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She steps with her literally cold feet
On my love poetry (what a cold feat).
A metric program insures your lines scan,
But I'd prefer free verse to such cold feet.
Autumn mornings the kids would march on grapes.
That's why the village wine tastes like cold feet.
Good doctors, to prevent diabetic
Amputations, make sure to check old feet.
The Emperor of Ice Cream fetishized
The fabric on the dead woman's cold feet.
Of course I want to marry the divine.
I keep meaning to; I just have cold feet.
How dare you ask me, Gino, to commune
-icate, without cliché, about the moon?
Must I recite the trite: the "new", the "blue",
the "paper", "silver", "waning", "harvest" moon?
Avoid the obvious, search for obscure
(some Braille alternative or car called Moon)?
Should I denude my ass as rude insult
to you, (and me, the world, the One, the moon)?
If I play games with indo-euro roots
to back-derive a coin, would that remune?
Can iambic pentameter redeem
unsentimental couplets on the moon?
Is my Bill in arrears? Alas, am I
from ghazals' company now excommune?
No tissue can ever dry the tears I've cried. Damn you.
The day she told her secret, my heart stopped its self-born lies. Damn you.
The fireflies must have never danced in your stomach,
so there's no need to keep on "Why?" and "Why?" and "Why?" Damn you.
We used to sit and exchange words across the table by candlelight,
but you exchanged more in the dark with her than simple sighs. Damn you.
You used to ink and pen me these pretty words of poetry
that held our bond together until you broke that tie. Damn you.
I used to think we had a meeting of minds and hearts alike.
If that were true, you would have invented a better alibi. Damn you.
Sometimes, I would dream of what our children would look like
with their summer sweet strawberry hair and oceanic eyes. Damn you.
Now, the only thing productive I might do is to warn every woman
because your meandering, like my memory, will never die. Damn you.
I would not be here but he's one of seven:
front runner, favored highly. Vote for If!
Such grand deportment and such searing wit.
A peaked lapel: a smiley. Vote for If!
Delegates go ape, the press is foxy,
interrogating slyly. Vote for If!
Candidates all brag and strut and gesture.
Kids of pols plead shyly: Vote for If!
My father's in the race, I would not be here!
Cast no vote for Riley. Vote for If!
For he is Abba, Papa, Baba, Dada.
Unfathomable, wily. Vote for If!
I desired to write an ode on ghazal,
But I thought, why not a ghazal on ghazal?
Some bread, some wine, some poetry — so we
And so shall lovers e'er nuzzle and guzzle.
Flitting eyes, fluttering hearts, a pale moth,
Fleeting happiness, a tan gazelle.
Still alive at dawn, was 't Scheherezade
Or the king who smiled, "Shukran gazeelan"?
Every poet loves a muse, and you
Are one in a hundred thousand gazillion.
Her hair flying like a flock of ravens
Shocked by ravens,
She mocks the ravens –
Nesting in the clock with ravens
Unlocked by ravens.
No gulls perch on the dock. They're ravens.
The unmistakable knock of ravens
Hewn into the hills and the rocks by ravens.
When the first one or two of these ghazals arrived in my inbox, I enjoyed them, but wondered what I could do with them. While each of these poems has its own tone, as a group they are . . . off-center . . . strange . . . funny . . . How could these various tones work in a usual issue of The Ghazal Page, which usually has tones falling into different ranges entirely.
As time passed and more of these ghazals arrived, I realized I could make up an issue of nothing but these ghazals. And then, I realized that April was coming up, as it usually does. Okay, a humorous, off-center April issue, then. I've labeled it an "April Fool's" issue, but there is no joke other than those in some of the poems. Not all the ghazals have jokes, but Roger Sedarat's ghazal and Bill Batcher's excel in puns and and comic situations. And Stephanie Jones' "Ghazal on Ghazal" has several puns on "ghazal," including the radif that ends the fourth sher.
The ghazals by Pamela Mohon and Kate Bernadette Benedict are different. Mohon's use of "damn you" as the radif turns the love-poetry tradition of the ghazal on its head. The insistent repetition overturns, for me, the bitterness of the poem: in expressing such bitterness, a lightness enters, a lifting above this anger. Benedict's ghazal is a very strange take on the electoral process. Personally, I find it realistic in expressing the somewhat incoherent mania that too often accompanies an election.
There's a parallel insistence in "The Lovely Ghoul." All the radif ("ravens") you could ask for and qafiya (on "-ock") that raps its knuckles on the reader's ear much as Poe's raven persisted in performing its message. "The Lovely Ghoul" could be effectively performed as sound poetry with three or four voices assigned its sounds (phrases) and guided in playing with the sounds.