DoveTales, An International Journal of the Arts, “Empathy in Art: Embracing the Other” (2018) edition features poetry, essays, and short stories from our 2017 and 2018 Young Contest Winners, our advisers, established, and emerging writers, as well as strikingly beautiful art and photography.
Writers, artists and photographers in the anthology come from the USA, Mexico (Pilar Rodriguez Aranda), Jamaica (Juleus Ghunta), Hungary (Llona Hegedtus), Ukraine (Yuliya Ilchuk, Serhiy Zhadan), Switzerland (Irène Kasermann, Althea Romeo-Mark) France (Antonia Alexandra Klimenko), Liberia (Patricia Jabbeh Wesley), Iran (Ali Nikzad), Virgin Islands/Antigua (Althea Romeo-Mark), Southern Africa (Mbeke Wasame)
Empathy in Art: Embracing the Other
Out of the Blue
The words when they land
hit below the belt.
She bends over, winded.
The pain excruciating,
she falls to her knees.
Tears turn into a deluge
no barriers can hold back.
The news--a ringing in her ears,
unceasing in its loudness.
“Mrs. Jones,
we are sorry to inform you
of your son’s death
in a shooting.”
We lift her up,
hold her tight.
begin the dressing
of her wound.
© Althea Mark-Romeo 2018
Residing on the Borders of Belonging
We live on the fringe within nations,
on the edge of cultures,
hearts and minds transplanted.
We belong everywhere and nowhere,
a foot in doors, never quite inside.
We cannot lay claim
to a place with certainty,
being a part of it, yet an alien
to those who cannot see beyond
their own eyes.
Going back generations
our people were never of one place,
and we continue to cross continents and oceans
for the sake of love, liberty, livelihood.
Ancestral spirits scattered around the world,
we live on the borders of belonging.
© Althea Romeo-Mark 2018
Breakfast
At the quarterly breakfast for women,
the faithful greet each other at the door,
embrace and kiss acquaintances,
spot new faces, shake hands.
Guests come from other cities,
countries as near as Germany,
as far as Egypt, Peru and Japan.
They are here to listen to selected speakers
talk about jagged roads traveled
to overcome adversity—
a woman from Turkey,
descendant of Genghis Khan,
is judged a foreigner
in her own land
by her Asian appearance;
and another, a “native foreigner,”
a Swiss from another Canton*
who could not speak nor understand
the unfamiliar dialect and language
in her new, neighboring home.
Each shares the struggle to find her place.
Each had survived feelings of alienation
to lead others beyond
the “outsider” wilderness.
Each word at breakfast, a morsel,
the mortar rebuilding the broken,
each word, vitamin, giving courage,
each sentence strengthening backbones,
each experience giving iron to the will.
© Althea Romeo-Mark 2018
*Native foreigner- someone from a different state/canton where a different language is spoken. In Switzerland, German, French, Italian and Romansh are spoken in different parts of the country.
*Canton- state
Dovetale: An International Journal of Arts is published by Writing for Peace.
https://writingforpeace.org/shop-now/
What an excruciatingly good ending: giving iron to the will. What an undying fan I am of the poetry of this amazing fellow-poet, Althea Romeo-Mark. I love these three - where they took me, so familiar and so strange. What an artist you are. What ability you have to say it slant and to make it new. What this suggest though might not be accurate because with Althea there are no poetic tricks being pulled. It is just that this is the sort of movement that takes place or that occurs at the very heart of the matter and it is there where Althea goes to find as well as to make verse. Art requires that sort of courage and she has it as sweet as she manages to seem to be as well.
ReplyDelete