Category Archives: Poems

David Galef, ‘How to Say “Thank You” Abroad’

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Donkey, mercy, grassy ass,
Effin’ Christ, something with God?
Spacey bow and airy ghetto,
Tic-tac-toe—or smile and nod.

Glossary: danke, merci, gracias, efcharisto, deo gratias, spasibo, arigatō, tak.

*****

David Galef comments: “The idea for this short (previously unpublished) poem came to me years ago when I was learning Japanese, and the mnemonic for the phrase “you’re welcome” (dō itashimashite) was explained to me as “don’t touch my mustache.” From there, it was a short step to “airy ghetto” for arigatō or “thank you.” A recent bout of Spanish language instruction yielded “grassy ass,” not that gracias is hard to remember, and the rest, as they say, is hiss Tory. As you can see in the poem, I’ve got eight or so examples, and I’d welcome more.”

David Galef has published over two hundred poems in magazines ranging from Light and Measure to The Yale Review. He’s also published two poetry volumes, Flaws and Kanji Poems, as well as two chapbooks, Lists and Apocalypses. His latest book is the novel Where I Went Wrong. In real life, he directs the creative writing program at Montclair State University.

Photo: “universal thank you note” by woodleywonderworks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

RHL, ‘In the Spring’

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In the spring, an old man’s fancy
ruefully reviews his youth;
thinks of girls both past and present,
wonders can he hide time’s truth.

His always googly gardening eyes
all ever which ways scan and glower
at the bud-bursting blossoming girls
exploding in their flower of power.

What is this green and noisy growth
that’s flourishing, fresh and unkempt?
Old’s good, so’s young… could one be both?
O Fates! from fate make me exempt!

*****

‘In the Spring’ was published in Bewildering Stories, an online weekly of Speculative Fiction, Poetry, Art, etc. Thanks, Don Webb!

“at the museum” by derpunk is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

SF poem: Don Webb, ‘Mars Draws Near’

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Do you know where now or in what lands
Are the voices that sang of vibrant Mars?
Of slender spires on iron-red sands
And canals, night-necklaces with stars?
They sang of visions that once seemed clear.
Who sings of the Mars of yesteryear?

Does sadness tinge new Eden’s rainbows
Or the sin-abrading void of space?
Close now, does Mars now close
Its alien, inviting face?
Today we hear triumphant fear.
Who hears the Mars of yesteryear?

Man, covet not the power of stones
Nor jails, nor ruins. Mars draws near.
It once gave flesh to now-dry bones:
Return to the Mars of yesteryear.

*****

Don Webb writes: “I wrote this poem in 2003. That happened to be a special time in astronomy, when Mars was closest to Earth. The ‘yesteryear’ reference was prompted by fond memories of the literature of Ray Bradbury and C.S. Lewis, among others.  The poem’s relevance to today’s world is explained in Bewildering Stories’ series of review articles: ‘Cassandra’s Voices: Warnings to the Modern Age‘  ( https://www.bewilderingstories.com/includes/toc/cassandra_toc.html). All of the works discussed shine important light on 21st-century civilization and continue to be of immediate interest in U.S. and world politics. The nostalgia of Mars invading Earth seems preferable to Trusk & Mump’s earthly imperialism and dreams of an Invasion of Mars.”

Don Webb is a teacher of French language and literature. B.A., Dartmouth College; Ph. D., University of Wisconsin. Major: French; minor: German. Thesis: Jean Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. Most of his career was spent at California State University, Sacramento. Ten years moonlighting as a professional translator of French and Italian. He is currently retired and has taught an on-line course in French for Reading Comprehension for several years and, occasionally, French for Listening Comprehension at the University of Guelph, in Ontario.

For a more complete (and highly amusing) bio with reflections on the various people he has been mistaken for – and the doppelgänger who has been mistaken for him – visit www.bewilderingstories.com/bios/donbio.html

Photo: “Mars the Mysterious (NASA, 1997)” by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Weekend read: Odd poem: Joseph Stalin, ‘The Outcast’

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He knocked on strangers’ doors,
Going from house to house,
With an old oaken panduri
And that simple song of his.

But in his song, his song—
Pure as the sun’s own gleam—
Resounded a truth profound,
Resounded a lofty dream.

Hearts that had turned to stone
Were made to beat once more;
In many, he’d rouse a mind
That slumbered in deepest murk.

But instead of the laurels he’d earned,
The people of his land
Fed the outcast poison,
Placing a cup in his hand.

They told him: “Damned one, you must
Drink it, drain the cup dry…
Your song is foreign to us,
We prefer to live in a lie!”

*****

Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili was a Georgian romantic poet who led a million-dollar heist that killed 40 people and funded the Bolshevik revolution. We know him as Joseph Stalin. His story is fascinating… and he is the model for the anti-hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in the Star Wars spin-off TV series Andor.

The BBC has an excellent background article on him and the Andor connection: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250417-how-a-young-joseph-stalin-inspired-star-wars-series-andor:
Yes, the troubled outlaw beloved by Star Wars fans everywhere is based in part on one of history’s most notorious mass murderers, as the series’ creator, Tony Gilroy, has acknowledged. “If you look at a picture of young Stalin, isn’t he glamorous,” Gilroy said in an interview in Rolling Stone in 2022. “He looks like Diego!”

The above poem and two others, all translated by David Shook, can be found here: https://molossusexperiment.tumblr.com/fall1/stalin. The link also contains Shook’s observations on Stalin’s qualities as a poet, and on his persecution of poets like Osip Mandelstam for the Stalin Epigram:
... the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men...

Not having found a title for Stalin’s poem, in this blog post I titled it ‘The Outcast’, though I considered ‘Panduri’.

Photo: “David and Panduri” by sarah&patrick is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Political poem: A.E. Stallings, ‘An American Wakes Up in Athens, Greece After the 2024 Elections’

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I wake up in the dark.
In dark I went to sleep.
There is a kind of stark
Accounting of lost sheep.

The day breaks with a dawn
So much like yesterday’s.
I turn the kettle on
And brew a dark malaise.

Things go from bad to worse,
Let’s call it entropy.
The blessing is a curse,
And treachery goes free

Or something. Never mind,
Here in the cradle of
Democracy I find
There’s history enough —

There on the shining rock
The entasis of state,
The subtle curves that lock
The crooked to the straight.

The centuries were slow
Where stood its solid scenes,
It took one night to blow
The roof to smithereens.

It boasts of Marathon,
It boasts of Salamis
Five generations on,
Of hemlock’s bitterness,

Between, the city nations
Of Greeks warred tribe with tribe
Why trouble with invasions?
It’s easier to bribe.

We still read Athens’ versions,
As though the Spartans lost,
As though the prudent Persians
Did not know what they cost.

Pericles died of plague,
And Phidias in prison.
Division’s sown, and vague
Suspicions have arisen.

It took nine years to build
Those columns in the air,
But half its marbles spilled,
Over fifty to repair.

It’s like a foundered ship,
That ruin on the hill.
It makes my heartbeat skip.
I’m afraid it always will.

*****

A.E. Stallings writes: “I [wrote this] poem the day after the elections. It was written on the fly, and has not been revised.”

‘An American Wakes Up in Athens, Greece After the 2024 Elections’ was originally published in Liberties Journal.

A.E. Stallings is the current Oxford Professor of Poetry. This Afterlife: Selected Poems was published in 2022. Her forthcoming book is Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon

Photo: “Parthenon” by R~P~M is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Jerome Betts, ‘Lines On A Lady In Bronze’

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(The statue of Boadicea and her Daughters by Thomas Thornycroft was erected in 1902 near Westminster Bridge London.)

Set up, the civic skyline Shardless,
A proxy late Victoria then,
She charges, rein-free, grim, regardless,
Towards the Gothic giant, Big Ben.

Just what is known about this fiery
And long ago wronged ruler’s life?
Such fields for scholarly enquiry
Are now churned up by toxic strife.

For some, her Roman power rejection
Makes for a memory well kept green,
While others mock as myth-confection
Their proto-Brexit British queen.

Remainers, Leavers, play Have at you!
That chariot and rearing pair
Of  horses make a super statue.
Whoever wins, she’ll still be there.

*****

Jerome Betts writes: “I find statues fascinating with their largely unchanging nature as the people and scenes around them change and they make an obvious target for revolutionaries, rowdies and rhymers. Boadicea, unveiled without ceremony in 1902 because of Edward the 7th’s appendicitis, strikes me as a splendid piece of slightly unhistorical sculpture and useful landmark for visitors. Amusement at her lack of reins and apparent charge towards the Palace of Westminster blended with the Brexit debate when the piece was published in Better Than Starbucks. Whether this dooms the last two stanzas to the archives remains to be seen.”

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the quarterly Lighten Up Online. Pushcart-nominated twice, his verse has appeared in a wide variety of UK publications and in anthologies such as Love Affairs At The Villa Nelle, Limerick Nation, The Potcake Chapbooks 1, 2 and 12, and Beth Houston’s three Extreme collections. British, European, and North American web venues include Amsterdam Quarterly, Better Than Starbucks,  Light, The Asses of Parnassus, The Hypertexts, The New Verse News, and Snakeskin.

Photo: “Boadicea Statuary Group” by Rafesmar is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Using form: RHL, ‘(on the value of learning languages when) Roughing It In Europe’

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One two three four
Is OK, but you need more:

Un deux trois quat’
If you want a welcome mat

En to tre fire
With the krone getting dearer,

Bir iki uç dirt
Selling off your jeans or shirt

Wahid zoozh teleta arba
In a cafe by the harbour

Üks kaks kolm neli
For some food to fill your belly;

Jeden dwa trzy cztery
Language may be shaky, very,

Uno dos tres cuatro
But they’ll love you if you’re up to

Eins zwei drei vier
Trying freely, laughing freer.

*****

This is one of my youthful hitchhiking days poems… It has just been republished in Firewords Campfire, but was originally in Unsplendid (and then in Better Than Starbucks, and Orchards Poetry Journal).

Firewords paired it with a short story, and commented they were “very different adventures, both centred on the art of connection: one through clumsy but charming attempts to bridge language gaps abroad, the other via a game that becomes a quiet battleground for attention, memory, and something close to intimacy. In both, every word counts.” It is always interesting to hear other people’s takes.

Artwork by Jay Carter, an illustrator from Lancashire who enjoys creating bold, colourful images, often finding inspiration in books, films, history, nature and travel. jaycarterillustrator.com

RHL, ‘Raised by Expatriates’

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When I was young, best thing I’d seen
was Morgan’s fort gone under green
in jungled Panama.
The only flags in forests there
were what leaf-cutting ants could bear:
for planet’s anima.

I touched skulls resting in plain view
in empty deserts in Peru:
mud walls stood rainlessly.
I sailed on seas beyond all land,
stood with a sloth, yes, hand in hand,
saw men drink sugared sea.

I learned to bodysurf in waves;
I climbed cliffs, and saw bats in caves,
saw beaches of pink sand.
Result? I always loved to roam
but nowhere lets me call it home,
All lands are not my land.

Some places I’m a citizen
but never been a denizen;
with others, the reverse:
the places that I’ve lived in most
ignore me like an unseen ghost,
foreign, vague-skinned, perverse.

The wind has blown me since my birth,
my home is nowhere on the earth,
from place to place I roam.
My parentage determined that
my citizenship’s “Expatriate”…
so… everywhere is home.

*****

Not all my poems are autobiographical, even if first-person. This one is. It was published recently in the Amsterdam Quarterly (thanks, Bryan R. Monte!)

Political poem: Michael R. Burch, ‘Not Elves, Exactly’

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after Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”

Something there is that likes a wall,
that likes it spiked and likes it tall,

that likes its pikes’ sharp rows of teeth
and doesn’t mind its victims’ grief

(wherever they come from, far or wide)
as long as they fall on the other side.

*****

Michael R. Burch writes: “Many people misunderstand the most famous phrase in Robert Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall.’ In the poem Frost’s neighbor quotes his father’s adage that “Good fences make good neighbors” as they work together to repair an unnecessary wall on the border of their properties. Talk about a misunderstanding: this phrase has even been used by politicians to justify apartheid walls and similar barriers! But Frost did not share his neighbor’s belief and compared him to a stone-armed savage who moved in primitive darkness and could not go beyond his father’s saying. Frost’s own belief about such walls was expressed in the poem: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out / And to whom I was like to give offense.” At the end of the poem, Frost considers teasing his neighbor with the idea that mischievous elves are responsible for the wall falling down, but decides to hold his peace. My title questions who builds such walls: ‘Not Elves, Exactly’ but something much darker and more ominous.”

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 22 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 61 times by 32 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.

“The Wall Has Spikes” by Kevan is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Max Gutmann: Planet of Love

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Venus, our neighbor that lies toward the sun,
    Is a sultry and amorous spot;
The astrologers tell us our passion and fun
   Are engendered right there, where it’s hot.

She’s the brightest of stars yet she’s hidden in cloud,
  So her pull on our psyches is double,
An enticing enigma concealed in her shroud
  And, like all such allurements, big trouble.

To the faithfully married, the word from above
  About passionate partnership stings.
There’s a planet we’re told governs all earthly love,
   And it isn’t the one with the rings.

*****

Max Gutmann writes: “I’m afraid I can’t think of anything interesting to say about ‘Planet of Love,’ which exists to support its punchline. The joke popped into my mind, so I wrote the poem.”

‘Planet of Love’ was published in the March 2025 issue of Lighten Up Online.

Max Gutmann has contributed to New Statesman, Able Muse, Cricket, and other publications. His plays have appeared throughout the U.S. (see maxgutmann.com). His book There Was a Young Girl from Verona sold several copies.

Photo: “Venus” by katmary is licensed under CC BY 2.0.