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zxxlyzq
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Date Posted:10/03/2018 10:38 AMCopy HTML

Feel free to ad one of your's or leave a comment,

Fall

Yes Tis the proper name for the season
because the temperature, 
leaves and snow are falling
DirtyDancer1957 Share to: Facebook Twitter MSN linkedin google yahoo #1
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Re:Poems

Date Posted:04/06/2024 9:57 PMCopy HTML

Pacific  by Callum
(Adelaide Botanic High, SA)

Crystal clear waves dance on the surface
Crashing and tumbling as they go.

Falling upon the shore,
And moving to and fro.

Beneath the shifting landscape
A storm is brewing,
A bountiful home for life,
A system self-renewing.

In the Abyss
Rests a memory of innovation.

A gentle giant gone amiss,
A reclaimed salvation.

This place of elegance,
Is also a place of power,
Moving millions of tons
In a fraction of an hour.

Grinding away at the cliff,
Stealing the rock and sand.

Crash and smash, swish and swirl,
Whisking away the land.

How alluring is the sea,
With all its quirky features.

It’s nature’s tidal dance,
And a home for many creatures.

The ocean’s beauty,
Now returns to the deep
Where it lives and it thrives,
And can finally sleep.


Rockymz Share to: Facebook Twitter MSN linkedin google yahoo #2
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Re:Poems

Date Posted:05/03/2024 2:14 PMCopy HTML

May be an image of map and text

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Re:Poems

Date Posted:01/02/2024 12:52 PMCopy HTML

She Walks in Beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:31/01/2024 1:04 AMCopy HTML

And Now It's Spring

© Lhtheaker

Published: April 11, 2018

The grass is green across the hill,
But yellow blooms the daffodil.
It's sunshine on a little stalk,
A friendly flower, I bet they talk...

Of little kids, too long inside
They burst outdoors to play and hide.
Tracking mud and bringing bugs.
Look, there's footprints on the rug!

Tiny whirlwinds, these little tykes,
They skin their knees while riding bikes.
They rip and roar, they're running wild!
What fun it is to be a child.

It grows warmer every day.
Shoo the children out to play!
Pick the flowers, play in mud.
Too much rain, here comes a flood!

My snowy, winter days are gone.
I mourn them, but I hear a song
Of birds in trees; wind chimes ring.
I guess it might as well be spring!


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:21/10/2023 11:01 AMCopy HTML

        

Dreams

© Jane A Beresford

Published: April 2, 2017

We slip beneath the pillow's spell
And drift from heaven and into hell
To lose control of conscious mind
The secrets of our soul to find.

A timeless journey fills our being.
The blind man now becomes all-seeing.
The lonely now becomes the lover.
The childless wife a loving mother.

Reflection of our dormant fears
Once woken may reduce to tears.
With sleep the master free to prey
On untold thought which nightly stray


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:07/09/2023 8:15 AMCopy HTML

Otranto

At sunset from the top of the stair watching
the castle mallets wrenched from their socket
fell from ambush into flame flew into hiding;
above the stoneware a latch like muscle hid
the green; he stood waist high under the rapt
ceiling and hanged the sparrow; where the kitchen
had been a mirror of eggs served in a tumbler he
saw the ring when a lancet pierced and threw it.
In a basket and lowered it where sails enter
the harbor over a parchment like dominoes;
the petrel-like eyelash.
To the sun and its rites were pulled the dried
banners; they flew past the ruins the tower
and window where ivory guided the mist on his back;
he rubbed his eyes and counted them kneeling
wrinkled as grass.
A ghost in their nostrils put a heel at their

forehead; they saw only the moon as it

fasted.
II
If the ship meant anything if he heard a world
view in the midst of his rhythm or the spell
lustrous like hair on his arm; that groaned as
it struck near the tumble down or
combing hair; words burnt as they quickened.
The bitter they share crept into forage and

muster is in their skin; the grey

worked like a vise they brushed this

to turn arrows; they shut off the vast

cellar and the turret leaped to a pattern;

the mosaic blended was untouched.
III
The frankish hills and hummocks metered
the greed over sun and cloud; voluptuous
in the straits turbanned held scarves to the
water each sail embroidered;
who washed in their music a lattice.
A major or borrowed sky this aspect provides

the lily stalk inside the frame; a gesture the lily

pointing north as if the wrench from sky decides

cold rain or change of tide; the lily

she chooses.
IV
Waking in must the high pierced window dew on
the furnaced bar the poaching hour the cup
takes smoke from the tower; they drink
in the smoke the print cradled; cut in dark.
The siege made cloth a transfer

learned from invaders who craved it;

spindle thieves.
She sang high notes and pebbles went into her
work where it changed into marks; in that room
the armor-like wrens:
rites turned with thread a dower
begs lapis; eglantine on a spoon; the castle
breeds tallow.
V
A change of tide might delay the run
they watched as if by simple water;
read magisterially whatever the book decided;
night outside covered with filmic screen

ghosts they store; then bring an experimental

wheel out of hiding.
Even the Nile wind; fortune cards
jugglers a remedy from old clothes;
to appease the fable—pearls
rolling in straw.
The way a cowslip bends
they remember or Troilus as he stared;
they agree on brighter covers; looser
shifts fluent tower to tower.
More ephemeral than roundness or
the grown pear tree connected
with vision a rose briar.
VI
There was only a rugged footpath

above the indifferent straits and a shelf where the

castle lay perhaps it was sphered like Otranto;

there the traveller stood naked and talked

aloud or found a lily and thought a sword;

or dragged a carcass upon blunt stone like a

corded animal. In weeds in spiritual

seclusion a felt hand lifted.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:05/09/2023 9:45 AMCopy HTML

Caedmon's Hymn (trans. by Roy Liuzza)

TRANSLATED BY ROY M. LIUZZA
Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian,
the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts,
the work of the glory-father—of every wonder,
eternal Lord. He established a beginning.
He first shaped for men's sons
Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;
then middle-earth mankind's guardian,
eternal Lord, afterwards prepared
the earth for men, the Lord almighty.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:02/09/2023 8:56 AMCopy HTML

                                    

Dear Dr. Frankenstein

I, too, know the science of building men
Out of fragments in little light
Where I'll be damned if lightning don't
Strike as I forget one 
May have a thief's thumb,
Another, a murderer's arm,
And watch the men I've made leave
Like an idea I meant to write down, 
Like a vehicle stuck
In reverse, like the monster
God came to know the moment 
Adam named animals and claimed 
Eve, turning from heaven to her
As if she was his
To run. No word he said could be tamed.
No science. No design. Nothing taken 
Gently into his hand or your hand or mine, 
Nothing we erect is our own.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:01/09/2023 8:24 AMCopy HTML

from “Poems to Czechoslovakia”

NEW VERSIONS FROM THE RUSSIAN BY ILYA KAMINSKY AND JEAN VALENTINE
Black mountain
black mountain
blocks the earth’s light.
Time—time—time
to give back to God his ticket.
I refuse to—be. In
the madhouse of the inhumans
I refuse to—live. To swim
on the current of human spines.
I don’t need holes in my ears,
no need for seeing eyes.
I refuse to swim on the current of human spines.
To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.
                                      •
They took—suddenly—and took—openly—
took mountains—and took their entrails,
they took coal, and steel they took,
they took lead, and crystal.
And sugar they took, and took the clover,
they took the West, and they took the North,
they took the beehive, and took the haystack,
they took the South from us, and the East.
Vari—they took, and the Tatras—they took,
they took our fingers—took our friends—
But we stand up—
as long as there’s spit in our mouths!


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:31/08/2023 8:02 AMCopy HTML

Casualty

I   
He would drink by himself   
And raise a weathered thumb   
Towards the high shelf,   
Calling another rum   
And blackcurrant, without   
Having to raise his voice,   
Or order a quick stout   
By a lifting of the eyes   
And a discreet dumb-show   
Of pulling off the top;   
At closing time would go   
In waders and peaked cap   
Into the showery dark,   
dole-kept breadwinner   
But a natural for work.   
I loved his whole manner,   
Sure-footed but too sly,   
His deadpan sidling tact,   
His fisherman’s quick eye   
And turned observant back.   
Incomprehensible   
To him, my other life.   
Sometimes, on the high stool,   
Too busy with his knife   
At a tobacco plug   
And not meeting my eye,   
In the pause after a slug   
He mentioned poetry.   
We would be on our own   
And, always politic   
And shy of condescension,   
I would manage by some trick   
To switch the talk to eels   
Or lore of the horse and cart   
Or the Provisionals.   
But my tentative art   
His turned back watches too:   
He was blown to bits   
Out drinking in a curfew   
Others obeyed, three nights   
After they shot dead   
The thirteen men in Derry.   
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,   
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday   
Everyone held   
His breath and trembled.   
                   II   
It was a day of cold   
Raw silence, wind-blown   
surplice and soutane:   
Rained-on, flower-laden   
Coffin after coffin   
Seemed to float from the door   
Of the packed cathedral   
Like blossoms on slow water.   
The common funeral   
Unrolled its swaddling band,   
Lapping, tightening   
Till we were braced and bound   
Like brothers in a ring.   
But he would not be held   
At home by his own crowd   
Whatever threats were phoned,   
Whatever black flags waved.   
I see him as he turned   
In that bombed offending place,   
Remorse fused with terror   
In his still knowable face,   
His cornered outfaced stare   
Blinding in the flash.   
He had gone miles away   
For he drank like a fish   
Nightly, naturally   
Swimming towards the lure   
Of warm lit-up places,   
The blurred mesh and murmur   
Drifting among glasses   
In the gregarious smoke.   
How culpable was he   
That last night when he broke   
Our tribe’s complicity?   
‘Now, you’re supposed to be   
An educated man,’   
I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me   
The right answer to that one.’
                   III   
I missed his funeral,   
Those quiet walkers   
And sideways talkers   
Shoaling out of his lane   
To the respectable   
Purring of the hearse...   
They move in equal pace   
With the habitual   
Slow consolation   
Of a dawdling engine,   
The line lifted, hand   
Over fist, cold sunshine   
On the water, the land   
Banked under fog: that morning   
I was taken in his boat,   
The Screw purling, turning   
Indolent fathoms white,   
I tasted freedom with him.   
To get out early, haul   
Steadily off the bottom,   
Dispraise the catch, and smile   
As you find a rhythm   
Working you, slow mile by mile,   
Into your proper haunt   
Somewhere, well out, beyond...   
Dawn-sniffing revenant,   
Plodder through midnight rain,   
Question me again.


Rockymz Share to: Facebook Twitter MSN linkedin google yahoo #11
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Re:Poems

Date Posted:25/08/2023 7:50 AMCopy HTML

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,   
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:24/08/2023 7:59 AMCopy HTML

The Unknown

Ye aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown
Who lies here with no stone to mark the place.
As a boy reckless and wanton,
Wandering with gun in hand through the forest
Near the mansion of Aaron Hatfield,
I shot a hawk perched on the top
Of a dead tree.
He fell with guttural cry
At my feet, his wing broken.
Then I put him in a cage
Where he lived many days cawing angrily at me
When I offered him food.
Daily I search the realms of Hades
For the soul of the hawk,
That I may offer him the friendship
Of one whom life wounded and caged.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:20/08/2023 8:44 AMCopy HTML

“At night, she’d turn into a beastwoman”

At night, she’d turn into a beastwoman
leaping across the rooftops
walking hidden in the shadows
her four legs and little pretty girl face
her tail and round breasts moving side to side
a black shape wandering the cornfields
devouring delicious little animals
wooing the stars with her vacant gaze
the beastwoman gets home tired
remembering nothing the next day
she’d wake up with messy hair and wounded feet
with dirty nails and body in heat
one night, she went searching for the moonlight
she went down a ravine to find her destiny
and howl out her sorrows with the coyotes
she realized this life and death made sense
and never again returned to her good girl bed.



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Re:Poems

Date Posted:13/08/2023 8:40 AMCopy HTML

               

Dreams

© Jane A Beresford

Published: April 2, 2017

We slip beneath the pillow's spell
And drift from heaven and into hell
To lose control of conscious mind
The secrets of our soul to find.

A timeless journey fills our being.
The blind man now becomes all-seeing.
The lonely now becomes the lover.
The childless wife a loving mother.

Reflection of our dormant fears
Once woken may reduce to tears.
With sleep the master free to prey
On untold thought which nightly stray.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:12/08/2023 8:06 AMCopy HTML

The Hammer

I have seen
The old gods go
And the new gods come.
Day by day
And year by year
The idols fall
And the idols rise.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:11/08/2023 8:15 AMCopy HTML

Homo Will Not Inherit

Downtown anywhere and between the roil
of bathhouse steam—up there the linens of joy
and shame must be laundered again and again,
all night—downtown anywhere
and between the column of feathering steam
unknotting itself thirty feet above the avenue’s
shimmered azaleas of gasoline,
between the steam and the ruin
of the Cinema Paree (marquee advertising
its own milky vacancy, broken showcases sealed,
ticketbooth a hostage wrapped in tape
and black plastic, captive in this zone
of blackfronted bars and bookstores
where there’s nothing to read
but longing’s repetitive texts,
where desire’s unpoliced, or nearly so)
someone’s posted a xeroxed headshot
of Jesus: permed, blonde, blurred at the edges
as though photographed through a greasy lens,
and inked beside him, in marker strokes:
HOMO WILL NOT INHERIT. Repent & be saved.
I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit: the margins
which have always been mine, downtown after hours
when there’s nothing left to buy,
the dreaming shops turned in on themselves,
seamless, intent on the perfection of display,
the bodegas and offices lined up, impenetrable:
edges no one wants, no one’s watching. Though
the borders of this shadow-zone (mirror and dream
of the shattered streets around it) are chartered
by the police, and they are required,
some nights, to redefine them. But not now, at twilight,
permission’s descending hour, early winter darkness
pillared by smoldering plumes. The public city’s
ledgered and locked, but the secret city’s boundless;
from which do these tumbling towers arise?
I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit: steam,
and the blinding symmetry of some towering man,
fifteen minutes of forgetfulness incarnate.
I’ve seen flame flicker around the edges of the body,
pentecostal, evidence of inhabitation.
And I have been possessed of the god myself,
I have been the temporary apparition
salving another, I have been his visitation, I say it
without arrogance, I have been an angel
for minutes at a time, and I have for hours
believed—without judgement, without condemnation—
that in each body, however obscured or recast,
is the divine body—common, habitable—
the way in a field of sunflowers
you can see every bloom’s
the multiple expression
of a single shining idea,
which is the face hammered into joy.
I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit:
stupidity, erasure, exile
inside the chalked lines of the police,
who must resemble what they punish,
the exile you require of me,
you who’s posted this invitation
to a heaven nobody wants.
You who must be patrolled,
who adore constraint, I’ll tell you
what I’ll inherit, not your pallid temple
but a real palace, the anticipated
and actual memory, the moment flooded
by skin and the knowledge of it,
the gesture and its description
—do I need to say it?—
the flesh and the word. And I’ll tell you,
you who can’t wait to abandon your body,
what you want me to, maybe something
like you’ve imagined, a dirty story:
Years ago, in the baths,
a man walked into the steam,
the gorgeous deep indigo of him gleaming,
solid tight flanks, the intricately ridged abdomen—
and after he invited me to his room,
nudging his key toward me,
as if perhaps I spoke another tongue
and required the plainest of gestures,
after we’d been, you understand,
worshipping a while in his church,
he said to me, I’m going to punish your mouth.
I can’t tell you what that did to me.
My shame was redeemed then;
I won’t need to burn in the afterlife.
It wasn’t that he hurt me,
more than that: the spirit’s transactions
are enacted now, here—no one needs
your eternity. This failing city’s
radiant as any we’ll ever know,
paved with oily rainbow, charred gates
jeweled with tags, swoops of letters
over letters, indecipherable as anything
written by desire. I’m not ashamed
to love Babylon’s scrawl. How could I be?
It’s written on my face as much as on
these walls. This city’s inescapable,
gorgeous, and on fire. I have my kingdom.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:10/08/2023 7:59 AMCopy HTML




  

The Paper Boy

My route lassos the outskirts,
the reclusive, the elderly, the rural—
the poor who clan in their tarpaper
islands, the old ginseng hunter
Albert Harm, who strings the "crow's
foot" to dry over his wood stove.
Shy eyes of fenced-in horses
follow me down the rutted dirt road.
At dusk, I pedal past white birches,
breathe the smoke of spring chimneys,
my heart working uphill toward someone
hungry for word from the world.
I am Mercury, bearing news, my wings
a single-speed maroon Schwinn bike.
I sear my bright path through the twilight
to the sick, the housebound, the lonely.
Messages delivered, wire basket empty,
I part the blue darkness toward supper,
confident I've earned this day's appetite,
stronger knowing I'll be needed tomorrow.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:05/08/2023 9:31 AMCopy HTML

When the Animals Leave this Place

Underneath ice caps, once glacial peaks
deer, elk, vixen begin to ascend.
Free creatures camouflaged as
waves and waves receding far
from plains pulling
upward slopes and faraway snow dusted mountains.
On spotted and clear cut hills robbed of fir,
high above wheat tapestried valleys, flood plains
up where headwaters reside.
Droplets pound, listen.
Hoofed and pawed mammals
pawing and hoofing themselves up, up.
Along rivers dammed by chocolate beavers,
trailed by salamanders—mud puppies.
Plunging through currents,
          above concrete and steel man-made barriers
these populations of plains, prairies, forests flee
in such frenzy, popping splash dance,
pillaging cattail zones, lashing lily pads—
the breath of life in muddy ponds, still lakes.
Liquid beads slide on windshield glass
along cracked and shattered pane,
spider-like with webs and prisms.
“Look, there, the rainbow
touched the ground both ends down!”
Full arch seven colors showered, heed
what Indigenous know, why long ago,
they said no one belongs here, surrounding them,
that this land was meant to be wet with waters of nearby
not fertile to crops and domestic graze.
The old ones said,
“When the animals leave this place
the waters will come again.
This power is beyond the strength of man.
The river will return with its greatest force.”
No one can stop her.
          She was meant to be this way.
                         Snakes in honor, do not intrude.
The rainbow tied with red and green like
that on petal rose, though only momentarily.
Colors disappear like print photographs fade.
They mix with charcoal surrounding.
A flurry of fowl follow
like strands, maidenhair falls,
from blackened clouds above
swarming inward
covering the basin and raising sky.
Darkness hangs over
the hills appear as black water crests,
blackness varying shades.
The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge .
Main gravel crossroads and back back roads
slicken to mud, clay.
          Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls.
Frogs chug throaty songs.
The frogs only part of immense choir
heralding the downpour, the falling oceans.
Over the train trestle, suspension bridge with
current so slick everything slides off in sheets.
Among rotten stumps in black bass ponds,
somewhere catfish reel in fins and crawl,
walking whiskers to higher waters.
Waters above, below
the choir calling it forth.
Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds
fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels.
They dance toward the rain crest,
the approaching storm
beckoning, inviting, summoning.
A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain
past the strength of sunlight.
The frog chorus sings refrain,
melody drumming thunder,
evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes.
Wanting to return to clearings and streams where ash, or
white birch woods rise,    tower over,
quaking aspen stand against
storm shown veils—sheeting rains crossing
pasture, meadow, hills, mountain.
Sounds erupt.
Gathering clouds converge, push,
pull, push, pull forcing lightning
back and forth shaping
windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants
from stratocumulus media.
As if they are a living cloud chamber,
As if they exist only in the heavens.
Air swells with dampness.
          It has begun.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:22/07/2023 8:42 AMCopy HTML

Affirmation: A Monologue Poem

1
    I gave this world a song.
the sounds of my life, my voice,
    my weeping, my laughter.
I gave this world my strength.
       I drenched it in my tears so that
    it grew crops of prosperity.
I oiled its wheels with the rumbling
    reasonance of my existence.
2
    In the wind,
and in the bluesy blue flame of fires,
  I can see and I can hear the stories
of my passages in time.
  I am so many women, you cannot rightly
name me. So many spirits of our dead
  rest in my breasts, I cannot know
myself as one woman either.
3
    I died in the heat of a Harlem or Detroit or
South African or Chicago summer night, my
    throat/gruff, stuffed with the dreams of all my kind
      around me. But when I died, I had planted fire
seeds in the children all around me.
    Each time breath left a body, a fire burning
inside to survive ran rampant in my people’s souls;
  those breaths became the very air breathed in
the poverty that screamed nothing and nobody.
4
    Garbage of old used lives. The stench of
putrified dreams.
  All in the streets with the sweet greenery of youth.
      A scrawny stubborn tree or bush or a
        scrawny gang of boys and girls, laughing and
talking, their living full of themselves,
  stutters the eyes and makes the unbelievers
know the meaning of grace and mercy.
5
    A wind blows all the way up the Mississippi River
from the south with the sweet scent of honeysuckle,
    lilac, or magnolia. It weaves in and out of the
blue light, red light nights, in and out of the
    wine and whiskey avenues and stumbles through
the streets,
    hung up in the air where the red eyes and stubborn
dreams live.
Cardboard and stone altars to God, the storefront churches
  hug the soul’s misery away. Tell the sad soul and spirit
their survival secrets.
        Whisper sweet songs and the miracle veiled stories of
        millions of Joshua’s fittin’ de battles of all the Jericho’s
  of Daniels in de lions den, of Moses’ barefoot
before God and the burning bushes
     like the burning hearts.
6
        And ain’t I a woman, Winnie Mandela once cried
out in a lonely year on a lonely night.
  a lone spent life
as Nelson’s imprisoned pulse became the drumbeat from
  the prison roar of freedom’s call.
        and ain’t I a woman, women have cried as they
struggled to break the yoke of worldly evils.
   Yes, Black spirit in the world moaned. Yes, it affirmed.
      If we can be the best of what we were, why our future
will exist through the best efforts from our past. Our
  newness will gain its momentum from the bone
and marrow of oldness!
        Come then Sojourner, come Harriet, come then
Bethune, come Wheatley, come Zora.
        We will arise as One valiant victorious dream. One triumph
for one here, for one there, for one in life, from one
in death, for millions of ones, an army of ones,
     marching all over the world!
trampling out the sodden, miserable dreams of frustration
and failure.
    We will do this. We will be this for our strength,
our liberty, our lives.
       It has already begun. Yes. It has. It was, even in
our crossing over.
       Yes, Black Spirit in the world moaned. Yes, Black
Spirit in the world affirmed.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:20/07/2023 8:18 AMCopy HTML

Flaxman

We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,
Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,
And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought
Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone,—
A higher charm than modern culture won
With all the wealth of metaphysic lore,
Gifted to analyze, dissect, explore.
A many-colored light flows from one sun;
Art, ’neath its beams, a motley thread has spun;
The prism modifies the perfect day;
But thou hast known such mediums to shun,
And cast once more on life a pure, white ray.
Absorbed in the creations of thy mind,
Forgetting daily self, my truest self I find.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:16/07/2023 8:52 AMCopy HTML

If Spirits Walk

“I have heard (but not believed) the spirits of the dead
May walk again.”
Winter’s Tale

If spirits walk, Love, when the night climbs slow
The slant footpath where we were wont to go,
      Be sure that I shall take the self-same way
      To the hill-crest, and shoreward, down the gray,
Sheer, gravelled slope, where vetches straggling grow.
Look for me not when gusts of winter blow,
When at thy pane beat hands of sleet and snow;
   I would not come thy dear eyes to affray,
               If spirits walk.
But when, in June, the pines are whispering low,
And when their breath plays with thy bright hair so
      As some one's fingers once were used to play—
      That hour when birds leave song, and children pray,
Keep the old tryst, sweetheart, and thou shalt know
               If spirits walk.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:14/07/2023 8:01 AMCopy HTML

Elegy

In sun the sunburned skin sloughs off the sunburned shoulder.
Most folks believe this is the body’s slow mend.
 
Most folks believe in the good yolk of the soul.
 
I believe in autopsy lingo of natural causes should be replaced
with of long-term exposure to the dim, unwavering radiation of the morning star.
 
The evening they burn your body,
I step into the garden and arrange a crooked line of birdbaths to skip stones across
 
until a bell tower tolls its eight arguments against daylight
and the skyline illuminates, ragged and unmended
 
like a poem turned on its side.
 
The evening they burn your body,
I believe I’ll step into the living room and be greeted by you
 
or by someone who could play you in a movie.
 
The curtains are an aurora of earthly proportion.
You don’t exist.
 
A flash igniting the paned glass is the silent lightning outrunning its noise.
You’re on fire.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:13/07/2023 8:21 AMCopy HTML

Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market

TRANSLATED BY ROBIN ROBERTSON
Here,   
among the market vegetables,
this torpedo
from the ocean   
depths,   
a missile   
that swam,
now   
lying in front of me
dead.
Surrounded
by the earth's green froth   
—these lettuces,
bunches of carrots—
only you   
lived through
the sea's truth, survived
the unknown, the
unfathomable
darkness, the depths   
of the sea,
the great   
abyss,
le grand abîme,
only you:   
varnished
black-pitched   
witness
to that deepest night.
Only you:
dark bullet
barreled   
from the depths,
carrying   
only   
your   
one wound,
but resurgent,
always renewed,
locked into the current,
fins fletched
like wings
in the torrent,
in the coursing
of
the
underwater
dark,
like a grieving arrow,
sea-javelin, a nerveless   
oiled harpoon.
Dead
in front of me,
catafalqued king
of my own ocean;
once   
sappy as a sprung fir
in the green turmoil,
once seed
to sea-quake,
tidal wave, now
simply
dead remains;
in the whole market
yours   
was the only shape left
with purpose or direction
in this   
jumbled ruin
of nature;
you are   
a solitary man of war
among these frail vegetables,
your flanks and prow
black   
and slippery
as if you were still
a well-oiled ship of the wind,
the only
true
machine
of the sea: unflawed,
undefiled,   
navigating now
the waters of death.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:12/07/2023 8:45 AMCopy HTML

Annabel Lee

By Edgar Allan Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.



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Re:Poems

Date Posted:10/07/2023 8:34 AMCopy HTML

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:09/07/2023 7:36 AMCopy HTML

Breathing Space, July 

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The one who’s lying on his back under the tall trees
is also up there within them. He’s flowing out into thousands of twigs,
swaying to and fro,
sitting in an ejector seat that lets go in slow motion.
The one who’s standing down by the docks squints at the water.
The docks age faster than people.
They have silver-gray lumber and stones in their gut.
The glaring light pounds all the way in.
The one who’s traveling all day in an open boat
over the glittering bays
will fall asleep at last inside a blue lamp
while the islands crawl like huge moths over the glass.
 


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:26/04/2023 8:02 AMCopy HTML

Duncan

1
When in his twenties a poetry's full strength
Burst into voice as an unstopping flood,
He let the divine prompting (come at length)
Rushingly bear him any way it would
And went on writing while the Ferry turned
From San Francisco, back from Berkeley too,
And back again, and back again. He learned
You add to, you don't cancel what you do.
Between the notebook-margins his pen travelled,
His own lines carrying him in a new mode
To ports in which past purposes unravelled.
So that, as on the Ferry Line he rode,
Whatever his first plans that night had been,
The energy that rose from their confusion
Became the changing passage lived within
While the pen wrote, and looked beyond conclusion.
2
Forty years later, and both kidneys gone;
Every eight hours, home dialysis;
The habit of his restlessness stayed on
Exhausting him with his responsiveness.
After the circulations of one day
In which he taught a three-hour seminar
Then gave a reading clear across the Bay,
And while returning from it to the car
With plunging hovering tread tired and unsteady
Down Wheeler steps, he faltered and he fell
—Fell he said later, as if I stood ready,
"Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn."
                                                      Well well,
The image comic, as I might have known,
And generous, but it turned things round to myth:
He fell across the white steps there alone,
Though it was me indeed that he was with.
I hadn't caught him, hadn't seen in time,
And picked him up where he had softly dropped,
A pillow full of feathers. Was it a rime
He later sought, in which he might adopt
The role of H.D., broken-hipped and old,
Who, as she moved off from the reading-stand,
Had stumbled on the platform but was held
And steadied by another poet's hand?
He was now a posthumous poet, I have said
(For since his illness he had not composed),
In sight of a conclusion, whose great dread
Was closure,
                  his life soon to be enclosed
Like the sparrow's flight above the feasting friends,
Briefly revealed where its breast caught their light,
Beneath the long roof, between open ends,
Themselves the margins of unchanging night.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:25/04/2023 8:27 AMCopy HTML

Evening Hawk

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense. The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.
If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.
Copyright © 1985 by Robert Penn Warren.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:21/04/2023 8:40 AMCopy HTML

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute   
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless   
As the flight of birds.
                         *               
A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time   
As the moon climbs.


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Re:Poems

Date Posted:18/04/2023 9:09 AMCopy HTML

So Many Books, So Little Time 

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For independent booksellers & librarians, especially Nichelle Hayes

Frequently during my mornings of pain & reflection
when I can’t write
or articulate my thoughts
or locate the mindmusic needed
to complete the poems & essays
that are weeks plus days overdue
forcing me to stop, I cease
answering my phone, eating right, running my miles,
reading my mail, and making love.
(Also, this is when my children do not seek me out
because I do not seek them out.)
I escape north, to the nearest library or used bookstore.
They are my retreats, my quiet energy-givers, my intellectual refuge.
For me it is not bluewater beaches, theme parks,
or silent chapels hidden among forest greens.
Not multi-stored American malls, corporate book
supermarkets, mountain trails, or Caribbean hideaways.
My sanctuaries are liberated lighthouses of shelved books,
featuring forgotten poets, unread anthropologists of tenure-
seeking assistant professors, self-published geniuses, remaindered
first novelists, highlighting speed-written bestsellers,
wise historians & theologians, nobel, pulitzer prize, and american book
award winners, poets & fiction writers, overcertain political commentators,
small press wunderkinds & learned academics.
All are vitamins for my slow brain & sidetracked spirit in this
winter of creating.
I do not believe in smiling politicians, AMA doctors,
zebra-faced bankers, red-jacketed real estate or automobile
salespeople, or singing preachers.
I believe in books.
It can be conveniently argued that knowledge,
not that which is condensed or computer packaged, but
pages of hard-fought words, dancing language
meticulously & contemplatively written by the likes of me & others,
shelved imperfectly at the level of open hearts & minds,
is preventive medicine strengthening me for the return to my
clear pages of incomplete ideas to be reworked, revised &
written as new worlds and words in all of their subjective
configurations to eventually be processed into books that
will hopefully be placed on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, homes,
& other sanctuaries of learning to be found & browsed over by receptive
booklovers, readers & writers looking for a retreat,
looking for departure & yes spaces,
looking for open heart surgery without the knife.


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