In Between the In-between Moments by Martin Willitts

“Yo no naka” means “the world of betweeness”in Japanese
.

Nothing has decided to Become. The lack of wind

wants to be heard. Before your heart blinks out, it must

shed cherry petals. It hesitates. It plunges

into the unknown where we all must go. It goes

expectantly. What does it know that we don’t?

The sky closes shutters, but some light comes through.

There is the smell of Always. A mountain laments —

fog. A hand tugs at leaving birds.
.

Before you left, you were here; and nothing listened —

the nothing was a pond of light. Light though pinfeathers.

A rustle of air against air.

Many moons were in many raindrops.
.

What is it that casts shadows in between the in-betweeness?

The impermanence flinches and falls.

Everything is attentive to the transient movement between.
.

There are words we must carry beyond what we know.
.

Before before there is nothing in the absence

loudly proclaiming in its silence.


Martin Willitts, USA

Chopin at Nohant by Askold Skalsky

Guests chat and smoke, pacing their day

with masterpieces until October.

They stroll or read, play billiards,

sprawl on sofas, hearing some chords

maunder through the keys

like the breath of watered roses

from his room.

It’s sunny and opens on the best purview,

a circle pond ringed with smooth stones

and two great oaks guarding white shutters

with tendrils of green vine curling 

around the recessed door.

You enter it—

the clock behind the escritoire floats

on its moon-phase calendar under a chandelier

with flaming finials where the summer sostenutos 

come to rest.

And in the evening, like a glimmery star,

the first uncertain version

of a melody. 


Askold Skalsky, Maryland, USA

St Jane by Elaine Pomeransky

Auschwitz, the kiss you didn't have to take, lips eagerly pursed,

Inviting the Nazi tongue to lick

You with gas.

Amongst the mass of strangers you died,

Sacrificed.

Name almost forgotten, because of your gender.

Left .....................................................Right

Left Dumfries to end up on your knees for a race forgotten.

'I have found my life's work' your tune, but the world didn't dance.

No rest in Budapest as you sewed stars of yellow

Onto your chosen children.

Light of Scotland, rejected the Church offering of safe return

Held tightly the hands of those who yearned

Your protection,

Affection enough to lay down your life.

'Even here on the road to Heaven there is a mountain range to climb'

You whispered,

As you were gassed

With a mass of Hungarian women

Such a German chore.

Left.................................................. Right

Left the world on August 16th, 1944.

The only Scot to be slain...martyred Jane.

Remembered only by a sliver of Glasgow glass and plaque,

Yad Vashem, men declared you 'Righteous' 55 years

After you'd died.

No libraries, films, memorials, tutorials

Lest we forget St. Jane

And the day you were crucified.

Elaine Pomeransky, Edinburgh, Scotland

Refugees by Ray Sharp

We carry our sorrows
in tin cups
and leather-bound journals.

Ink tracks the yellowed pages
like foot steps
on a barren plain.

At night
we stir the red coals
of dying fires.

This is what stars
would look like
fallen at our feet.


Ray Sharp, Michigan, USA

Air Defense by Jenny Ward Angyal

Saint Francis’ Satyr—

so rare its cocoa-powder wings

flutter only across a few wet meadows

on a single military base, where fire bombs

lobbed into canebrake make a scuttle of  flames,

open patches of sun where the sedges grow

and the Satyr, guarded only by eyespots,

lays one by one her tiny eggs

the color of new grass. 
.

The meadow over the way

turned white with daisies the summer I was six,

and we wandered for weeks, the dog and I,

linked by garlands and lost

in an ocean of white.  
.

A man with a camera came,

and then a full-page photograph

in Time magazine—the daisies, the laughing dog,

and me—important reasons for effective air defense

in black and white. The year was 1956 but the war

was the one war always being fought

somewhere beyond the edge

of the field of daisies. 
.

Yet somewhere

among the leaves of grass

perhaps a chrysalis—

Jenny Ward Angyal, NC, USA