Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry  Tombstones Are Greedy - Sarah Mkhobza I didn’t know  that tombstones are greedy. I came to talk to you, and they all looked at me and waved unseen hands and said, “This one, too.” I thought they fought with ants over their contents, the bodies of souls, mingled with dirt, but found they fight for me to look at them and wonder: who lies in there so silent? I thought I was alone and yet there was a contest, fighting for my gaze to turn in their direction. My eyes wandered, thinking of my loved one, whose message was so clear. Who lies here was beautiful. Who lies here was never sick. Who lies here was strong, princess of lonely spaces.  If you do not say “hello,” you will miss a message from beyond the now. I said a loud “Hello!” It echoed in the loneliness, arrested my own thinking, and walked all the way home with me.

Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry  So Long Ago it Was - Sarah Mkhonza I sit at the end of the yard I see the true end of the string Long, winding it goes Leading my thoughts through the needle Sewing a spectacle called my life In a home meant to be mine forever Yet taken from me by time. I see the trees green and solid Painted in the space that shows We lived, loved and laughed there For we knew not that we were The thread that was held In the hands of the sewer turned time We walked into the mud puddles After the rains bare footed And felt the cold earth underneath. We heard the sounds after the rain Saw the sun creep into the valley Like it was afraid of the rainbow It stood high against the mountains Another day we would live to think of The day we wish to return to It is gone and only the mind Can take us there to see you Beautiful country of mine. Who said we would walk in exile? Who said we weren't in exile Our land bleeding with death People shrouded b...

Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry Crush 1999 - Peter Mason The good lilac just beyond the house hangs in bloom like a lace dress. With no one home, I gather my young body from the closet, smell every floral and vased death, fit loose my sister’s robin’s egg skirt around my waist. Quiet, in her unlit room, I go tenderly to the mirror, my bare collarbone a trickled pond of redbirds that will ribbon unsoftly with time— but here, now, I am seven, and love so deeply a boy in second grade, I need to be pretty in the dark.

Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry Late February - Ted Kooser The first warm day, and by mid-afternoon the snow is no more than a washing strewn over the yards, the bedding rolled in knots and leaking water, the white shirts lying under the evergreens. Through the heaviest drifts rise autumn’s fallen bicycles, small carnivals of paint and chrome, the Octopus and Tilt-A-Whirl beginning to turn in the sun. Now children, stiffened by winter and dressed, somehow, like old men, mutter and bend to the work of building dams. But such a spring is brief; by five o’clock the chill of sundown, darkness, the blue TVs flashing like storms in the picture windows, the yards gone gray, the wet dogs barking at nothing. Far off across the cornfields staked for streets and sewers, the body of a farmer missing since fall will show up in his garden tomorrow, as unexpected as a tulip.

Published by Sarah Uzunlar ProMosaik Poetry Cow -Selima Hill I want to be a cow and not my mother’s daughter. I want to be a cow and not in love with you. I want to feel free to feel calm. I want to be a cow who never knows the kind of love you ‘fall in love with’ with; a queenly cow, with hips as big and sound as a department store, a cow the farmer milks on bended knee, who when she dies will feel dawn bending over her like lawn to wet her lips. I want to be a cow, nothing fancy – a cargo of grass, a hammock of soupy milk whose floating and rocking and dribbling’s undisturbed by the echo of hooves to the city; of crunching boots; of suspicious-looking trailers parked on verges; of unscrupulous restaurant-owners who stumble, pink-eyed, from stale beds into a world of lobsters and warm telephones; of streamlined Japanese freighters ironing the night, heavy with sweet desire like bowls of jam.   The Tibetans have 85 words for states of consciousness. This dozy cow I want...

Pubslihed by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry A Poem About Miracles - Alden Nowlan Why don't the records go blank the instant the singer dies? Oh, I know there are explanations but they don't convince me I'm still surprised When I hear the dead singing As for orchestra's I expect the Instruments To fall silent one by one as the musicians succumb  to cancer and heart disease so that toward the end I turn on a disc labelled Gotterdammerung and all that comes out is the sound of one sick old man scraping a shaky bow across an out-of-tune fiddle. 

Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry Let Me Be Mad - Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi O incomparable Giver of life, cut reason loose at last! Let it wander grey-eyed from vanity to vanity. Shatter open my skull, pour in it the wine of madness! Let me be mad, as You; mad with You, with us. Beyond the sanity of fools is a burning desert Where Your sun is whirling in every atom: Beloved, drag me there, let me roast in Perfection! 

Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry  I Am A Woman - Joumana Haddad  No one can guess what I say when I am silent, who I see when I close my eyes, how I am carried away when I am carried away, what I search for when I reach out my hands. Nobody, nobody knows when I am hungry, when I take a journey, when I walk and when I am lost. And nobody knows that my going is a return and my return is an abstention, that my weakness is a mask and my strength is a mask, and that what is coming is a tempest. They think they know so I let them, and I happen. They put me in a cage so that my freedom may be a gift from them, and I'd have to thank them and obey. But I am free before them, after them, with them, without them. I am free in my oppression, in my defeat and my prison is what I want. The key to the prison may be their tongue. But their tongue is twisted around my desire's fingers, and my desire they can never command. I am a woman. They think they own my freedom. S...

Published by Emmanuel Bermundez, ProMosaik Poetry A Silence Called Solitude - Emmanuel Bermudez In halls of forgotten, dust-covered grace, I wander alone through a shadowy place. No voices remain, no laughter, no song— Only the silence that lingers too long. The windows are smudged with the breath of the past, And every reflection is fading too fast. The days blur together, the nights stretch like thread, Spun from the thoughts I wish I had said. The wind in the trees sounds like someone who cries, A sorrowful hymn beneath endless skies. And the moon, though it watches, speaks nothing at all, A silent observer of my quiet fall. I speak to the stars—they never respond, Their shimmer is cold, distant and fond. I tell them my secrets, I whisper my pain, But they twinkle away, like ghosts in the rain. My footsteps are heavy, yet no one can hear, Like walking through time where nothing is near. I pass through the world like a shadow unseen, A flicker, a whisper, a pause in between. People s...

Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry Everything - Anna Akhmatova  Everything’s looted, betrayed and traded, black death’s wing’s overhead. Everything’s eaten by hunger, unsated, so why does a light shine ahead? By day, a mysterious wood, near the town, breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume. By night, on July’s sky, deep, and transparent, new constellations are thrown. And something miraculous will come close to the darkness and ruin, something no-one, no-one, has known, though we’ve longed for it since we were children.

  Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry A Poem About Miracles -  Alden Nowlan Why don't the records go blank the instant the singer dies? Oh, I know there are explanations but they don't convince me I'm still surprised When I hear the dead singing As for orchestra's I expect the Instruments To fall silent one by one as the musicians succumb  to cancer and heart disease so that toward the end I turn on a disc labelled Gotterdammerung and all that comes out is the sound of one sick old man scraping a shaky bow across an out-of-tune fiddle. 

  Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry Love's Secret - William Blake Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be; For the gentle wind does move Silently, invisibly. I told my love, I told my love, I told her all my heart; Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears, Ah! she did depart! Soon as she was gone from me, A traveller came by, Silently, invisibly He took her with a sigh.

  Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry Be kind - Charles Bukowski we are always asked to understand the other person’s viewpoint no matter how outdated foolish or obnoxious. one is asked to view their total error their life-waste with kindliness, especially if they are aged. but age is the total of our doing. they have aged badly because they have lived out of focus, they have refused to see. not their fault? whose fault? mine? I am asked to hide my viewpoint from them for fear of their fear. age is no crime but the shame of a deliberately wasted life among so many deliberately wasted lives is.

Published by Sarah Uzunlar, ProMosaik Poetry  If I  Must Die - Refaat Al-Areer If I must die, you must live to tell my story to sell my things to buy a piece of cloth and some strings, (make it white with a long tail)  so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—  and bid no one farewell not  even to his flesh not even to himself— sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above  and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale. Poem taken from the book: Poems For Palestine