Poetry

Lost Luggage

Part One - Ten Poems by Dan Savery Raz


Hebrew Headache

(For Shiri) לשירי

Letters, words and sentences I cannot yet understand,
Television newsreaders talking but delivering no information.

Adverts, billboards and slogans selling me something,
Food in alien packaging, with clever logos lost on me.

Two for one deals and mystical menus, intriguing and confusing,
Bus stops and cafes filled with meaningless mobile chatter.

Passing road signs and neon lights, leading me to nowhere,
Even election posters and religious rhetoric cannot reach or teach me.

And finally comes the punch line of the joke I do not get,
But with every step I am closer to you and losing my headache.

Hamlet on Wall St

I yield to the yeast of Nasdaq,
Thy frozen dollar hangeth from African trees,
a rate of 3.333 recurring,
recurring amidst our false economies.

I beseech thee, oh CEO of the G8,
bear witness to the CPI and GDP,
the EU, UN and thou wretched Dow Jones,
and reduce thy incestuous income tax immediately!

For what valor, a billion euros?
What separate the bank from the slaughterhouse?
A mere exchange rate, methinks,
that maketh a mockery of man and king of a mouse.

‘Tis inflation that’s to blame,
for the soul’s bloody destruction,
the merger of murderers,
the deceitful corporations.

Ay, a plague hath descended,
on Wall St’s treacherous walls.
The housing market poisoned,
by profits and by fools.

Behold! The doomsday and
the hedgefund’s funeral pyre,
thy lawless stocks and shares,
acquisitions in the fire.

Conglomerates converge,
in an evil covenant,
the money it doth multiply,
by 6.66 per cent.

So farewell, all ye merchants
with your demonic financial doom.
There are more things in heaven
and earth, than your calculated gloom.

Epiphany of an Embryo

To know that we know what we know,
and that we do not know what we do not know,
this is true knowledge
Confucius

Poetry is a plough,
it digs deep and turns me upside down,
exposing my inner earth,
my hidden voice.
Poetry challenges our laziness,
our monadic point of view
that tells us everything
is evanescent and fleeting.

Poetry, I once heard, is the only
true form of communication,
where words are mechanical air
rather than a tool for man’s greed.
Poetry sends me to the edges,
the very borders,
of the entangled mind –
my only recognizable reality.

When it reaches the boundaries,
it asks me questions unanswerable,
and answers unasked questions.
The embryonic existence
Expands in all directions,
as the painter paints in colors,
the poet is the poem,
and the beginning is the end.

Bedtime Story, 1984

I sat on the carpet,
next to the coffee table,
eating a bag of chips,
dipping them into red sauce.

The TV was blaring,
the BBC 6’O Clock News,
when an Ethiopian child stared at me,
with flies buzzing around its head.

Its belly blown up like a balloon,
the eyes – an unfamiliar glare,
a misery inhuman,
from a distant, desert planet.

Not everyone has food,
not everyone has clothes.
A child was dying,
before Top of the Pops.

On a Thursday night,
I was glued to the TV eye,
out of childish hunger,
rather than adult apathy.

I, was a child,
My questions were simple.
It may not have been real,
yet I was five years old.

How easy it was,
back then, eating chips.
That red sauce tasted good,
before I saw the news.

Villanelle

Just like you I search inside
to find the words I want to write,
but there’s nothing here except the tide.

They say there’s nothing there to hide,
though you know you’re blessed with insight.
Just like you I search inside.

Just like you I need a guide
to navigate the inner fight,
though here’s nothing there except the tide.

Governments have always lied.
A sweeping statement may be right?
Just like you I search inside.

Why have innocent people died?
A child screams in the middle of night.
There’s no answer except the tide.

I faced the ocean and I cried,
“Show me something! Shine a light!”
Just like you I search inside,
– there’s nothing here except the tide.

Tortus

Slow-moving, sleeping king,
tartaroukhos, ancient thing.
Those Latin poets called you twisted,
but in sea or on land, you have existed
through ages and ages, you’ve seen kingdoms fall,
a silent witness, an animal.

Your dome of rock, served you well,
your elephant legs, your armored shell.
A moving statue, with timeless integrity,
a pillar of strength, throughout eternity.
Lord of the underworld, lord of the dead,
or just a small reptile, with re-tractable head.

Lost Luggage

In London I lost myself,
my shyness, inhibitions, the stupid
town that held me back. I lost my past,
the teeth knocked out of my mouth so fast
by bored brats who smoked too much weed,
suburban anti-artists will never succeed.

In London I lost my luggage,
that invisible weight I carried on my shoulders,
I lost the hatred that ran in my veins,
I remember reading M.K Gandhi on trains,
thinking this world’s not always insane,
suffering leads to inspiration again.

In London I found my voice,
while hundreds of people passed me by,
on the pavement outside Angel tube station,
freezing winter days were my revelation.
In London I found my song,
the African drum that goes on and on.

In London parks I walked alone,
from Oxford Street to Chalk Farm home,
I cried on a park bench in Golders Green,
my friends, my family, my life unseen.
It was all too little, it was all too much,
So long London, (I’ll be in touch).

World War IV

Once upon a midday waiting, by the university gating,
I was wondering and contemplating, what all man’s hating was for.
I slowly became obsessed by the raven that possessed
Poe’s poem that was caressed by his dark pen and nothing more.

As the professor was professing, the confessor was confessing
and the poem was addressing what my heart could not implore,
The winds of hate were howling, the underworld was growling
and all the wolves were drowning on the blood red shore.

The flags they were waving were pretending to be saving
all the people that were craving to be marched to another war.
The politicians were parading while all our hope was fading
fading, fading and cascading beyond the furthest shore.

The leaders were disappointing while the entire world was pointing
in blood they were anointing another declaration of war.
While governments’ corruption, leads to humankind’s destruction
you can forget your liposuction, there’ll be war and nothing more.

The TV was declaring while terrorists were scaring
and soldiers were preparing for another bloody war.
Democracy was turning. The missiles were burning
everything we had been learning throughout the days of yore.

But the bombs they kept destroying, the blasts were so annoying
and every girl and boy in the city prayed for an end to war.
Using religions and nations to legitimize annihilations
in the name of liberation is rotten to the core.

And the purpose of the killing is the oil we are drilling
and the bellies we are filling to fuel another war.
If I sound like a preacher or some peculiar teacher,
I’m sorry I’m just a seeker of some truth and nothing more.

History will be spoken, hearts and minds will be broken,
and when we have awoken, we’ll say “‘twas a war and nothing more”.
World War I was in the mud, World War II was in the thud,
World War III is in the blood and World War IV means ‘nevermore’.

And when we die we ask inviting, “Why were we always fighting?”
We never let the light in; instead we chose to slam the door.
And if we were to awaken in green fields less forsaken
and understand innocent lives were taken – may there be war, nevermore.

The Leaders

Ah, these are the leaders
These are the leaders –

Madmen in suits.

Believing in numbers, percentages and sanity
Drawing bar-charts to make sense of tanks and air strikes.
Using ‘intelligence’ to fool
with White Papers and dossiers
In corridors lined with hanged faces
they meat in murder;
It is not just us and them. I want

An end to war
another world was possible

It has been said, once it was true –
Violence breeds violence.

The lunatics with their economies
Protecting. The lunatics with their rocket launchers
Projecting. Leaders are leading us
down the road

to ruin

we are going going…

Birds of Pray

My outside is in, it always has been.

On the Heath I heard
A fresh and natural way,
The simple song of a bird
Taught me how to pray.

I found a quiet place
And began to look around,
I witnessed wild space
And listened to autumn sound.

Then shutting my tired eyes,
I saw thousands of dots and lines.
But like the black night skies
There was nothingness behind.

I left the chaos of thought
And abandoned my daydreams,
All the burdens I brought
Were lost in the streams.

I thanked the Lord above,
For giving me a soul,
And for sending me love,
Home, purpose, a role.

Then I said sorry
For the aggression inside,
My twisted lies and worries,
And the people I made cry.

“Help me to be good
And guide me,” I said,
Still wondering if God
Was a part of my head.

“Send love,” I prayed,
“Wherever we roam,
Send love far away
And love close to home.”

“I want to forget time
And breathe concentration,
And free my stressed mind
To speak like the ocean.”

At the end of my prayer
I finally realized
There are others that care,
If I open my eyes.


Lost Luggage

Part Two - Poems by Dan Savery Raz


The Zeigermeister

My outside is in, it always has been
inside the outsider, on the outskirts of life
drifts in and out of sleep.
His long hibernation is almost at an end,
It’s dawn, the time when all the dreams
fade into the background,
absorbed into the tissue of the cycle,
the emptiness in the fullness.
Now, in on the inside, the outsider looks out,
as the insiders look in the mirror,
and the mirror is upside down,
inside out, a reflection of a reflection.
The outsider on the inside,
looking into the interior of the exterior.
Deep down inside he still feels outside.

Alpaca Farm

I think I saw an eagle soar
this morning on Alpaca Farm.
I must charge my mobile phone
and turn off the car alarm.
The shepherd dog only wanted me
to stroke his fur and smile.
I need to open my laptop,
check my emails for a while.
Last night I was scared when a
field mouse rummaged in my food.
Now I have nothing left to eat,
but I am not in a bad mood.

You see, nature can take my Bamba,
animals can steal my food.
But I cannot eat their breakfast –
because that would be too rude.
Here on this farm of harmony,
I am merely the llamas' guest.
Migrating birds sing forever,
for the Negev is their nest.
It’s not ours, or yours or mine,
the desert belongs to no-one.
Bedouin, tourist, police or army,
we are all beaten by the sun.

Café Voltaire

Tel Aviv is a French film
black & white, jump cuts, edited by students
with haircuts, long brown curls, girls with flowers
in their handbags, shopping on Dizengoff
for wedding dresses to cry on.

Tel Aviv is the Café Voltaire, in Zurich,
Switzerland, where surreal Dadaists painted poetry
on pub toilet walls, forever is never the end,
cats make love below balconies, while bicycles
circle in silence.

Tel Aviv is Manhattan in the 60s, where
Bob Dylan and Ginsberg drink tea and smoke
weed, honey, lemon and speed past
the falafel stalls to be human,
once more, to the core.

Tel Aviv is and will be
a dream, unless men and women
with hindsight and insight use the light switch
to switch the tide of time, a Mediterranean mind
game that nobody can win.

Space of Waste

The Internet is a poem, a 21st century epic,
where Google is 'God', and God I'm pathetic.
The Internet is nothing but poker and porn,
there really is no reason for us being born.

The Internet began a long, long time ago
back in ancient Egypt, Wikipedia told me so.
The Internet is alive, growing bigger every day,
we crash and burn on the information superhighway.

The Internet is a business of traffic and users,
if you're not uploading you're one of the losers.
The Internet is my friend, a book of faces,
but we never 'click', we inhabit different spaces.

The Internet is a domain, a land of its own,
send me an email, but don't call me by phone.
The Internet is slow and we are children of speed,
there are millions of blogs that no-one will read.

The Internet is down, you have a System Error.
We are all components in this web of terror.
The Internet is free speech, real people power,
you can change the president, but never the hour.

The Internet is a library, infinite and wise,
we no longer need to look to the skies.
The Internet is Mom, Dad and Babysitter.
You can follow this poem on YouTube and Twitter.

© 2010 Dan Savery Raz