From Israel With Love

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Hello Poetry Lovers,

It is a pleasure today to share something worthwhile from a friend in Israel.

Helen Bar-Lev is an interesting artist—she is both poet and painter, one whose work is hightly inventive and can charm young and old. She loves words and she loves images, and possesses the rare ability to create both.  She is also a skilled editor, one who reaches out way beyond geographical and cultural borders to others.  After numerous books of poetry, exhibitions and one-woman shows of paintings, Helen has three recent publications well worth noting here. All are published by Cyclamens and Swords Publishing, Medulla, Israel.

They are:

CANVAS CALENDAR, 2014;

IN MOONLIGHT THE SKY WILL SLIDE, 2009;

LOVE LETTERS: The Alphabet Falls in Love with Itself, 2014;

Canvas Calendar and In Moonlight the Sky Will Slide are both collaborations with others, but each in a different way. Canvas Calendar, for which Helen served as author, artist and editor,  is a seventy-seven page excursion through an entire year, remarkably with the words and illustrations of seven different poets and artists, each from a different part of the world, each sharing his or her own unique vision. Thus, in addition to Helen’s, we have the voices of  John Smelcer, poet of the Ahtna Tribe of Alaska, Lillian Cohen, living now in Australia, Katherine L. Gordon of Ontario, Canada, Luis Alberto Ambroggio, Argentinan-American, Robert Kihara of Kenya, and Mike Leaf, currently living half the year in Israel, half in Thailand.

Thus, we learn that in Alaska,

January and the sun is a memory…

Most living things huddle…*

Or in Canada,

April is so tender, casting green shadows on dissolving snow heaps… **

While in Thailand, in August,

The festival of the Hungry Ghosts that visit us from Hell

..burn paper money…

Whilst the Monsoon rages…***

Come December, in Kenya,

…We slaughter goats, roast them and enjoy hearty drinks…the year is a tortoise, slowing

covering miles step by step…****

And Helen herslf tells us that in Israel:

June is delicious

smooth as a peach

beautiful as a bride

a hybrid between seasons

yellow with acacia and broom

mellow in its temperment

plug up the clouds

don’t sit on the thistles

take stock of the hollyhocks…

It is difficult to convey the sweep of  this collection here. Suffice it to say CANVAS CALENDAR succeeds in bringing the reader a fascinating variety of pictures and poetic impressions, a year experienced fully, month by month, place by place.  

Finally, many people feel that poetry is not for them—not accessible, not relevant, not enjoyable. For them, and everyone, really, this collection is a way “in,” a highly entertaining, informative and often quite lyrical journey around the world.

Thanks for clicking in.

Click in soon again for reviews of  IN MOONLIGHT THE SKY WILL FALL and LOVE LETTERS.*

 

                                                                     xo Judy

 * all three titles can be ordered at:

www.cyclamensandswords.com/bookshop.php

In Moonlight: $10.

Love Letters-The Alphabet Falls in Love with Itself:  $15.

Canvas Calendar: $20.

 

 

 

 



Read more: The Jewish Chronicle - entry FROM ISRAEL WITH LOVE
 

Art Deco

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Art Deco

 


The hotel is vast and pink

squatting on a southern shore

grand old palm trees

turquoise water

shimmering waves of white heat.


I am running the burnished halls

that reek money

I am not naked

exactly but searching for my nightie.

Butlers in tuxedos are on the lookout.


I can’t get the elevator

to come for me

can’t remember which room I had;

utterly lost and out of ideas.


But I don’t cry, don’t give up,

just keep dashing around

in full frenzy,

the angry butlers closing in on me.


They don’t get me. I wake up.

Just in time to tell

the whole wretched tale to Y.


She listens, nods in her wise way

then goes to the kitchen to make coffee.

The paper says rain she says

and you’re not too old to dream.

 

 

 

Happy New Year

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Approaching another year, after a lifetime’s worth of instruction by Kim and William, Ingrid, Humphrey, Cary, Fred and Ginger and the Warner Brothers I realized that dances into golden sunsets are not regularly happening. My daily life runs more along the lines of  confrontations with machines grinding away in order to outsmart me and other humans and surely take over.  It could happen in 2015. According to gleeful nerd experts, computers will write symphonies greater than Mozart’s, paint masterpieces that surpass Monet’s, contol and or hack into every system we’ve got, defensive, economic, strategic, etc. Then the superhuman contraptions will go on to destroy the electric grid, whatever the hell that is. The only way I sustain a small  measure of hope is to think perhaps they can’t do everything we can. The way I figure it, they will not likely commit petty larceny or string along some other machine just for carnal pleasure.

 

A Poem for King David

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Hello Poetry Lovers,

As I am certain you already know, our ancestor King David was, among many other things, a psalmist, a poet.  The psalms have guided Jews and Christians alike, across the centuries. The wisdom is as palpalable today as it was thousands of years ago. As I consider the terrible rising tide a Anti-Zionism, which is another expression of the curse of Anti-Semitism, as well as the growing marginalization and isolation of Israel, I cannot but note how King David addressed a situation closely akin to what we face today.  For your consideration, I offer Psalm 129:

Psalm 129

A SONG OF ASCENTS

1 “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth,”
    let Israel say;

2 “they have greatly oppressed me from my youth,
    but they have not gained the victory over me.

3 Plowmen have plowed my back
    and made their furrows long.

4 But the Lord is righteous;
    he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.”

5 May all who hate Zion
    be turned back in shame.

6 May they be like grass on the roof,
    which withers before it can grow;

7 a reaper cannot fill his hands with it,
    nor one who gathers fill his arms.

8 May those who pass by not say to them,
    “The blessing of the Lord be on you;
    we bless you in the name of the Lord.”

We have faced hate and discrimination from time immemorial. And we have survived.

Thank you for clicking in.  xo Judy



Read more: The Jewish Chronicle - entry A POEM FROM KING DAVID