featured image by Melanie from Pixabay

Yahia Lababidi 

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” -Walt Whitman

For John

🍃There are leaves & petals strewn 

on my bedroom & bathroom floor,

as if I’d returned from sleepwalking 

in the woods which, in a sense, I had.

The stroll, with my almost 3-year-old nephew, 

ended up being more of an extended bow— 

as the awestruck child knelt, reverently, 

to gather bits of nature into my pocket.

The green called out to him, wildly & he 

responded, exuberantly, collecting 

what he could fit into his small palms:

a pretty orange flower, for Lisa, 

his sister, who stayed behind 

and tiny berries, he called apples 

Everything was new, important 

and worthy of closer inspection…

a poem is what makes you smile, 

when you are alone.🍃

 

White

Snow of old age falls, steadily 

while I stand before the mirror 

using my razor as a shovel 

to clear the walkway 

to a face I remember.

 

Yahia Lababidi is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose. Lababidi’s most recent works are a collection of his meditative aphorisms, Quarantine Notes (2023); a love letter to the deserts of Egypt, Desert Songs (2022); and spiritual reflections, Learning to Pray(2021). He, regularly, posts short inspirational videos on his YouTube channel.

 

 

Madronna Holden

Maps of Blue Wells and Sunlight 

        I
Our minds are mapped on our lands:
the storytellers who knew this 
never ran out of stories. 
 
I could map my grandfather’s mind 
by the land in Moravia 
where he spent his boyhood—
trace the pattern of his thinking 
in the swell and give
of those hills. 
 
I learned to locate his tenderness 
in the corn reaching for the sun–
in the sweetness of the trees 
where the forest 
liked to gather.  
 
The dew in his eyes 
related how the river
kept its water or sent it away–
the way black soil 
welcomed the rain. 
 
        II
If you want to know what thinking is,
you should sit on the grass, 
feel the hum of life under you. 
 
The way the land slopes and flows–
that is how we know nearness 
and proportion—everything that 
can be counted.
 
Blue water is the calculus of deep wells
and sunlight—the physics 
of our moist inspired breath. 
 
The philosophy of life 
is in the headwaters
of the near river
 
and our souls in the vision 
of wildflowers that make 
each of us singular.  
 
        III
Thus I learned where everything was–
 
how with synapse, circuit, 
little cell—the brain swings 
on the trapeze of trees.
 
So that if our logic stumbles on asphalt—
our reason trips itself up 
on factory-exhausted air–
our cure is to look at the land  
and begin thinking 
all over again.
 

Indwelling 

Come closer. 

This fire will all too soon 
be ash. 

I would tell you the story the moth knows 
for making peace with the night.

The story tears have for making medicine 
out of grief.

The story for eliciting the purr 
in the belly of the tiger.

If you listen to your blood
you can hear the story of the sea
pulled by the moon
in the open sky
pouring the water of rivers
into your heart.

You can hear the aria 
of the wind that the birds 
know by heart

singing the story of your body 
a hundred generations 
in the making.

Come closer:

This is the story that will be yours 
long after I have left this place.
 

Madronna Holden is using her recent retirement from university teaching to concentrate on her poetry, which won the 2022 Kay Snow Poetry Award and has appeared in over three dozen literary journals and anthologies including Cold Mountain Review, Verse Daily, The Bitter Oleander, Leaping Clear, Equinox Poetry and Prose, and the Plumwood Mountain Journal. Her chapbook, Goddess of Glass Mountains, was published by Finishing Line in 2021.

 

 

Willow Annan Rose

Sweep the threshold

Sweep the threshold,

unlock the door,

put the busyness away–

what comes is far

too important.

Build a fire,

quiet the house,

all your sensing is required.

Hear the hoof beats?

The full horse breaths?

Mice may scratch in the walls,

spiders rattle the roof,

you’ve nothing to do

but be home.

Movements beneath your skin,

flashes of thought,

quickening heart,

allow them.

This is a welcoming.

You don’t know who approaches

only that they must.

Freedom blooms

as we set

a place for everything.

What you carry in your blood

has voice–

Let her sing.

Willow Annan Rose grew up held in the sway of the salty Pacific. Winter swell crashing against granite cliffs, pelicans flying low, pine, sagebrush and sand raised her as much as the humans around her. She is a student of Spirit, the body and the wild, of herbalism, Jung, dream, and the word. Letting poems wriggle to the surface, she kneels down to sense their gestures toward sound. If lucky, one forms and, like prayer, touches soul. Ever listening, always learning, she follows the poetry.

 

 

Iljas Baker was born in Scotland and now lives in Thailand where he is a retired university professor. His first book of poems Peace Be Upon Us was published by Lote Tree Press in Cambridge UK in 2023. His poems have also appeared in three anthologies, namely The God’s Eye, We Humans, and, most recently, A Kaleidoscope of Stories: Muslim Voices in Contemporary Poetry and in numerous poetry journals. He writes about essential things and his writing is inspired principally by an inclusive, compassionate interpretation of Islam and the practice of the Spiritual Exercise (Latihan Kedjiwaan) of Subud, which originated in Indonesia. He is married with a daughter and a son and two grand-daughters.