This is her

Names have power,
so let us speak of hers.

Her name is Sharbat Gula,
and she is Pashtun,

that most warlike of Afghan tribes.
It is said of the Pashtun

that they are only at peace
when they are at war,

and her eyes�then and now�
burn with ferocity.

She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30.
No one, not even she, knows for sure.

Stories shift like sand
in a place where no records exist.



From 'A Life Revealed', by Cathy Newman, National Geographic, April 2002. Submitted by Angi Holden.

Working life

People simply empty out.
They are bodies with fearful
and obedient minds.
The color leaves the eye.
The voice becomes ugly.
And the body. The hair.
The fingernails. The shoes.
Everything does.



Charles Bukowski in a letter to John Martin, Reach for the Sun, Selected Letters, 1978-1994, vol. 3. Submitted by Howie Good.

Writing the Day

Writing the Day was the name I chose for a new daily practice I started for 2014. It wasn't a New Year Resolution, and it wasn't totally original.  I want to write a poem each day.

William Stafford is the poet who inspired this daily practice the for me. Stafford wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. He left us 20,000 pages of daily writings that include early morning meditations, dream records, aphorisms, and other �visits to the unconscious.�

It�s not that I don�t already write every day. I teach and writing is part of the job. I do social media as a job and for myself. I work on my poetry. I have other blogs. But none of them is a daily practice or devoted to writing poems.

When Stafford was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning and what he did when it didn�t meet his standards, he replied, �I lower my standards.�

I like that answer, but I know that phrase �lowering standards� has a real negative connotation. I think Stafford meant that he allows himself some bad poems and some non-poems, knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I decided to create my own form for this project.

I call the form ronka � a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

And that will be our short prompt for this short month.

These poems are meant to be one observation on the day. It might come upon waking. It might come during an afternoon walk, or when you are alone in the night.The poems should come come from paying close attention to the outside world from earth to sky or from inside � inside a building or inside you.

People know haiku as three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. But that�s an English version, since Japanese doesn�t have syllables.

The tanka form consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when Romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7.

For my invented ronka form, there are 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Like traditional tanka and haiku, my form has no rhyme. You want to show rather than tell. You want to use seasonal words - cherry blossoms, rather than �spring.�

It's hard for Western writers to stay out of their poems - lots of "I" - but ronka have fewer people walking about in the poem.

The poems are just 5 lines, but you can certainly write several on a single theme and chain them together renga style.

For examples, there are some on our main site and all my ronka poems so far are on the Writing the Day website. I look forward to you outdoing me at my own form.

Submission deadline: February 28, 2014

A UK Taxpayer Considers Concorde

As a way
of getting over the Atlantic
it may have sucked

but as a beautiful thing
to look up and see
flying

over Reading
and the Thames Valley
at 6pm every afternoon

it was worth
every
penny.



A friend's Facebook comment, 22 January 2014. Submitted by Ailsa Holland.

Bogong Moth by Joe Dolce

A Bogong moth

darts out of
darkness
to seize fire -
it�s burned away its tarsi,
yet
continues to swoop,
kiss, careen, sizzle,
fluttering and
candle-banging
like fawn-crazed Nijinski.



I look up from my book

accepting the
immortal,
fatal dance
of life and light,
like Icarus�s
father
resigned to watch
his flying boy
hurl against
brilliance.



When you were a baby

night
crying,
often the

UKIP Weather Forecast: It�s Raining Men

A morning kiss between two consenting adults
will lead to drizzle on higher ground.
An area of blame will move in from the east
before drifting away and settling over Brussels.
Dark clouds are forming over the Midlands
following voluntary sexual intercourse
between two unmarried persons.
Temperatures will plummet as a result
of a man in Cumbria enthusiastically browsing
through a home furnishings catalogue.
The early sunshine in the Cotswolds
has been replaced by cloud after a man
spent a suspiciously long time grooming his facial hair.
The sun makes a brief appearance
after John Barrowman stubs his toe
on the corner of a wardrobe.



Compiled from tweets by @UkipWeather in response to UKIP Councillor David Silvester's remarks linking bad weather to same-sex marriage. Submitted by Angi Holden.

Typo in a Dead Language

The scene is in a synagogue,
but the word probably has nothing to do with religion.
It seems that the butchers in town
were either at fault, or the ones faulted.
Something about meat being sent out of the shtetl,
and the butchers collecting money.
Those protesting in half-mumbled sentences
end their words with "kupkes kupkes"
or possibly "kuFkes kuFkes."
I don't see how hats or head-coverings would be involved,
unless it was somehow used as a symbol of protest
(maybe something "socialist," like waving the flag,
or similar to the Bund motto: sher un ayzn [scissors and iron])
or something like throwing down a gauntlet
(in this case a hat - maybe like the Muslims throw shoes)
or used as a swear word or curse...
and someone else suggested a typo (twice?).



From a discussion about the Yiddish word 'kupkes' on Mendele, a moderated mailing related to the Yiddish language. Original post on this page (vol23011.txt), 9 November 2013. Submitted by Howie Good.