84 words
Some nights are never-ending hells
for these old veterans in our care.
We do not hand out pills, but shells,
as out of battlefields they stare
from over sixty years ago
on far-off Guam or Guadalcanal.
With trembling hands they try to show
how the bravest or youngest fell.
(more…)
317 words
for Robert Conquest
I.
Each day Naftaly greets a prison train.
Two days ago: spies and reactionaries,
yesterday: kulaks from Ukraine,
this morning: counter-revolutionaries.
30 words
At the gates of heaven
he did not know the names
beyond the bombing bay.
But many miles away
he could still see the flames
judging the dead in Dresden.
Nikolai Getman, "Gulag Prisoners"
100 words
I see your noble face behind barbed wire,
looking out at endless taiga, greeted
only by cold. The laughter of the liar
who put you there is still loud in your ears,
although in far-off Moscow now—he’s seated,
the hooked-nosed slayer of the highborn rich,
sadist and defiler of Slavic daughters,
egalitarian savant and snitch.
Rudolf Hess, 1894–1987
291 words
“My coming to England [sic] in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children’s coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children.”
—Rudolf Hess to his wife Ilse, June 10, 1941 (more…)
115 words
You see October at the foot of hills,
the leaves of suburbs rotting in the yards
of smiling couch-potatoes, hands on hearts
that beat because they can. They’ve made their wills.
They will bequeath their kingdoms and their money
to bunny shelters. Childless, they will send
their love to Bantu tribesmen, give the honey
from their jars to geisha girls who bend
and make their beds. Yes, you can smell the rot
as you see young men dressed as Catholic nuns (more…)
510 words
A. E. Stallings
Hapax: Poems
Chicago: Triquarterly, 2006
A. E. Stallings began writing, doubtless, before her 20th birthday or thereabouts. I have no source to confirm this, but I can tell when a poet has gone to school with the great poets of the past, and when they began versifying. The earlier a poet starts reading and writing, the better ear he or she will have. Stallings has a fine ear. (more…)
Leo Yankevich
955 words
Editor’s Note:
Recently, I interviewed leading formalist poet Leo Yankevich on poetry, politics, and his new Counter-Currents title Tikkun Olam and Other Poems.
What is formalist poetry? What is the new formalist movement? (more…)
120 words
Tikkun Olam*
(Ekaterinburg, Russia, 17 July 1918)
His mouth agape, as though still asking questions,
the Tsar lies at the end of his long reign.
(Blue lips almost struggle to explain,
caught in the halfway realm of last expressions.) (more…)
Open air cages in Pisa, where Ezra Pound was imprisoned by the American military for 25 days, until, they say, his mind broke
120 words
No, this is not a station in the metro,
this is an open cage outside of Pisa.
Ezra Pound now sits inside of it,
his beard a burning bush of grief made new.
Gazing at the moon, and looking retro,
the better craftsman grins to bars, and sees a
night of stars implode, his touched eyes lit
and posed for labour. If not he, then who
will scribble truth into a timeless croon?
Twenty-five days will pass before the good
guys offer him a tent, his face now wood,
his psyche worn by rain and sun and moon.
He leaves the cage, and is assisted in,
his mouth ajar, his grin not quite a grin.
