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Writers International Edition

Poetry

CYBERWORLD: Poem by Irene Doura-Kavadia

Towards the end […] it’s like towards the end of a masked ball, when the masks are removed. You can now see who those with whom you came into contact [ … ] actually were. For the characters have (finally) revealed themselves, the deeds have borne their fruit, […] and all delusions have crumbled…
A. Schopenhauer

A fancy, shiny new world
Stretches right before your eyes
Picture, colour, enticing word
A brand new reality luring
Out loud for you to enter, cries,
With the bright shiny smile
of a toothpaste commercial star
constantly with attractions pouring
draws you along to travel far

God, it looks so enticing!
Undeniably, unchartered waters
For all the globe’s seafarers
-Amateurs and experienced alike-
Always prove utterly inviting
For you to cross all borders
And reach out for the spike

With a bright shiny flashing smile,
Skillfully pulling the wool over your eyes,
There stretches out all-hiding cyber vile
And sweet reality soon turns into hideous lies
As virtual truth no real virtue bears
And when the going gets really tough
Only the tough ones shall get going

While the rest, all graces and airs,
perform behind a foggy curtain
the tantalizing seven veils’ dance
of Salome, the utter femme fatale,
and meeting their demands ends up in death most certain;
and they can equally be a female’s or a man’s
leading inevitably to heartbreaking results

A fancy, shiny, stardust-sprinkled world
Stretches right before your eyes.
Beware! It won’t be long before
The veil drops, rearing Medusa’s ugly head
That venomously turns it all into icy stone
Or to a hellish devouring fire, scarlet red,
Till even your last breath’s tear dries.

Thus, do not wonder, dear, do not cry
Don’t even dare to ask how or why;
The fact is obviously evident yet wry
-as at times willingly by most overlooked-
That for reality there is absolutely
no possible substitute, even when rough,
difficult, harsh, or undoubtedly tough.
So, listen to my sound advice and not ever try;
better prove wise and not get hooked!

Poem by
Irene Doura-Kavadia
© Irene Doura-Kavadia 2022

My Love: Poem by Sujatha Warrier

My love is all my own,
I dream about its rainbow hues,
I wind my way often
down the lanes of its memory,

I smile over its expressions,
revive its passions,
ruminate on its reflections,
ramblings and rants of long ago,

I keep at bay the fears,
wipe away the tears,
revel at the joys
buried in the deepest fathoms
of my heaving heart,

The tears, fears,
joys, sorrows,
thoughts, dreams and all
will be mine on call
to relive as is my wont,

It’s not in me to give them away,
It’s not in you to take them away,
It’s not in them to just go away,

My love’s been about me, always,
I’m its master, I’m its slave,
It’s in me to give you the reins

or take them away.

Poem by Sujatha Warrier
© Sujatha Warrier 2022

About the Poet

Sujatha Warrier is a writer and editor by occupation, and a poet and translator by inclination. Her articles and poems have appeared in magazines, literary e-journals and anthologies. One More Line and Other Poems is her latest collection of poems. The Attic & Other Poems is a collection of her poems, with illustrations. Fireflies is a collection of her micropoems. Totally Owordosed is her blog. A few awards and jury recommendations have come her way.

A LIE: Poem by Dr. Sreekanth Kopuri

For CHARP

woven with the void of
years in the African sands,
borrowed from the
life’s incomplete pages

sits in secure flat seated chair
bought from the supermarket
as a highest bidder at a secret
safe government auction

the natural defensive uproar adorned
in showy kinesics, entreats for scraps
of learning from another that
proclaims the biography of its own
blunder written with the stolen letters
from the pages of a ruined history

it picks up the leaves and windfalls
spilled under growing trees in the
government orchard with more lies
that socialize a life whose belly
bulges with the voracity for wealth

(First published in A New Ulster Ulster, Northern Ireland, November 2019)

Poem by Dr. Sreekanth Kopuri
© Dr. Sreekanth Kopuri 2019

About the Author

Sreekanth Kopuri is an Indian poet, current poetry editor of Kitchen Sink Magazine, Alumni Writer in Residence, Athens and a Professor of English from Machilipatnam, India. He recited his poetry in University of Oxford, John Hopkins University, University of Florida, Heinrich Heine University, University of Gdanski and many others. His poems appeared in Arkansas Review, Christian Century, A Honest Ulsterman, Chicago Memory House, Heartland Review, Lannang Archives, Tulsa Review, Expanded Field, A New Ulster, The Rational Creature, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry Centre San Jose, Underground Writers Association, Athereon Review, Word Fountain, Synaeresis, Wend Poetry, Vayavya, Ann Arbor Review to mention a few and are forthcoming in many. His book Poems of the Void was the winner of Golden Book of the year 2022 & finalist for the Eyelands Books Award Greece, 2019. He is the recipient of Immanuel Kant Award for his collection of poems on Silence 2020. An independent research scholar in Contemporary Poetry, Silence, and Holocaust poetry, he is presently working on his research work “Silence in Contemporary Ecopoetics of Transcendence”. He lives in his hometown Machilipatnam with his mother.

Palazzo della Pietà hosts OMNISCIENT the exhibition of Filippo Papa’s photographic works and Joan Josep Barceló’s poems in Venice 

Venice was the place where art and poetry met a new vision and experimentation through the representation of the REGENERATION performance by Filippo Papa and Joan Josep Barcelo creating a new way of making art, the union between photographic and performative art, holographic technology and poetry.

The Palazzo della Pietà in Venice hosted OMNISCIENT the exhibition of Papa’s photographic works and Barceló’s poems, curated by Mac Art, included in the Amedeo Modigliani Foundation Biennale. On the occasion of this exhibition, the commemorative book OMNISCIENT was published by the Setteponti Publishing House, with the preface by Paolo Giansiracusa and the afterword by Michele Lasala, where the various photographs and poems of both artists are collected. In the first part we find the twelve works of Omniscient accompanied by the twelve poems of Barcelo and in the second part, a tribute to the ten-year career of the artist Filippo Papa with the publication of ten works, one for each career year, always accompanied by poems unpublished by the poet Barcelo.

This whole concept materialized in the presentation of the performance REGENERATION at the end of April, with two representations, where Filippo Papa, live, as a visual performer, showed expressive art in his own body through a wonderful performance full of colour and interpretation, and where the poetry of Joan Josep Barceló adopted the holographic form, enhancing the act.

“Filippo Papa and Joan Josep i Barcelo travel in unison on the curvilinear paths of the universe. They adopt the same synthesis and love the musicality of silence. One captures images that push the gaze toward the Empireus, the other “rebuilds in the ceiling of the sky with every heartbeat”. It would seem that their poetics are entirely constructed by admiring the infinity that dominates our presence. Both look upwards as if looking for a trajectory that pushes the soul towards the place where everything is destined to converge. In this regard, Barcelo weaves verses as light as air, as burning like fire, and reminds us of everyone’s destiny in “asking only to die in the belly of the dome”.

Paolo Giansiracusa

“Filippo Papa and Joan Josep Barcelo, the photographer and the poet, the Sicilian and the Catalan, united in a journey called beauty. Moved by the desire to grasp, in the most varied forms of things, the most intimate essence of being, the two brave wayfarers unleash the weapons they know best. Papa does this by using light, with which he rewrites and describes the order of the world and admirably discloses that silent grammar that lies, eternal, under the heavy blanket of the visible. Barcelo does this by using the word, with which he illuminates, like a powerful beacon, the darkest and most hidden corners of the spirit of man. Two languages apparently distant from each other, but which actually show and prove to be basically the same thing. In fact, photography and poetry are both forms capable of capturing, imprisoning, freezing and crystallizing in an image or in a word the fleeting moment, the instant, the moment; what by nature is destined to live in a short space of time and then soon be swallowed up in the infinite darkness where everything is cancelled out. But art, photographic and poetic, has the strength to steal the moment that is about to dissolve from its evil destiny. At that moment there is the secret of the world, there is the whole sense of being. It is that light that pierces the darkness and illuminates the conscience of man, and that art reveals precisely. An image that, in Papa’s wonderful photos, finds full concreteness in the elegant shapes of a dome pierced by a mystical ray of sunshine. Seen from below and from inside, this almost looks like a circle of light, surrounded by the deepest darkness that eats away and cancels the rest of the church. In Barcelo’s profound lyrics, however, takes on the appearance of those words that no one understands and understands, which however herald a possible tomorrow. In one way or another, the presence of the transcendent is felt in the captured moment; the presence of what is far beyond the narrow schemes of reason. Absolute knowledge, or omniscience, whose most perfect symbol is not by chance the circle, among the forms, the one that best expresses the Umgreifende, the all-embracing of Jaspersian memory, where the possible is understood as well as the impossible”.

Michele Lasala

to multiply all hopes by four to irrigate with desire
the dome in the bud of each of the auroras
among celestial songs of guessing angels
what must be a martyrdom of symphonies of numbers

to savor the solitude of the hours that enter the night of the bodies
with a firm step on an oblique path

to fall completely into the lap of luminous forests
and of a twilight sky under the light weight of the eyes of a sun
that draws the most beautiful shadows in the world

*****

to try to sleep to talk to the angels about who is the most powerful
and to ocupy all the spaces feeling how their hands
are placed on the other hands

to feel no ties and cover nudity with rays of light
to combine their blood with other blood
to usurp the place in the shadows and not leave the fire of the circle

to ask only to die in the belly of the dome

*****

to unfold eight numbers on a distant and dark background
of the paradise of the eight gardens with eight doors

a circle of perfection in a mystical limit of light and dark
eternity between wind swirls and words between dream images and stars

to explain everything with drunkenness without depending on someone
who speaks a language that no one understands

(Poems by Joan Josep Barcelo)

William Wordsworth poem writers edition

I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth