On an excellent poetry find the past few days, there’s some real gems here. The first shining jewel is titled ‘Two Eyes Show’ and written by Kyla Pasha. She’s a journalist and poet from Pakistan as well as a contributing editor to the Global Comment blog.

The link to her home page is located Here

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The link to her poem on Global Comment is located Here

‘Two Eyes Show’

The one walks along normal, like it has
a day to live out. The other mimics it.
Forgets it. The other wanders about

smelling its own sidewalks and imagining
cars skimming the ground upside down.

One eye is open. The other
is open again, not lazy so much as
not here right now, can I
take a message? One eye

moves forward. One eye
moves back. The universe slants
a little and can’t fathom why.
Shakes its large starry head,

changes tack. One eye
waits for the other
staring at God
darkness and stars.

The universe
blinks. One eye
clings
to the other in pain, gets pulled

back in. Two eyes hold each other
closed. The world rings.

Two eyes open.
God hushes his din.

- Written by Kyla Pasha

Here’s another pretty bauble, I ran into it unexpectedly. Imagine the pleasant surprise! I was looking for one of the synonym dictionaries and instead, got to browsing. This one isn’t as visually abstract as the previous poem, but no less potent for all that. ‘Two Eyes Show’ reminds me a bit of a carefully built machine of several personalities, all with the power to experience newness but only half of one with remembered experience. Something most adults, I suspect, have forgotten how to fully grasp. Or perhaps it’s too frightening, having to look at things with no mental map as a reference. Anyway! ‘The List of Most Difficult Words’ by Len Roberts puts me in the mind of desperate hope surrounded by a bit of middle class appearances. It reminds me quite a bit of my childhood, self-enforced, if you can call such a choice on a brief list of actions to blend and prosper that. I’ve babbled a bit too much, I’m afraid. Here’s the poem!

‘The List of Most Difficult Words’

I was still standing although
Gabriella Wells and Barbara Ryan were too,
their bodies dark against the wall of light
that dull-pewter December afternoon,
shadows with words that flowed
so easily from their mouths,
fluorescent and grievous,
pied and effervescent,
words I’d spelled out to the rhythm
of my father’s hoarse whispers
during our nightly practice sessions
beneath the dim bulb,
superfluous, excelsior,
desultory and exaggeration
mixed with his Schaefer breath
and Lucky Strike smoke

as I went down
The List of Most Difficult Words
with a man whose wife had left,
one son grown into madness,
the other into death,
my father’s hundred-and-five-pound skeleton
of skin glowing in that beer-flooded kitchen
when he’d lift the harmonica

to blow a few long, sad riffs
of country into a song
while he waited for me to hit
the single l of spiraling,
the silent i of receipt,
the two of us working words hard
those nights on Olmstead Street,
sure they would someday save me.

- Written by Len Roberts, b. 1947