Litter skitters down the street,
stopping beseechingly at my feet.
No one likes the morning chill.
So this raucous street is now still.
Still but for the will to wake.
Shhh! Let it sleep for goodness sake.
POEM: The Street Sleeps
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Category Archives: Poetry
POEM: This Indescribable Feeling
I lack the words to dignify this feeling.
Imagine a coarse hemp rope knotted around one’s heart
It’s cinched tighter and tighter, tugged at both ends
The rope creaks under this burden, but it does not snap
It creaks like an old wooden sailing vessel, riding the swells
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POEM: Deceit Days
What an apple!
–spoiled and rotten
The weave of lies
is soon forgotten.
Cast and reel,
no hook is set.
Which lie is true?
He soon forgets.
He says,
Just let me be, and I won’t lie.
But ask me now and it’s fib or die.
The lying life is tenuous.
Backpeddling? Strenuous
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POEM: Overcast Day
Clouds tugged themselves over the city like a thick quilt
adding to the gritty gray inner-city nightmare.
I rode through this monochrome madness
without seeing a person on the sidewalks.
I felt their eyes peer down through ash-covered windows,
like a hand running over the tips of tiny hairs on my back
A high-pitched tone sounded in my ears
filling the void of chirpless birds and dumbstruck relicts
It can’t be long now.
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POEM: Chirpy Bird in a Cedar Tree
Hey, little chirpy bird,
who rambles on without a word,
does your measure and your meter
tell of life in yonder cedar?
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Haiku no Gyokko-ryū Jōryaku no Maki
throw open the gate
mindless herds will charge headlong
into the stockyard
prolong each journey
show the Emperor the sights
drop his palanquin
the guitarist’s hand
bounds chord to chord on the dot
no beat is missed
the slug ricochets
yet always finds its mark
burrowing deeply
waves washing ashore
within a rocky inlet
turn about strongly
gulls flap into flight
slowly lifting skyward in
an unrushed climb
sparks pop from the fire
with impeccable timing
uncapturable
topple the gatepost
with a splintering impact
but start with a sting
the pinky finger
of a raging wild-eyed brute
snaps like a pea-pod
once the snake constricts
all is hopelessly lost
sting first and sting deep
bears don’t crush stout trees
stout trees sometimes crush a bear
falling in tree’s time
the bull’s hoof clomps down
a statement made decisive
not to be wrangled
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Two Tigers Circle In The Night
Taken at the Budapest Zoo
Two tigers circle in the night.
Neither eager to be first in fight.
Bellies low, they scrape the ground.
Each step pads without a sound.
One false step brings the pounce
of each fearsome muscled ounce.
They twist and writhe and snap,
each jaw a toothy, steely trap.
In the end one slinks away.
Both live on to later days.
A test upon the jungle floor
and each cat knows the final score.
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Life by Lists
I remember when I could remember,
but these days I invariably forget.
My life isn’t even in its September
but by absent-mindedness I’m beset.
My keys? My keys? Where are they please?
I’ve searched from ceiling to floor.
My keys? My keys? Where are they please?
No, I’m certain I didn’t ask that before.
Once I juggled a hundred tasks right within my mind.
Now I need write a list if they number more than two.
Buy stock in the makers of legal pads, if you’re so inclined
What were we talking about? There’s something I need to do…
Daily list
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POEM: Twisted Time
Six months a year
the river flows
away from the sea.
Entropy’s fall?
No.
The fits and starts
of progress are
not rooted in
twisted time.
Here,
blacksmiths exist.
The hammer bounces
on the anvil
Tap-Tap-CLANG
Tap-Tap-CLANG
Ordered repetition,
until the steel begins
to bend and twist
and flex and tear.
It tears like taffy,
taffy glowing orange.
Tap-Tap-CLANG
Tap-Tap-CLANG
What is time for
that glowing rod?
The fire makes
its molecules
race and feud.
The hammer spreads
time into an eternity
of
Tap-Tap-CLANG
Tap-Tap-CLANG
Taken in Hungary in 2008
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BOOK REVIEW: 101 Great American Poems ed. The American Poetry and Literacy Project
101 Great American Poems by The American Poetry and Literacy Project
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a collection of 101 poems by 39 different American poets. It begins with a poem by Anne Bradstreet in the 17th century and proceeds through to a work by W.H. Auden of the 20th century. In between are many poets that one would expect, such as Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Sandburg, and Cummings. There are others that might be unexpected such as Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane. While the poems aren’t all jingoistic in nature, there is a recurring theme of celebration of America.
Most of the poems in this tiny anthology will be familiar to poetry readers. This is a $1 Kindle e-book of a Dover Thrift Edition, and so one won’t find living poets represented, or poems that tap into the zeitgeist du jour— at the risk of mixing loan words. However, most of these poems deserve to be read and reread.
A few of my favorites are below with title, author, and a fragment.
The Builders by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.
The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman
O Captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done,
the ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
I’m nobody! Who are you? by Emily Dickenson
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know
The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
“Give my your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,…
Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone
War is Kind by Stephen Crane
Do no weep, maiden, for war is kind
Sence You Wend Away by James Weldon Johnson
Seems lak to me de stars don’t shine so bright,
Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Chicago by Carl Sandburg
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
Fog by Carl Sandburg
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird;
The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
The Love Songs of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
First Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–
it gives a lovely light.
Ars Poetica by Archibald Macleish
A poem should not mean
But be
I, Too by Langston Hughes
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
Little Old Letter by Langston Hughes
You don’t need no gun nor knife–
A little old letter
Can take a person’s life.
Nothing struck me as conspicuously absent from this collection, but I’d be curious what poems people feel should (or shouldn’t) be in such a collection.
