God, the Puppeteer by Smitha Vishwanath

 

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God, the Puppeteer

They say God is a puppeteer
holding all the strings.

He decides when to put someone on stage
and when to pull them back.

He breathes life  and stands back watching
As each puppet comes alive.

He gives each a voice and allows choice
Like an experiment in a controlled environment

He lets his puppets make decisions
a few variables in an equation

The puppets sing, dance and make merry,
until the end of their journey

When the strings are pulled
and the show comes to an end

Different acts, different timings,
different stories, different endings

Like the movies, a few blockbuster successes
some terrible failures, some memorable

Some forgotten, even before the curtains close
some horrifying, some tragic

the director and the producer, two-in-one,
watches closely from above

and makes a note- it’s called Karma
determines if the actors get another chance

in the limelight, on the stage
and the role they get to play in the next production.

© Smitha Vishwanath

Enjoy other posts by Smitha Vishwanath HERE.

Smitha Vishwanath

Smitha Vishwanath’s poems are found in several International online publications, including Thieving Magpies, Spillwords Press, MasticadoresUSA, Silverbirch Press, Borderless Journal, and other noteworthy anthologies. She has received many awards and honors from Spillwords and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She received the Reuel International Prize in 2022. Her poem, 'Out of Order,' was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Smitha is the author of Coming Home (2023). She co-authored a book of poems, ROADS : A Journey with Verses (2019). You can follow Smitha on her blog: https://smithavpennings.com.

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Reading at Dawn, Pondering the World’s Evil by Yongbo Ma

SYVETS Productions

Reading at Dawn, Pondering the World’s Evil

 

The room remains cold—no crackling stove,
no hum of hot water cycling through pipes
to drown Augustine’s ancient admonition:
Evil is the misuse of free will.
I mutter: Insomnia is not my choice.
I sleep in my abyss; the abyss stays awake.

 

Then Leibniz flares into view,
his head emerging sharp from atoms,
declaring divine order governs the world.
Evil, he claims, is but a partial view—
a fragment of the good, unfinished.
As he finishes, my son turns away,
dodging the lamp’s rude fingers like a fish.
Yet from the dark universe before dawn,
my window, the size of a skull,
casts rough, warm grains of light for early walkers.

 

Gloomy Berdyaev speaks from the wilderness,
surrounded by stones, sheep, and snowflakes:
Evil’s essence is the inversion of orders—
a cartoon of being, elevating the low,
as frost layered over snow,
as poetry placed above life,
as me, confusing night and day, reading, and vanishing.

 

So I close the book,

outside, a winter is fading.

 

© Yongbo Ma

Enjoy more poetry by Yongbo Ma HERE.

Yongbo Ma

Yongbo Ma was born in 1964. He has a PhD and is a translator, editor, and leading scholar of postmodern poetry. He has authored or translated more than 80 published books. Ma is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Literature at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. His translations from English include works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, W.C.Williams, John Ashbery, Herman Melville, and others. You can follow him on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093276516900.

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