From the Heart of a Harlem Hellfighter

“For the whole entire battlefield was hell, so it was no place for any human being to be.”
Horace Pippin 

 With one arm supported by another
I paint a picture, 
a memory
of bomb holes and burned-out buildings in France.
 
Black and gray oil on white muslin create
a path of marching footsteps,
broken marks on land left hollow. 
A scorched log points upward.
 
A shattered roof, cracked walls,
and bent barbed wire.
A farm and field laid bare. 
No man or beast remains.
 
God help those who cannot see
this stormbound past, 
our soldiers’ black embedded footprints,
repeated footprints, footsteps in soft clay.
 
Judy Harding
 
After working as a Wildlife Biologist in Boston, San Francisco, and Annapolis, Judy Harding settled in Baltimore, where she began writing poetry. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program. An emerging writer, her work has appeared in: Close Up: Poems on Cancer, Grief, Hope and Healing; Persimmon Tree; Plants and Poetry Journal; The Winnow Magazine.

Dakota Medicine Man                 
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Set on his table-lap the turtle accepts the gaze of the Shaman,
200 million years of life wisdom radiates up and outward,
Spiral vortex of confused coherence generates whirling genius,
Dissolves Shaman’s arms and legs, melds them into the earth,
Informs the healing way on whose back we all travel.
 
Earth begins and ends in dirt, the soil of our souls,
Carries our simple relatives we name algae, fungi, nematodes,
Grows the healing plants, animals and incantations 
Shaman knows from his insides out, beyond the edges, 
Recollects himself from the dissolution the turtle demands,
Buffalo horn headdress, chants, prayers create connection,
Plants becomes herbs for healing and soothing,
Intuition born of mingling into earth begins a trial
and error of thirty thousand human generations.
 
We blood and bone children of the mystery 
that moves through timeless space and endless time,
Extrusions of mother earth, too complex to imagine,
Our core shared with every living expression,
Built of her atom and essence, molecule and dipole,
Almost chimp, not quite dolphin, less so cat,
Even less strawberry, 60% banana, 90% turtle.
 
Hard shelled symbol and bearer of longevity and health,
Mythic foundation of life’s beginnings on this planet,
Our lunar cycle real-time hard copy magic of meaning,
Every shell with thirteen plates encircled by twenty eight more,
One for each lunar month and one for each day of each month,
Universal cosmic energy and order etched in keratin shells,
Vibrating toward our own keratin hair and nails and minds,
Shaman’s energetic vortex creates meaning for healing,
Translates nature into nurture, our gift from the great mother.

Corey Weinstein
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This poem was written after the artwork Dakota Medicine Man, by Oscar Howe (USA) 1968. View it at 11:41 in the video above.

Corey Weinstein’s poetry has been published in Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Forum (City College of San Francisco), California State Poetry Society, Abandoned Mine and Jewish Currents, and he wrote and performed a singspiel called Erased: Babi Yar, the SS and Me.  He is an advocate for prisoner rights and founded California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he plays the clarinet in a local jazz band, his synagogue choir and woodwind ensembles. 

Hands in the Sistine Chapel

Fingertips tentative early that morning
you tested the fresh plaster
to know if your painting could begin.
Too soon: it yielded to your touch
and for a moment, to seek support perhaps
or simply to pause for thought,
you rested your whole hand there,
and in that moment of repose you knew
the skewed perspective you would use
to feign volume for the viewer far below
who’d see two hands outstretched
to strike the arc-light of creation.
 
I stood there once, high up
on the restorers’ scaffold. I saw
the handprint that you left that day
and at arm’s length I felt your touch.
Now, as I gaze upwards from the marble floor,
all I can see is the hand of the master
in his image of the finger of God.

Nico Mann

Nico (Nicholas) Mann. Long since retired academic (Cambridge, Warwick, Oxford, London), who has not quite been able to let go of his attachment to Petrarch - less as a poet however than as a scholar and self-fashioner. Other intellectual passions: myth, the Middle Ages and Mnemosyne, which can all be encompassed in the study of the Classical Tradition as a key element in European civilisation. Has been writing and translating poetry for over 60 years and hasn't finished yet, but also teaches yoga, which he has practised for as long as poetry, and is passionate about carving stone.

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Very good news for 2024- the birth of The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry is scheduled for January 15!

As many of you know, one of my passions is prose poetry. There are only a few journals dedicated to this wonderful form and I have wanted to launch a new one for years. I was afraid to undertake such a large project when I already have my hands full of this amazing Ekphrastic journal and community, along with my own writing, my other work, and a long list of projects and dreams. But it kept coming up inside my mind and heart. 

The Mackinaw will not replace or take away from The Ekphrastic Review. Ekphrasis, art history, and this family remain absolutely essential. The new journal will publish every other month and it will only publish prose poetry. It is not an ekphrastic journal, although of course we welcome ekphrastic prose poetry.

The first issue launches on January 15. We have a tremendous lineup of luminaries in prose poetry for our debut edition. 

Visit www.themackinaw.net for more information about this wonderful new project!

​Lorette

Haibun- Last Field
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As we took the animals meandering slowly home, he was teaching me how to tell if moon is waxing or waning: Look for where the horns are pointing; left for wax, right for wane. Or, put another way; pre moon or down moon [with small letters, p or d]. But I was getting confused with all this, mesmerized to stillness by the labourers in the field, who were bathed with radiant illumination by light of the harvest moon.

in silver moonshine
familiar yellow flees
corn turns pale grey

This last field is always a difficult one to manage, squeezed as it is on a just about workable sloping patch of an otherwise steep hill where the wind runs free. But it is fertile and lush and worth the effort.

still much to gather
and the bales are weighty
sweating in moonlight

As we enter deep evening, tired muscles and bones still toil, for we all, even the sheep, sense the coming of the rain.

from shadows we watch
harvesters cut swollen grain
bread for the dark days

Clive Donovan

This poem was first published in Time Haiku.

Clive Donovan is the author of two poetry collections, The Taste of Glass (Cinnamon Press) and Wound Up With Love (Lapwing) and is published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Crannog, Ekphrastic Review and Popshot. He lives in Totnes, Devon, UK. He is a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee for 2022’s best individual  poems. 

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