Poems for Persons of Interest

  It's the start of the Labour Day (or, if you like, Labor Day) long weekend here in North America , and we're celebrating with another contest. Like all our contests, it's a 50/50,  meaning half of the (modest) entry fee goes to the winner and the other half goes to PFPOI's hardworking but penurious staff. Which means if you think you have a winning poem, it's to your benefit to cajole your friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances into entering too. How do you enter? Glad you asked! Between  7:00 PM EDT, August 29  and  7:00 AM EDT, August 31 : Send a word doc or pdf with one or more poems, each no longer than 50 lines, about work (broadly construed) to  poemsforpoi@gmail.com .  This part is tricky, so pay attention: The submission fee for the  first poem  you submit is  $5 CANADIAN.  The fee for each additional poem is  $2 CAN . So if you submit 5 poems, the fee is $13 CAN. Send the fee via PayPal to  poemsf...

Peace from the Ashes For Hiroshima, eighty years after   And so it was— The sun, jealous of itself, Split in two above Shima. It bloomed: A second coming of silence, Without trumpets nor angels, But a shrine of screaming light— Even silence had pores to bleed from. Children’s laughter froze mid-breath. Bone-chimes shattered into shadow-scrolls. Cicadas shrieked like red-lipped sirens. Peace was not born that day. Peace was a barefoot girl— Ghost-skin unraveling— Cradling her brother’s ribs Like reed flutes Blown by breathless gods. She limped across the red river Where koi turned belly-up, Like censored verses Scribbled in soot. They called it Little Boy. It spoke in the accent of an orphaned sun. Mothers embraced dust. Fathers swallowed fire. Yet we define peace in palaces, On parchment. Peace is a ghost Learning to dance in bone shoes, Haunting alleyways Where laughter forgot its echo. O Hiroshima— First psalm of t...

Peacely Reparations for Imaobong War is to men what childbirth is to women. E.P. Bali   call : Childbirth is a war, but at least the enemy cries when it arrives.   response: Your first scream outshouted the mortars.   call: I cut your cord like rope off a rebel’s throat.   response: You breathed like a god entering its mask.   call: Milk is peace, but peace bites when the child grows teeth.   response: Still, I gave. Even when peace ran dry.   call: I held you the way I held my brother's corpse, tight, so it wouldn’t fall twice.   call: A baby is a war without bullets. Does it not come after your name & sleep?     response: Does it not break you then call you Mother?   call: You sucked my breast like it owed you reparations.   response: And since the soil refused to grow anything but graves, I paid in blood and bodywater.   call: Each night...

Shells after June Jordan You came with shells. And left them: shells .   Everyday I listen for the sea inside me. Some days, it pulses, Most days, the tides Never come back . The war I was trained for had moved underground. No more sirens, Only the scars from dying in installments. I’ve outlived so many orders. Eat. Work. Sleep. Swallow. Don’t ask: Shells There’s no ceasefire in a body that keeps waking. From what law do you judge a soul that pays no allegiance to a god? The universe says: survive. But never says how. I light matches in the open, in the greening wheat field; so no one else can say they lit the fire, so I can feel the burn belongs to me. Peace is the moment I don't aim at myself in the mirror.

A Lesson from a Dove From jungle lushness to the rolling plains, A sanctuary for life, both great and small. Cardinals, hummingbirds, and doves call it home, but the planet fades with passing time.   Through storms of sorrow and floods of war; Fields burn, skies weep, and hunger gnaws. Bitter cries echo near and far, Silencing the hummingbird, dimming the cardinal’s fire.   Shadows stretch as dusk descends, Darkness dances with the sun Like in the days of Noah, when waters swallowed earth, Life ground against ruin, desperate for survival.   Then came the dove, returning with an olive branch. A sign of receding floods, a whisper of hope. She had no voice, no words to utter, Yet her act spoke louder than any tongue.   The dove bore a branch of peace, Marking the end of storms, the arrival of calm. Much can be debated, much can be said, But wisdom finds its lessons in quiet gestures.   That day, the dove was more th...

A Crown Jewel of Sympodial Palace Sympodial, a garden down South, cradled in a plain walled by hills, at the heart of ruins and wretched silence. Storms rage fiercer here than any place else. But Sympodial stood in the eye of the tornado. Lightning of airstrikes tore the sky, walls crumbled as streets swallowed sound. Where were the children? The elders? Birds, livestock and those left behind, the ones who could not flee. Yet among the fallen, vines took roots Their blood watered the palace, where now the garden grows, bodies of the ageless and nameless woven into the soil like a vast blanket. Some lost to airstrikes, some to machine fire, others to hunger’s slow execution. A war crime, when the heart turns to stone. Hush, Begonias. Tulips, Asters, Salvias and you Daffodils. Be sated now, fed by bloods of the innocents, Woven in unison with them for eternity. Though, the sun is warm now, And the wind hums a new song, a song of peace, I st...

The Umbrella of Peace  Lips smile and laugh, but the heart does not forgive, And patiently resentment broods till time Presents the vulnerable hated neck, And then by insult or by blade we draw The blood we crave. This is the way it is With individuals as with their states, As states are persons in their sovereignty, Wholes that are part of some much greater whole, Young and unwise as is humanity, But one at last, if we can will it so. The wound of human nature ever heals, And there is never an end to its growing pains; What may assuage the festering of it Must be a kind of cautery, agonizing And yet too necessary to forgo. Some say the only real medicine is The deluge or the comet, or the wrath Of God in some more obviously intentional Agent of doom, such as by our own hands, And the tools and weapons that extend them well, Too well, too well, at least in certain ways, As every weapon might become a tool, And every state have reactors ye...

In a Nuclear Bunker in Budapest It is again the hottest August ever recorded. Like every single one for the last three years, this time honey moon. At the end of a rotten lemon   green corridor, a man stands in storm grey overalls wearing a full-face gas mask, his head made of three circles—a snout-like plastic mouth   with a couple of blind glassy eyes gleaming in the sizzling dimness. We walk down the corridor, deep into the viscera of the museum to see   he is carrying a metal oxygen tank hung on his back, the round venom yellow sign he is holding says: sugár veszély , which means radiation   danger. Isn’t it both tragic and comic, I ask, that sugar is one of the most terrifying words in Hungarian while it’s the sweetest in your tongue?   Isn’t that how life is, you say, holding my hand to put it on the luscious love bite on your neck. See, what is poison is also honey, and vice versa, my love.

Armistice At eleven, I believed that wars could end with handshakes and the signing of a name, that enemies might simply choose to mend their differences and walk away from blame. The playground battles taught me how to fight— mock victories with sticks for rifles held by boys who charged into the fading light where no one truly conquered or was felled. But history books revealed the deeper cost: the mothers counting sons who won’t return, the cities burned, the innocence we’ve lost, the scars that in our collective memory burn. Still, August mornings whisper of release: The earth endures. A child dreams of peace.

Nagasaki Cicadas The children play where glass once broke like bells. The playground swings and shadows pitch and yaw. The wind still hums through hollowed citadels as if it grieved what human hands once saw.   The cicadas scream like Geiger counts at noon, but only trees now carry that refrain. No pilots here, no detonating moon— just rust and grass, and boys outracing rain.   The world, absurd, persists in making more: more children, more cicadas, more July. A girl stands still. She points toward the shore and counts the clouds dissolving in the sky.

  swivel: a computer wizard’s wheelchair?             peace pools within me like still water in a basin & settles into my bones like the warm African sun             from the wall above, a towering photograph of my uniformed                      great-grandfather watches   Ubuntu boots my laptop to life & crepitates my knuckles primed to cock my artillery against the enemy   starts from root in the terminal with barking of commands & a team assembly   into huggling &  low-f iving with my copilot over Tango Down!

In Pace [In Peace] VE Day, 2025 The garden gathering has just begun, we notice, once we’re through the flats’ front door; the chatter’s started too. They’re having fun, the neighbours, who’ve enjoyed the prep. No chore, to tie a flag around the oldest tree – the cedar – then to fix the festive lines of bunting round the beeches. Finally, the table’s set, dolled up well past the nines, but we’re en route to hospital again – some battles cannot end. And there’s a ghost still lingering, an airman on a plane that never soared beyond the British coast – malfunctioning mid-air, before the war, it crashed down. RIP, Great-Uncle George.

The Archaeology of Silence After the last shot , silence hid itself in empty foxholes The earth exhales bullets     like     seeds     that     will     n ever     grow Somewhere, a mother sets one less space at the table and the empty chair becomes an instrument playing goodbye’s song.   Peace is not the opposite of war— it is the time between the last bomb and the first                 bird                    returning   Listen: to the sound of gun s hammered flat, beaten into                 plowshares,                 ...

A Parliament of Ravens Let us negotiate with the ravens— they who have witnessed every battlefield, every treaty broken like a lame promise .   Article I: No more feeding on the aftermath. From now on, only breadcrumbs scattered by children who do not yet know the weight of helmets.   Article II: The sky belongs to everyone— passenger planes and paper airplanes, kites shaped like doves, balloons released at birthday parties.   Article III: We agree to disagree about borders. The wind recognizes none. Seeds drift where they will, take root in foreign soil, become native through the simple act of growing.   Article IV: Our mind will be our sepulcher. Not marble, not bronze, but the living remembrance of what we almost lost, what we chose to save.   The ravens nod their dark heads, sign with wing and claw across the wide parchment of sky.   Peace: ratified by unanimous consent of al...