STANLEY H. BARKAN is the editor/publisher of Cross-Cultural Communications, a small literary-arts, non-commercial press, which started as in Institute at LIU’s Brooklyn Center in 1971. To date, it has produced some 500 book titles, and 500 broadsides and postcards in 60 different languages, and has organized and participated in numerous university and international poetry festivals, including in Macedonia, Poland, Puerto Rico, Sicily and the United Nations in New York. His own work has been translated into 34 different languages and published in 35 collections, several of them bilingual (Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, Farsi, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Sicilian, Spanish, Urdu). His latest books include, Crossings, translated into Russian by Aleksey Dayen; Brooklyn Poems and Sutter & Snediker (2016); Gambling in Macáu and No Cats on the Yangtze, both translated into Chinese by Zhao Si (2017); and More Mishpocheh (Wales: The Seventh Quarry Press, 2018). He was the 1991 New York City’s Poetry Teacher of the Year (awarded by Poets House and the Board of Education) and the 1996 winner of the Poor Richard’s Award, “The Best of the Small Presses” (awarded by the Small Press Center), for “25 years of high quality publishing.” In May 2006, he was invited by Peter Thabit Jones, editor of The Seventh Quarry, to be the first solo featured poet at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, Wales. In 2016, he was awarded “best poet” in China. In 2017, he was awarded the Homer European Medal of Poetry & Art.
Please visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_H._Barkan
It’s March
but no winds blow.
This trip I visited the Egadi
not the Aeolian Isles.
Besides, I made no request
for the bagging of any kind of storm.
And I’m no Odysseus anyway.
Is it that the gods no longer determine
or interfere with our doings?
Our journey is our own thing,
and it is we who decide
even Nature’s course.
Yes, even the seasons change
at our untuning of the string.
Will March then come in like a lamb
and go out like a lion?
Can we even expect spring
in its appointed time?
From Strange Seasons
LA PLAGE PUBLIQUE
Yellow-blue and blue-and-white
Parasols spread, stuck in sand . . .
Bikinis yellow-green and green-and-bright,
Bronzed and browned and yellow-tanned . . .
La Plage Publique.
A light-blue saucer sky,
Lemon sun with rays awry . . .
Transistors blaring,
Bespectacled noses leering . . .
La Plage Publique.
Orange rinds and banjoes plucked,
Towels spread,
Yellow-red
Rippled winds–gently ducked . . .
La Plage Publique.
The sails are floating,
everyone's boating,
while I am noting . . .
La Plage Publique.
For other contributions by Stanley H. Barkan, please follow the link below:
Poetry in this post: © Stanley H. Barkan
Published with the permission of Stanley H. Barkan