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Greater than all created things summed up
And multiplied by immortality,
The LORD attends to every buttercup
And blade of grass and bird and bumblebee.
The greatest knows the least; and every man
His every hair has been accounted for;
And all of him is fitted to God's plan
The earth and chosen people to restore.  
Everything's His to give or take or loan,
And nothing lies beyond His lone control.  
Everything's His, and every thing is known
By Him who sees all parts and every whole.
He understands, both root and all, and all
In all, the flower in the crannied wall.
My Dear Poet May 2022
Three poets
rot down a river bed
their body decomposing
except their head
still composing poetry
and recite being dead
where poems still flow
I’ve heard them read

one was caught
by the sun beam
flickering ripples of light


another fought
by a splashing bream
kicking up a fight


the third flowed down
the rapid stream
where water foams white


I, one day went fishing
and caught myself a fish
down the river swimming
quoting Tennyson
Dickinson and Finch
I set it free
because poetry is freeing
Not every line in the end
is a hook
three dead poets can testify
down by the brook
Three poets wrote about a river
Leigh Everhart Mar 2020
"'I am half-sick of shadows,' said the Lady of Shalott."
-Lord Alfred Tennyson
…but half of her bends towards them,
these whispered tableaus, her spine tilting backward.
She carefully hordes them
like granules of opal. Her hands become lacquered
in half-dreams and dyes,
and her tapestry spins into colors so rich
even she is surprised
that her fingers have laced every cross, every stitch.
She is sick of half-shadows;
she wants the thick darkness to drown her whole essence.
These sparkles and dayglows
will stir her to madness in milky-white crescents,
and she will sink into nothing
without any name on the heirlooms she weaves;
She will fade into nothing,
and no shadows will weep on the day that she leaves.
that line in Lady of Shalott always stirred something in me; I suppose this is my attempt at a tribute
The Napkin Poet Mar 2019
Black moss and flower pots.
She cometh not, she cometh not.
Lonely and moated,
Rusted nails broken.

Dew with tears,
An hour before sunlight.
Cold winds wake,
A greyish mourn.
Clustered marish-mosses,
Silver green bark.

In a dreamy home.
Among wainscot,
Door hinges creak.
Like a mouse,
She shrieked-
She cometh not, she cometh not.
Rebecca Jan 2019
The ocean, consume me.
I hear your call to me like a mother cow to her calf,
A low drawling echo that grows with the hour.
Or the calf to its mother,
you call me home
to suckle on my breast where in it my heart beats.
Drum, drum.
Be still the drums.
Laying deep in dark abyss.
The drums, the drums.
I smell the salty air
It haunts my passage, staining my dress
with crusted, crystallised foam.
Will this heart ne'er be clean?
To be filthied by shame, now unworthy to him
by the sea and what it has done to me.
I wait for you.
You growing pains, you. You wisdom teeth pushing through.
The dust settles in my candle light.
The little white flecks fall together like prancing dandelion seeds
as fragile as children who have been wasted in your hands like white gold,
thrown away.
What they could have been had they fallen to my hands.
Rosey and blue-eyed with marjoram soft hair.
So I wait, breath now freezing with the in and out
steadying as the tide rises.
It calls me to consume me.
Dare I step to it? Submerse my feet within the waves.
One more hour, one more day - tick, tock, tick, tock.
But what if this hour he comes my way?
Descending from heaven, knocking at my gate.
The crash of the ocean against my hull.
Wait, wait, for my life and forever, I will wait.
The ocean, consume me.
A response to Sir John Everett Millais's 1851 painting 'Mariana', Inspired by Alfred Tennyson's 1830 poem 'Mariana' "I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!"
Lawrence Hall Oct 2018
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new” 1

On that cold night Sir Bedivere looked long
Into the dawnlight where three Queens gold-crowned 2
With Arthur passed at last into the West
And the sun rose, but not upon the King

Then in the silence of the raw new year
A masterless knight turned unto the hills
And after wanderings there took the cowl
And among new faces told the beads of worlds

For us – our old year too is someone’s new
With quiet grace and faith we pass from view


1 This line appears both in “The Coming of Arthur” and in “The Passing of Arthur” in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, framing the arcing narrative.

2 The three Queens, too, appear in “The Coming of Arthur” and in “The Passing of Arthur.”  They are perhaps symbols of faith, hope, and charity from 1 Corinthians.
Your ‘umble scrivener’s site is:
Reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com.
It’s not at all reactionary, tho’ it might be drivel.

My vanity publications are available on amazon.com as bits of dead tree and on Kindle:  The Road to Magdalena, Paleo-Hippies at Work and Play, Lady with a Dead Turtle, Don’t Forget Your Shoes and Grapes, Coffee and a Dead Alligator to Go, and Dispatches from the Colonial Office.
TheUnseenPoet Mar 2018
"Cannons to the left of them, cannons to the right",
The boy exhales deeply,twirling dust motes in the light.
His pencil moves laboriously as his notes limp to the end,
And he shifts back from his studies and grimaces at a friend.
The girl gazing along the row admires his boyish face,
The frown lines from thinking have left a shallow trace,
So she whispers across to him that he needs to smile,
And he grins at her and stretches, adds annotations to the pile.
I observe him from the whiteboard,
Feel a rush of maternal pride. Young, strong and full of hope,
The world is open wide.
Then emotion clutches at my throat, sins forefathers have done,
A hundred years ago he'd have been,
In the trenches with my son.
TheUnseenPoet Oct 2017
He sat in his chair with his back to the fire,
He deliberately sought to make the air chill,
His hand on the paper lover's pink with desire,
But his method of savagery not lust but the quill.
His starchy stiff collar was tightly ill-fitting,
His shoes chafed his ankles but he did not care,
His breathing was hot in the cool of the evening,
His fingers streaked ink through his long wavy hair.
He scowled at the pen and he frowned at the paper,
The writer accursed his impotent art,
He wrote with great ease those magnificent ballads,
But useless he felt at affairs of the heart.
He rose and he cast all the sheets of fine paper,
Into the fire and he winced at the heat,
He lit up his pipe, eyes smarting at the vapour,
And bitterly cursed this impossible feat.
For who but a fool smitten for a princess,
An admirer for now but soon to be queen,
When he just a poet and a poor one nonetheless,
And dandy Prince Albert just arrived on the scene.
He slouched at his desk and once more made a scribble,
Decided to write the biggest lie he could call,
For who but a fool would believe in such drivel,
“Better to have loved and lost than not loved at all.”
Roo May 2017
I wish I lived in Wayne’s World,
where Wayne and Garth are real.
I wish I had Cassandra’s curls,
and her *** appeal.

I wish I dated Jason Dean,
and coloured him impressed.
I wish I had the killer gene,
but never ever confess.

I wish I went to Ashfield Hospital,
and looked a little on edge.
Explored shutter island in the spittle,
and made the Marshall pledge.

I wish I lived with Yeats,
or in the lonely moated grange,
I wish I danced on table tops,
my body for money,  fair exchange.

I wish reality didn’t exist,
or better yet just me,
all those opportunities would be missed,
and at peace I’d finally be.
A few of my favourite films/poems/poets incorporated into what started off as a uniform poem but soon disintegrated.  (a metaphor for my life)
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