Left My Soul There #Publication

© Giorgi Iremadze (Unsplash)

I heard
Saturn ate his babies
to stop them taking his power.
Icy moons
with hearts of fire
they ruptured
then hung
in orbit
reborn and broken.
Saturn nestles
into rings
of resculpted newborns.

…you can read the rest of the poem here.

© N Nazir 2023


*February’s been kind of unreal for publications! Sometimes, you don’t hear back from editors at all and then you get more than one acceptance in the same month. It’s made up for a stressful month. I hope you like this latest offering. Though I actually wrote it about two years ago. I’d change the title if I could, I just couldn’t think of a better title. My greatest thanks to Green Ink Poetry for publishing it in their latest Collection: Cosmos

I Am Kate Bush on the Mountain #Visual Verse Publication

© Olga Naida

Into the balmy blue of a spring wind. Premature and devouring. Earth air grows green in the midday lens. Some kind of humbug illusion. I came dressed for adventure. Where were you? I waited. Watched…

…you can read the rest of the poem here.

© N Nazir 2023

My greatest thanks to Visual Verse for publishing my poem ❤

Shared for dVerse Open Link Night.

If You Know What’s Good for You

© John Towner, Unsplash

The season brings a delirium of time
shifty as quicksand, but I’m too far adrift to
fathom it.  It’s just so damned hard to get
into these dreary daily doings, so I’m drunk

on a procrastination of coffee.  I don’t
want to unravel, unanchored, just want to be
a charming plaything, winsome, not martyred
as house elf, one of those unseen slaves

who ensure the spick-span purification of
sparkling quarters, a place that swallows time
with its early phantoms.  Only when asleep I get
to better chase the perfect escape, a drunk

devouring wolf sleep, rogue and sham.  I stay
bed-long into Sunday morning, an earned drunk
aftermath of a night’s unspooling of limbs on
the comfort and cooling of sheets, the taste of wine

iron scent in my hair, my long-abandoned virtue
lost somewhere, a hyena of chores circling my poetry
but for now, I’ll deliquesce, vegetate, do whatever.

© N Nazir 2023

Written for Shay’s Word Garden, where we are given inspiration with a word list from the surreal poetry of Rimbaud.  Words used: season, delirium, charming, plaything, phantoms, asleep, wolf, sham, hyena.

Written also for WWW at the Skeptic’s Kaddish, where the poet of the week (Angela Wilson) challenges us to write a golden shovel poem, a form that entails us to incorporate a line or section of a known poem as the final word in each line (similar to an acrostic).  I’ve never done one before so I was keen to have a go.  I included a section of Baudelaire’s well-known poem Get Drunk.

“…Time to get drunk!
Don’t be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!”

*You can read the full Baudelaire poem here.

*Of course, my poem is not true.  Though such a Saturday night is familiar to me, it’s been a while.  Last night, I had a nice cup of cocoa and was all tucked up in bed at a perfectly reasonable time 🙂