WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

  Stones   Stones take to each other naturally, Like a family of sleeping creatures,   The large ones accommodate little ones, To create a colony of hardness;   They rest in centuries of stark stillness; They are elephant-heavy to lush grass.   Their colours employ the afternoon sun; They are as warm as loaves from an oven.   Each one embodies its personal death; They are cobbled memories of the sea;   They are the solid language of labour: Each one weathered to a perfect image.   They rest, innocent of their history, Like a grey display of featureless skulls.   They have tasted our sweat and absorbed our blood. They rise and fall, symbols of man’s conscience.   Their persistence has sculptured their silence; They hint that their souls haunt other planets.   They are magnets for our primitive thoughts; They are the armour of truths beyond us.   They shape our built fears of an afterlife, They could tempt us into acts of worship...

  silence   sometimes a lot of silence is needed for me to wake up between shadow and soul even in this century the lantern flickers and I 'm finally still the moon and the river accompany our walk everything is left to its own   even this century walks and again we return to the place where we are and are not for me it's enough that I 'm close it resembles the space of two souls   nearby is the sea which is not a wall and the night shows horizon beyond the sight the seagulls wave at us and I surrender into voice   the wild horizon and vastness incomprehensible and uninhabited light frightening love and the mountains maintain the height everything here is turned inwards   people leave their houses every day and they return this century and the silence within us   the sky continues   the best are the days when nothing happens I inhabit the silence let the sun rise out of the day I water the flowers the droplets should fall to drive the flower's ju...

  Fig Leaves   It was the leaves of the fig that covered them in their nakedness,  hiding the shame of their opened eyes.   So close they were, those happy leaves,  to the source of pain and pleasure to follow expulsion from the garden.   Perhaps it is thus why the fig itself —when opened—spreads to receive  the tongue that delights in exploration.   Luscious fruit, open to willing mouths, so full of transient solace, momentary bliss,  opening and closing to the curious.     Chreyn   for Max Schwartz   Grandfather liked white horseradish chreyn, on his gefilte fis because it was strong like the Limburger cheese he spread on the large oval slice of pumpernickel he covered with heavy sweet cream  thick from the top of the tin milkcan  delivered at predawn to the grocery store  he opened at the crack of every morning.  Horseradish, after all, is just a weed  whose roots in the earth you may, by...

      " The Old Guitarist " - Pablo Picasso   dried up in his room he embraces his guitar whispering to it with his fingers songs from the wedding at Galilee   his legs entwined he sits with lowered head listening to the light of blue to the shadow of a distant voice   overwhelmed by loneliness he takes the pain away from Jesus     (From the anthology of the German-Arab Poetry Salon, published by Edition lyrik-salon Spezial in Germany in 2026. Titled: "das lich ruht sich aus", / in english: " the light is rasting " )     The House Is Half Empty   in the heart of the city a very short street   on its left side stand four houses three of them inhabited by grief   the fourth - half empty the other half filled with the voices of those who left   in a silent war beneath clouds that carry no rain     (From the anthology of the German-Arab Poetry Salon, published by Edition lyrik-salon Spezial in Ge...

    Refugees   On the other side of the photograph I write to remind myself not where and when but who   I am not in the photograph   They left us nothing to take with us Only this photograph   If you turn it over you will see me   Is that you in the photograph, they ask me I don’t know what to tell you   (Translated by David Mason & the author)     Odysseus at Home   Using my guile as everyone knows I left my shadow at sea and returned directly to Ithaca.   Nobody believed that I am here.   I, too, now pass my days like one of the suitors. I am secretly weaving, however.   Penelope is alarmed every morning to find a new dress on the loom. She immediately makes us unravel it each suitor pulling on a different thread.   Her body will become a wedding gown when she is left without any dress and completely naked she will marry one of us dispersing others to foreign places.   It is in our interest therefo...

  Yusuf Yusuf is sitting next to his mother, his body lying faceup in the field. Sunshine ’ s carving his childlike gaze. In the morning lightening in the sky, a blast: perhaps a thunderstorm, but no rain melting the soil into endless dark rivulets. War deletes the borders of sense. Perhaps it was a game, his mother had been sleeping for hours, her arms folded on her belly and wouldn't wake up. And the black chasm had swallowed the poor things of home.   Yusuf still doesn't know, his father and his brother killed far away beyond the dunes of blood from sunrise to sunset.   His mother had been telling tales of love, tales of peace. Yusuf is now waiting for her Voice.   Poetry Sometimes words are eyes gazing at the world aslant. Deep down they dig different perspectives. Sometimes, however, words hover in mid air and fail to reach into the corners of life. And verse is dust in a beam of light.     Living things Memories are waves devouring the mind’s sand...

  The smell I’m sure comes from farther off than the seaweed dead grasses brought by the sea false twin of humidity and you in symmetry with the worm up there silencing the white holes you’d only have to lift your finger to invent the rain I’d put a lid on it and we would never speak of it again.   But you drew the bolt when the eclipse came even the shutters stayed closed with four roses outside at the foot of the wall tomorrow I’ll cut three of them you told me and put them to dry on the grass the fourth is the rose of the winds someone has to keep the north when pieces of the compass are pecked by the highway’s devouring birds.   Your finger raised toward the dark regions was it leaving to descend again with the very first rain was it going away to pierce the abscess so the sky would deflate unless it’s saying more prosaically since poetry is not afraid of paradox how hard it is to defend THE INTEREST OF ALL THE ROSES.   (Translated from the...

  Question     My mother is growing younger in my thoughts,    And is recovering under the ground,    As the frail lily-like hand    Is petrified by agony and fright,    And I’m still wondering why in my thought    I see my mother growing younger.       So Much Searching   You told me in the phone call    That the last poem    I’ve sent you,    Is put in a Sèvres bowl,    An expensive one, inherited from your grandparents.    You read it from time to time and also caress it    And it smells like fresh earth,    Like a rose before the falling of hoar-frost,    Of dew and rain,    Sometimes it smells like me,    And a little dizzy     You do not know what to do with the page    From where so many vowels and exclamation marks    Are flying to your heart.    Offer ...

  Bathsheba   Not even white dresses, fresh blossoms or the despairing angels hovering could change the fire that seized you the night after she was through her period and her womb lay open and fertile, beckoning you, arousing you, leading like a siren.   Not all the concubines combined could deter the beckoning of history, not even the memory of how Michal saved your life could break the trance of Bathsheba as you saw her bathing and allowed lust to set your breath and soul on fire, until there could be no euphony but your body with hers   emitting the percussion and wail of passion, until you could have her beneath you, her eyes widened and brightened by your driving sin. And when death seemed the answer, you dispatched it with all the authority of God’s king, all the madness and delirium of greed and guilt.   You chose your love from forbidden quarters, and Solomon’s soul sang in the marrow of your bones.     (from “ Stations in a Dream” ,   D...