A Blue-Winged Thought
A blue-winged thought navigated round my fingertip,
then cast its anchor at the foot of the lethargic quill
that in my hand had stood for hours so transfixed.
The ink that in stagnant wells had congealed
began to ripple with Osirian zeal
irrigating with words my yawning sheets.
With aquamarine, azure, and Egyptian blue
my consonants and vowels were imbued,
genetic hues.
Congruity
I’ve never wanted to be a politician,
a social worker, or a shrink,
a saviour in the miraculous sense,
a superwoman, a clairvoyant, or Merlin.
But my students keep on asking me:
How can we make the future a better thing?
So with my propensity to philosophize,
I answer: start with foetuses,
how they are impregnated,
because the semen of love is the foundation of a healthy citizen.
Annul social contracts that have infested marriages,
then build a mother who is devoid of prejudice.
She does not only suckle babies white fluids.
Her every pore exudes her beliefs and feelings,
to be imbibed by her infants.
Make religion an affair of the heart,
the inner light within.
Erase it from documents.
Stop segregating school-pupils
each according to inherited creeds,
to abolish sectarianism.
When hunger and pestilence stalk continents,
why spend trillions on ships to navigate galaxies!
Why enthuse the public with enmities
against potential adversaries,
the Aliens,
as if civil and international wars are not enough distraction.
They claim they have abolished racism,
discrimination at work, of gender, of skin.
I suggest they start with the family and establishments,
the nuclei of favouritism.
Prune and preen your media missions,
your visual images,
the sounds which kill from a distance,
make it a tool of pacification
and not of perennial division.
The Word-Shields
Your steps recede
into the uncharted leas,
I hearken to the retreating echoes in a state of disbelief.
How dare you leave?
The man who looked death in the eye has disappeared.
You thought I use hyperbole in speech
but wait till you view with the second sight granted to the deceased
my grief water every vein that steaks your grave
until new blood seeps into your dissolving heart,
my tears.
Wait till you see your eyes bloom into fleur-de-lis
to float on the surface of every word I out-breathe,
endowing the shields of my words with heraldic miens.
Apart From
Apart from Sir Sean Connery, the sage
and the antiquarian Nicholas Cage
what would be your perfect catch?
The Roger Moore of The Persuaders,
or the Kevin Costner of Dances With Wolves?
A Scottish,
Sinclairean,
or wolf-dancing match!
Apart from Auden’s Funeral Blues
and the bards’ of the Yorkshire moors,
with what type of verse do you converse?
With Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
or with Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol ?
The hyperbolic,
stoical,
or penitent strain!
Apart from the wall-breaking Pink Floyd’s
and the sensuous sinuousness of Depeche Modem
to what type of music are you attuned?
To the Arthurian leitmotifs of erudite Era,
or the expansive vistas of Massive Attack?
A psychedelic,
erotic,
or transfiguring bent!
Dr. Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with
a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Since 1996, she has been
lecturing in Syria. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Adelaide
Literary Magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, the Pennsylvania Literary
Journal, The Blotter, Mad Swirl, Leaves of Ink, Down in the Dirt,
WestWard Quarterly, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Crossways 4, A New
Ulster, The Moon Magazine, the Mojave River Review, The Opiate, Always
Dodging the Rain, Coldnoon, and Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine.
