Number 298
Fall 2006

Poetry
Copyright © 2006 Poetry Flash

The Jeweled Net of Indra
DANE CERVINE

from Don't Apologize For What You've Done
MAHMOUD DARWISH (translated from the Arabic by OMNIA AMIN and RICK LONDON)

A Casino Culture
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

Poem
SIMON PERCHIK

My Own Private Iditarod
CYNTHIA KRAMAN

The Jeweled Net of Indra
DANE CERVINE

Driving down the freeway, remembering Hindu mythology—Indra’s net, each intersecting weave holding a jewel reflecting every other facet of every other jewel, infinitely. Suddenly, I see the hands that paint the white lines, that lay the black asphalt, hands of a man joyous or lost soap-scrubbing his body clean for dinner and beer, for the wife who loves him, hands that hold their tickets for London to see the grandmother, the hard-drinking pub matron whose body bore children in building rubble when the Nazi bombing relented—and if not for that war, would I be driving now, hands on the wheel, listening to the radio recount the birth of the child named Tsunami after the storm that drove her mother into the hills, would the meager dollars I send to rebuild a village—minted with the Rosicrucian-eye above the pyramid dreamed by this country’s founders as the all-seeing vision of a world where not a sparrow falls that we don’t know about—would I have known to send it, if not for the hands that flew the kite that drew electricity from the skies that made its way into the flat-screened box that unveils this jewel-linked world twenty-four hours of every gleaming day, weaving news with advertisements for clothes made by hands in China nimbly sewing a dream of Hollywood and Ipod and offering their bodies one by one for a better future—while the coal that fumes the electricity that plunges the needle drifts in air that circles a globe that warms the icecaps that melt into sea that shifts the current that loves the wind that swirls from heaven to earth stirring one storm after another, blowing its diaphanous passion over New Orleans like a trumpet sinking the heart so low with blue notes that flood is a dark cure for what burns—this illusion that anyone stands alone—stranded on the roofs of our swollen houses mouthing save me to a world whose millions of hands can turn up the volume loud enough to finally hear, or flick with a single click the entire interconnected vision of it all off.

Dane Cervine's poems have recently appeared in The Hudson Review, The Sun. One of his poems was chosen by Tony Hoagland as a finalist for the Wabash Prize for Poetry. The poem published here was chosen by Adrienne Rich as the winner of the 22nd Annual National Writers Union Poetry Competition, 2005. His poem “Holography” received an honorable mention. Dane Cervine’s recent poetry book is What A Father Dreams; his new chapbook is News From A Burning Man. He can be contacted at danecervine@cruzio.com.

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In Jerusalem, I mean inside the old wall&

In Jerusalem, I mean inside the old wall, I walk
from age to age without memory to guide me. For prophets
there are dividing the city’s history&ascending to Heaven
and coming back less sad and less disappointed – love and peace
are sacred and are coming to this city. I was walking on a slope
and had forebodings:
How can storytellers differ over the way light
speaks to stone?
Do wars erupt from stones faintly lit?
I walk in my sleep. I look around in my dream.
I can’t see anyone behind me. I can’t see anyone
in front of me. All this light is for me. I walk.
I get lighter. I fly and become someone else in transfiguration.
Words sprout like grass from the prophetic mouth of Isaiah:
“If you won’t believe now, you’ll never believe.”
I walk as if I were someone else. My wound
is a white rose of the gospels. My hands are two pigeons
hovering around a cross carrying the weight of the earth.
I don’t walk, I fly. I become someone else in transfiguration.
No place, no time. So who am I? Ascending, I’m not myself.
I think: Only he, the Prophet Mohammed, spoke in
classical Arabic: “What will come next? And after that?”
Suddenly, a soldier cries out: “You again? Haven’t I already
killed you?” I said: “You’ve killed me&but, like you,
I forgot to die.”

Now, as you awaken&

Now, as you awaken, remember the swan’s
last dance. Did you dance with young angels
while you were dreaming? Did the butterfly
light you up when it burned with the eternal
light of the rose? Did the phoenix appear clearly
before you and call you by your name?
Did you see the morning dawn from the fingers
of the one you love? Did you touch
the dream with your hand or did you
leave it to dream alone, aware suddenly
of your own absence? Dreamers don’t abandon
their dreams, they flare and continue
the life they have in the dream&tell me
how you lived your dream in a certain place
and I’ll tell you who you are. And now,
as you awaken, remember if you have wronged
your dream. And if you have, then remember
the last dance of the swan.

On a day like this&

On a day like this, in a hidden corner
of a church, in full feminine magnificence,
in a leap year, when eternal green
meets navy blue in morning,
when form meets content and the sensuous
meets the mystic,
beneath a teeming arbor
where the shadow of a sparrow wearies
the image of meaning – in this emotional place
I’ll encounter my end and my beginning
and say: To hell with you both. Have your way
if you must – take me and move on,
leaving the heart of truth fresh
for the hungry daughters of the jackal.
I say: I am not a citizen
or a refugee.
And I want one thing, nothing more,
one thing: a simple, quiet death
on a day like this, in the hidden heart
of the lily,
maybe compensation for a lot or for a little,
for a life measured in moments and departures,
I want a death in this garden.
No more&no less.

The author of more than 20 books of poetry, Mahmoud Darwish is the most celebrated Palestinian poet writing today. Born in 1942 in Palestine, he has lived in Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, and Amman, and currently resides in Ramallah. A collection of his poetry, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein, (University of California, 2003), was reviewed for Poetry Flash in 2004. His most recent book of poems is Don’t Apologize For What You’ve Done (Riad El-Rayyes Books, Beirut, 2004). The translations that appear here are from this collection, and are forthcoming in Now, As You Awaken, translations of twenty poems by Mahmoud Darwish, (November, 2006, Sardines Press, in association with Rumor Books).

Omnia Amin was born in Cairo, Egypt. She graduated from The American University in Cairo and received an M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary British Literature from the University of London, Queen Mary and Westfield College. She currently teaches at Zayed University in U.A.E.

Rick London’s most recent publication is the chapbook Picture With Moving Parts (Doorjamb Press, 2002). He lives and works in San Francisco.

____________________________________________________________________
A Casino Culture
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

It’s Autogeddon
An Armageddon of autos
In the City of Angels
In downtown Denver
Chicago and Manhattan
Mexico City and Milan
Calcutta and Tokyo
The sun’s wearing shades
The ozone layer breathing smog
The eco-system as finely balanced as a mobile
like a computer about to crash

A casino culture out of control
A shooting gallery
for masters of war
A bull market with toreadors
A runaway robot a runaway train
bombing through cities
The hydraulic brakes blown
And no one can slow it down
Not even the President
Not even the UN not even the EU
not even the Pope or you name it

America America
oh beautiful with spacious skies

In Las Vegas they’ve made
a replica of it-- the whole tamale-- the whole shebang--
The Eiffel Tower
The Statue of Liberty
The George Washington Bridge
The Golden Gate
King Kong and the Empire State
Swept with con
the millions stand under the signs
Dot-com billionaires
Coked-up in stretch limos
Everybody playing the slots
The predatory ladies purr
The pinballs whirr
The whole spinning world lights up
TILT!
Shoppers carried by escalators
into the flames
Skin-deep civilization
gone in a flash of samsara

Rockabye baby!

Swing low sweet chariot

Poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco’s first poet laureate, co-founder of City Lights Books, received the first Literarian Award at the 2005 National Book Awards. His most recent collection is Americus I, which received the 2005 Northern California Book Award for Poetry.

____________________________________________________________________

Poem
SIMON PERCHIK

Without any smoke all 100 watts
—a fireball! And you
face to face the way two stars

become one and morning
—you unfold this rickety ladder
till it falls into the ceiling

—a sudden splash and wings
begin to form from wings
and that slow climbing turn the dead

look forward to :you embrace the bulb
shake it, gently! make sure
if what you hear is a loosening

or thenight sky that never heals
—you almost drown holding on
and the lake drained black

half overhead, half dirt
burnt to the ground where you
still follow behind —gone, gone

—in time you will dig a place
not too far, not too wide
for the rippling among the stones.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Interested readers are invited to read “Magic, Illusion, and Other Realities,” at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet. He lives in New York.

____________________________________________________________________ My Own Private Iditarod
CYNTHIA KRAMAN

If we want the world to glisten like blond
Women turning in a doorway, like thick
Issuings out of open mouthed bank vaults
Like boyish breakings: locks picked, dishes dashed
Like girlish dervishings: whirlwind of fire
If we want that we have to launch north, go
For the Iditarod of the soul. We

Have to make our twosome ragged loopings
Over the white snow of the fugitive
Present moment whose virginal nose goes
Sniffing along the ice’s underbelly
For a track, trail. Tails erect we have to
Plunge deeper, snouts snarling, open, barking
Over the great expanse of terror.

Why? Because Michelangelo, writing
To his lover explained this: shattering.
That to love is to break. Like gold’s mold
A lover must be entered by the other
And broken. Vision, art, all love just that.
For us, to harness all hot desires
To one. Then to race it in a cold world.

Cynthia Kraman is the author of Taking on the Local Color, The Mexican Murals, and Club 82. In the seventies, she toured, sang, and wrote songs with her band, Chinas Comidas. Her poems and stories have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Switched-On Gutenberg, The Paris Review, Southern Review, Café Review, Antaeus, Black Box, Telephone, and other journals. She lives in New York City.