Back to 2007 Ghazals
June Issue
- A butterfly fluttered by, Bill Batcher
- Recycle, Bill Batcher
- The Trouble with Will, Bill Batcher
- Smoldering Secrets, Bill Batcher
- The Introvert, Jim Doss
- This Heart, Samuel Salerno
- Mirrors, J. E. Stanley
- Editor's Comments
A butterfly fluttered by
Bill Batcher
Two Notes
I glanced out my kitchen window just as a butterfly fluttered by.
It happened so quickly, I wondered, "Has a butterfly fluttered by?"
Alan West passed up his chance when Frank Morris and
the Anglins escaped from Alcatraz. His butterfly fluttered by.
Underground, bacteria worked away in the rhizosphere,
while high above this busy BAZ, a butterfly fluttered by.
"Did you eat Churchy LaFemme?" Pogo asked accusingly.
Insulted, Albert cried, "Bazz Fazz!" and a butterfly fluttered by.
"Start the car. I know a whoopee spot where the gin is cold
but the piano's hot and all that jazz." A butterfly fluttered by.
By definition, nothing you buy lasts more than a season
that claims it has pizzazz. A butterfly fluttered by.
Di, the fairy tale princess, never actually entered
the royal world of Camilla and Chaz. The butterfly fluttered by.
An Asparagus, Timber Wolf, Robin's Egg Blue,
Tickle Me Pink, and Razzmatazz butterfly fluttered by.
Bill begs your indulgence for not providing a more enduring
ghazal for your enjoyment, whereas a butterfly fluttered by.
Notes on "A Butterfly Fluttered By"
Sher 3 - BAZ is an acronym for Biologically Active Zone.
Sher 5 - These were five of the new colors introduced in 1993 by Crayola.
Recycle
Bill Batcher
May I ask, do you recycle?
Nowadays so few recycle.
When I was a little boy,
nobody we knew recycled.
(Though I wore the hand-me-downs
and my toys were too, recycled.)
Now a grey can gets the garbage,
red the toxic, blue recycle.
Learn the motto of the greens:
Reduce, reuse, renew, recycle.
Look, those who can't afford to have
everything brand new, recycle.
God doesn't waste when he creates.
He knows and shows how to recycle.
We often check the used book stores
so we are people who recycle.
Collecting antiques, I suppose,
we also could construe recycle
When someone tells you something good,
you know what to do: recycle.
And now Bill writes a ghazal 'cause
the radif is the true recycle.
The Trouble with Will
Bill Batcher
Wozniak, Bezos and Gates all claim to build us servants.
Maytag, Hoover, Westinghouse, the same: they built us servants.
In the new and perfect Metropolis, Hel was an indomitable dame;
she told the mass, "Your lives reclaim!" She was built a servant.
Rossum insisted his Universal Robot machines were tame
but in Act III, dying in shame, said, "I built you, Servants."
The rebbe made a man of clay, and inserted G-d's name
and among the Jews, gained fame, for he built them a servant.
Pygmalion kissed Galatea and she suddenly came
to life—and love, and he proclaimed, "I built me a servant."
In his foundry, forger Hephaestus, misshapen and maimed,
fashioned self-moving tripod frames, he built as servants.
That's the trouble with Will. The Lord was the first to play this game;
he has only himself to blame for building a servant.
Smoldering Secrets
Bill Batcher
But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. (Jeremiah 20:9)
God's word hid in his heart, Jeremiah was smoldering,
he wearied of withholding it, the fire kept smoldering.
Doris Day once had a secret love
but she couldn't keep desire from smoldering.
Stabbed by love's poisoned arrow, Tristan lay dying,
his floating funeral pyre already smoldering.
Mrs. O'Leary milking your cow,
do you know your byre is smoldering?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
as the widening gyre is smoldering.
Inside the walls, as babies sleep
and parents cuddle, a wire is smoldering.
Bill sits contented, carefree, but stops
writing this ghazal to inquire, What's smoldering?
The Introvert
Jim Doss
The ancients said we are born with only one song inside,
then spend a lifetime trying to perfect how to out what's inside.
Autism is an abnormal absorption with the self,
an inability to communicate, break free from the prison inside.
that people, objects are merely a mental extension of one's insides.
But when a rock strikes me in the head, how can it be
an imaginary event when blood streams from my insides?
My wife expresses anger at my non-anger, tells me I need
to stop keeping all my frustrations locked inside.
I walk through stands of oak, sumac, head-bowed,
absorbed in thought, trying to get in touch with my insides.
At parties I shy away from contact and small-talk,
speak only to close friends, share little of what's inside.
Yet in my writing, I am a tiger stalking the innocent emotion,
claws bared, ready to spend a lifetime exposing what's inside.
This Heart
Samuel Salerno
It is good to remain silent and listen,
to let others break themselves over you like waves.
In the evening the iris closes itself:
its colors sing for the sunlight.
There are several doors before us:
the voice inside of you is not lying.
Green jade is rising from the ocean
to perch on your heart as lightly as the sparrow does.
The anger you witness in cold eyes
is the one voice longing for God.
In the early morning stars are a landscape:
you walk on them as a child at play.
We live with so many faces!
The quiet one is dancing in this forest.
We are travelers in a desert:
Hope is our caravan, water our love.
The heart is a closely guarded fortress:
underneath the turtle's shell, blood is a river.
I want my life to be honest,
even if my words are sometimes not.
Mirrors
J. E. Stanley
His fiery guitar, the sun's blaze in the mirror,
till he fades like ghost, purple-hazed in the mirror.
Her venom and bite are all I desire,
her visage unseen in the glaze of the mirror.
A doppelganger seeks an escape from his crimes
and steals your soul through his gaze in the mirror.
Narcissus' true love will keep him enthralled.
Imprisoned, he'll spend all his days in the mirror.
Facing mirrors seek forever, defined,
but the image recedes and decays in the mirror.
The poet stains reams with meaningless tales
of alternate worlds he surveys through his mirror.
Editor's Comments
Bill Batcher
"A butterfly" has rich overtones: mutability, resurrection, Chuang Chou's dream . . . also the butterfly of chaos theory that starts a hurricane in one hemisphere by fluttering by in the other. In this ghazal, the butterfly becomes a trickster, either appearing at crucial points or altering situations. (You decide which.)
"Recycle" and "The Trouble with Will" each have a good range of reference, illustrating one of the virtues of the radif as a means of generating ideas.
Do all secrets smolder or onl Jeremiah's, Doris Day's, Tristan's, and so on? As so often in a successful ghazal, the signature couplet turns the poem back on the poet and, by implication, the reader. What is smoldering?
Jim Doss
I missed the quality of this ghazal on first reading. Its diction—quiet or prosaic, as you will—accumulates numerous contexts for "inside." How many different qualities can our "inside" have? A poem externalizes the poet's inside, and then, literally via light, enter's the reader's inside. And then?
Samuel Salerno
More "inside": concealment, protection, cherished secrets, mysteries. Rivers, turtles, jade, stars, dancing are all also parts of the Taoist vocabulary, along with butterflies, and the trickiness of words. The semiologist and novelist, Umberbto Eco, says, "A sign is something you with which you can tell a lie" (a close paraphrase, not a direct quote). We can also, with signs, create landscapes of dream inside each other.
J. E. Stanley
This ghazal describes the destiny of dreams, signs, secrets that turn dark. The narcissistic. solipsistic writer/reader run the risk of becoming eternally repeating mirrors, a reiterative loop of shadow and ghost and vampire. The ghazal itself, in its orderly movement, its own reiterative dance, cancels the negative implications of the imagery.