WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

  I am a Taiwanese poet    I am a humble poet As humble as a blade of grass The grass on the land has a name Thorns prick the skin But it has a name And I have a name too, Taiwan   I am a Taiwanese poet At every international poetry festival I read aloud in my beautiful mother tongue, Taiwanese Telling the stories of Taiwan's joys and sorrows Please do not change my country's name If I cannot attend your magnificent literary event No matter how splendid and alluring the laurel wreath are   If I read aloud in Taiwanese And you feel it is beautiful language Please applaud me Yes, I await the world's friendly response In the name of my beloved Taiwan This is my humble wish Though humble, I persist Even the most splendid literary laurel wreath If it cannot be in the name of my nation, Taiwan It is meaningless to me If one day I die On my tombstone only need one line: Here lay a Taiwanese poet   A Cave     By a dark, dingy cave, A soldier with a pistol...

  Etymology                       The Nobel Prize in Physics 1986 was awarded to jointly to Gerd Binnig                     and Heinrich Rohrer for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope.   It seems like, on one day in Spring, overnight while peepers are singing and mating, buds emerge. Then shortly after, over another night, buds spread into a canopy of leaves shading tadpoles in vernal pools. The refinished table by the window in my upstairs room can’t do anything like that. I mean, if you cut a piece of it and examine it under a scanning tunneling electron microscope you can see atoms. If you cut a piece of tree, you see the same atoms, yet these bud in the Spring. What leaves a tree when it becomes a table? I’ve been thinking about this for some time. Only I’d rather think less and feel more. Thinking is more like doing, an armor that shields one from ...

  Those Days in Letterkenny   Buncrana stank of smelly fish, Letterkenny was very heaven – tonnes of Oatfield   butter and sugar and cream. They made chocolate toffees – Emeralds and Eclairs .   We’d savour their scent on summer holidays when you told us about Peggy’s Leg –   a name that made us laugh – sticks of sugar wrapped in cellophane,   all the more mysterious for our never having tasted them.   I want to ask you, did you love cough sweets, lemon drops, clove rock?   There’s so much I need to learn about you – like why you left farming   and decided to join the army. Why weren’t you a fan of The Beatles,   not even The Rolling Stones – what was it about you preferred   the tenor voice of John McCormack – Tom Waits was a fan,   but that would mean nothing to you? I loved the faint taste of coconut   in an Oatfield Emerald caramel – did you, Dad? There’s so much   I don’t know about you – and you nearl...

  Timeless Gardens   In poetry’s warm snares melancholy has built a nest for words banished from the gardens of Heaven, which pine for their homeland, for the fruit of the Tree of Goodness which still grows where it was planted by the eldest son of time.   From the icy plains of our lives trackers come into our dreams, and fate, with a hand of stone, gathers flowers and dew in gardens of unchanging seasons – to feed sorrow on its journey upon the Earth, while poets stand at the gates of the Creator trusting in his silence –   which they want to turn into words, into a cry whose echo, thrown back from the stars, will become a magic stone, a crystal that can sculpture silence, and be used to write pure poetry.     In the Squares of Babilon   Plug your ears with your palms, do not listen to the conversation between your time and some other time.   Do not heed the effort of this moment to run away from itself and from it all.   Are calamiti...

  enheduanna   was i the first one who dared put her name on a text was i the first one who angered some heads so they erased my face from the tablets tell me oh goddess inanna was i the first one who’d spoken in first person singular in the prayers for escape from trials so particular: I was a princess in the first world empire high priestess in your temple but nanna took my crown gave me a dagger and a sword and bade me be my own judge and put an end to my shameful life still my urge is strong and here i am at midnight speaking unto you there’s one thing that troubles my soul i wish to know if i was the first to work with illustrator but hush now and speak not a word we’ll wait for a mansplanation from the omniscient narrator                                                                         ...

  the shadow of music     the blackbird doesn’t kiss the night the blackbird kisses always             the air that becomes music   the blackbird turns to             a shadow a shadow travelling             the night a shadow of a sound   nothing moves not the water not the air not a thought   rising high & deep only a fine sound you hear you see you taste   rising from the shadows             the yellow beak             the wondrous beak bringing your breath to a halt   the blackbird sings again               it is spring   (tunari, april 2026)       your lips were waiting for too long for ...

  Trespassing on Paradise   Only monster presumes It is his birthright to invade full-on, but Paradise, like Onyx, does not give in.                                 Wherever we go we carry them - the monster and paradise- like a pair of parakeets; two sovereign states of black and white- with us.     There are no sober words in monster’s dictionary; you can realise it while reading newspaper, listening to radio, watching TV or browsing social media. Everything deteriorates with the passing of time.   The domain of the statuesque paradise is squeezing day after day and the monster believes in expansionism. There is only one remedy left to block its road: Burning the effigy of hatred and inviting simulacrum of love.   Be assured, the Paradise is not tired of upholding the tenderness as done earlier an...

  Maria and the l ily   The lily was black.   And the angel adorned with heavy armor. Whose words sounded a declaration of war. This would be the battlefield – for attack His gaze directed, beyond the window into the dancing desert   listening from the street, the womens' voices and laughter. Echoing from – as billowing white sheets waved high on rooftops.   The flow of everything impeded nothing And for a while, she forgot the angel which called on her to stand for all that she stood Her stance, here nor there, would matter not   Yet she knew the battle would rage festering under skin ravaging a'waste   crimson deep like the apple while the worm devours – savors a lesser creature without name burrowing yet darkening, beauty's face.   (From “The Lost Goddess”, 2023)   (translated by Ginger F. Zaimis)         A N N A                   ...

  On the fragment   What begins,             what ends,   we transit from one night to the other, to another nightfall, another fog, knowing that each instant touching us is the last   that we aren’t eternal that time isn’t ours only its indifference   that we emerge from hollowness, from silence from the absent   It is said that one cycle ends and another begins, a something that closes, a something different that appears. But, if there is a new phase, which we suppose is true and it approaches as a radiance in the half-light, what would the difference be from that other detachment of the environment? what makes rain stop being rain or wind from it no longer being wind and that their caress is now different? what should be glimpsed upon so that it provokes another yell, another countenance another fog? The orphanage we endure as we discover ourselves in transit towards death, is evidence of the other’s...