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The muezzin's voice echoes across the grit and the silts
The sun has laid waste to all but the grit and the silts
In the inky afterlife he sees himself buried
He reaches without hands to stop the grit and the silts
That homebrew that Mike made put us all on our asses
We downed bottles of skunk juice to the grit and the silts
Glanton had the kid sprung from a Chihuahua cárcel
Killers hunted Apaches through the grit and the silts
We returned home to the villa after the summer
Our furnishings were begrimed with the grit and the silts
A low pressure system buffets the peninsula
Sheet lightning races over the grit and the silts
The intractable wastes extend past the horizon
What djinnee or dervish wanders the grit and the silts?
He's a stark waking nightmare after weeks of no sleep
Wraiths and apparitions slip from the grit and the silts
Judge Holden caught the kid at a bar in Fort Griffin
He's dancing somewhere still beyond the grit and the silts
The road into town was mined before morning's first light
Metal, flesh and fire rain upon the grit and the silts
Dust storms mark the transition from winter to summer
After work Matt goes dashing through the grit and the silts
The mold inside the breadbox doesn't grow anymore.
Why the wallaby wanders she doesn't know anymore.
flaccid parasols
droop over tails of peacocks
concealing splendor
She who once had such skill at three-dimensional chess
can't even win a game of tic-tac-toe anymore.
muted flourishes
fall like sandbags on sawdust
rousing nobody
Once she aspired to write lays like Marie de France.
Now it's not even chic to write a rondeau anymore.
pearls and persimmons
draped over gleaming crankcase
rhomboid rhapsody
She follows sunken silk roads into the rising sun
tracing a wadi whose water doesn't flow anymore.
scent of piranha
mimicking the pale murmur
of birchbark logic
How shall she ransom the saffron music of the spheres?
Grandfather's silver saxophone doesn't blow anymore.
fatherless dustmop
flares among the chameleons
dromedary wine
Esther guzzles ghazals with swift and sharp abandon,
all because she can't scratch her ear with her toe anymore.
latch-hooked rug design
only red-green blind can see
its feelthy peectures
A traveler, a wanderer, my lover, Radif,
Ten years to the day since he left with his dejmbe,
8 am on my doorstep, can it be — Radif?
Some girls have a strange idea of fun
On Saturday night they go to the pub.
Instead I stay home making puns with Radif.
Forget it! They said, he's not coming back
A charmer like that's not a one-woman man.
Just be glad of the good times you had with Radif.
I look in his eyes and see aeons passing
And thousands of miles in a syllable's space.
He'll be gone, he'll be back, I rely on Radif.
"Faithfulness" he said, with a familiar dimple
"Is just a disguise for fear of the new."
I had to admit I still fancied Radif.
Too much coincidence can ruin a novel
But in real life I find the reverse to be true
So I fried up some bubble and squeak for Radif.
So many years without realising it
The silence
That one day I wouldn't
Be able to talk to him anymore
The silence
Those years of brathood, ignorance
And the ugly force-fields of divorce
Fragmented my time with Dad
Into shards of silence.
I wanted that time back
So I could talk and appreciate
What I had with my father
But he was silent
It was already too late
To even find words to say sorry
And learn a lifetime I'd lost
So much silence
I hugged him again and again
I said, We'll make this the best year ever!
But he didn't last that long
Before he was silenced
I looked at his small body
No longer yellow from jaundice
Silent
Lying in the recycled cardboard coffin
And I wanted him to speak
But like so many times
While he was alive
He remained totally silent
T. S. Eliot famously described April as "the cruellest month," a phrase that has spread throughout popular culture so that one isn't surprised to see allusions to it in media ranging from dramatic dialog to comic strips. April is also noted in much of the world for April first — April Fool's Day. Last spring's April issue used the April Fool's theme.
This year's April ghazals have, perhaps, less humor than last year's, but they share the quality of being off-center from the ghazals usually published here, although three of the poets in this issue have appeared before on The Ghazal Page. Matthew Stranach's "Lashed by the Desert Winds" follows the Persian/Urdu form well; as with Matthew's other ghazals here, the content is unusual for ghazals. The poem's radif expresses this quality well: "grit and silts." As with Matthew's other ghazals, various narrative threads twist and turn throughout. See his "Devolution Ghazal" in the November 2009 issue, for instance.
The other three ghazals in this issue play with the form in expressive and revealing ways. Esther Mürer's combination of shers (ghazal couplets) with haiku demonstrates a harmony between the two forms one might not have expected. Both the ghazal sher and the haiku are relatively brief and self-contained, at least syntactically. The result is a rich pattern for the reader's response.
Since the tercet challenge last year, poets have submitted several more ghazals in this form. Personifying "Radif" as a lover allows Ellen Head to use the erotic/romantic tradition of the ghazal to express a poet's sometimes frustrating fascination with poetry. Traditionally, the muse has been figured as female. Here the male muse, Radif, shows the same inconstancy as his female counterpart.
Despite its display on your screen, Initially NO's ghazal is a ghazal in the Persian/Urdu tradition. A mistake the literate often make is foregrounding the visual appearance of the poem. However, a poem with a formal structure can be displayed on the page, or screen, in anyway one wishes. Couplets can exist even when the visual display of the poem doesn't highlight them. For Example, a ghazal printed as a prose paragraph would retain its ghazal form. Breaking the lines in an unexpected way, as Initially NO has done, introduces a kind of counter-point or syncopation into the familiar ghazal form. As a result. the reader's perception of the ghazal form is refreshed.