Sea Song of the Crazy Poet.Poem.Sonnet.Sondra Ball(Deceased2010)

 

It’s been a long time since I wrote a song.

I used to write beside the bay at night.

The music made me feel much less alone.

Night shadows forced a lashing, screaming fright.

Music was comforting. I’d sit and write

Until the sun wove light forms on the sea.

Then dawn would bind the shadows. I was free.

At last my music grew completely clear.

Then shadows shattered every pitch and rhyme.

They scream and dance. No note can stop my fear.

My loneliness grows with the measured time.

The shades are odorous. They smell like brine

The sea has tossed with rotting fish and shell,

Or like dead music, a stillborn dream or tale.

 

Sondra Ball (deceased March 17 2010) touched the lives of many with her passion, spirituality, intuition, outspokenness, and love. Born in Kentucky to migrant workers, an active Quaker and child of the Creek Nation, Sondra was passionate about race relations as well as the environment. An accomplished and passionate poet and writer, Sondra published the online poetry journal, Autumn Leaves, where she took great pleasure in encouraging new voices, especially among children and Native Americans. Sondra has been published many times in several anthologies, E-zines, journals and sites, such as Canadian Zen Haiku canadien ISSN 1705-4508, Matrifocus, Poetry of the Desert ISBN 0974197548, Spirits in Peace (see Richard Doiron) and Sonnetto Poesia.

 

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

 

 

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian

30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information.

 

http://vallance22.hpage.com/

 

 

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Conformal Mapping.Poem.Sonnet.Vera Rich(1936-2009)

 

 

I cannot come to you without a sleep,

And travelling through sleep, I cannot know

If through one firm continuum I go.

Night is an involution which may keep

 Strange secrets, map our plane from sphere to sphere,

 And though we travel post-stage, can we swear

 Nights in strange inns preserve invariant “there”

 And “thither”? One brief day embeds our “near”.

 So, meeting, can we claim a mundane path

 Maps me to you in spatial translation?

 Rise with the dawn – however swift we run,

 Time draws its radius around each hearth,

 And hence we meet, sped by night’s transformation

 Where children dream gold lands beyond the sun.

 

***

Vera Rich(1936-2009)

Educated at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and at Bedford College, London, Vera Rich, a respected science journalist and a tireless campaigner for human rights, was a fine poet. Her wits were quick, her memory prodigious and she had a wonderful sense of humour.

During the 1960’s she had three books of her own poems published, and founded the poetry magazine, Manifold. This ran with some success for 28 issues before publication was suspended in 1968, when Vera became Eastern European correspondent for the science magazine, Nature.

Once asked to translate some Ukrainian poems, she learned the language to do so. For the next three decades, she travelled extensively in eastern Europe, becoming the foremost translator of both Ukrainian and Belarusian poetry into English. She reported on the activities of dissident Soviet scientists, the Chernobyl disaster, psychiatric abuse and AIDS in the Soviet Union. Her anthology of Belarusian poetry, Like Water, Like Fire, published by UNESCO, was subsequently withdrawn under pressure from the Soviet Union.

Manifold, which she revived in 1998, regularly published foreign-language poetry with parallel text in Engtlish and, occasionally. foreign poetry untranslated. In 2006 Vera travelled to the Ukraine to receive the Ivan Franko Award for her 40 years service to the translation of Ukrainian poetry. While on a visit to the Ivan Franko Homestead she gave an emotional reading of Shevchenko’s poem “Testament”. On her next visit in 2007, she wore her medal, the Order of Princess Olha, which had been presented to her at the Ukrainian Embassy in London. Vera could fairly be described as a Ukrainian patriot, an unusual distinction for an Englishwoman.

In 2006 Vera underwent treatment for breast cancer. But she always insisted her illness was an inconvenient obstacle to her work. On 18 December 2009, her doctor advised her to go into hospital, but even then Vera gave priority to her translations. On 20 December, 2009, she died peacefully in her bed. She will be greatly missed, not least for her kindness and the support she gave to so many. Alan Flowers (UK)

 ***

This sonnet and bibliography is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:

Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.

30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information.http://vallance22.hpage.com/

 

 

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