This is not a free country
(Never was a democracy)
The eighteenth shows how fickle
The public opinion goes,
How easy it is to foment.
The bison are being driven toward the cliff
And thinking ‘yeah let’s do it!’
This is not a precipice
We need leaders who will allow
Us to flourish, not drive us
To impending doom.
20210112: for the prompt at https://dversepoets.com/2021/01/12/poetics-object-poems/
What words can doings have?
The drum sings with a touch
The horn with a kiss,
The flute, breath.
Sleeping till noon speaks
Of my labors
And in the dabs of mortar
The wall that I have made
Tells the truth of my work
20210111
https://dversepoets.com/2021/01/11/quadrille-119-dabbling-in-poetry/
We sat up on the wall
To gain a new vantage.
Like Rome we reached out, thinking
We achieved something new.
So little brotherhood,
to make a crown to fit,
Our Good seems small.
Perched Clifftop, Unheeding Rome and Humpty
We dabble in falling
20210111: https://dversepoets.com/2021/01/11/quadrille-119-dabbling-in-poetry/.
It had been quite an evening, I put myself in the road, god rushing towards me like a truck, his headlights illuminating everything I did not want to see in myself but was plainly there. At a little after two in the morning, the light had moved on and I was there at the dining room table, with a bowl of organic chicken soup in front of me. I was so sweatsoaked, spent and hungry and that soup was everything my body needed. I couldn’t bear to eat it. I remembered my chickens, imagined this birds life, and I wept into my soupbowl.
Until gratitude
cherryblossomed in my heart-
Thank you little bird
20210104 for the prompt at d’verse https://dversepoets.com/2021/01/04/happy-new-year-2/
Sherry at earthweal prompts us to consider the thoughts of animals. I’m not sure the dead in my yard have thoughts, or at least not the wordy thoughts that most people think in. Andbythis I mean they are not chained to words the way we are. Having held their skull in my hands, and their meat in my stomach also gives an interesting perspective though observing them gives a different taste of their life. My challenge then is how to depict the inherently wordless with mere words? I can step in the grass the way they do, and they look at me differently when that happens. Of course there is art, images, but to reduce the vast experience to paints produces different results than reducing it to words. With that in mind here (and there! Lol) are my words:
Lettuce among the grasses
Garden fence, asparagus
Tasty liriope seeds
Fallen fruit of apple trees
Thumb-monkey opens door!
Moves from box to box,
Ok uninterested in us
Neither our eater nor eaten.
20210104
Please read the challenge as well: https://earthweal.com/2021/01/04/earthweal-weekly-challenge-when-animals-speak/
I am in the street
Before a little shop
I wonder why I’m here
What’s in store for me?
20291229
We’ve girt the land
With asphalt garland
Festive red and white lights
20201224
I am
looking for
Any kind
Of
Caring
That doesn’t hurt in the doing of it
20201222
There is an urgency
A mustness
To this agency
These resolutions.
It lays upon the peace
The quiet of the longest night
Rent only by the silent
Crescent moon sickle slice like snow:
Those tiny individuals
Sixfold symmetrists weaving
Blankets for streets and fields
Rubbish heaps and cemeteries
Can you get to sleep under that blanket?
Where each flake screams for your blood
Your dignity, your heart? Your vote?
I don’t blame you for drowning in that flood.
I asked him,
How much can we endure?
The answer:
More
What’s called for is … is …
What? What choice is there?
My strength is dead. Writing this,
Exhausting. What the bed offers
Cannot soothe this. The church’s
Balm is empty. The only thing left
Showing in my fellow humans, is
Eyes
Averted, Beaten and downtrodden
Or frantic with desperate longing
Searching for connection. Thank god for those
Tiny beacons in the vast sea
Lighthouse perched on the rocky shore
Whatever happens here
Whatever we endure
Those eyes close at the end either way.
So then I asked,
How much can we love?
The answer:
More
20201221
For the solstice and the prompt at earthweal https://earthweal.com/2020/12/21/earthweal-weekly-challenge-a-solstice-bell/
Listing.
An aging ship.
St nick.
Sticks bare,
Save thorns and hips.
Brown leaves.
Frail stones
Stink of baking
Scones.
Empty atonement.
Sirens getting louder
Harder to deny
Unreliable rudder lies.
Sharp stem sickles slice skin
Spill red petals within
The baby forms, and drips from
The spilling of her hips.
Melasma cracks alabaster.
Reeds. Flute, nej. Basket.
Burned cookies.
Open bilco.
Cold sea pours in
Deep behind the eyes
Drawn.
Well-sweep
Revolver
Last breath
20201217
For the prompt ‘endings’ at http://www.diverse poets.com
