“Heron” is a haiga I created using a sketch with a haiku published in Seashores
“Dwindling light” is a haiga I created using an ink drawing with a haiku published in Seashores
“Crownights_mist” is from Daily Haiga
“Long Tailed Tit” is unpublished (apart from ‘twitter’)
“Memory-raven” was in Contemporary Haibun Online (cho)
“Wren-song” was ‘Highly Commended’ in the Jane Reichhold 2018 haiga contest
“Owl in mist” and “twilight ravens” are both in the Wales Haiku Journal haiga gallery.

-John Hawkhead

Eggs

I hold you up to see the eggs,
five of them, blue as April sky.
You cling on with your toddler legs,
observing them so solemnly.

Five of them, blue as April sky,
each one a fragile, freckled womb;
observing them so solemnly,
we hope that they will make it through –

each one a fragile, freckled womb,
holding an ugly, hairless thing.
we hope that they will make it through,
and in July, we’ll hear them sing.

Holding an ugly, hairless thing,
in need of food, and warmth, and love,
and in July we’ll hear them sing
of earth below, and sky above.

In need of food, and warmth, and love,
I watch you grow and learn new things
of earth below, and sky above,
and start to spread your fledgling wings.

I watch you grow and learn new things;
you cling on with your toddler legs,
and start to spread your fledgling wings:
I hold you up, to see the eggs.

Bios And Links

-John Hawkhead

http://www.albapublishing.com/#9781910185537

is a writer and illustrator whose short-form poetry has been published all over the world and has won many competitions. His book of haiku and senryu ‘Small Shadows’ is available directly from him or Alba Publishing.

–Sarah Connor

lives in Devon, writes for fun and sanity, grows apples, keeps going.

Photo by Paul Brookes – A Holocaust Candle

Light a Candle Again

Light a candle–
six million, if you can,
resplendent glow,
for those who say they didn’t know,

for those who didn’t, do not see
what once was, what could be,
who overlooked the ash-filled air,
who still ignore the pleading cries
and do not hear the ghostly sighs
that float over the walls of hate,

light a candle
for those who suffered then—
and now

and when
the hate-filled cries ignite the night
don’t pretend you led a fight,

or that you were righteous and true,
or even had a clue

as you embrace soundbite and meme
to boost your fragile self-esteem,

but see? The ghost numbers grow everyday–
and they never go away.

-Merril D. Smith

Pest control

pest control
the hiss of gas
in reasonable words

-John Hawkhead (from Bones Journal No18, November 2019)

One Day

I look forward to seeing all my friends
We will play and sing songs
Our words will not need to be measured
Like steps to safety

One day, one day
My family said one day

I yearn to dance with my grandfather
But he’s gone away
I don’t know where to I’m starting
To forget little things

One day, one day
My mama says one day

Hiding in the walls with my aunt
My parents are both gone
A long holiday they said
Fear in their eyes as they spoke

One day, one day
We will come home, one day

Separate from everyone I lived
Like the rat they said I was
Everyone is gone and still
I tell myself the same thing daily

One day, one day
We can go home, one day.

We will burn the yellow stars
Sing songs for the ancestors
Eat and be joyful
Hold one another as I leave earth

One day, one day
When we are home, one day.

-©Ailsa Cawley 2022

Holocaust

It is understood
We are in danger of being burned again
This is harsh, for we were treated cruelly
And no one stood there for us
Though we had given birth to
Their children in our berths
And silence met our deaths
As their sirens screamed overhead
And we felt their thankless scorn
As they absolved themselves from guilt.

-Elizabeth Cusack

Small Boy Walking past Belsen Corpses

(from the war photographs of George Rodger)

They’re stretched on the verges,
ribs like the teeth of combs,
skull plates pushing through
the shrunken layers of skin.

So many. So many.

The boy is thinking of a game of marbles,
his pockets full of them.

Marbles.

Like so many glazed eyes.

-Gill McEvoy (She says: This poem is from my collection “Are You Listening?” (Hedgehog Poetry).)

Another Anne

Kirsten! I’ve caught the chicken,
come kill it. Bring the knife and bucket for the feathers.
She bustles like a duck across the yard,
crosses the very spot. It was so long ago,
such times, in November 1944.
We watched our guest-girl grow
pale inside the tiny room.
At eight, parents taken, her eyes the saddest brown.
If soldiers passed she hid behind the shower,
the one, my cousin said, “you never use”.
He never thought we were the type,
it made me smile. Safer that way.
A moonlight night and footsteps came.
I went to see: Van Kreusen, overfed,
squint-eyed, smiling. Tingles in my fngernails.
I shot him with my rabbit-gun,
to my surprise he bled. I buried him
right there, in the farmyard
the very spot.

-Dave Garbutt (He says: It was published in ’New Worlds’ The 1992 Berkshire Literature Festival Anthology collection.  ISBN 1851631976.

It is based around a true story told to me by a Dutch friend about his Uncle.)

Bios And Links

-Ailsa Cawley

has been writing stories, poems and verses since she was a child.
It’s not always what is considered poetry by some, as she isn’t a lover of sweet, schmaltzy rhymes!
She is currently writing her first novel. A psychological thriller with a paranormal element, and she hopes to bring out a poetry collection one day!
She lives on the Isle of Skye. While some of her poetry is written from personal experience, others are written from her slightly dark and twisted  imagination.

-John Hawkhead

is a writer and illustrator whose short-form poetry has been published all over the world and has won many competitions. His book of haiku and senryu ‘Small Shadows’ is available directly from him or Alba Publishing.

-Dave Garbutt

has been writing poems since he was 17 and has still not learned to give up. His poems have been published in The Brown Envelope Anthology, and magazines (Horizon, Writers & Readers) most recently on XRcreative and forthcoming in the Deronda review. His poem ‘ripped’ was long listed in the Rialto Nature & Place competition 2021. In August 2021 he took part in the Postcard Poetry Festival and the chap book that came from that is available at the postcard festival website. https://ppf.cascadiapoeticslab.org/2021/11/08/dave-garbutt-interview/.

He was born less than a mile from where Keats lived in N London and sometimes describes himself as ‘a failed biologist, like Keats’, in the 70’s he moved to Reading until till moving to Switzerland (in 1994), where he still lives. He has found the time since the pandemic very productive as many workshops and groups opened up to non-locals as they moved to Zoom.

Dave retired from the science and IT world in 2016 and he is active on Twitter, FaceBook, Medium.com, Flickr (he had a solo exhibition of his photographs in March 2017). He leads monthly bird walks around the Birs river in NW Switzerland. His tag is @DavGar51.

-Gill McEvoy.

Won the 2015 Michael Marks award for The First Telling (Happenstance Press). Collections from Cinnamon Press. Most recent collection “Are You Listening?”  is from Hedgehog Press. Hedgehog will publish a ‘Selected’ of my work in 2022.

-Elizabeth Cusack

is a performer and published poet.
She may be found tweeting as “Poetry on the Rocks” and reading poems at “Poetry on the Rocks for Lonely Hearts” on You Tube.

-Merril D. Smith

writes from southern New Jersey. Her poetry has been published recently in Black Bough Poetry, Sledgehammer, Dead Skunk, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among others. She’s working on a collection of poetry.

Diving into a poetry collection images swim passed, metaphors transmogrify, elemental, ideas become physical things, physical things become ideas. It takes time to take it all in. I grow into my reviews. Once entered collections stay, sink into me, my reviews grow slowly in time. I will add to this review and the others over time.

Amantine Brodeur

Amantine Brodeur’s poetry and fiction has appeared in numerous online and print journals,
among these, in paragraphplanet, December 2019, Deep Time, Volume One, 2020, published by Black
Bough Poetry, iamb- quarterly journal and poet library, wave three, summer 2020, Pink Plastic House Journal, July 2020, Pendemic.ie, August 2020, and in the online and print anthology 100 Words of Solitude, edited by Philippa and Simon Holloway and published by Rare Swan Press 2021. Her piece on Beckettian women, written on the 30th anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s death in 2019, is featured in Thrice Fiction, Volume 2, Issue No 1, December 2020. alongside Ann Bogle, Eckhard Gerdes and Franny Forsman. Her piece Solitude is part of the Alternative Stories and Fake Realities podcast featuring the 100 Words of
Solitude project directed and produced in the UK by Chris Gregory. Her second poetry collection augustea is due for release soon.

twitter: @Amantine.B

https://www.iambapoet.com/amantine-brodeur

Short Interview:

1. How did you decide on the order of the poetry in your book?

The original collection came about after several years of reclusiveness following the suicide of my closest friend. It was an attempt to work through the loss of her and other very dear friends over the years. I had submitted it for publication and withdrew it. It sat untouched until 2019 when I took a look and decided I was not entirely happy with the original selection and ‘took it apart’ – I was after something a little broader in scope in respect of its themes of love and loss. There was a body of work written around that time which tied in with more recent pieces I’d written and so I started from scratch using Falling Slowly dedicated to my friend who took her life and worked ‘outward’ as it were listening to the works and how they ‘spoke’ to those around them. I gave the initial draft to Marcelle and from there it became a process of editing and selection through discussion and her critical feedback. Some poems were culled and replaced while the ms was also read by a select few whose feedback was also taken into account. Several poems were also heavily edited during this process as is always the case and so really, the final selection has been a deeply collaborative process.

2. What are you poetic influences?

It’s funny because during much of this time – a decade or more from which this collection is gathered I wrote way more than I read- I’ve just been going through an old file that runs to a staggering 3740 pages of Gogyohka (1) written between 2009 and 2012 – that aside from numerous unfinished collections up to 2017 – so if anything my influences likely came from much earlier. I’ve been told more than once my work reads like this or that poet, and in every instance it was the first I’d heard of them- something which I took as a compliment somehow and which reinforced in me that my work is headed in the right direction. Many of the poems written in this collection, when read at the time of writing, by strangers, took me to be a man – so there’s that ambiguity at play too, which I find interesting. As far as writers who remain with me – it is broad and eclectic; from Apollinaire, Bréton, to Steinbeck, Auden, Yeats, Joyce, Nin, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Octavio Paz, Lorca, Garcia Llosa, Rilke, Herman Hesse, Milan Kundera, Adrienne Rich, Woolf, to Nathalie Handal, to Brecht, Tom Waits, Simic, Ali Liebegott, Angifi Dladla and list of stunning African poets – I could go on and on – and then there’s Sonia Sanchez, Ferdinand Pessoa and Philip F Clark whose ‘Carnival of Affection’ just stops me dead in my tracks. Not sure how any this helps you..

(1) From Wkipedia:

Gogyohka（五行歌） is a five-line, untitled, Japanese poetic form. Unlike tanka (57577 syllables), Gogyohka has no restrictions on length.

Poets such as Kenji Miyazawa, Jun Ishiwara, Yūgure Maeda, Hakushu Kitahara, Toson Yashiro and Shinobu Orikuchi have written five-line poetry as free-style tankas since the Taishō period around the 1910s. However, they did not name the form.

In 1983, Enta Kusakabe named it Gogyohka (五行歌) and for the first time laid out the five rules of five-line poetry. He trademarked Gogyohka in Japan. The form of English Gogyohka is the same as that of free English tanka because both are untitled and are written in five free lines. As of 2018 at least five Gogyohka magazines existed: Gogyohka, Hamakaze, Minami no kaze, Sai  and Kojimachi club.

Five rules of Gogyohka by Enta Kusakabe (1983).

• Gogyohka is a new form of short poem that is based on the ancient Japanese Tanka and Kodai kayo.
• Gogyohka has five lines, but exceptionally may have four or six.
• Each line of Gogyohka consists of one phrase with a line-break after each phrase or breath.
• Gogyohka has no restraint on numbers of words or syllables.
• The theme of Gogyohka is unrestricted.

The Review:

“This collection is where I began to reflecting on what it means to be woman and how it feels to experience love, life, loss and betrayal through a feminine gaze.”

from “A note from the author“

It is the fluidity of Amantine’s poetry that strikes me first. “Falling Slowly”. Inner and outer indistinguishable. Fluid movement between both. Blocks of text. Imagery evolves out of imagery. It is a brilliant, amazing read from page to page. Inspirational. A book to dip into when your creative process is not operating correctly. Her book acts as oil to get the gears working again.