on the mountain-top
Kisses stained his lips red
Red petals on a red bed-spread
Love-making – her red spread
Months pass
Red heat
of the Summer sun ends
Leaves turn red
marking the beginning of Fall
And soon she finds
he’s not taking her call
Red eyes burn
from fallen tears
No word from him
She faces her fears
Red watermelon
and red cherry pie
She sat watching
the red sunset sky
feeding the seed
he planted within
Mind locked shut
She wished she was dead
Laws forcing her to have
the baby he left
The smell of iron
permeates the air
A baby’s cry—
red everywhere
Congratulatory flowers,
Carnations of red
A hopeless situation
The red stop sign—
a signal telling her no
but she had no other option
with nowhere to go
A disgrace to her family
The blade cut in deep
she was tired of the red now
with the baby asleep—
she closed her eyes,
red turning black—
her final sleep
Norbert Góra (Poland)
IS IT ME OR JUST A MACHINE?
Norbert Góra is a 29-year-old poet and writer from Poland. He is the author of more than 100 poems which have been published in poetry anthologies in the USA, the UK, India, Nigeria, Kenya, and Australia.
The pair is about to
suffocate the whistle,
the clatter of the transmission
on a par with the heartbeat,
I pull it off the conveyor belt
and put it on again,
there is a voice behind my back,
“Faster, cut it short!”
Gears grind in the background,
life becomes too mechanical,
my hands are like steel,
I can hardly feel them anymore,
these standards are not for a man,
so I’m asking constantly,
“Is it me or just a machine?”,
I discover that I doubt my humanity.
Natalia Kuznetsova (Russia)
RAVEN
Natalia Kuznetsova is from Shchekino, Tula Region, the homeland of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Natalia doesn’t know if this fact has influenced her somehow but it is an interesting detail to mention anyway. She writes in English, Russian, and now also French. She takes interest in fantasy, science fiction, Slavic and Celtic mythology, and adventure fiction. Besides writing, she is also into acting, traveling, and photography.
Some of her favorite writers are Robert E. Howard, Rafael Sabatini, P.G. Wodehouse, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Terry Pratchett.
Natalia wrote her very first poem when she was only four years old. Of course, it was just a simple quatrain. At the age of nine, two of her poems were chosen to be recited during an Autumn School Festival. Nowadays she takes writing more seriously, and she is currently working on short stories and novels, but that is another story.
