough and roguing wind and rain.
    Maybe it was the wet, or the rabbits;
    whatever, just one made it through to flower,
    when each closed and softly bristled brush became
    a clump of rosy Jagger lips. Yet I remember

    wrongly: it wasn’t Spain, it was Sicily,
    and maybe what we saw was Sulla,
    Italian sainfoin, a deeper red colour,
    but its name would never stick with me;
    not like Holy Hay, coumarin still drifting
    from an early mowing, with vetch and clovers,
    sweet vernal grass, sown by an unseen other
    who disappeared with the passing spring.
    That’s why I tried it in our garden,
    feeling it somehow sacred, so it might recover
    the past; seeing it there you would laugh and
    I would find in that perennial trait
    passed down from your dear, faithful father
    a way back to those fertile fields of grace.

    Feature Image: Flowers of Hedysarum coronarium at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

  • Poem: ‘They Have Gained An Audience’

    THEY HAVE GAINED AN AUDIENCE

    with the divine. The plumbline is vertical
    as the resulting verse, so that neither agony
    nor ecstasy travel horizontally but curl and rise,
    sweet smoke from the swung thurible. Perhaps

    these are the only prophets left to us, still able
    to loop the loose thread of heaven through earth’s
    needle-eye, a tremendous feat because her heavy lid
    cannot stay open, closes now even on a clear day.

    I imagine a bird and the bird is language, the bird
    encircles the head of the most high and does not
    flinch or burn, does not hide itself in a cleft of rock
    that the holy might pass by. It cannot land. The point
    is that the bird approaches—the point is flight. We need

    only send our winged words through the needle’s eye,
    the poets tell me, as though it’s easy, as though handfuls
    of heaven are there for anyone to pattern, Dante or
    the old woman at the end of the street who drives out
    alone to check her spring calves. And yet to see her
    returning at dusk, you’d swear she has covenantal
    rainbows on her face, in her white hair.

    Image: Daniele Idini

  • Poem: ‘The Longest Day of the Year’

    THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR

    Lucky gull chicks on a city roof
    take food from their parents and snuggle for warmth;
    for them, life has begun as well as it could.
    The flightless chick who fell from its nest above
    and is abandoned by its parents
    on a hostile gull family’s roof
    is shut in a large, bright, open room
    and soon learns that fear is a nail
    that fixes the whole being to a hard board.

    The lost chick can hear its family above
    and calls to them, looking up to a place
    it cannot reach and from which no helps comes;
    flight is weeks away. The enemy adults attack
    and the refugee huddles in a corner
    watching the privileged chicks eat well,
    all because the spots on its head
    are not in the correct pattern.
    Sometimes it cannot resist any longer
    and rushes forward to try and share the food,
    but is driven back by sharp, flashing beaks.

    The fallen one must somehow hang on,
    surviving on forgotten scraps
    until its feathers are ready
    and a new phase of life begins.
    The prisoner walks around and around,
    the will to live fighting the hunger,
    but it cannot escape for now, no matter what.
    Living in terror in this rooftop hell,
    every day is the longest day of the year.

    Feature Image: Magda Ehlers

     

  • Poem: ‘And Not Your Garments’

    And Not Your Garments

    Lord, Lord this my heart full

    of secrets, seeds I know
    you did not send—Lord, I

    cannot rend.

    If I am choked, therefore,

    by weeds,

    I will not ask
    for a mended garden, I

    won’t beg your holy pardon
    at scythe’s end.

    These were difficult to bury,
    so little loam left in me. You,

    perfect,            alone
    apprehend.

     

    Feature Image: De intrige, (James Ensor, 1890); collection: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen

  • Poem: ‘All is Number’

    All is Number

    If the late afternoon light is beautiful
    but God’s not behind it
    then my mind is just classifying;

    if the late afternoon light is beautiful
    and God designed it,
    it’s a blessing and a deep unknowable well:

    light seems a word beyond metaphor —
    a wave and a particle
    neither wave nor particle,

    energy cast out of the sun,
    passed through a vacuum —
    so vast in its power

    the plump earth greens luminous
    and humans agree terms to barter for
    what’s there which lies shimmering
    and only calculable.

  • Poem: ‘Faerie Fire’ by Rye Jaffe

    Faerie Fire

    From forests, fields and fens, fair folk are found,
    where witchery winds with the wailing wind,
    dug deep down dreams drooled by departed drowned,
    as painfully professed by powers pinned.
    In iron, imps immersed incur ill eye,
    manacled to mortal machinations,
    while led by living lights, our lost lives lie
    sunk ‘neath stars of shoreless sublimation.
    Hence, happiness haunts high in harrowed hells
    as eldritch escorts eagerly enthrall,
    with conjured chains to clasp close cloistered cells
    run red by romance rebuffing recall.
    And nevermore need namesakes now be known,
    to those tied tight unto this twilight throne.


    Feature Image: The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania by Joseph Noel Paton (1849)

  • Poem: St. Patrick’s Day 2024

    St. Patrick’s Day 2024

    My dream takes me to the White House
    where Kelly green fountain streams
    spit red globules, ricochet on the pristine lawns.
    Dirty skies sit low, a brazen breeze propels
    smell of sizzling flesh to the oval office
    stage where emerald men show cause
    bear not the crystal bowl of shamrock, Mr President
    but a clay jar of sinews stewed in the tears of Gaza.

    I wake to the daymare of a festival episode
    stars of our sod line out to stroke your cloak, Mr President
    detonate the oval space with leprechaun lyric.
    Like a gaping silence of Connemara stone
    what remains unsaid
    scars my heart.


    Feature Image: President Joe Biden participates in a bilateral meeting with Taoiseach of Ireland Leo Varadkar, Friday, March 17, 2023, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

  • Poem: ‘Year of The’ by Haley Hodges

    Year of The

    Restless at the kitchen table, year of our Lord
    twenty twenty-four, year my words marched
    backward into my mouth and forward only
    when forgotten, year of the idiotic Stanley tumbler,
    year of the subtle but far reaching machinations of
    neo-Marxism depending on who you ask, year of
    our lady of fuck around and find out, year of pundits,
    year of Doja Cat, year of royal family tabloid drama, year of
    literal and figurative warfare, bloodlust year, year of desire
    year of frustrated desire, year of gradually excruciating
    guided identification of desires, year of my father
    unable to discuss that which is not the village
    council, year of the child, the laughing year of the wailing
    child, the domestic year, the exotic year, the year
    of everything turning to poetry, the year of poetry
    turning to nothing, the year of your turning to
    everything, the year of totality, the lost and found
    year, the year of the late bloom of the heart’s silent
    madness, year of attending to various screens, year
    of continual scrolling, the unchurched year, the year
    of tallying ecclesial Latin absorbed by the body, the
    pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua year, the irreverent
    year, the year of tabula rasa and later perceptions
    of time, the year of the timely year, the seasonal
    year, the calendar year, the yearly restlessness
    at the kitchen table year of annual infinity
    the year of the erotic diminuendo, the yearless
    pleasured year of self, the wanton year, the may be
    out after hours year, the year of slow staircase
    ascents, the year of our Lord not yet come
    again, the year lavished on a boy, the year wasted
    on a man, the unmanned barely manageable
    one-woman year of kitchen table restlessness,
    the year of being trapped in a word document
    the year of being trapped in a word


    Feature Image: Vlada Karipovich

  • Poetry: Putriyana Asmarani

    The Leap

    Down, down the stairs to the five pillars of pronounced architecture,
    Five entrances into the forgotten yore, a bridge gutter, the rippling gore.
    4.     3. 8. 3. 0. days passed, wind hushed, sins unconfessed, ‘Tis bridge’s structure.
    There, there the Plaintive Cuckoo lamented immortal spirit marred and impaired;
    Walked forward, stepped towards a mortal she, it breached time, it whispered—
    –                                                                                 “Come sleep and take a leap.”

    Deep into the Night’s Plutonian mist, she fell asleep; the gutter’s mud gushed,
    The floor she laid was bare, moldy, musty, the midnight sound rebounded;
    Waterbrug te Boeloelawang bij 1904, the spirit preached and preached…preached.
    The mortal woke a shapeless wake, a form unforming, between two worlds—same place.
    Remember no nepenthe but an absolution after a penance, night fell, she rose.                            –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “Come take a leap.”

    Startled in a quietude passivity, her placid bust, barren soul, she spoke
    In aeolian gust, “Angel,” said she, the spirit sushed. “Thou art death inescapable,
    Walk I in the depth of night, whole-heartedly hopped myself on to thy’s canoe.”
    “Hush Dear One, death is mine, life is all yours,” the spirit said, “For the past is mine,
    The present is yours. For I’m a bread crumb, spared left to confess, now is the time—
    –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “Now take a leap.”

    The water washed crime scene in the gutter’s lane, but never the grief, the sins.
    The sugar cane and paddies trees, plantations, farms, industries— the Netherlands Indies;
    Told thee the mortal, that unsang yore from a bridge which pillars were made of bones,
    So the water could travel far reaching the belly of  De Rijke, Groskam & Co, the firms.
    “Time is a lonely silent maiden,” said the mortal she, “For sons she traded, sugar she gets.”
    –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “Leap more.”

    “In my bosom’s core, agony is catching. I speak no syllable but ones with sores;
    Three souls, five souls a week, few were pregnant, deep in impenetrable bushes
    Of sugar cane, the angels took infants with no names, and the mothers,
    The sons, the fathers mistook their presences in common farm labor struggles,
    They mistook death as regular pains. Chop…chop the sounds of their axes.”
    –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “They’ll leap.”

    “The current in the gutter grows higher, the seraphim, never they take souls;
    Just like an epidemic when summer ends, hundred souls a day, in Java—
    Hundred souls a day—or even more. “‘Tis the grace and glory in East Indies,”
    The Governor-General’s hymn echoed across the seven seas;
    Shall he know, some quite wandering souls refuse to rest in peace.”
    –                                                                                     Quoth she, “Glory won’t leap.”

    “Eternally, eternally, I have all the leisure to suffer,” murmured the spirit to she.
    “Deaths, like a flock of cranes pass by this very bridge, marching to the
    Dilated moon shine. I know some—I employed some—I killed many;
    He who dipped his forehead to the earth’s chest, begging, calling me Master, the
    Other he who traded his daughter to please the thirst of mine—thirst of mine. –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “That leap of mine.”

    “Tell me, what thy lowly name is on the yore, rippling gore, the gutter’s fame?”
    Asked she, “Though pale, singing dirges blue, breathing the breath of a grave’s fume,
    Though bearing the pains all mankind—victims bore, thou art a bearer of a lore,
    I sleep and leap—and leap more, down to your essence’s core, events’ shore.
    Swore Thee no angel but the one who stores—I am no dead man’s chore.-                                                                                 Quoth she, “I leap no more.”

    Grim and gaunt the spirit beguiled, it was—he was—master of her kind.
    “I made myself heard and loud,” answered the spirit, “The unseen is unheard;
    No more, the unseen have confessed. I am the Governor-General, the butcher,
    A master a brief once and a sinner for evermore, in eternal tempest tossed
    And clogged, under the five pillars of forgotten yore, a manslaughter;
    –                                                                                     Quoth the spirit, “That leap of mine.”

                                                                                                   

    *This poem is inspired by the construction of Waterbrug te Boeloelawang bij Malang, East Java, Indonesia, 1904.

  • A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    In the poem your butchers
    fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries

    are clean, the brimming
    table-top restored – your every room

    aflush with idleness again,
    a bowl of flying spices

    near to hand, the oven-bread
    uplifted through the haze: a feast

    the windy air will sing
    from the open-hearted balcony

    to the salted promenade below,
    where a boy

    is counting ripples out to sea,
    and the market-men

    are bundling their wares,
    the coming dark

    a gentleness
    and rustling of wings:

    no raining heat
    or carnage to allay,

    the waterways unpoisoned
    by cruelty or death.

    You see – the dream
    your fingers fashioned like a sail

    is soaring in the breeze;
    your pen

    outlives the bullets
    of the eviscerator’s gun.

     

    The Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) was killed along with his family in Gaza on December 6th. His final broadcasted poem, “If I must die” makes reference to his statement in an interview that if soldiers arrived on his doorstep he would fling his pen, his only weapon, in their faces.