Poetry

Just one recalcitrant patch of hair by the left ear refuses to join the crowd and age, thrusting itself into glaring visibility with assertive determination while pronouncing, “This is who you once were: dark-haired, youthful, full of unexplored opportunities and...

I suppose you might have left it there yesterday on purpose, or maybe you didn't. Perhaps it flew from the plastic bag hanging on your motorbike or out the car window, unnoticed. Still, it seemed odd to find an unopened, stamped and addressed envelope lying on the...

Trees bent over like prostrating monks to give us their fruit, ripened like mischievous children. Fish jumped up from the briny deep to give us their slithery, twisting bodies Plants welcomed scythes and hoes as we sliced off their nutritious bounty And animals, like...

It’s twilight. Not especially interesting clouds block the blue. It’s been raining often during the last month. The grey clouds and green trees, exquisite with a touch of sun a bit later, leave stark silhouettes. The rice has just been harvested, leaving beige remains...

Death, death, death everywhere in Gaza as brackish tears fall into polluted water. A nation is mourning as the young join together in daring danger, sometimes only spraying black slogans on clay walls before being gunned down by smiling soldier sociopaths wearing...

No, Martha, I don’t want to make Curried Chicken Salad for my beach party: with two cups of mayonnaise and blistering sun, I could become Botulism Bertha, a worse menace than Typhoid Mary! Nor do I want to make Belt Buckle Frames or get my hands all purpled with cute...

The apple trees were loaded with fruit weighting down thin branches until tumbling onto dried leaves. Worm-eaten, gnarled, mushy on one side, not sprayed or genetically modified and better than any eaten since.  

Apricot season lasts only a few weeks. In Gaza, war talk stops in anticipation of the delicious fruit, called in Arabic, Mish Mish. How many orange tabby cats have that name, carry the memory of perpetual spring, of life forever renewed?  

And so dreams drape across days like old clothes ready to be passed on as remnants of the past, when tranquility rests on present facades which only look solid on lies or hopes, we don’t know which isn’t surprising as one only takes while the other gives, while one...

The broken bamboo blinds are down even though the sun is not shining directly on this part of the house in Bali where a fan palm leans against the balcony and a purple orchid paints the scene with color. I try to imagine the beige blinds as a map, whether modern,...

(This poem was made into a performance piece and presented at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October, 2011) While soft city noises flow through dim-lighted streets and the Nile continues its inevitable passage to the sea I sit quietly, reflecting...

(Remembrances of a man about his boarding school days) There was nothing to say about it because who was to care? I wasn’t the most loveable of offspring nor one of the most talented, funniest or outstanding, no doubt just the sort of boy to be molested when others...

The streets are jammed with old cars, luxury cars, battered trucks, buses, microbuses, motorcycles, bicycles, donkey carts, and stray cats and people weaving through stalled traffic. Men in faded, colorless clothing, are attempting to sweep into pitiful piles desert...

Sitting in a hospital bed waiting for what? a meeting? the voice of authority to speak? another sad, sick face to appear? a child missing a leg hopping back to his dismal room? Outside the Nile flows as usual. Cars and trucks crowd the streets, as usual But nothing is...

Egrets are all over Cairo, clustered in trees like huge, feathery beasts spreading their angelic wings before blessing trees and parked cars with thick white splats. In the rice paddies, each resting on one leg, they are graceful ballerinas gazing over their watery...

Faded plumes rise out of the large, cracked flowerpot, the grey-green fronds resembling tattered boa feathers falling off a worn-out peignoir now lying in a discarded heap. Imprisoned in an ochre clay jail, the plant struggles while beside it a yucca blossoms,...

Some things look better at night – placed to optimum advantage on the red granite windowsill, the Crown of Thorns, straggly in winter with insufficient water, transforms into an elegant, finely crafted sculpture overlooking endless aging buildings in downtown Cairo. A...

To Brueghel it was spring, a time when crocus burst through the snow lambs and calves trot beside proud parents and farmers plant crops and promises. It was then that Icarus’s wax wings dissolved into sticky drops, thick tears slipping first to signal the rest was...

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