WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

Posts

Knut Odegard [Norway / Iceland]

Mother I have a mother in a blue coat. She takes my hand, I am small I am afraid, she leads me. Her coat is sewn with stars. The snow is so high here when we walk in the Milky Way where no snow is cleared: She and I. Time Time comes on to the stage now. Stands a little at first and hesitates, looks closely at the doorplate in the house (a backdrop there on the stage) to make sure it is the right place, rings and I open: Then the Time is in. The stage curtain falls, it shines of moon and stardust trickles from the curtain, which is the universe´s glowing ground the curtain glides up again and there stands the eternal clown: holds a shrieking newborn baby on the stage while Time bows down for applause. Then the Time is out. Old Lady at the Airport She walks like a bird, flows forward with small jerks through the departure hall. Her name is Hanna, she has a body almost without weight. She is on her w...

Marianne Catzaras [Tunisia / France]

When The Birds When the birds leave my body I will lose the words To enter my memory When the wheat part my fingers A landscape as old as the earth Will rise When the secret hides Behind the trees You will tell me I am cold And the text will be swallowed up By the archeology of the seas There will be no more text Only a botanic book That will be opened To write about the horizon When the statues fall asleep In my hands When the flowers cover up the exile Hastily Then Then I will come back Hanging on your youth As a surprised traveller I will plunge from the quays Not understanding The murmur of the sea I – animal of the sands I – clay, argil, seaweed I will have seen nothing of the oceans When the children on Good Friday Will make the bouquets fly into pieces When the sap flows over The resin of the temples When water mixed with earth Starts howling Like an ...

Javier Gutierrez Lozano [Mexico]

The Queen She gathers up her hair, slowly paints her lips the color of fruit -flesh of every peach, homeland of licentiousness, dream framed by a mouth’s corners-. Her body is blessed, her eyes large with new growth, her face, her word; and clothing makes her uncomfortable, her blood, her hair is eaten away by silence, her wounds fill up with holes... and she knows it. She cuts her arms, chews her legs, calls herself goddess, faultless fairy queen, like when she was a child... and she does not know it. She spits up bile on her miniskirt and stops being who she is so as to be who she thinks she should be; and yet she isn’t. But from one side of the mirror, blind to harvests gone by, untouched by the corruption of trickery, still innocent, everlasting, she is again the shy girl who said "no" with her silence, the unfinished woman who flees from love as from a punishment and who uses up the coherence of life among guilt and pills, among men and sorrow, among the shadows of...

Sotirios Pastakas [Greece]

Academy Street to Michalis Ganas As he walked down Academy Street, he didn’t feel the yellow acacia floret that came and settled in his hair. He didn’t realize that people stepped aside for him to pass, his way clear - green, too, the next pedestrian light. He was unaware of a host of erotic glances, of smiles never returned, of faces warmly beckoning with optimism, Confidence, and kindness. Only when he entered the lift did he blush with shame, as he saw in the mirror the yellow floret caught on his tie; and he smiled, he, Tuesday’s honoured guest, invested with the order of everydayness. ( From “ Learning to Breathe”, 1990) (Translated from the Gr...

Niels Hav [Denmark]

The Dead Have No Telephones Letters no one has written never arrive. Snow covers the churchyard. A taxi waits outside for ten years. ...