"Have you ever made a just man?"
"Oh, I have made three," answered God,
"But two of them are dead,
And the third --
Listen! Listen!
And you will hear the thud of his defeat."
“Have you ever made a just man?” by Stephen Crane [w/ Audio]
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Tag Archives: Free Verse
Night Swimming [Free Verse]
Trudging into lapping waves
On a dim and dusky eve.
Chest deep
One pops up, pressing one's chest
Onto the water,
And swims toward a distant
Silhouetted rock outcrop.
But it doesn't stay silhouetted.
Soon, one is heading into
A grand, black abyss,
There is no shape in this world,
Only the feel of limbs -- pulling & kicking.
Sounds grow ever more feeble --
And ever more rare --
Until the smell of seawater becomes
A bright and vivid sensory experience --
Layered & textured.
Rolling onto one's back, one can see
Patches of sparkling stars
In the cloud gaps.
One lays upon the waves --
Feeling as though one conforms to them
As one floats like a piece of driftwood --
And sees the twinkle of distant stars,
In a world too vast to understand.
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Salmon Skies [Free Verse]
Sun dips below the hill;
Light rises off the roof,
And the lowest clouds
Glow in salmon hues.
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“From China” by Amy Lowell [w/ Audio]
I thought:
The moon,
Shining upon the many steps of the palace before me,
Shines also upon the chequered rice-fields
Of my native land.
And my tears fell
Like white rice grains
At my feet.
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A Rugged Coast [Free Verse]
Limestone lumps
Karst columns
Dot the waters,
Like ancient wreckage --
Wrack & ruin
Slung near & far
From coastal homelands;
A landscape torn asunder
And littered about,
But beloved for the beauty
Of its scraggy, weedy
Weathered rock.
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“A learned man came to me once” by Stephen Crane [w/ Audio]
A learned man came to me once.
He said, "I know the way, -- come."
And I was overjoyed at this.
Together we hastened.
Soon, too soon, were we
Where my eyes were useless,
And I knew not the ways of my feet.
I clung to the hand of my friend;
But at last he cried, "I am lost."
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“One of the ‘Hundred Views of Fuji,’ by Hokusai” by Amy Lowell [w/ Audio]
Being thirsty,
I filled a cup with water,
And, behold! -- Fuji-yama lay upon the water,
Like a dropped leaf!
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“A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass” by Gertrude Stein [w/ Audio]
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and
nothing strange a single hurt color and an
arrangement in a system to pointing. All
this and not ordinary, not unordered in not
resembling. The difference is spreading.
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Mutual Drift [Free Verse]
Lying back on the water,
Peering into a cloud,
I shift like driftwood --
rocking and rising,
rolling and dipping.
As I stare at the cloud,
It seems to stare back.
It drifts - suspiciously -
Or maybe I'm drifting
And it is still --
In truth, we're both drifting,
And neither of us has
The mental energy to be
Suspicious.
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Potential Energy [Free Verse]
Boulders, precariously perched
on the edge of a precipice.
Do the residents
of the huts
down the mountain
ever think of that boulder?
Maybe they thought not being
directly under it would keep
them safe, but what bounce
might a boulder take --
freefalling, tumbling, hitting
outcrops, sliding on scree,
cracking to fragments,
being not spherical in the least,
and so on?
My guess is that they never think
about it... or think about it
every minute.
And in some moment when
they aren't thinking of it...
SPLAT!
Tiger Riding for Beginners 