Helen
Bar-Lev, IL
Developments
Hello again, holiday season
greetings to all. There have been several
exciting developments here.
The first development is that I have been appointed Poetry
Editor for PRESENCE, An International Journal for
Spiritual Direction, Published by Spiritual
Directors International,
www.sdiworld.org The journal is seeking poems
from all over the world, so if you have written poetry in
that vein, please send your poems to me: hbarlev@netvision.net.il
and we’ll see if PRESENCE will publish them.
When Johnmichael Simon and I visited South Africa for
three weeks, returning here 6 December, there was a poetry
reading in our honour at the home of friends in Cape Town.
At the meeting was a woman who had been incarcerated under
the apartheid regime. She had been in solitary confinement
for 4 ½ months, and to prevent herself from going insane,
memorized a story she later wrote down. And poems. This is
how she became a writer. She read one of the poems to us
that evening. It was an electrifying evening.
The talk was how far South Africa has come in the years
since apartheid ended. For me, there is still an enormous
par between white and black, and the shanty towns that are
all over are too horrible. One is in Hout Bay, an
extremely affluent town where white people live behind
electrified fences and signs giving the name of the
security company, saying, ARMED RESPONSE. Of course, not
only in Hout Bay, but in many cities. On the other side of
the South African coin is its natural beauty and, of
course, its animals. We spent time at a few National Parks
and saw many many wild animals. This is a humbling and
mystical experience. Many poems came out of this trip and
Johnmichael and I will perhaps publish a chapbook. This is
one of the poems I wrote while there:
This is
Africa
Where I feel at home
yet not
where the colour brown
was created, mixed
and blended
and I want to be brown
but am not
This is Africa
with all its animals
I want to stoke the zebra
and ride the cheetah
stand beside an elephant
fly with a stork
but cannot
This is Africa
decimated by disease
I want to relieve it,
stomp on it, stop it,
but cannot
In the meantime, the two
poetry books I told you about last time are
available from Cyclamens and Swords Publishing for
purchase. One is IN
MOONLIGHT THE SKY WILL SLIDE by Katherine L.
Gordon, the esteemed
poetess from Canada , and myself, with my black and white
drawings, 61
pages. The other is THE MUSE IN THE SUITCASE,
a book of poems
written on our travels, Johnmichael Simon and myself, also
illustrated
with my black and white drawings, 105 pages. It is a
companion book to
Cyclamens and Swords and Other Poems about the Land
of Israel
(Ibbetson Press, 2007).
Our own Cyclamens and Swords,
www.cyclamensandswords.com, annual
competition is closed and judging is underway. Winners
will likely be
announced next month. The Winter issue of the website will
go up in the
next week or so. Do look. We have wonderful poems, short
stories and
artwork. We are accepting submissions for the Spring
issue, poetry on a
general theme, short stories not to exceed 5000 words,
artwork.
John B. Lee was the judge for this year’s Reuben Rose
Annual
Competition. The winners are as follows. We are proud of
our new
editor-in-chief of the annual Voices Israel Anthology, who
won both first
and second prizes. There will be a reading of the winning
poems in
Jerusalem , 7 January.
1ST Prize – MICHAEL DICKEL
“Crows”
2nd Prize - MICHAEL DICKEL “Forty Two Sacrifices”,
3rd Prize - APRIL BULMER (Canada) “Blood”
HONORABLE MENTIONS :
MICHELLE COHEN (USA), YAKOV AZRIEL,
JOHNMICHAEL SIMON (four poems), APRIL BULMER, SARAH AVITAL,
ANDREA MORIAH (two poems), and VASIN (no first name ,
USA). As
John B. Lee could not come to Israel to lead the workshop,
Michael
Deckel will do so, 25-26 December at Kibbutz Shefayim.
Below is the first prize poem. All the poems will be
posted on the Voices
website very shortly.
http://voicesisrael.webs.com/ Take a look at the
website – it is very extensive, very nicely done.
Michael
Dekel, IL
Free
Verse
Crows
i
Resisting rising from bed this gray morning.
A cow lowing lulls me. A crow's short bark
disturbs my rest.
At dusk one crow comes,
then another, then a flock gathers in the poplars.
They have eaten frogs. They tasted
duck eggs. They savor carrion, laughing.
ii
Send the crows to Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda!
Refugee camps in Zaire overflow with cholera.
A young girl rolls her brother's body in a reed mat.
A once dignified man cannot hide his shit-stained pants.
The young woman every young man desired dies in the night.
The young man who turned heads when he walked down the
street
averts his eyes as he lays desiccated at your feet.
The man who cut the throat of his neighbor's
daughter rattles his own bones.
iii
An old couple hear. They peer at the rock covered
with skeletons living and dead, tattered flesh barely
clinging to bone in this killing field.
Their arms
bruised with small calligraphy. They turn away.
They climb the mountain.
On the radio they call for help.
They seek solace in burning brush
from the smell of ammonia poured over dead bodies
and the too familiar sound of bulldozers.
They try but cannot cry enough tears
for the thirsty millions.
iv
With the muffler gone from my old Ford tractor
I drive up to where the crows call.
It's open season. I could shoot them,
had I brought my shotgun.
The beast under me roars as its wheels dig
into the raw earth. The tractor submerges;
I hang onto its seat with everything. It takes
me down, down into the gravel left by glaciers,
down through the rock, through the hot mantel,
the liquid core--
out the scabbed crust.
I am on a mountain
covered with skeletons,
rotten flesh. I stop breathing
to stop the stink.
I have arrived
too late.
Helen Bar-Lev, artist, poet
www.helenbarlev.com
Senior Editor, Cyclamens
and Swords Publishing
www.cyclamensandswords.com
poetry editor for
Presence:
An International Journal of Spiritual Direction,
published by Spiritual Directors International
www.sdiworld.org
