Rosalyn Bernardo Pastrana writes, Carl Scharwath shoots

MY BEAUTIFUL OLD RADIO

Day and night

from your signing in

till signing off
Your soothing music
traveling in the air
Breaking the silence
in my quiet room

Clock is ticking
while the song is playing,
“People Need the Lord,”
Listening to every line
each word speaks so loud
Passing by and by
my wide open ears
Deeply sinking in
to my longing heart

What a beautiful
song of life
Strumming the cords
of my lonely heart
waiting for a song
Bringing joy
to my weary soul
Tears rolling down my face
as I listen 
my burdens rolled away
I finally found out,
only God can fill
the God-size hole
in the heart of man

From dawn
till midnight
Me and my radio
are always connected
Forgetting not its worth
like treasure I ever hold
Hearing the words of truth
God’s love towards men
Untiringly reaching out
across the land
Leaving a great mark
of who I am now
like a living radio in tune
Sharing what I heard
from my old friend,
my beautiful old radio

Radio Fiction -- Carl Scharwath

Jack Scott writes

Blood Bond

Brick by brick by brick 
the wall goes up 
strong as stubbornness, 
but lasting longer.

Ruddy mortar 
surrendering identity, 
compromised eternity 
set into every course, 
strength in every seam.

Masons build by generations, 
sons upon their sons, 
grow old, then older 
climbing up and coming down.

Brick has ancient in it 
much the same as stone 
that makes each master humble, 
each hand and trowel as one.
Bricks -- Caleb Colon

Geethanjali Dilip redux

Shadow play

The recent moons have left their nocturnal rains of dreams in the walls of this house you built me .. with your own hands with virgin clay and sunbaked bricks of promises you made while you discovered the Earth that I am.

All the walls are damp and moist emanating the fragrance of petrichor of our endless conversations echoing of lifetimes you’ve made me homes of rainbows and dawn mist while you lost yourself in my eyes. You were suffocating me for fear that I would drift away with monsoon clouds.

The oil lamps cast bizarre shadows on the murals you and I painted with soft plaster of sandal paste, passion yolk and the mortar of resilient commitment.

Terra-cotta walls and floors blended with our red angst of anticipated separation. Me the Earth and you the Heavens. 

A star shed its gentle light on my nose pin. My nose was your object of amusement. Not so perfect as you sculpted me in your imagination. What’s in a nose anyway. I smelt your soul aeons ago. Isn’t that enough? You found me!

Now suns of several seasons have dried the walls of our home.. cured and smoothened with our desperate footsteps of longing and pining, that time was our villain watching our embrace as we lay mute with the pulse of existence.

The dead silence of such anticipation gets comic relief from the crickets and cicadas in the thicket of our backyard where we planted poetry.

Oh love! As a far away moon glides and our shadows hazy on the dark floor, the bells of my anklets break the still of a night that threatens to be washed by daybreak as I lie in surrender that you would redeem my penance. Yet you touch me only with your shadow! And I become a fog sighing with a resignation that nights are forever and that I will be your shadow.

 

The Shadow -- Pablo Picasso

The Shadow on the Woman -- Pablo Picasso

Akash Sagar Chouhan redux

"Freedom For Free"

And man was born,
He gave himself a name untorn;
Sketched borders to abandon
The pawn's own throne.

A kingdom,
Denied its freedom.

Man tilled minds,
Traded needs of all kinds;
Tried in time to swim against tides,
The hungry sickle still finds.

Freedom got sold for free,
In lands of eternity.

Now we make plastic Gods,
Brick upon brick in every abode;
Endless war of crossroads,
Evenly lost in personal odds.

Freedom died,
When Earth cried.

Geethanjali Dilip, Akash Sagar Chouhan redux

As Night Falls

 

Geethanjali Dilip, Akash Sagar Chouhan redux

A Song Within

Steve Koons draws

Headshot

Pramila Khadun writes

Every Time

Every time I hold back
This heart of mine,
It just leaves me
At its own free will
And runs after love
The way butterflies
Go towards flowers.
What to do
With such a heart?

 

Good Luck -- T. Meeuwissen.

Duane Vorhees writes

Letter
  (after Yun Dongju)

Sister!
This winter again
we've had much snow.

Should I put a handful
into this white invelope
instead of this letter
and stampless
just like that so nicely done
mail it to you?

Because I hear where you went
it never snows.

Suresh Chandra Dwivedi writes

Mother Earth
     ( For Hon. Achut Samant )  

Earth is the best place for love and world peace. 
Lord Jagannath whispered this truth in my ears.
When I visited Lord Jagannath temple five years ago.
He often talks to me with love and affection.
Earth is the best place for brotherhood.
Earth is the best place for friendship.
Earth is the best place for equality.
It fills our heart, mind, soul with Karun Rasa.
Earth is the best place for Democratic values.
Earth is full of sympathy and empathy.
Earth is of many colours and many peoples.
But she is the mother of all of us. 
Earth teaches us virtues and morality.
She loves our children and grandchildren.
Oceans are like her green sari.
and mountains are her breast.
Earth teaches us to end all wars, and terrorism .
Casteism, favouritism, vanshavad, communalism and nepotism.
Mother Earth treats all her children equally.
Black, White, Yellow, Brown, Dalits, Girijan and Backwards.
She offers her nectar like milk to all of us.
She makes no distinction between man and woman nation and nation.
Earth teaches us to be modest and tolerant.
She is orderly and arranged like a beautiful painting.
Regularise and organise like her O friends!
Thank you Mother Earth! for giving us a comfortable berth.
Earth moves round the Sun.
And Sun kisses her beautiful face daily early in the morning.
Earth is the beloved of Lord Vishnu.
I seek permission from my mother for padasparsh.
Our liberal mother permits us to play, run, jump and enjoy  ourselves on her body

Marc Carver writes

ETERNAL







When some days you can do nothing else










Sit down clear your empty mind and write some words.

























Any bloody thing that pops up there

























Good.

























Bad

























Even if it is really nothing put it down and send it into the eternity of the spiral internet

























because now it will live forever

























forever there

























even if no one ever reads it































It will be eternal. 

 


--from The Epic of Gilgamesh

Sufia Khatoon draws

Ajarn Wu Hsih redux

"trees of life"

two trees feeding on the same ground
growing together when they were found

years enjoying one sun and one moon
also drenched in the rains of monsoon

throu' them winds blow, hot and cold
they stood together, their roots tightly hold

yet they bear fruits not for each other
not even for a child, mother or father

they are the trees of life: good and evil

 mural, Bro kyrka, Gotland

Ajarn Wu Hsih redux

12^th Septon Flow 

Mind seated in a posture

Enumerating the ephemerals

Cogitating of cognition

Rendering itself powerless

Awaiting for an iota of grace

Longing for the Beloved

To come and bestow

Even just a glance

Yes, a glance into a mirror

A Vanity -- Auguste Toulmouche

Ajarn Wu Hsih redux

" Nondual-dual-nondual Tree of Life"

The tree of life grows

From beginninglessness to endlessness.

Its root grows from Infinity.

Its tip extending to Infinity.

There are branches,

There are leaves,

There are flowers,

There are fruits,

But there is only One

Nondual-dual-nondual Tree!

And so, there are palpable prominences

Of falling leaves,

Of drying flowers,

Of rottening fruits,

Of falling branches;

Fuelling the flame

Of embered desires,

Of greed.

Leaving only ashes of vanity.

Until comes the regeneration

Of the Seed.

The budding of evergreen leaves.

Bearing flowers of hope

And fruits of deliverance

By The One who uttered,

"BE!"

And it is.

Ajarn Wu Hsih redux

A Veil  

As long as the spells of time, space
Delude the gullibles as rats in race.
Wars will go on within human race.  
Believing that one fights for a cause.
Each to his demise without a pause.
His charges like those of a blind horse.  
Such is the design of life a veil.
It starts, ends inside a triangular jail.
No one is exempted, yet all shall prevail. 

Metropolitan Correctional Center

Ajarn Wu Hsih redux

"nude"

holding onto a web 
woven into the edges
of rainbow quilt,

i wander in the rhapsody
of the unstruck sound,
led by eternal longing
for the sweet lotus scent
emanating from her navel
bedecked with jewel.

with each beat, i pause
and i sip from the vine the wine
pressed by three thousand maidens
moaning in unison, "aaaaaaaah!"
but my beloved's moan i yearn.
in the dawn, upon awakening
from deep slumber
after dreaming of her and i
being not two but whole, nude.

Le Baiser (The Kiss) -- August Rodin

Ajarn Wu Hsih redux

"Veiled Being"

Not a settler but a cosmic stream I am,  
A process in progress of feeling the ideal love.
I come and I go from sight to site
In search of You, Maharliiná,
To taste the surge of honeyed passion
In the banks of temporal cyclic flow
And to sniff the flowers of life
That decorate Y....our Being
Veiled with beauteous adjectives.








Tears -- Rio Villegas

Ajarn Wu Hsih redux

_ _ _T_ _ isn't only

H o r i z ontal

but also

.L
A
C
I
T
R
E
V

ylno ton sah TI
YAS ot gnihtemos

gnihtemos sah osla TUB

T
O

S
H
O
W !
-
It is qualialized quantum text:
# trapped #, {localized}, (grouped) p h õ n e s
& punct'ritical marks ---
standards and gonfalons held by poets
in strategic places
in times of revolution.
to draw its roaring voice
from the spilt blood of innocence
by the maddening ignorance.
-
It displays:
the beauty
in the ugly;

It shows: >>><
directional goal
in chaos;

It produces:
self from
it.
-
It thaws the consciousness
from frozen desires.
It churns the awareness
from strings.
It calibrates the instruments
of knowing
To untie the knots
of braids.

it is why it is!

If a Woman Have Long Hair -- Guy Radcliffe

Ajarn Wu Hsih redux

Commodity: An Acro-Septon

Cast all your cares...

Onto this last shoppin' you go.

Mind only just one thing:

Make it through the show!

Over prices you'll be passing,

Discounts bidding adieu.

It'll be your grandest procuring,

To get the back the profit "i"

You – 

Yourself lost, lost while trading.

Black Friday -- Tom Sanford

Ajarn Wu Hsih redux

A Septon: The Embrace

The lord embraced her, uttered no word,

With just a kiss she understood her lord.

She afterwards sat on her lord's lap

Lost herself, awareness almost did snap

But tears flowed and drowned the gap

The maiden and her lord in love did unite,

Time got jealous and it fled out of sight!

The world stood still, no day e'en night:

Her past misdemeanors all turned white.

 

Redemption -- Tina Blondell

Vitaliy Mashchenko paints

MIRROR

 

Marianne Szlyk writes

No. 7 (Green and Maroon), Rothko (1953)

Tangy red mud clings to the beach,
the ocean at low tide.
The world dwindles
to what we see
in this room without whispers.

The darkened shade is pulled
down to hide the sky
with its shreds of clouds.
Shades of white would spoil the view.
Keening seagulls might whirl up,
breaking the fourth wall,

the belief
that our world has dwindled
to green and maroon paint.