Thankful for autumnal insights,
They open nature’s windows and doors
And like leaves, invite themselves in,
And even blow across our floors.
Thankful even for the fruit that falls
And for the absence in the distance.
I know springtime by its perfect recall
And fear no evil now or in nonexistence.
Photo by Brigitte Ala
False friends fight to the alphabet’s end
Brothers muffled on roadsides
Soon to be cognate in ice
Parsed by the grammar of days
Fate covers them in common ash
They’re familial only as information
They listen for the drones and moan
They’re muted by a shared gun
And then washed away by time
They’ve broken the bread of flesh
Into language and starve
Laying waste to the present tense
A battlefield of Cyrillic characters
Mangled like twisted smoldering alloys
Wars begun in shared languages
End in babel and begin again
RIP to my old friend,
Too many stories to attend,
Late night discussions,
Love life repercussions,
Readings and road trips
And memorable quips,
Surviving a fire bombing,
Living for poeticizing,
Other wild and surreal times,
A few misdemeanor crimes,
Hilarity and sadness,
A touch of divine madness
That defies death,
Friendship its frozen breath.
RIP to my old friend,
Too many stories to attend,
Late-night discussions,
Love-life repercussions,
Readings and road trips
And memorable quips,
Surviving a fire bombing,
Living for poeticizing,
Other wild and surreal times,
A few misdemeanor crimes,
Hilarity and sadness,
A touch of divine madness
That defies death,
Friendship its frozen breath.
Mother, the bread is moldy,
The meat is rotten
And the milk curdled.
We return to you then,
One son after another
As though back
To the belly of the earth.
Jan Železný
The world needs Jan Železný,
His javelin to travel far,
Launching us beyond belief,
Exhausting the possible limits.
We need his Olympic records
To remind us that, if not greater
Than our ancestors, we can be
Superior to our own average.
Toni Turek
A football God, Toni Turek.
He caught the winds of fate,
Pushed ball lightening over his bar
And smothered fires on his line.
The miracle of the miracle at Bern
Was that a human being
Intercepted information,
Replacing an instant for an instant,
Editing headlines and history,
And like a time traveler
Waking far from where he slept.
More alive than a landslide
More brimming than prairie potholes
More eventful than a carnival
It is all the wings that keep it afloat
All the dragonflies that drive it
It’s a sea bound by old poetries
The single vine of multiple waters
And mother of all nurseries
It’s the face of migrating flocks
With reeds rioting for the sun
The hive of every insect alive
Like a water lotus and pod
It’s the blazing before brumation
The hunger before the torpor
The carp that swallows the moon
Before its resting state in hypnotic cold
Paint the cider you taste
With a tint you create.
The golden delicious
Should ripen on the palette.
The brushstrokes
Ought to flower into fruit.
The composition
Must bare transition.
The rot at the core
Nature itself will restore.
Lastly, give the picture
A reason for being,
A return for all the beauty
And for all abundance.
A bushel, ladders,
A human shadow, an answer.
Salvatore Ala 