Poems of Love, Poems of War. In A Warring Absence. The duality of violence and of peace that courses through veins and through hearts: the fundamental contradiction of the human animal, hurt, raging, fighting between healing and burning flames, the root of all evil, wrote Blake, we find in the human brain. After two years of silence, internal changes and dilemmas, a family death, then the fratricidal attack on Israel followed by the Gaza genocide that has lasted now for almost two years and has resulted in tens of thousands of human beings slaughtered and maimed, and a new U.S. government which rages against the Constitution on which the American republic is built we publish a new edition of Beltway Poetry. We are no longer a quarterly. We will publish twice a year. And we will gather compelling poems from everywhere, from the Beltway to the extreme ends of Earth.
In this issue we publish poems and translations that respond to a call: give us poems on war and peace. Let your imaginations run after both steeds. Can poetry corral war? Peace? And give us poems in the world’s languages. So we feature today poems written in various tongues about the curse that we carry in our genes: the hunger for land, jewels, the desire to dominate, to control, to enslave…and how we can overcome the warring, get the yin back in place next to the yang and create harmony again, in the morning, not of pink clouds and a whistling silence, but something whole, a sunrise without the stench of murder, a wind blowing on the faces of lovers who look not only on their own happiness but stretch their hands across the borders to help their neighbors. Let us share poems that explore the darkness and spring the light in words that bring us together and shake off our fears.
Our next issue will focus on “Remembrance.” Consider submitting by sending between 1-2 poems to our next email address beltwaypoetryeditorial@gmail.com
Love in poetry
Indran
Indran Amirthanayagam, Editor
David Alberto Fernández, Associate Editor
Renee L. Gherity, Associate Editor
Indran Amirthanayagam writes poetry in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He is the author of twenty five books of poetry and poetry in translation, including Seer (Hanging Loose Press, 2024), The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia, Blue Window (Dialogos Books) The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press 2020),Coconuts on Mars (Paperwall, 2019), Uncivil War (Mawenzi House (formerly TSAR), Canada, 2013), and the Paterson Prize-winning The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose, 1993). Amirthanayagam is a 2020 Foundation for Contemporary Arts fellow in poetry, and a past fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the US/Mexico Fund for Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions (www.beltwayeditions.com), edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly; curates the reading series Poetry at Beltway Editions, He serves on the Board of DC-ALT. His blog is http://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com