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Haiku of the Times
We inhabit these times
Like a pouting bird
Perched on the outermost branch
Seeking the fastest escape route
− on the ready to take flight
In Praise Of Shape Shifters
who know how to speak to the corn
who court the sturdy roots of the Bermuda grass
whose eye can catch the shifting of the plates
and weep at the melting of the ice.
Praise be to she who plays all 12 strings
and neglects not the humble ones
And when you’re no longer comfortable
in your own skin
don’t hesitate to moult
and be another
Have no fear of exposing the tender layer
to the wind of day
for there is no growth without ripples
no advance without stumble.
Ode to Jordan Peele, Man of Warning…
Stare not at the porcelain cup
Pay no ear to the clinking of the spoon
For it is not the scheduled murmuration
Of happily migrating starlings
It is the hypnotic din of the sunken place
Where you plummet
Deeper and deeper
Into the surface of things
Veering off its sloshy veneer
A decoy of absence
Its constant shifting
Paralysis’ lure.
Do not lend your nose
To the musty smells
Issuing from the swamp
Do not catch your tongue
Uttering its mantras
Maybe your clumsy friend
Won’t make it in the nick of time
Steel your senses
Train brain, muscle and soul
For on this ring
The game is seriously rigged
And no referee will ever be on your side.
Not Unknown To Your Fearless Heart
Don’t mind the man behind the curtain
as you come to the end of the yellow brick road
Lightly buoyed by cognitive storms
the facts lay there, suspended
As the song of the lyre bird
Dirges the death of the forest
As throats of children
and black men can’t breathe
As distressed, failing nations
seek the company of collapsing bee colonies
Don’t mind the man behind the curtain
follow your app to the land of milk and honey
Let a lullaby put you in touch with alien species
the one writing this might be on its way out.
Embedded deep in the ice-core of Ages
please find the instructions for the Seventh Generation
Perhaps no different from the ones issued
on the eve of the 5th Great Extinction
Leak them out: though not pretty and polished like a Grail
they are not unknown to that fearless cove in your heart
who knows – maybe in this pinch they will do.
Foreign Celestial Body
Because in our heart of hearts
we may hail
from some distant celestial body
and got here, eventually,
evolving from the water
spilled from a far away galaxy
most of us are
perhaps secretly at odds
with this carbon reality
with these valleys
and these rivers
the mountains
the forests
and the seas
We might wax poetic
about them
but do we really feel we belong
as we lay
another piece of plastic
or dig out another lump of coal?
Yet the planet has not ceased
to scatter its brethren signs:
to be fathomed
in the wagging of a tail
in the landing of a butterfly
in the crow cawing
incredulously
at you
from the power line
A crossing of the wires:
we see nothing but
a mechanistic movement
of a muscle
random ornithological
vibrations of the throat
patterned wings flapped
by instinct
hardly an attempt at instigating
the complementary beauty
of intersecting species
Somehow, and it is a mystery why,
it does not belong to us
nor we to it.
I thank Seamas Carraher and Global Rights for interviewing me and publishing it in the website Global Rights on 30 June 2018 a few months ago. For a poetry of liberation?An Interview with Pina Piccolo
Artwork featured on the cover: Print by Hassan Vahedi.
