Month: July 2017

Tony Press – On The Homefront

Sitting with a friend, drinking hot chocolate and actually looking at each other, taking each other in. And more, truly listening to each other. There is no greater gift than full attention. That is the deeper beauty.

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Yu-Han Chao – Four Poems

Beauty is arbitrary, subjective, and for all the banal and common stuff it’s made of, entirely irresistible. We aspire to it yet at the same time cannot bring ourselves to trust it. This is a curse of sorts because it would seem that the timing is never right, the universe filled with obstacles and excuses, and then all of a sudden, one morning we wake up, and it is too late.

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Phyllis Wax – Five Poems

In nature, art and writing, I become almost breathless.  I want to keep looking at the scene or art that evokes that response.  I need to re-read the phrase, the line, the stanza that elicits it.  It’s a physical and an emotional reaction, not a thought-out rational response.  How is it created?  I have no idea.

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Kirk Hathaway – Five Poems

Beauty is an art of finding comfort unexpectedly. It’s like the feeling of blowing warm air into cupped hands while being outside on a cold, fall evening.  Less something defined than experienced, beauty provides that ease of absolute knowing. 

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Katacha Díaz – Machu Picchu Beckons

I have travelled all over the world and visited more than 30 countries to gather material for my stories and articles.  I undertake a project because I want to immerse myself in the subject, learn more about it, and take my readers on a journey with words

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Susan Spear – Four Poems

I believe everything in this world is potentially luminous, and I want to study it. These poems began as lovely images: pansies, blue eyes, a wedding under a tree covered with snow, and two crosses rising in the evening sky.

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Andy McLeroy – Three Poems

I remember standing on the driveway when I was eight years old, looking up at the Pleiades stars and discovering the uncanny fact that if you look directly at them, they blur into a hazy clump of light, whereas if you look away and keep them in your periphery, they crystalize into vibrant individual gems. Beauty has a similar beguiling quality.

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Sanjeev Sethi – Five Poems

Beauty is in hesitation, in search. It’s in camouflaging truths to map circuits of comfort, if fortunate to realize its meaninglessness. In a temporal edifice beauty is an extension of oneself: some find it on the outside, some within.

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Ava C. Cipri – Five Photographs

Regardless if the medium is a poem, a dance, or a photograph, the intention is the same; to capture the beauty of what may otherwise be lost. It’s attempting to distill the essence of something so fleeting and preserve it; to give its voice agency by choosing from a variety of containers.

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Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb – Three Poems

Our need to encounter aesthetically-pleasing experiences is perhaps critical to our survival.  We love vast green and colorful spaces because they represent the potential for nourishment.  We are attracted to water, whether to deep blue lakes in the natural world or to indoor waterfalls in architectural design, because water is crucial to our existence.

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D. Vaisius – Sky Rocket

A mountain is universally beautiful, overwhelming in its grandeur. Stunning in its awe. Anyone can look at a mountain and find it beautiful. We all look at mountains and find them beautiful. But I don’t believe all beauty to be as obvious.

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Mark J. Mitchell – Five Poems

The full moon rises behind the western span, dressed in the amazing Bay Lights. The bay itself is suddenly silver, painted by the Goddess Herself and the breath is sucked out of us. Beauty should be divine.

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Steven Mayoff – Effigies

Beauty is the only possible voice by which we can make ourselves heard. Beauty is the only mirror we have to see something of our true and better selves.

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John Grey – Three Poems

Beauty begins with the natural world. Whether it’s the fiords of Norway or the thick jungles in the far north of my country of birth, Australia, the heart is engaged before the head has had time to define what exactly it’s looking at – the dredging and earth moving of the last Ice Age or what happens when heavy rains and intense heat get together. 

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Nancy Naomi Carlson – Five Translations

Muslim by birth, Waberi’s themes include living a simple life based on meditation and spirituality, the nomadic life, Arabic language and culture, religious tolerance as opposed to extremism, and Djibouti’s harsh climate and civil wars. In recognition for his commitment to the values of multiculturalism and linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity, he was awarded the 2016 Words to Change Prize.

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Sandra Arnold – Heartbeats

Beauty lies in the transformative power of words. I love the way the rhythm, musicality and juxtaposition of words on a page can ignite all five senses and create whole worlds in the mind.

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Leonard Kress – Four Poems

Sometime, sooner or later you’ll have to make this journey. You might think that you have no clue where to begin, but you do know, you’ve always known the place. You might have read about it in Pausanias, who traversed the whole of Greece, mountains, plains, and seas to find it—what he called the Oracle of Trophonius.

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