The Words That Fell To Earth - Amelia Walker

The Words That Fell To Earth

Thirty seven pages.
Thirty seven miles.
The diary of Ilan Ramon,
Israel's first astronaut,
found, wet and crumpled,
in a field just outside Palestine,
Texas. Words:
scrawled survivors,
the only survivors of Columbia,
the space shuttle that disintegrated
upon re-entry, February 1st, 2003
- the newspaper says.

Disintegrated.
Such a newspaper word.
Distintegrated.
All that metal.
All that flesh
and blood and bones and organs
and thoughts -what thoughts?
Any?
Where did they go?

How is it ink and paper escaped
the explosion, the heat,
the ice cold plummet,
the dirt and damp of the field
to be found, two months later
and returned to Ilan's wife?

All that ink.
All that paper.
All that metal.
All that flesh.
Thirty seven pages
and how many words?

Amelia Walker
http://www.freewebs.com/ameliawalker/

New Tone Poem at 'The Poetry Slave'

Jane Williams and I have just finished the first collaborative tone poem at 'The Poetry Slave' (see link below & to the right)

Much in the same way that Sergei Rachmaninoff used Arnold Böcklin’s painting ‘The Isle of the Dead‘ as a starting point for his piece of the same name, we’ve used the expressionist painter Marc Chagall’s work Les Fiances de la Tour Eiffel as ours.

Have a look!

http://thepoetryslave.wordpress.com/

Mark William Jackson - These Days that Play like Toothaches

These days that play like toothaches.
dragging each breath in
then pushing it out
like a cheating lover.
Breath upon breath until
the day is drawn up
and spat into a waste basin
by the straight syringe of time.
Day upon day until
we are left
to sleep with worms.

Mark William Jackson
http://markwilliamjackson.com/

Ron Wilkins - A Matter of Life and Death

A matter of life and death

While walking down the street
I surprised a girl and a boy
in passionate embrace against a wall.
Nothing strange about that, you may say,
but she was dressed in school uniform
and it was during school hours.
Ah, that’s life I said to myself.
Hey, guess what I saw in The Boulevard
I said to my wife.

Next day I was carrying
a ring-tailed possum by the tail
as I walked along the road.
Schoolgirl heads
swivelled in unison as I passed.
Burying the possum
in an unmarked grave next to the last
and beside the graves of my two cats,
creating quite a cemetery,
I thought to myself, that’s death.
Hey, guess what I saw down the street
I suppose a schoolgirl said to her mum,
completing yet another
life and death tale.

Ron Wilkins
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2008/4/worm

Sorting - Benjamin Dodds

Sorting

Stainless-steel pincers prick and tear
at a spread of gelatinous film
as I tack across the magnified world
of circular Pyrex dish.
Resting my eyes back in 1:1 scale,
I find that this membrane
is the anaemic skin
of a tiny speckled frog
made transparent
through weeks
of refrigerated storage
in hermetic cube-stacked jars,
its silken bounds
the only thing
that kept free-floating workings in.
Previously anchored to their task,
strange forms now range adrift
in the sterile expanse of ethyl alcohol,
a wash of organelles
breathed out by the slackening shape.

Benjamin Dodds
http://benjamindodds.blogspot.com/

Running - Vanessa Page

Running

When roadside has turned to red
and desert oaks are stenciled
neat on car window canvases
you’ve run far enough - to where
dust folds over to new thicknesses
taking with it every trace.

It’s too late for the maps, left
unfolded on the passenger seat
you’re lost in odometer’s slow roll
passing bloated marsupials
with legs stiff as tent poles
grasping the sense in endings.

Vanessa Page
http://vanessapage.wordpress.com/

A Free Verse Sonnet for Freya Buchanan - Phillip A. Ellis

A Free Verse Sonnet for Freya Buchanan

With the sun slowly
growing through winter,
till the spring comes at last
with its crop of birds,
and the earth itself wakes
from the somnolence that is frozen soil,
it is not strange that some may
look to the long suns of summer.

But, before you do, think on this:
each element of snow is unique,
and will never be seen again,
just as is each mote of dust
strangely attracted along the shafts
of summer sunlight on sleep-dealing days.

Phillip A. Ellis
http://phillipellis.f-snet.com/