REFUGEES
by W.D. Furley


You show me a countryside
empty except for bare trees
colorless apart from brown
and grey, I show you in return
the supple angles of the trees,
the way they creak and sway;

you show me a highway
leading into a blank distance
trodden in single infinite file
by refugees, I show you the miles
they have already come, the resistance
needed to become refugees

instead of unburied corpses.
You point to villages destroyed
and refugee camps already filled
to overflowing. I say men rebuild
the most soul-shattering void
if they only keep on going.





published in Outposts Vol. 160.

A visit to Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona lead to the following:




THE UNFINISHED CATHEDRAL


Your Grace, let us forgo the Michelangelo skies -

Their golden harmonies too pure, too perfect
For our rustic place

Where primal columns rise, glint like mid-summer
Over a nave still naked and innocent.

Your Eminence, let us send the workers home -

And invite our Muslims, our Jews, our Humanists, Hindus
The Harbour-women who cast petals on the sea.

Let us climb freely, up through un-claimable light.
In a forest-cool air

Draw the same breath of heaven.
In concert mouth the love-songs loudest in our heads.

Your Holiness, won't you join us.



ms (2005)


www.cadenza-magazine.co.uk

VI


For, after the gospels,
After the human and divine comedies,
After the one thousand and one nights,
After crime and punishment,
War and peace, pride and prejudice,
The sound and the fury,
Between good and evil,
Being and nothingness,
After the tempest, the trial,
And the wasteland,
After things have fallen apart,
After one hundred years of solitude,
And remembrance of things past,
In the kingdom of this world,
We can still astonish the gods in humanity
And be the stuff of future legends,
If we but dare to be real,
And have the courage to see
That this is the time to dream
The best dream of them all.



-- from Ben Okri's Mental Flight

FROM SILENCE
by Debjani Chatterjee



"Speech is...but silence is golden."
"Little girls should be seen, not heard."
What bully shut our silver mouths?
("In the beginning was the Word".)

Silence is ripening yearning,
listening. Let my silence grow -
silence to nurture thoughtful speech.
From silence may my language flow.



-

CALLING AT AN OLD FRIEND'S FARM
- Meng-Hao-jan (A.D. 689-740)


My old friend cooked chicken and millet,
invited me home to his farm.
Green hills grow around the edge of his village.
Green hills slope away from its walls.
We dined looking out at his vegetable garden,
took wine, talking of hemp and mulberry.
I'll wait till the day of Double Ninth,
then come again for chrysanthemum flowers.



(trans.by Richard Burton)