A #ChatGPT #poem about #SpaceInvaders

In a world of pixels and light,
Where aliens reign with all their might,
A lone ship stands tall and brave,
Ready to save the world from the invaders' rave.

They descend in waves of three,
Their intentions far from friendly,
But the ship is quick and agile,
Dodging lasers with a smile.

Firing back with all its might,
Destroying aliens left and right,
The battle rages on and on,
But the ship knows it must stay strong.

With each level, the challenge grows,
But the ship's determination only shows,
For it knows the fate of humankind,
Rests on its abilities to outsmart and out-grind.

And as the final boss appears,
The ship knows there's no room for fear,
With one final blast, the alien falls,
And peace once again befalls.

Space Invaders, a game of old,
But its legacy will never grow cold,
For in the hearts of gamers everywhere,
The brave ship's tale will always be there.

The Last Hummingbird of Summer
By Beth Ann Fennelly

reveals itself in retrospect. Unlike the first,
whose March arrival bade you gasp, hands clasped,
like a child actor instructed to show joy, when the last
departs for points south, there’s no telling,
and no tell. Well, so what? You know their cycle.
In August, they swarm the feeder, all swagger,
greedy tussle for sugar water. Suddenly,
September. Chill tickles your ankles. You reach
for long sleeves and you fret. They’ve left? Not yet.
Ear cocked for the symphony’s shrinking strings.
Then comes a day without a ruby flash. Next day,
they’re back. Next day, there’s one. Then none.
Or maybe one? From porches, pumpkins grin.
Your last had left, and left you uninformed.

Kinda? Sorta? Can I say it?—like menstrual blood,
again, between your legs. Your last, perhaps,
or next-to-last, your no-longer-very-monthly
monthly. So unlike your first crimson, at twelve,
its “Yes-You-Are-There-God” annunciation.
Well, so what? You know the cycle. Your body’s
eggy miracle, unneeded now for years.
And you hate waste. Why fill and dump
and fill again the undrunk sugar water?
Enough. Let’s progress to whatever season’s next.
But still, a farewell ritual wouldn’t be amiss.
The last hummingbird of summer, zinging
from the feeder—to others, a smooth departure—
to you, alone, unmistakably, dipping its wing.

#poem #poetry #litarature #PoetryMagazine
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161986/the-last-hummingbird-of-summer

(glad they finally posted this one... I love it!)

TIME TRAVEL FOR BEGINNERS
by Ardon Shorr

Every crumb of starlight
sails across the universe,

the journey of a million years
to end inside our eyes.

Except I was looking at you,
canvas coverall cinched at the waist,

as you undressed me with photons,
wrapped me in stories,

painted with x-rays,
until everything glowed

with backstory—the names of trees,
the name of an extinguished star,

still visible, ghost in the sky,
climbing a staircase of optic nerve

into an afterlife of sight.
Hand on my hand you pointed to the past:

the sun, an 8-minute time machine,
the moon, one second old,

and the incredible now,
unfolding like a cone,

megaphone of memory stretched to the sky
and balanced on the tip was us,

a luminous shout
of life at the speed of light.

In a blink, this moment reaches the moon.
When we pack up the hammock, it floats

in the acid clouds of Venus.
Which means that somewhere, there is a spot,

past the gaps in Saturn’s rings,
beyond the storms of Jupiter,

outside the curved embrace of the Milky Way,
at least one place in the universe,

where you could turn around and see us,
back when we were still in love.

—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner

---

Ardon Shorr: “I was trained as a scientist. There’s this moment in an experiment where you can ask a question of the universe and actually get an answer. It’s like something is speaking to you, and for a moment, you’re the only one who knows it. Then you get to share it. Poetry is how I return to that moment.”

https://www.rattle.com/time-travel-for-beginners-by-ardon-shorr/

#poem #poetry #literature

The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

#poem #poetry #literature

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

#poem
The work of #CarolynMorgan: everything from Beyond the Clouds
I have never considered myself a poet yet, for reasons unknown, I am awoken in the early hours of the morning to pick up a pen and write the words that are given.

“How can I feel love
When all the world is crying?
So many children dying, dying, dying.
Our brutish leaders lying, lying, lying.
And I am tired of trying
To be the best that I can be
When my body is relying
On poisons slowly killing me.
My heart is in such torment
Empathetic with this discontent
Of Mother Earth in ferment
Of cleansing and rebirth.
The trauma, pain and sorrow
Before a new tomorrow
Dawns for a rain-washed sun-kissed Earth.

No more the men of hate,
No more of wars and killing.
Let love and light be sovereign
And angelic wings be hovering
As they heal the bruised and broken,
And our world shall be awoken
When the consciousness of love
Streams forth from above
To cleanse us from all crying, lying, dying.

No more torture, tears and pain,
Just compassion, care and love again,
To live our Holy Life as deemed,
The one we all have dreamed.”

#quote from #pa

(I received and devoured her chapbook of the same name a couple of days ago. Love Love Love what she has done!)

The Potential of Radio and Rain
by Myna Chang

June 21, 1984
Deaf Smith County, Texas

I.

Moonshot Rodriguez used to mash up lightning bugs and smear them on his front teeth. His grandpa had named him, and told him the graveyard was haunted with the light of special lives. Moonshot believed him. He wanted to shine.

II.

On her 17th birthday, Gracie Lynn Johnson stole her stepdad’s truck: freedom in the form of a twelve-year-old stepside Chevy, red, stick shift, with an empty gun rack and an AM radio. Pulse thundering, she stepped on the gas.

III.

It was one of those close, rare summer nights when radio waves bounced from the WLS studio in Chicago across the continent and the mesquite and the grit, through layers of atmosphere miraculously windless and damp with possibility, alighting the Caprock like a secret love. Gracie Lynn adjusted the knob. John Cougar cut through the static, singing about Jack & Diane, bass setting the brittle speakers to a tremble.

Moonshot was parked outside the Church of Christ, in the gray Pontiac that once belonged to his grandpa. He crumpled a beer can, waiting.

Gracie Lynn rolled up in a swirl of caliche dust. “Shut up and get in,” she said.

Moonshot didn’t have to be told twice. He grabbed a couple of cold ones out of his cooler.

“Graveyard night,” he said.

They passed the hardware store and the diner, and then Gracie Lynn shifted into third, leaving town behind. Two minutes later, they topped Coyote Ridge and turned on the dirt track that led to the cemetery. The air tasted like sage and, maybe, rain. Lightning bug flickers lit the polished tombstones ahead, and it was magic, that quick sparkle of life under a starshine sky.

“This is almost good enough,” Gracie Lynn breathed.

A lightning bug fluttered through the open window, its glow fading. Moonshot cupped it in his hand and steered it back into the charged night and the AM waves.

~

Myna Chang writes flash and short stories. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in X‑R-A‑Y Lit Mag, Reflex Fiction, FlashFlood, Atlas & Alice, Writers Resist, and Daily Science Fiction. Anthologies featuring her stories include the Grace & Gravity collection Furious Gravity IX; and the forthcoming This is What America Looks Like anthology by Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Read more at MynaChang.com or on Twitter at @MynaChang.

https://newworldwriting.net/myna-chang-the-potential-of-radio-and-rain/

https://mynachang.com/

#flash #poem #poetry #fiction #micro

When you stand on an empty stony plateau alone
under the fathomless dome of Asia in whose blueness an airplane
or an angel sometimes whips up its starch or star -
when you shudder at how infinitesimally small you are,
remember: space that appears to need nothing does
crave, as a matter of fact, an outside gaze,
a criterion of emptiness - of its depth and scope.
And it's only you who can do the job.

Когда ты стоишь один на пустом плоскогорьи, под
бездонным куполом Азии, в чьей синеве пилот
или ангел разводит изредка свой крахмал;
когда ты невольно вздрагиваешь, чувствуя, как ты мал,
помни: пространство, которому, кажется, ничего
не нужно, на самом деле нуждается сильно во
взгляде со стороны, в критерии пустоты.
И сослужить эту службу способен только ты.

An Admonition, Joseph Brodsky
Назидание, Иосиф Бродский
1987

#poem #brodsky #стих #бродский

#music #french #poem
Georges Brassens Il N'Y A Pas D'Amour Heureux French & English Subtitles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzf6urpFpuw

Of The Empire
by Mary Oliver

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

© 2008 by Mary Oliver
From her 2008 collection, Red Bird, p. 46
Published by Beacon Press 2008

#poem #poetry #literature

ELEGY FOR TÍO LAZARO
by Isabella DeSendi

Because he was already dying, he figured
there was no harm in huffing through 2 or 3 cigarettes

in the early morning before my mother would wake—
the animal of his thin, brown body lassoed

to an oxygen tank. Because he didn’t have papers
we had to drive two hours to retrieve the tank

from a discount store in Ocala
where my mom had to pay

out of pocket for air that would be filtered
from a rocket-ship shaped canister

into a tiny tube three times the size of a vein
directly into the soggy, plastic bags of my tio’s

stalling lungs just so he could drink cafecitos
& play crossword puzzles or the lottery

while we sat around in the kitchen
wondering how long we could keep him alive.

My mom was elbow deep in dishwater
when the letter came

denying our appeal for his citizenship.
No, he could not get Medicare.

Yes, he would have to go back after living
50 years in this country. This country,

where, at 20, he learned to fix engines
in chop shops and likened himself

to a surgeon—saying any man with purpose could fix
any broken thing if he simply tried hard enough.

Entiendes sobrina? It’s why God gave us hands.
Sometimes, I like to imagine him in the garage

surrounded by brutal heat and moonlight,
the broken chair under him barely keeping

itself together while he held metal chunks
in his hands like a heart, wondering where

it all went wrong, believing enough screws
could put it all back. Of course, this was after he fell

in love with a woman in Kentucky,
dreamt of being a local politician

and with that same American sense of disillusion,
grandeur—discovered heroin: the god he’d worship

until he felt nothingness, & after nothingness
the dull edge of sobriety, the death of his American wife

which meant the death of food stamps, which meant the death
of a life that allowed him to lay on the roof of his car

while he smoked Marlboros and recited constellations:
Andromeda, Aquilus, Ursa major, Ursa minor

which made him feel just as smart as the white men
he swept for. Aren’t our lives just simple constellations

made up of many deaths? Yes, someone in an office
in a building in this country decided no, he could not

get medical care. No, he could not stay.
Two nights later, Lazaro woke from a dream

screaming aliens were coming to get him.
That their ship was hovering over the house.

The light so bright he couldn’t see my mom’s hands
as she helped him back to bed. The next night he died.

Milky Way: one answer on yesterday’s crossword puzzle.
You can’t tell me the dying don’t know

when their time is coming.
The tip of the letter, still sticking out

of my mom’s black purse like a cigarette
already flickering gone.

—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

---

Isabella DeSendi: “I wrote this poem after telling two of my poet friends the story of my tio’s death, including his vision of being abducted by aliens just days after we’d received the news about his deportation. My mom was still trying to figure out how to fight the government’s decision, how to break the news. My friends and I were huddled in a small circle during the intermission of a reading when I decided to share the story with them. One friend, Cat, turned to me and said, ‘Bella, this is a poem.’ She was right. This piece is an elegy for my tio, but it’s also a lamentation for immigrants in this country—and ultimately a song of praise for my mother, whose strength, generosity, and capacity for enduring I am constantly in awe of.” 

https://www.rattle.com/elegy-for-tio-lazaro-by-isabella-desendi/

#poem #poetry #literature #immigration

With Thanks to the Field Sparrow, Whose Voice is so Delicate and Humble
by Mary Oliver

I do not live happily or comfortably
With the cleverness of our times.
The talk is all about computers,
The news is all about bombs and blood.
This morning, in the fresh field,
I came upon a hidden nest.
It held four warm, speckled eggs.
I touched them.
Then went away softly,
Having felt something more wonderful
Than all the electricity of New York City.

#poem #poetry #literature

STORYTELLING
by C. Wade Bentley

The morning they saw the body in the river
on the way to school was also the day Jessica
said how she’d known all along that Seth
was gay and she was perfectly fine with it
and Kaylie said well me too but if you knew
why didn’t you say something before we went out
for two months but just before Jessica could answer
was when Jared said what the hell? and pointed
down along the banks of the river where half hidden
in the grass was what they would soon know was the naked
body of a young woman maybe a few years older
than they were and where for a still and silent minute
they just looked at the way her hair had woven
itself into the weeds the way her head would nudge
gently against the shore and then retreat
how the little ripples in this quiet section of water
would splash onto her right hip all purple and grey
shiny and taut with a look on her face
and her wide eyes that said nothing at all
that said I have no opinion I will have nothing to say
on that matter and it’s no use waiting for it you will
tell the police your story now and play it up big
for your mates at school later but you won’t hear it
from me that story that love story that fantasy
I had hoped to tell had begun to tell has now moved
to mid-stream and will be out to sea sooner or later
where old couples who are even now walking
along the shore will pause from time to time
their faces into the wind, listening.
—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

---

C. Wade Bentley: “There are three things I can count on to make me happy: playing with my grandsons, hiking in the mountains, and writing poetry. Even when the end result of my poetic effort is crap—as it often is—I am never quite so happy as when lost and wallowing in the mud of a possible poem, trying to write my way out. And when the alchemy actually works, that’s a bonus. That’s magic.”

#poem #poetry #literature

https://www.rattle.com/storytelling-by-c-wade-bentley/

‘80S LEGACY #poem

Don’t honor Bush II’s administration with undue blame.
Twas Reagan and his merry crew reset our country’s tenor.
Of course progressive opposition clamored through post-Nixon ‘70s,
hot and sure about every error.
The point is, we had that luxury. Yes, there was poverty,
discrimination,
aggregations and individuals in need; but hunger,
untreated disease, was not perceived as righteous penalty
for lack of decent wage. There was real spirit of community,
especially on the lower rungs, but noblesse oblige philanthropy still
held, built civic structures, cohesion.
Neighbors could meet upon moral foundation that made sense,
incorporated well-wrought reason.
The ‘80s brought in a different paradigm,
more wily and wild. Days of cocaine,
champagne, glamour and celebration for sweet deregulation,
when every schemer
could conjure a neo-capitalist heritage of wealth unbound.
Before it was found that
poisonous as plutonium, in the gleeful hands of elitist true believers,
just what we
were free to become.
Since then it seems proportion and balance speed spinning to demise.
Wisdom demonized in mad shrapnel’s wake of
blast-warped brains.
Games of harassing hatred and spitting disdain. Contemporary
Cassandras warned: his numbers are 666.
A man possessed by
Hollywood fantasies. America construed as big screen portrayed,
folie a deux with a nation.
And here those snowy yesteryears roost
in loyal rafters, lay out
macabre future ruled by disaffected youth.
Who is it, really, that we as a people choose to be?
Distanced from encouraging history,
adumbrated by convenient lies, what are our chances
for recovery?

#CAPITALISM #poem

Capitalism
All well and good
But we are not always
(thank providence)
driven by profit.
We have the capacity
to be driven by all kinds of motives
and to act sometimes
for quite foolish reasons
when looked at objectively.

         It is not all black and white
          neither is it plus or minus
                for we are not logic machines
        but human beings
        creatures of passion:
        capable of intense emotions,
          unreasoned behavior,
        and not always
            predictable.

Sometimes, When the Light
By Lisel Mueller

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

A Note from the Editor
Lisel Mueller was born on this day 100 years ago. Read from a 2013 interview with Mueller.

#poem #poetry #literature

The Negro Speaks of Rivers
By Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

#poem #poetry #literature

Remember Our Names
Haya Abu Nasser

Life is devoid of meaning
a philosopher once declared,
and what is life for
if my dreams are obliterated with my city
and children are dying.

A single, relentless shot,
and I become the next number
on the long death roll.
They’ll bury me without funeral words.
No tears will be shed over my grave,
no flowers will grace my name,
and they might misspell it
with no one to correct them.

Between life and death,
if I had been three steps later,
or if I had escaped one night later,
I would be dead, without friends,
to see the end of the war
and the withdrawal of weapons.
If a shell hit me,
no one would collect my broken body.
I’d lie beneath the rubble,
awaiting a passerby,
to hear my weeping soul.

My friend was trapped for three days
beneath the fallen walls.
No one heard him when he cried out.
No one heard his last breath, but it happened.
No one rescued him, but God intervened,
and he ascended to heaven.

My friend left on his desk,
one paper, one final poem.
In this poem he prayed to survive;

he begged, but no one listened.
A number was inscribed on his coffin,
“Mahmoud is his name,” I shouted.
We were the same age and both dreamed
of white gulls flying above the rustling waves.

We were young, debating life’s meaning.
I think of the unwritten chapters of our stories.
Life is devoid of meaning, my friend once said.
We are the meaning, I declared,
while our laughter echoed.

When I depart, remember the blood red tulip.
My name is Haya, so carve it on my grave,
and do not misspell it.

---

Haya Abu Nasser is a human rights activist and writer, originally from Deir-Sneid. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature and humanitarian sciences and works as a fundraising and partnership officer for Save Youth Future Society and other NGOs in Palestine. Haya’s mission is to advocate for the rights of youth and women, combatting discrimination, violence and economic inequality. She has had the honor of acting as keynote speaker at several international events, including the Exeter University Conference, the Islamic Malaysian Union, and the recent WD23 in Rwanda, where she passionately addressed topics related youth engagement in peacebuilding efforts, aligning with the principles of UN Resolutions 2250 and 1325. She is currently internally displaced within Gaza.

https://scoundreltime.com/remember-our-names/

#poem #poetry #literature

the damsel
let the dragons
swoop down
& steal her away
from the ugliness
of her world.
unbeknownst to her,
she was only trading
one tower
for another. 
- the wickedest liars of all.

-- Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in This One

#poem #poetry #Amanda-Lovelace

TODAY: On “the fifth of/February 1918,” a soon-to-be seven-year-old girl called Elizabeth Bishop accompanied her aunt to a dentist’s appointment. Fifty years later, she published a poem about her experience called “In the Waiting Room.”

#poem #poetry #poets #literature

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMNT
#poem

What is achieved in a life?
All those moments we live, feel.
Blood pumped,
air inhaled, expelled.
Voices, words that reverberate,
haunt, compel as passion
that won’t let go.
Grasp, if you can, those
floating threads each holding
chapters, stanzas, soul songs
that carried you through
excruciating days, months, years.

See, brilliant achievement,
creation, demons and gods
as needed, a whole world
intricately, intimately
perceived
Exquisite beauty –the essence of artistic
inspiration.