Nora Tarmann

Someone looked at you

Know that somewhere someone looked at you and saw perfection
Somewhere there’s an image of you tucked away in some old chest
Like a small picture of a cherished icon
A Laughing Buddha sitting on a shelf surrounded by trinkets
Was it you? Holy Maria holding Baby Christ
Somewhere there is a picture of you
You look beautiful
Perfection etched in every line
A fleeting glimpse of something eternal
A quality only you possess
Oh, my dear if I could only show you what I see in the tiny movement of your head
What I hear in the tremble of your voice
What I see in your stance
I can’t really say what this seeing demands
Except acknowledgement
Bearing witness that you too are touched by some divine grace that makes your eyes sparkle.

Nora Tarmann completed her training as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist this year and lives in London. For the last 14 years, she has been working with children and young people in care, in schools and privately. She writes poetry as a hobby and explores the city in her spare time.

Four Poems by Iljas Baker

Homage to ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani

mixing the good fruit with the bad
is the only way to earn a living,
those market traders lie.
but the Grey Falcon says:
go directly to the orchard,
select only the good fruits
from the tree
and let the bad fruits fall
and rot

‘Abd al-Qadr al-Jilani, a renowned Sufi and eponym of the Qadiriyya order, was born in 1077 in al-Jil in what was then Persia. He is widely known by the epithet The Grey Falcon (al-Baz al-ashab), which signifies his absolute faithfulness to his Lord. A slightly different version of this poem was published in Iljas’ recent collection of poems – see below.

The Return

light becomes sound
and surah Ya Sin
drifts out
of a window left ajar
there’s
a potent warning
word of a bountiful garden
and
an unassailable truth

soon they will disperse
in twos or threes or more
say their salaams
under a starlit sky
and a cold waning moon
they cannot know
if their prayers will be answered
but they never doubt
the unassailable truth
of
the Return

Ya Sin is the thirty-sixth chapter of the Qur’an and is often recited in the presence of the dying and the deceased.

You never ask

He who knows his Self, knows his Lord
has multiple meanings

those passed along from thought to thought
come tinged with doubts
the best is revealed only to your essence

in a flash
like lightning

and you never ask was that lightning

A Gazan sky

ashes fall
—from a Gazan sky
——to remind us
———of other lives lost
————while we are busy
—————finding
——————our own

Iljas Baker is Scottish and lives in Nonthaburi, Thailand. His poetry collection Peace Be Upon Us was published by Lote Tree Press, Cambridge, UK at the end of 2022. His poems have appeared widely in poetry anthologies and journals and are always about essential things.

Chris Roe

The Soldier

I have died for you
Many times.
Carried your children
From battlefield to grave.
I have shed your tears,
Fought futile wars,
For religion, power and greed,
For the flawed philosophies
And ideologies,
Of men of arrogance and conceit.
I fought for hope of change.

Still I fight,
Still I hope,
Still I die.

Still, I shed your tears.

Chris Roe lives in a small village in the county of Norfolk in the UK. Most of his working life has been spent within the agricultural industry. Individual poems have been published in magazines and on websites around the world.