Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Eurpa Poets' Gazette No. 69, January 2010

Writer’s Block
These past few months I’ve been far away -
To the Gobi and Sahara, and to all the arid places
Of the world.
No rain has fallen there - or on me,
For I’ve only visited those places in my mind!
As exciting as it was, I still couldn’t write about it,
But today, small beginnings splatter onto this page.
© June Maureen Hitchcock December 2009

Eurpa Poets' Gazette No. 69, January 2010

God: Said to have supernatural power, a Supreme Being to be worshipped; an idol.
On God
Through revelation’s fiction we may see
With fables, parables and short stories
The theories of the brain as deity
That may alleviate life’s worries;
To elevate us all from earthly pain
Where miracles defy all nature's law;
To show a slight confusion in their aim
As violated sense is what they saw.
And then one prays for proof and hopes in vain
But often dreams of cure and fame that lift
A spirit that has sunk to fearful shame;
Only then the light of hope may be a gift
That drives the spirit and may clear your name,
When life becomes the God’s own game.
Being: Existence; that which exists; creature.
On Being
I am the essence of ambitious themes,
A quality of much intrinsic worth;
With attributes of light and colour schemes
That quantify my spirit towards terse.
Relationships within me are obtuse
All space is filled by some organic work
Where heartbeats pump to drums that are abstruse
There, in a tunnel where diseases lurk.
But in this state where skin, like leather, hides
The churning mills that actively enrage
The enemy of life where rape abides
And through affection, warring cells engage.
Where my survival is a way of life
To make my cells a ubiquitous hive.
© Joe Lake

Eurpa Poets' Gazette No. 69, January 2010

Aloneness
Rain pelting down outside
Eerie reflections in puddles,
Silence crowding my mind,
Aloneness threatening to throttle me,
And all the while I keep wishing for miracles.
My past torments me, my present stifles me
And my future threatens me -
age creeps upon me
Like a creek choked with weeds,
Skies that are blue seem constantly slate
And grass that is green seems dead or dying.
When night rolls up, and morning creeps in,
I pray I will see the world in a new light.
© June Maureen Hitchcock
September 2008

Eurpa Poets' Gazette No. 69, January 2010

My View with Joe Lake

In this new year, I have no resolutions. I’ve done all I can and will ever do.
I’ve just finished my Philosophical Sonnets 2010 and you can read two of them on this page. These are general western philosophical ideas that have been around for thousands, if not hundreds, of years but each generation does its best to ignore them.
In the sonnets I have avoided telling you what I believe in relation to the existence of God. You can read about this in my Basic Postmodernism.
In the new year love yourself and everyone you meet that humanity may prosper and resolve its problems. Because if anything, God is the totallity of mankind just like an anthill is one total being, or a beehive, so humanity is one entity that survives best by loving their neighbour as themselves.

Eurpa Poets' Gazette No. 69, January 2010

Renewed
Hear the distant mower, awesome,
And grass trembles
in this living nightmare,
A blade-beat,
And green is severed, shredded,
To die slowly,
And when earth has fed, sufficient,
Skeletons are blown away
as so much dust,
Thunder echoes close and clean,
No mercy in this meadow,
And yet?
And yet above the stench and din,
A stem reaches for loving clouds,
Renewed.
© Michael Garrad November 2009







A Slaying
Watch the smoke on the blaze and hungry calls through the haze
Watch the eyes in the fire,
Burning hot, full of ire.
Watch the face melt away,
The price of living, the price to pay.
Hear the throng chant rejection,
To kill the beast grants protection.
Hear the roar, hear the throb of excitement running through the mob,
See the tears evaporate and touch the sky
Where family and friends sadly fly.
See the chain that keeps him down to slay a dragon
The fear of a town.
© Dripping Ink (Lauren Hay)

Eurpa Poets' Gazette No. 69, January 2010

Your Death
I am your death,
This cold breath
upon your neck,
Lips that peck
flesh from bone
in a place, alone,
And blood runs
as setting suns
knife the sky,
For you, to die,
You are mine
Night, to dine,
Hail the feast,
Feed the Beast!
© Michael Garrad December 2009

Europa Poets' Gazette, No 69, January 2010

MY VIEW with Michael Garrad
Are we genuine about who we are? I think not.
We are as we wish to be seen. We comply with rules, written and unwritten.
We are products of what society expects of us.
We let our hair down, fired by the adrenaline of alcohol; we shop, sombre and focused on prices; we are the model of decorum at work; we love designer outfits at the gym, or just walking the streets. We are an image!
And the reason we are this image is because we have no choice. We must conform.
How different it is behind closed doors where, briefly, we can be ourselves. But, then, are we truly who we are, even in front of our children and, perhaps most important of all, with our partner? Are we ever able to be individual?

Eurpa Poets' Gazette No. 69, January 2010

My Heart
My heart longs to hear your voice,
Even for just a moment,
One last time.
Nothing could possibly compare
To hearing you speak my name,
Or telling me you love me.
I feel as though
I took you for granted,
And I have much regret.
I pretend to be strong,
But deep down,
Every day is a struggle.
I’m unsure of what hurts more,
Missing you,
Or trying to live without you.
The people we once knew
Now seem like strangers,
As if I never knew them at all.
Every time I think about you,
I miss you more and more,
Life doesn’t seem worth living.
People tell me you’d want me to be happy,
But the reality is,
It’s easier said than done.
© Samantha Colombari
(Burnie High School)

Unfair
I wish I would die and leave this unfair world.
People hurt you, not just physically but mentally,
In more ways people could ever dream of.
I have holes in me from people I lost, loved,
People I was with, that passed away,
That left me in tears, and people around me know
There is no such thing as best friends.
No one is the same; we have all fought with our
friends
At some point in our life.
Having a partner isn’t all that great either.
We fight, we split, we get back together again
’Cause it’s just the cycle we know when we were
kids.
You don’t find true love till your twenty
Unless you’re a lucky one and find it early.
We can’t be completely good all our life
But we can’t be completely bad.
The sunset is not completely perfect
Because it’s too good to be true;
Even something sad has a happy side to it.
© Nicole Viney

Eurpa Poets' Gazette No. 69, January 2010

Crankypants
"Crankypants has gone," she said. "He’s nesting.
George has gone, is he nesting, too?"
Soon she will go.
She doesn’t miss them - she knows they’re nesting.
When she goes - who will miss her?
When she goes - will they return to accept the crumbs from someone else?
Crankypants and George have both gone
to the rookery, we think. The weather is wild
and the seas reach with Neptune’s greed onto the garden that she worked so lovingly on for years.
Daisies hang by a thread to life, on low tide and visible to the eye, they blink with hope that soon the sun will come and gentle water will let them have their peace again.
She has peace while waiting for her slow death. She is content, wants life, but as her life is, I’d want death.
Is it because I’m younger and naive, or has she gone too far to take control of such a powerful thing?
As the finality of death approaches - we and Crankypants, and George are absent more often as the ugliness of life in death is grim.
She will wait to see them both again when spring with its air of velleity and anticipated joy of sunshine and warmth brings positivity to all.
Crankypants and George will come to say their last farewells to her in spring.
Or maybe summer will lead them on a journey. We’ll never know. She’ll be with the boys, together, as friends, nesting, feeding, or to lie dead.
We are left with memories of that love and with arm outstretched, throw crumbs in case George and Crankypants return, bringing her back, too.
© Ruth Stendrup September 2009

Eurpa Poets' Gazette No. 69, January 2010

Dinosaurcaustic
On the perimeter of a green forest
Stands a metallic form with dinosaur-like teeth.
From its jaws drips warm sap-like plasma,
Mingled with fur and animal guts.
Its gigantic chest is still warm from its last kill,
A patch of forest.
A minuscule part of its cold metallic arm is being
Embraced by its owner, its friend in cohorts.
They are both waiting for their next gratuitous
moment.
For like a serial rapist, their urge
For self-gratification is never satiated.
© Judy Brumby-Lake

Europa Poets' Gazette, No 69, January 2010

Cherries
Skin of cherries the glass of the woods
All taunt on the fruit holding sweet tasting goods
The colour of blood in my mouth a warm spicy flood
Of summer and sun the red rivulets run.
The texture of silk, the cherry’s dark milk.
Buoyant on the air, held by green stalks of hair,
Yes little cherry, so cute in my hand,
It is your soft skin my teeth demand.
Ripe on the wind fall to forest floor,
Crimson on lips the door to the maw.
Now left in the woods, glassy silence once more.
© Dripping Ink (Lauren Hay)

Europa Poets' Gazette, No 69, January 2010

Feature Poet
We Are The Music Makers
We are the music makers,
We are the dreamers of dreams,
But we’ll never out-master the Masters
with the poems that we write, so it seems.
O, My Love is like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June
But we cannot improve on that melody...
Rabbie Burns gave life to that tune.
I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the sky,
We seldom achieve such eloquence
however hard we try.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of death, rode the six hundred...
Has anyone wondered, how Tennyson
thundered?
I take thee for richer, for poorer,
I take thee for better or worse.

The wonderful book of Common Prayer...
un-excelled both in prose and in verse.
Sink me the ship, Master Gunner!
Sink her, split her in twain,
Fall into the hands of God
...Tennyson does it again!
Eleanor Rigby died at the Church
and was buried, along with her name;
Nobody came...
but the Beatles knew
Just how to sing verse and to make it ring true!
There was movement at the station,
for the word had passed around
that the colt from Old Regret had got away
Banjo Patterson’s a winner any day!
It was a lover and his lass,
with a hey, ho, the wind and the rain...
How did Shakespeare ever come to pass?
We’ll never see his like again!
Tho’ we think we’re the Music Makers,
the truth is clear, for it seems...
we’ll never out-master the Masters,
not in our wildest dreams!
© Mary L. Kille