Sharing with friends my poems “Fears and Feelings”, “Silent Witnesses”, “Night”, Sweet Memories” and “Surprise at Dusk”, just published in the printed 2023 Winter issue of Westward Quarerly. Many thanks do the dear editors Dr. Richard Leonard and Ms. Shirley Anne Leonard, of Hamilton IL. They published me as the Featured Writer of that issue!

We walk in this borrowed world,

sharing loves and dislikes, coldness and caresses,

managing to create new hopes from disenchantment,

on cold nights knowing there will be a new tomorrow. 

We are not given to know the due date of the loan,

nor how much we will have to pay in principal and interest.

We ignore what return we will have on investment

that we have done.

They call us humans, travelling just like on a bus

with no scheduled stops and an unknown destination.

We were left with some laws, also many legends,

dictated by a Creator and ancient ancestors,  

who soon ignored us, hiding their faces,

as if repentant to create, raising, and strengthening us.

People say a promised land awaits us,

where milk and honey flow in abundance, and ashamed evil  

always hides and has no shelter.

It is part of the legends, but we consider it as a law,

we, a generation that amalgamates all the will and desire

of all the righteous who have preceded us.      

This poem and all others at this blog, authored by Edilson Afonso Ferreira ©

Sharing with friends my poem “My Love for Earth”, just published in the Fall 2022 print issue of “West Ward Quarterly”, page 27. Many thanks to the dear editor Dr. Richard Leonard.

My Love for Earth

I know there is a final day for my life on earth.

Perhaps I will win the prize of the righteous,

which is, after death, living in Paradise.

But, oh my God, I love so much this planet

which You granted to us from earliest ages!

I love every sunrise, every new day calling me  

to join forces and open new work fronts.

I love that scarlet red sunset that announces    

the early evening, enchanting and bewitching

haunted nights, always full of beautiful women,

loving sisters of our race, only found here,

nowhere else.

I learned to love, hard and harsh, the way

we were condemned to gain our bread,

since the disobedience of our ancestors.   

I think I will never be able to say goodbye

to this homeland, mine and of all of us.  

If I come to deserve an eternal life,

please, leave me here, even if you have to enchant me

as an elf or a fairy, forever feeling its brown ochre scent,   

among sinful, yet amorous brothers and sisters.

####

Small towns tell stories of their inhabitants,

those current ones and those

who already have said goodbye to this life.

Indeed, people prefer to be told of those 

who are no longer with us.  

Unlike the big cities, such stories are known for all

and never fall into oblivion.

As if they were plots of soap operas or television series,

always appear followers of this or that character,

who neither know nor suspect they have not died,

continuing to live and giving to the posterity some reason

to unfold uncertain and so ordinary their days.

People don’t forget the one who didn’t listen to parents,

brought his wife from stranger town

and produced three sons and countless betrayals;

also that family whose grandparents were dominant

in society, their sons lost tradition and money,

 grandchildren now live in poverty

and don’t know how to start again;  

that casino and its illusive machines and stripteases,

bad-looking owners and poker tables, boycotted

by the population and set out to look for another place;

the cemetery that needs to be deactivated

and make way for a new and more modern,

what they are putting off, so they continue to rest

and be seen near those they had loved in life.

They realize with sadness the current youth which loses

the meaning and strength of one life well lived,

the smile that was able to open hope and create

their fathers’ generation.

A generation that persecutes daily the happiness 

 in all its fullness we are in the right duty to achieve.

This poem and all others at this blog, authored by Edilson Afonso Ferreira ©

Sharing with friends my poem “The Seaman’s Death”, today, Oct 5 2022, published in the Canadian Literary Review “Ekphrastic Review”. Many thanks to the dear editor Lorette C. Luzajic. Read (and enjoy) it at: https://www.ekphrastic.net/

Sharing with friends the publication, today, Sep 13th 2022, of my five poems – “On War and Love”, “Chronology of the Pleasures”, “Desires”, “Gloomy Days” and “Rewriting Paradise”, in the Lothlorien Poetry Journal. Many thanks to the dear editor Strider Marcus Jones. Read (and enjoy) it at: https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/2022/09/five-poems-by-edilson-afonso-ferreira.html

Sharing with friends my poem “Another Language”, today published in the August 2022 issue of “The Lake”, highly regarded Literary Journal of London (UK). Many thanks to the dear editor Mr. John Murphy. Read (and, perhaps, enjoy) it at:

http://www.thelakepoetry.co.uk/poetry/edilson-ferreira/

On “Island Funeral”, egg tempera and oil on hardboard, by N. C. Wyeth, 1939.

They were worth a lot, the five years that the painter kept in his  

memory and heart the scene of a maritime funeral procession,

that took place on September 11th 1934, in Teel’s Island.    

It had been a lapse of time in which he honed and trained his brush,

until 1939, enabling the birth of this masterpiece.

In true, like some others, he had not seen, but heard about,

the transport to the island for burial of a 96 years’ lobsterman,

a remarkable event, remembered long afterward.

The man, one that his family was the name of the island,

where he was born and had lived all his entire existence.

In a bird’s eye perspective, both grave and lyric, we see the collision,

also the coexistence of two worlds, the sea the man had much loved

and the mainland with so hard a hillside to be climbed.

The sea was liquid and bright to honor him in this day,

the earth, substance and shadow, ready for his rest.   

This poem and all others at this blog, authored by Edilson Afonso Ferreira ©

Published in The Ekphrastic Review, Oct 05 2022.

http://www.ekphrastic.net