MODERN SONNETS

MODERN SONNETS I prefer the original definition of the sonnet as a “little song” of indeterminate form and length. These modern sonnets vary from more-or-less traditional to free verse and experimental sonnets. Auschwitz Rose by Michael R. Burch There is a Rose at Auschwitz, in the briar, a rose like Sharon’s, lovely as her name. The world forgot her, and is not the same. I revere her and enlist this sacred fire to keep her memory’s exalted flame unmolested by the thistles and the nettles. On Auschwitz now the reddening sunset settles ... They sleep alike—diminutive and tall, the innocent, the “surgeons.” Sleeping, all. Red oxides of her blood, bright crimson petals, if accidents of coloration, gall my heart no less. Amid thick weeds and muck there lies a rose man’s crackling lightning struck: the only Rose I ever longed to pluck. Soon I’ll bed there and bid the world “Good Luck.” Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea, then by Voices Israel, Other Voices International, Verse Weekly, Black Medina, The Eclectic Muse (Canada), Promosaik (Germany), FreeXpression (Australia), Poetry Super Highway, Inspirational Stories, Trinacria, Pennsylvania Review, Litera (UK), Yahoo Buzz, and de Volkskrant Blog (a Dutch newspaper) Such Tenderness by Michael R. Burch for the mothers of Gaza There was, in your touch, such tenderness—as only the dove on her mildest day has, when she shelters downed fledglings beneath a warm wing and coos to them softly, unable to sing. What songs long forgotten occur to you now— a babe at each breast? What terrible vow ripped from your throat like the thunder that day can never hold severing lightnings at bay? Time taught you tenderness—time, oh, and love. But love in the end is seldom enough ... and time?—insufficient to life’s brief task. I can only admire, unable to ask— what is the source, whence comes the desire of a woman to love as no God may require? Published by Borderless Journal and SindhuNews (India) Lozenge by Michael R. Burch When I was closest to love, it did not seem real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness it might dissolve in my mouth like a lozenge of sugar. When I held you in my arms, I did not feel our lack of completeness, knowing how easy it was for us to cling to each other. And there were nights when the clouds sped across the moon’s face, exposing such rarified brightness we did not witness so much as embrace love’s human appearance. A Surfeit of Light by Michael R. Burch There was always a surfeit of light in your presence. You stood distinctly apart, not of the humdrum world— a chariot of gold in a procession of plywood. We were all pioneers of the modern expedient race, raising the ante: Home Depot to Lowe’s. Yours was an antique grace—Thrace’s or Mesopotamia’s. We were never quite sure of your silver allure, of your trillium-and-platinum diadem, of your utter lack of flatware-like utility. You told us that night—your wound would not scar. The black moment passed, then you were no more. The darker the sky, how much brighter the Star! The day of your funeral, I ripped out the crown mold. You were this fool’s gold. The Composition of Shadows by Michael R. Burch “I made it out of a mouthful of air.”—W. B. Yeats We breathe and so we write; the night hums softly its accompaniment. Pale phosphors burn; the page we turn leads onward, and we smile, content. And what we mean we write to learn: the vowels of love, the consonants’ strange golden weight, each plosive’s shape— curved like the heart. Here, resonant, ... sounds’ shadows mass beneath bright glass like singing voles curled in a maze of blank white space. We touch a face— long-frozen words trapped in a glaze that insulates our hearts. Nowhere can love be found. Just shrieking air. Published by The Lyric and Contemporary Rhyme Maker, Fakir, Curer by Michael R. Burch A poem should be a wild, unearthly cry against the thought of lying in the dark, doomed―never having seen bright sparks leap high, without a word for flame, none for the mark an ember might emblaze on lesioned skin. A poet is no crafty artisan― the maker of some crock. He dreams of flame he never touched, but―fakir’s courtesan― must dance obedience, once called by name. Thin wand, divine!, this world is too the same― all watery ooze and flesh. Let fire cure and quickly harden here what can endure. Originally published by The Lyric The ancient English scops were considered to be makers: for instance, in William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makiris.” But in some modern literary circles poets are considered to be fakers, with lies being as good as the truth where art is concerned. Hence, this poem puns on “fakirs” and dancing snakes. Ebb Tide by Michael R. Burch Massive, gray, these leaden waves bear their unchanging burden― the sameness of each day to day while the wind seems to struggle to say something half-submerged planks at the mouth of the bay might nuzzle limp seaweed to understand. Now collapsing dull waves drain away from the unenticing land; shrieking gulls shadow fish through salt spray― whitish streaks on a fogged silver mirror. Sizzling lightning impresses its brand. Unseen fingers scribble something in the wet sand. Originally published by Southwest Review Marsh Song by Michael R. Burch Here there is only the great sad song of the reeds and the silent herons, wraithlike in the mist, and a few drab sunken stones, unblessed by the sunlight these late sixteen thousand years, and the beaded dews that drench strange ferns, like tears collected against an overwhelming sadness. Here the marsh exposes its dejectedness, its gutted rotting belly, and its roots rise out of the earth’s distended heaviness, to claw hard at existence, till the scars remind us that we all have wounds, and I ... I have learned again that living is despair as the herons cleave the placid, dreamless air. Originally published by The Lyric The City Is a Garment by Michael R. Burch A rhinestone skein, a jeweled brocade of light,― the city is a garment stretched so thin her festive colors bleed into the night, and everywhere bright seams, unraveling, cascade their brilliant contents out like coins on motorways and esplanades; bead cars come tumbling down long highways; at her groin a railtrack like a zipper flashes sparks; her hills are haired with brush like cashmere wool and from their cleavage winking lights enlarge and travel, slender fingers ... softly pull themselves into the semblance of a barge. When night becomes too chill, she softly dons great overcoats of warmest-colored dawn. Originally published by The Lyric Loose Knit by Michael R. Burch She blesses the needle, fetches fine red stitches, criss-crossing, embroidering dreams in the delicate fabric. And if her hand jerks and twitches in puppet-like fits, she tells herself reality is not as threadbare as it seems ... that a little more darning may gather loose seams. She weaves an unraveling tapestry of fatigue and remorse and pain ... only the nervously pecking needle pricks her to motion, again and again. Published by The Chariton Review (as “The Knitter”) in-flight convergence by michael r. burch serene, almost angelic, the lights of the city extend over lumbering behemoths shrilly screeching displeasure; they say that nothing is certain, that nothing man dreams or ordains long endures his command here the streetlights that flicker and those blazing steadfast seem one from a distance; descend? they abruptly part ways, so that nothing is one which at times does not suddenly blend into garish insignificance in the familiar alleyways, in the white neon flash and the billboards of Convenience and man seems the afterthought of his own Brilliance as we thunder down the enlightened runways. Originally published by The Aurorean and nominated for the Pushcart Prize Chloe by Michael R. Burch There were skies onyx at night ... moons by day ... lakes pale as her eyes ... breathless winds undressing tall elms ... she would say that we’d loved, but some book said we’d sinned. Soon impatiens too fiery to stay sagged; the crocus bells drooped, golden-limned; things of brightness, rinsed out, ran to gray ... all the light of that world softly dimmed. Where our feet were inclined, we would stray; there were paths where dead weeds stood untrimmed, distant mountains that loomed in our way, thunder booming down valleys dark-hymned. What I found, I found lost in her face by yielding all my virtue to her grace. Originally published by Romantics Quarterly as “A Dying Fall” Come Down by Michael R. Burch for Harold Bloom and the Ivory Towerists Come down, O, come down from your high mountain tower. How coldly the wind blows, how late this chill hour ... and I cannot wait for a meteor shower to show you the time must be now, or not ever. Come down, O, come down from the high mountain heather blown far to the lees as fierce northern gales sever. Come down, or your hearts will grow cold as the weather when winter devours and spring returns never. I dedicated this poem to Harold Bloom after reading his introduction to the Best American Poetry anthology he edited. Bloom seemed intent on claiming poetry as the province of the uber-reader (i.e., himself), but I remember reading poems by Blake, Burns, Byron, cummings, Dickinson, Frost, Housman, Keats, Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, Shelley, Whitman, Wordsworth, Yeats, et al, and grokking them as a boy, without any “advanced” instruction from anyone. Erin by Michael R. Burch All that’s left of Ireland is her hair— bright carrot—and her milkmaid-pallid skin, her brilliant air of cavalier despair, her train of children—some conceived in sin, the others to avoid it. For nowhere is evidence of thought. Devout, pale, thin, gay, nonchalant, all radiance. So fair! How can men look upon her and not spin like wobbly buoys churned by her skirt’s brisk air? They buy. They grope to pat her nyloned shin, to share her elevated, pale Despair ... to find at last two spirits ease no one’s. All that’s left of Ireland is the Care, her impish grin, green eyes like leprechauns’. To Flower by Michael R. Burch When Pentheus [“grief’] went into the mountains in the garb of the baccae, his mother [Agave] and the other maenads, possessed by Dionysus, tore him apart (Euripides, Bacchae; Apollodorus 3.5.2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.511-733; Hyginus, Fabulae 184). The agave dies as soon as it blooms; the moonflower, or night-blooming cereus, is a desert plant of similar fate. We are not long for this earth, I know— you and I, all our petals incurled, till a night of pale brilliance, moonflower aglow. Is there love anywhere in this strange world? The agave knows best when it’s time to die and rages to life with such rapturous leaves her name means Illustrious. Each hour more high, she claws toward heaven, for, if she believes in love at all, she has left it behind to flower, to flower. When darkness falls she wilts down to meet it, where something crawls: beheaded, bewildered. And since love is blind, she never adored it, nor watches it go. Can we be as she is, moonflower aglow? Loose Knit by Michael R. Burch She blesses the needle, fetches fine red stitches, criss-crossing, embroidering dreams in the delicate fabric. And if her hand jerks and twitches in puppet-like fits, she tells herself reality is not as threadbare as it seems ... that a little more darning may gather loose seams. She weaves an unraveling tapestry of fatigue and remorse and pain ... only the nervously pecking needle pricks her to motion, again and again. Published by The Chariton Review (as “The Knitter”) Discrimination by Michael R. Burch The meter I had sought to find, perplexed, was ripped from books of "verse" that read like prose. I found it in sheet music, in long rows of hologramic CDs, in sad wrecks of long-forgotten volumes undisturbed half-centuries by archivists, unscanned. I read their fading numbers, frowned, perturbed― why should such tattered artistry be banned? I heard the sleigh bells’ jingles, vampish ads, the supermodels’ babble, Seuss’s books extolled in major movies, blurbs for abs ... A few poor thinnish journals crammed in nooks are all I’ve found this late to sell to those who’d classify free verse "expensive prose." Originally published by The Chariton Review The Harvest of Roses by Michael R. Burch I have not come for the harvest of roses― the poets' mad visions, their railing at rhyme ... for I have discerned what their writing discloses: weak words wanting meaning, beat torsioning time. Nor have I come for the reaping of gossamer― images weak, too forced not to fail; gathered by poets who worship their luster, they shimmer, impendent, resplendently pale. Originally published by The Raintown Review Love Has a Southern Flavor by Michael R. Burch Love has a Southern flavor: honeydew, ripe cantaloupe, the honeysuckle’s spout we tilt to basking faces to breathe out the ordinary, and inhale perfume ... Love’s Dixieland-rambunctious: tangled vines, wild clematis, the gold-brocaded leaves that will not keep their order in the trees, unmentionables that peek from dancing lines ... Love cannot be contained, like Southern nights: the constellations’ dying mysteries, the fireflies that hum to light, each tree’s resplendent autumn cape, a genteel sight ... Love also is as wild, as sprawling-sweet, as decadent as the wet leaves at our feet. Originally published by The Lyric Redolence by Michael R. Burch Now darkness ponds upon the violet hills; cicadas sing; the tall elms gently sway; and night bends near, a deepening shade of gray; the bass concerto of a bullfrog fills what silence there once was; globed searchlights play. Green hanging ferns adorn dark window sills, all drooping fronds, awaiting morning’s flares; mosquitoes whine; the lissome moth again flits like a veiled oud-dancer, and endures the fumblings of night’s enervate gray rain. And now the pact of night is made complete; the air is fresh and cool, washed of the grime of the city’s ashen breath; and, for a time, the fragrance of her clings, obscure and sweet. Published by The Eclectic Muse Mare Clausum by Michael R. Burch These are the narrows of my soul— dark waters pierced by eerie, haunting screams. And these uncharted islands bleakly home wild nightmares and deep, strange, forbidding dreams. Please don’t think to find pearls’ pale, unearthly glow within its shoals, nor corals in its reefs. For, though you seek to salvage Love, I know that vessel lists, and night brings no relief. Pause here, and look, and know that all is lost; then turn, and go; let salt consume, and rust. This sea is not for sailors, but the damned who lingered long past morning, till they learned why it is named: Mare Clausum. Leaf Fall by Michael R. Burch Whatever winds encountered soon resolved to swirling fragments, till chaotic heaps of leaves lay pulsing by the backyard wall. In lieu of rakes, our fingers sorted each dry leaf into its place and built a high, soft bastion against earth's gravitron― a patchwork quilt, a trampoline, a bright impediment to fling ourselves upon. And nothing in our laughter as we fell into those leaves was like the autumn's cry of also falling. Nothing meant to die could be so bright as we, so colorful― clad in our plaids, oblivious to pain we'd feel today, should we leaf-fall again. Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea In Praise of Meter by Michael R. Burch The earth is full of rhythms so precise the octave of the crystal can produce a trillion oscillations, yet not lose a second's beat. The ear needs no device to hear the unsprung rhythms of the couch drown out the mouth's; the lips can be debauched by kisses, should the heart put back its watch and find the pulse of love, and sing, devout. If moons and tides in interlocking dance obey their numbers, what's been left to chance? Should poets be more lax―their circumstance as humble as it is?―or readers wince to see their ragged numbers thin, to hear the moans of drones drown out the Chanticleer? Originally published by The Eclectic Muse Free Fall by Michael R. Burch These cloudless nights, the sky becomes a wheel where suns revolve around an axle star ... Look there, and choose. Decide which moon is yours. Sink Lethe-ward, held only by a heel. Advantage. Disadvantage. Who can tell? To see is not to know, but you can feel the tug sometimes―the gravity, the shell as lustrous as damp pearl. You sink, you reel toward some draining revelation. Air― too thin to grasp, to breath. Such pressure. Gasp. The stars invert, electric, everywhere. And so we fall, down-tumbling through night’s fissure ... two beings pale, intent to fall forever around each other―fumbling at love’s tether ... now separate, now distant, now together. Originally published by Sonnet Scroll In this Ordinary Swoon by Michael R. Burch In this ordinary swoon as I pass from life to death, I feel no heat from the cold, pale moon; I feel no sympathy for breath. Who I am and why I came, I do not know; nor does it matter. The end of every man’s the same and every god’s as mad as a hatter. I do not fear the letting go; I only fear the clinging on to hope when there’s no hope, although I lift my face to the blazing sun and feel the greater intensity of the wilder inferno within me. Huntress by Michael R. Burch after Baudelaire Lynx-eyed, cat-like and cruel, you creep across a crevice dropping deep into a dark and doomed domain. Your claws are sheathed. You smile, insane. Rain falls upon your path, and pain pours down. Your paws are pierced. You pause and heed the oft-lamented laws which bid you not begin again till night returns. You wail like wind, the sighing of a soul for sin, and give up hunting for a heart. Till sunset falls again, depart, though hate and hunger urge you―"On!" Heed, hearts, your hope―the break of dawn. Originally published by Sonnetto Poesia Water and Gold by Michael R. Burch You came to me as rain breaks on the desert when every flower springs to life at once, but joy's a wan illusion to the expert: the Bedouin has learned how not to want. You came to me as riches to a miser when all is gold, or so his heart believes, until he dies much thinner and much wiser, his gleaming bones hauled off by chortling thieves. You gave your heart too soon, too dear, too vastly; I could not take it in; it was too much. I pledged to meet your price, but promised rashly. I died of thirst, of your bright Midas touch. I dreamed you gave me water of your lips, then sealed my tomb with golden hieroglyphs. Originally published by The Lyric Fountainhead by Michael R. Burch I did not delight in love so much as in a kiss like linnets' wings, the flutterings of a pulse so soft the heart remembers, as it sings: to bathe there was its transport, brushed by marble lips, or porcelain,― one liquid kiss, one cool outburst from pale rosettes. What did it mean ... to float awhirl on minute tides within the compass of your eyes, to feel your alabaster bust grow cold within? Ecstatic sighs seem hisses now; your eyes, serene, reflect the sun's pale tourmaline. Originally published by Romantics Quarterly The Folly of Wisdom by Michael R. Burch She is wise in the way that children are wise, looking at me with such knowing, grave eyes I must bend down to her to understand. But she only smiles, and takes my hand. We are walking somewhere that her feet know to go, so I smile, and I follow ... And the years are dark creatures concealed in bright leaves that flutter above us, and what she believes― I can almost remember―goes something like this: the prince is a horned toad, awaiting her kiss. She wiggles and giggles, and all will be well if only we find him! The woodpecker’s knell as he hammers the coffin of some dying tree that once was a fortress to someone like me rings wildly above us. Some things that we know we are meant to forget. Life is a bloodletting, maple-syrup-slow. Originally published by Romantics Quarterly Pan by Michael R. Burch ... Among the shadows of the groaning elms, amid the darkening oaks, we fled ourselves ... ... Once there were paths that led to coracles that clung to piers like loosening barnacles ... ... where we cannot return, because we lost the pebbles and the playthings, and the moss ... ... hangs weeping gently downward, maidens’ hair who never were enchanted, and the stairs ... ... that led up to the Fortress in the trees will not support our weight, but on our knees ... ... we still might fit inside those splendid hours of damsels in distress, of rustic towers ... ... of voices of the wolves’ tormented howls that died, and live in dreams’ soft, windy vowels ... Originally published by Sonnet Scroll Hearthside by Michael R. Burch “When you are old and grey and full of sleep...” — W. B. Yeats For all that we professed of love, we knew this night would come, that we would bend alone to tend wan fires’ dimming bars—the moan of wind cruel as the Trumpet, gelid dew an eerie presence on encrusted logs we hoard like jewels, embrittled so ourselves. The books that line these close, familiar shelves loom down like dreary chaperones. Wild dogs, too old for mates, cringe furtive in the park, as, toothless now, I frame this parchment kiss. I do not know the words for easy bliss and so my shriveled fingers clutch this stark, long-unenamored pen and will it: Move. I loved you more than words, so let words prove. Published by Sonnet Writers, Setu (India), Borderless Journal (Singapore) and Vallance Review (Canada) how many Nights (i) by michael r. burch how many Nights we laughed to see the sun go down ... your hair a frightful, dizzy golden crown ... your skirt up to your thighs, displaying these and others of men’s baser fantasies ... that little pouting flower, slightly parted, with nothing intervening, nothing thwarted ... how many Nights (ii) by michael r. burch how many Nights we laughed to see the sun go down ... because the Night was made for reckless fun. Your golden crown, Your skin so soft, so smooth, and lightly downed. how many nights i wept glad tears to hold You tight against the years. Your eyes so bold, Your hair spun gold, and all the pleasures Your soft flesh foretold. how many Nights i did not dare to dream You were so real ... now all that i have left here is to feel in dreams surreal Time is the Nightmare God before whom men kneel. and how few Nights, i reckoned, in the end, we were allowed to gather, less to spend. Come! by Michael R. Burch Will you come to visit my grave, I wonder, in the season of lightning, the season of thunder, when I have lain so long in the indifferent earth that I have no girth? When my womb has conformed to the chastity your anemic Messiah envisioned for me, will you finally be pleased that my sex was thus rendered unpalatable, disengendered? And when those strange loathsome organs that troubled you so have been eaten by worms, will the heavens still glow with the approval of God that I ended a maid— thanks to a spade? And will you come to visit my grave, I wonder, in the season of lightning, the season of thunder? “Come!” won fifth place in the Writer’s Digest 2012 Rhyming Poetry Contest, out of over 9,500 overall contest entries. This is a sonnet despite the nonstandard stanza breaks. It was inspired by Dylan Thomas's poem "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower." There’s a Stirring and Awakening in the World by Michael R. Burch There’s a stirring and awakening in the world, and even so my spirit stirs within, imagining some Power beckoning— the Force which through the stamen gently whirrs, unlocking tumblers deftly, even mine. The grape grows wild-entangled on the vine, and here, close by, the honeysuckle shines. And of such life, at last there comes there comes the Wine. And so it is with spirits’ fruitful yield— the growth comes first, Green Vagrance, then the Bloom. The world somehow must give the spirit room to blossom, till its light shines—wild, revealed. And then at last the earth receives its store of blessings, as glad hearts cry—More! More! More! Keywords/Tags: poem, poetry, spring, stirring, awakening, spirit, power, force, grape, vine, wine, growth, bloom, blooming, blossom, blossoming Herbsttag (“Autumn Day”) by Rainer Maria Rilke loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch Lord, it is time. Let the immense summer go. Lay your long shadows over the sundials and over the meadows, let the free winds blow. Command the late fruits to fatten and shine; O, grant them another Mediterranean hour! Urge them to completion, and with power convey final sweetness to the heavy wine. Who has no house now, never will build one. Who's alone now, shall continue alone; he'll wake, read, write long letters to friends, and pace the tree-lined pathways up and down, restlessly, as autumn leaves drift and descend. Published by Measure, Setu (India), The HyperTexts, 3 Penny Paintings and The Society of Classical Poets Aflutter by Michael R. Burch This rainbow is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh.—Yahweh You are gentle now, and in your failing hour how like the child you were, you seem again, and smile as sadly as the girl (age ten?) who held the sparrow with the mangled wing close to her heart. It marveled at your power but would not mend. And so the world renews old vows it seemed to make: false promises spring whispers, as if nothing perishes that does not resurrect to wilder hues like rainbows’ eerie pacts we apprehend but cannot fail to keep. Now in your eyes I see the end of life that only dies and does not care for bright, translucent lies. Are tears so precious? These few, let us spend together, as before, then lay to rest these sparrows’ hearts aflutter at each breast. Published by The Lyric, Poetry Life & Times and The Eclectic Muse (Canada) For All That I Remembered by Michael R. Burch For all that I remembered, I forgot her name, her face, the reason that we loved ... and yet I hold her close within my thought: I feel the burnished weight of auburn hair that fell across her face, the apricot clean scent of her shampoo, the way she glowed so palely in the moonlight, angel-wan. The memory of her gathers like a flood and bears me to that night, that only night, when she and I were one, and if I could ... I’d reach to her this time and, smiling, brush the hair out of her eyes, and hold intact each feature, each impression. Love is such a threadbare sort of magic, it is gone before we recognize it. I would crush my lips to hers to hold their memory, if not more tightly, less elusively. Water and Gold by Michael R. Burch You came to me as rain breaks on the desert when every flower springs to life at once. But joys are wan illusions to the expert: the Bedouin has learned how not to want. You came to me as riches to a miser when all is gold, or so his heart believes, until he dies much thinner and much wiser, his gleaming bones hauled off by chortling thieves. You gave your heart too soon, too dear, too vastly; I could not take it in; it was too much. I pledged to meet your price, but promised rashly. I died of thirst, of your bright Midas touch. I dreamed you gave me water of your lips, then sealed my tomb with golden hieroglyphs. The Forge by Michael R. Burch To at last be indestructible, a poem must first glow, almost flammable, upon a thing inert, as gray, as dull as stone, then bend this way and that, and slowly cool at arm’s-length, something irreducible drawn out with caution, toughened in a pool of water so contrary just a hiss escapes it—water instantly a mist. It writhes, a thing of senseless shapelessness ... And then the driven hammer falls and falls. The horses prick their ears in nearby stalls. A soldier on his cot leans back and smiles. A sound of ancient import, with the ring of honest labor, sings of fashioning. Published by The Chariton Review See by Michael R. Burch See how her hair has thinned: it doesn’t seem like hair at all, but like the airy moult of emus who outraced the wind and left soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs, and deepens on itself, as though mirth took some comfort there, then burrowed deeply in, outlasting winter. See how very thin her features are—that time has made more spare, so that each bone shows, elegant and rare. For life remains undimmed in her grave eyes, and courage in her still-delighted looks: each face presented like a picture book’s. Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes. Flight 93 by Michael R. Burch I held the switch in trembling fingers ... asked why existence felt so small, so meaningless, like a minnow squirming feebly in my grasp ... ... vibrations of huge engines thrummed my arms as, glistening with sweat, I nudged the switch to OFF ... I heard the klaxon’s shrill alarms like vultures’ shriekings ... earthward, in a stall ... we floated ... earthward ... wings outstretched, aghast like Icarus ... as through the void we fell ... till nothing was so beautiful, so blue ... so vivid as that moment ... and I held an image of your face, and dreamed I flew into your arms ... the earth rushed up ... I knew such comfort, in that moment, loving you. Published by The Lyric If You Come to San Miguel by Michael R. Burch If you come to San Miguel before the orchids fall, we might stroll through lengthening shadows those deserted streets where love first bloomed ... You might buy the same cheap musk from that mud-spattered stall where with furtive eyes the vendor watched his fragrant wares perfume your breasts ... Where lean men mend tattered nets, disgruntled sea gulls chide; we might find that cafetucho where through grimy panes sunset implodes ... Where tall cranes spin canvassed loads, the strange anhingas glide. Green brine laps splintered moorings, rusted iron chains grind, weighed and anchored in the past, held fast by luminescent tides ... Should you come to San Miguel? Let love decide. Published by Romantics Quarterly To Please The Poet by Michael R. Burch To please the poet, words must dance— staccato, brisk, a two-step: so! Or waltz in elegance to time of music—mild, adagio. To please the poet, words must chance emotion in catharsis— flame. Or splash into salt seas, descend in sheets of silver-shining rain. To please the poet, words must prance and gallop, gambol, revel, rail. Or muse upon a moment—mute, obscure, unsure, imperfect, pale. To please the poet, words must sing, or croak, wart-tongued, imagining. Originally published by The Lyric The Endeavors of Lips by Michael R. Burch How sweet the endeavors of lips—to speak of the heights of those pleasures which left us weak in love’s strangely lit beds, where the cold springs creak: for there is no illusion like love ... Grown childlike, we wish for those storied days, for those bright sprays of flowers, those primrosed ways that curled to the towers of Yesterdays where She braided illusions of love ... “O, let down your hair!”—we might call and call, to the dark-slatted window, the moonlit wall ... but our love is a shadow; we watch it crawl like a spidery illusion. For love ... was never as real as that first kiss seemed when we read by the flashlight and dreamed. Published by Romantics Quarterly and The Eclectic Muse (Canada) Once for Beth Once when her kisses were fire incarnate and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame, when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes, leaving me listlessly sighing her name ... Once when her breasts were as pale, as beguiling, as wan rivers of sand shedding heat like a mist, when her words would at times softly, mildly rebuke me all the while as her lips would more wildly insist ... Once when the thought of her echoed and whispered through vast wastelands of need like a Bedouin chant, I ached for the touch of her lips with such longing that I vowed all my former vows to recant ... Once, only once, something bloomed, of a desiccate seed— this impossible blossom her wild rains of kisses decreed. Published by The Lyric, Writer’s Journal, Grassroots Poetry, Tucumcari Literary Journal, Unlikely Stories, Poetry Life & Times These Hallowed Halls by Michael R. Burch a young Romantic Poet mourns the passing of an age . . . A final stereo fades into silence and now there is seldom a murmur to trouble the slumber of these ancient halls. I stand by a window where others have watched the passage of time—alone, not untouched. And I am as they were—unsure—for the days stretch out ahead, a bewildering maze. Ah, faithless lover—that I had never touched your breast, nor felt the stirrings of my heart, which until that moment had peacefully slept. For now I have known the exhilaration of a heart having leapt from the pinnacle of Love, and the result of each such infatuation ... the long freefall to earth, as the moon glides above. Oasis by Michael R. Burch for Beth I want tears to form again in the shriveled glands of these eyes dried all these long years by too much heated knowing. I want tears to course down these parched cheeks, to star these cracked lips like an improbable dew in the heart of a desert. I want words to burble up like happiness, like the thought of love, like the overwhelming, shimmering thought of you to a nomad who has only known drought. Melting by Michael R. Burch for Beth Entirely, as spring consumes the snow, the thought of you consumes me: I am found in rivulets, dissolved to what I know of former winters’ passions. Underground, perhaps one slender icicle remains of what I was before, in some dark cave— a stalactite, long calcified, now drains to sodden pools whose milky liquid laves the colder rock, thus washing something clean that never saw the light, that never knew the crust could break above, that light could stream: so luminous, so bright, so beautiful . . . I lie revealed, and so I stand transformed, and all because you smiled on me, and warmed. Published by Borderless Journal Afterglow by Michael R. Burch for Beth The night is full of stars. Which still exist? Before time ends, perhaps one day we’ll know. For now I hold your fingers to my lips and feel their pulse ... warm, palpable and slow ... once slow to match this reckless spark in me, this moon in ceaseless orbit I became, compelled by wilder gravity to flee night’s universe of suns, for one pale flame ... for one pale flame that seemed to signify the Zodiac of all, the meaning of love’s wandering flight past Neptune. Now to lie in dawning recognition is enough ... enough each night to bask in you, to know the face of love ... eyes closed ... its afterglow. All Afterglow by Michael R. Burch Something remarkable, perhaps ... the color of her eyes ... though I forget the color of her eyes ... perhaps her hair the way it blew about ... I do not know just what it was about her that has kept her thought lodged deep in mine ... unmelted snow that lasted till July would be less rare, clasped in some frozen cavern where the wind sculpts bright grotesqueries, ignoring springs’ and summers’ higher laws ... there thawing slow and strange by strange degrees, one tick beyond the freezing point which keeps all things the same ... till what remains is fragile and unlike the world above, where melted snows and rains form rivulets that, inundate with sun, evaporate, and in life’s cyclic stream remake the world again ... I do not know that we can be remade—all afterglow. [Note: “inundate with snow” is not a typo.] A Vain Word by Michael R. Burch Oleanders at dawn preen extravagant whorls as I read in leaves’ Sanskrit brief moments remaining till sunset implodes, till the moon strands grey pearls under moss-stubbled oaks, full of whispers, complaining to the darkening autumn, how swiftly life goes— as I fled before love ... Now, through leaves trodden black, shivering, I wander as winter’s first throes of cool listless snow drench my cheeks, back and neck. I discerned in one season all eternities of grief, the specter of death sprawled out under the rose, the last consequence of faith in the flight of one leaf, the incontinence of age, as life’s bright torrent slows. O, where are you now?—I was timid, absurd. I would find comfort again in a vain word. Published by Chrysanthemum and Tucumcari Literary Review Break Time by Michael R. Burch for those who lost loved ones on 9-11 Intrude upon my grief; sit; take a spot of milk to cloud the blackness that you feel; add artificial sweeteners to conceal the bitter aftertaste of loss. You’ll heal if I do not. The coffee’s hot. You speak: of bundt cakes, polls, the price of eggs. You glance twice at your watch, cough, look at me askance. The TV drones oeuvres of high romance in syncopated lip-synch. Should I feel the underbelly of Love’s warm Ideal, its fuzzy-wuzzy tummy, and not reel toward some dark conclusion? Disappear to pale, dissolving atoms. Were you here? I brush you off: like saccharine, like a tear. Published by Sonnet Writers, Freshet and Sontey (Czechoslovakia) At Cædmon’s Grave by Michael R. Burch “Cædmon’s Hymn,” composed at the Monastery of Whitby (a North Yorkshire fishing village), is one of the oldest known poems written in the English language, dating back to around 680 A.D. According to legend, Cædmon, an illiterate Anglo-Saxon cowherd, received the gift of poetic composition from an angel; he subsequently founded a school of Christian poets. Unfortunately, only nine lines of Cædmon’s verse survive, in the writings of the Venerable Bede. Whitby, tiny as it is, reappears later in the history of English literature, having been visited, in diametric contrast, by Lewis Carroll and Bram Stoker’s ghoulish yet evocative Dracula. At the monastery of Whitby, on a day when the sun sank through the sea, and the gulls shrieked wildly, jubilant, free, while the wind and time blew all around, I paced those dusk-enamored grounds and thought I heard the steps resound of Carroll, Stoker and good Bede who walked there, too, their spirits freed —perhaps by God, perhaps by need— to write, and with each line, remember the glorious light of Cædmon’s ember, scorched tongues of flame words still engender. Here, as darkness falls, at last we meet. I lay this pale garland of words at his feet. Published by The Lyric Altared Spots by Michael R. Burch The mother leopard buries her cub, then cries three nights for his bones to rise clad in new flesh, to celebrate the sunrise. Good mother leopard, pensive thought and fiercest love’s wild insurrection yield no certainty of a resurrection. Man’s tried them both, has added tears, chants, dances, drugs, séances, tombs’ white alabaster prayer-rooms, wombs where dead men’s frozen genes convene ... there is no answer—death is death. So bury your son, and save your breath. Or emulate earth’s “highest species”— write a few strange poems and odd treatises. Crunch by Michael R. Burch A cockroach could live nine months on the dried mucous you scrounge from your nose then fling like seedplants to the slowly greening floor ... You claim to be the advanced life form, but, mon frere, sometimes as you snatch encrusted kinks of hair from your Leviathan ass and muse softly on zits, icebergs snap off the Antarctic. You’re an evolutionary quandary, in need of a sacral ganglion to control your enlarged, contradictory hindquarters: surely the brain should migrate closer to its primary source of information, in order to ensure the survival of the species. Cockroaches thrive on eyeboogers and feces; their exoskeletons expand and gleam like burnished armor in the presence of uranium. But your cranium is not nearly so adaptable. “Crunch” is a poem about evolution and survival of the fittest which questions where human beings really are the planet earth’s most advanced life forms. Duet (II) by Michael R. Burch If love is just an impulse meant to bring two tiny hearts together, skittering like hamsters from their Quonsets late at night in search of lust’s productive exercise . . . If love is the mutation of some gene made radiant—an accident of bliss played out by two small actors on a screen of silver mesh, who never even kiss . . . If love is evolution, nature’s way of sorting out its DNA in pairs, of matching, mating, sculpting flesh’s clay . . . why does my wrinkled hamster climb his stairs to set his wheel revolving, then descend and stagger off . . . to make hers fly again? Published by Bewildering Stories Album by Michael R. Burch I caress them—trapped in brittle cellophane— and I see how young they were, and how unwise; and I remember their first flight—an old prop plane, their blissful arc through alien blue skies ... And I touch them here through leaves which—tattered, frayed— are also wings, but wings that never flew: like Nabokov’s wings—pinned, held. Here, time delayed, their features never merged, remaining two ... And Grief, which lurked unseen beyond the lens or in shadows where It crept on furtive claws as It scritched Its way into their hearts, depends on sorrows such as theirs, and works Its jaws ... and slavers for Its meat—those young, unwise, who naively dare to dream, yet fail to see how, lumbering sunward, Hope, ungainly, flies, clutching to Her ruffled breast what must not be. Because You Came to Me by Michael R. Burch for Beth Because you came to me with sweet compassion and kissed my furrowed brow and smoothed my hair, I do not love you after any fashion, but wildly, in despair. Because you came to me in my black torment and kissed me fiercely, blazing like the sun upon parched desert dunes, till in dawn’s foment they melt ... I am undone. Because I am undone, you have remade me as suns bring life, as brilliant rains endow the earth below with leaves, where you now shade me and bower me, somehow. Caveat by Michael R. Burch If only we were not so eloquent, we might sing, and only sing, not to impress, but only to enjoy, to be enjoyed. We might inundate the earth with thankfulness for light, although it dies, and make a song of night descending on the earth like bliss, with other lights beyond—not to be known— but only to be welcomed and enjoyed, before all worlds and stars are overthrown ... as a lover’s hands embrace a sleeping face and find it beautiful for emptiness of all but joy. There is no thought to love but love itself. How senseless to redress, in darkness, such becoming nakedness . . . Originally published by Clementine Unbound The Princess and the Pauper by Michael R. Burch for Norman Kraeft in memory of his beloved wife June Here was a woman bright, intent on life, who did not flinch from Death, but caught his eye and drew him, powerless, into her spell of wanting her himself, so much the lie that she was meant for him—obscene illusion!— made him seem a monarch throned like God on high, when he was less than nothing; when to die meant many stultifying, pained embraces. She shed her gown, undid the tangled laces that tied her to the earth: then she was his. Now all her erstwhile beauty he defaces and yet she grows in hallowed loveliness— her ghost beyond perfection—for to die was to ascend. Now he begs, penniless. Published by Katrina Anthology, The Lyric and Trinacria Every Man Has a Dream by Michael R. Burch lines composed at Elliston Square Every man has a dream that he cannot quite touch ... a dream of contentment, of soft, starlit rain, of a breeze in the evening that, rising again, reminds him of something that cannot have been, and he calls this dream love. And each man has a dream that he fears to let live, for he knows: to succumb is to throw away all. So he curses, denies it and locks it within the cells of his heart and he calls it a sin, this madness, this love. But each man in his living falls prey to his dreams, and he struggles, but so he ensures that he falls, and he finds in the end that he cannot deny the joy that he feels or the tears that he cries in the darkness of night for this light he calls love. Free Fall (II) by Michael R. Burch I have no earthly remembrance of you, as if we were never of earth, but merely white clouds adrift, swirling together through Himalayan serene altitudes— no more man and woman than exhaled breath—unable to fall back to solid existence, despite the air’s sparseness: all our being borne up, because of our lightness, toward the sun’s unendurable brightness . . . But since I touched you, fire consumes each wing! We who are unable to fly, stall contemplating disaster. Despair like an anchor, like an iron ball, heavier than ballast, sinks on its thick-looped chain toward the earth, and soon thereafter there will be sufficient pain to recall existence, to make the coming darkness everlasting. Fledglings by Michael R. Burch With her small eyes, pale blue and unforgiving, she taught me: December is not for those unweaned of love, the chirping nestlings who bicker for worms with dramatic throats still pinkly exposed, ... who have yet to learn the first harsh lesson of survival: to devour their weaker siblings in the high-leafed ferned fortress and impregnable bower from which men must fly like improbable dreams to become poets. They have yet to grasp that, before they can soar starward like fanciful archaic machines, they must first assimilate the latest technology, ... or lose all in the sudden realization of gravity, following Icarus’s sun-unwinged, singed trajectory. The Higher Atmospheres by Michael R. Burch Whatever we became climbed on the thought of Love itself; we floated on plumed wings ten thousand miles above the breasted earth that had vexed us to such Distance; now all things seem small and pale, a girdle’s handsbreadth girth ... I break upon the rocks; I break; I fling my human form about; I writhe; I writhe. Invention is not Mastery, nor wings Salvation. Here the Vulture cruelly chides and plunges at my eyes, and coos and sings ... Oh, some will call the sun my doom, but Love melts callow wax the higher atmospheres leave brittle. I flew high: not high enough to melt such frozen resins ... thus, Her jeers. In the Whispering Night by Michael R. Burch for George King In the whispering night, when the stars bend low till the hills ignite to a shining flame, when a shower of meteors streaks the sky as the lilies sigh in their beds, for shame, we must steal our souls, as they once were stolen, and gather our vigor, and all our intent. We must heave our husks into some raging ocean and laugh as they shatter, and never repent. We must dance in the darkness as stars dance before us, soar, Soar! through the night on a butterfly's breeze: blown high, upward-yearning, twin spirits returning to the heights of awareness from which we were seized. Published by Songs of Innocence, Romantics Quarterly, Poetry Life & Times and The Chained Muse Elemental by Michael R. Burch for and after Dylan Thomas The poet delves earth’s detritus—hard toil— for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet; each syllable his pen excretes—dense soil, dark images impacted, rooted clay. The poet sees the sea but feels its meaning— the teeming brine, the mirrored oval flame that leashes and excites its turgid surface ... then squanders years imagining love’s the same. Belatedly, he turns to what lies broken— the scarred and furrowed plot he fiercely sifts, among death’s sicksweet dungs and composts seeking one element whose scorching flame uplifts. Premonition by Michael R. Burch Now the evening has come to a close and the party is over ... we stand in the doorway and watch as they go— each stranger, each acquaintance, each casual lover. They walk to their cars and they laugh as they go, though we know their forced laughter’s the wine ... then they pause at the road where the dark asphalt flows endlessly on toward Zion ... and they kiss one another as though they were friends, and they promise to meet again “soon” ... but the rivers of Jordan roll on without end, and the mockingbird calls to the moon ... and the katydids climb up the cropped hanging vines, and the crickets chirp on out of tune ... and their shadows, defined by the cryptic starlight, seem spirits torn loose from their tombs. And we know their brief lives are just eddies in time, that their hearts are unreadable runes carved out to stand like strange totems in sand when their corpses lie ravaged and ruined ... You take my clenched fist and you give it a kiss as though it were something you loved, and the tears fill your eyes, brimming with the soft light of the stars winking sagely above ... Then you whisper, "It's time that we went back inside; if you'd like, we can sit and just talk for a while." And the hope in your eyes burns too deep, so I lie and I say, "Yes, I would," to your small, troubled smile. Leave Taking (II) by Michael R. Burch Although the earth renews itself, and spring is lovelier for all the rot of fall, I think of yellow leaves that cling and hang by fingertips to life, let go . . . and all men see is one bright instance of departure, the flame that, at least height, warms nothing. I, have never liked to think the ants that march here will deem them useless, grimly tramping by, and so I gather leaves’ dry hopeless brilliance, to feel their prickly edges, like my own, to understand their incurled worn resilience— youth’s tenderness long, callously, outgrown. I even feel the pleasure of their sting, the stab of life. I do not think —at all— to be renewed, as earth is every spring. I do not hope words cluster where they fall. I only hope one leaf, wild-spiraling, illuminates the void, till glad hearts sing. It's not that every leaf must finally fall ... it's just that we can never catch them all. Because She Craved the Very Best by Michael R. Burch Because she craved the very best, he took her East, he took her West; he took her where there were no wars and brought her bright bouquets of stars ... The blush and fragrances of roses, the hush an evening sky imposes, moonbeams pale and garlands rare, and golden combs to match her hair ... A nightingale to sing all night, white wings, to let her soul take flight ... She stabbed him with a poisoned sting and as he lay there dying, she screamed, "I wanted everything!" and started crying. Wonderland by Michael R. Burch We stood, kids of the Lamb, to put to test the beatific anthems of the blessed, the sentence of the martyr, and the pen’s sincere religion. Magnified, the lens shot back absurd reflections of each face— a carnival-like mirror. In the space between the silver backing and the glass, we caught a glimpse of Joan, a frumpy lass who never brushed her hair or teeth, and failed to pass on GO, and frequently was jailed for awe’s beliefs. Like Alice, she grew wee to fit the door, then couldn’t lift the key. We failed the test, and so the jury’s hung. In Oz, “The Witch is Dead” ranks number one. Artificial Smile by Michael R. Burch I’m waiting for my artificial teeth to stretch belief, to hollow out the cob of zealous righteousness, to grasp life’s stub between clenched molars, and yank out the grief. Mine must be art-official—zenlike Art— a disembodied, white-enameled grin of Cheshire manufacture. Part by part, the human smile becomes mock porcelain. Till in the end, the smile alone remains: titanium-based alloys undestroyed with graves’ worm-eaten contents, all the pains of bridgework unrecalled, and what annoyed us most about the corpses rectified to quaintest dust. The Smile winks, deified. www.firesermon.com by Michael R. Burch your gods have become e-vegetation; your saints—pale thumbnail icons; to enlarge their images, right-click; it isn’t hard to populate your web-site; not to mention cool sound effects are nice; Sound Blaster cards can liven up dull sermons, [zing some fire]; your drives need added Zip; you must discard your balky paternosters: Sex!!! Desire!!! these are the watchwords, catholic; you must as Yahoo! did, employ a little lust :) if you want great e-commerce; hire a bard to spruce up ancient language, shed the dust of centuries of sameness; lameness SUCKS; your gods grew blurred; go 3D; scale; adjust. Happily Never After (the Second Curse of the Horny Toad) by Michael R. Burch He did not think of love of Her at all frog-plangent nights, as moons engoldened roads through crumbling stonewalled provinces, where toads (nee princes) ruled in chinks and grew so small at last to be invisible. He smiled (the fables erred so curiously), and thought bemusedly of being reconciled to human flesh, because his heart was not incapable of love, but, being cursed a second time, could only love a toad’s . . . and listened as inflated frogs rehearsed cheekbulging tales of anguish from green moats . . . and thought of her soft croak, her skin fine-warted, his anemic flesh, and how true love was thwarted. Originally published by Romantics Quarterly 130 Refuted by Michael R. Burch My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red ... — Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 Seas that sparkle in the sun without its light would have no beauty; but the light within your eyes is theirs alone; it owes no duty. And that flame, not half as bright, is meant for me, and brings delight. Coral formed beneath the sea, though scarlet-tendriled, cannot warm me; while your lips, not half so red, just touching mine, at once inflame me. And the searing flames your lips arouse fathomless oceans fail to douse. Bright roses’ brief affairs, declared when winter comes, will wither quickly. Your cheeks, though paler when compared with them?—more lasting, never prickly. And your cheeks, so dear and warm, far vaster treasures, need no thorns. Originally published by Romantics Quarterly Heat Lightening by Michael R. Burch Each night beneath the elms, we never knew which lights beyond dark hills might stall, advance, then lurch into strange headbeams tilted up like searchlights seeking contact in the distance . . . . . . quiescent unions . . . thoughts of bliss, of hope . . . long-dreamt appearances of wished-on stars . . . like childhood’s long-occluded, nebulous slow drift of half-formed visions . . . slip and bra . . . Wan moonlight traced your features, perilous, in danger of extinction, should your hair fall softly on my eyes, or should a kiss cause them to close, or should my fingers dare to leave off childhood for some new design of whiter lace, of flesh incarnadine. Hymn to an Art-o-matic Laundromat by Michael R. Burch after Richard Moore’s “Hymn to an Automatic Washer” O, terrible-immaculate ALL-cleansing godly Laundromat, where cleanliness is next to Art —a bright Kinkade (bought at K-Mart), a Persian rug (made in Taiwan), a Royal Bonn Clock (time zone Guam)— embrace my ass in cushioned vinyl, erase all marks: anal, vaginal, penile, inkspot, red wine, dirt. O, sterilize her skirt, my shirt, my skidmarked briefs, her padded bra; suds-away in your white maw all filth, the day’s accumulation. Make us pure by INUNDATION. Published by The Oldie, where it was the winner of a poetry contest If Love Were Infinite by Michael R. Burch If love were infinite, how I would pity our lives, which through long years’ exactitude might seem a pleasant blur—one interlude without prequel or sequel—wanly pretty, the gentlest flame the heart might bring to bear to tepid hearts too sure of love to flare. If love were infinite, why would I linger caressing your fine hair, lost in the thought each auburn strand must shrivel with this finger, and so in thrall to time be gently brought to final realization: love, amazing, must leave us ash for all our fiery blazing. If flesh’s heat once led me straight to you, love’s arrow’s burning mark must pierce me through. Imperfect Sonnet by Michael R. Burch A word before the light is doused: the night is something wriggling through an unclean mind, as rats creep through a tenement. And loss is written cheaply with the moon’s cracked gloss like lipstick through the infinite, to show love’s pale yet sordid imprint on us. Go. We have not learned love yet, except to cleave. I saw the moon rise once ... but to believe ... was of another century ... and now ... I have the urge to love, but not the strength. Despair, once stretched out to its utmost length, lies couched in squalor, watching as the screen reveals “love’s” damaged images: its dreams ... and masturbating limply, screams and screams. Renown for Jeremy Words fail us when, at last, we lie unread amid night’s parchment leaves, life’s chapter past. Whatever I have gained of life, I lost, except for this bright emblem of your smile . . . and I would grasp its meaning closer for a longer while . . . but I am glad with all my heart to be unheard, and smile, bound here, still strangely mortal, instructed by wise Love not to be sad, when to be the lesser poet meant to be “the world’s best dad.” Late Frost by Michael R. Burch The matters of the world like sighs intrude; out of the darkness, windswept winter light too frail to solve the puzzle of night’s terror resolves the distant stars to salts: not white, but gray, dissolving in the frigid darkness. I stoke cooled flames and stand, perhaps revealed as equally as gray, a faded hardness too malleable with time to be annealed. Light sprinkles through dull flakes, devoid of color; which matters not. I did not think to find a star like Bethlehem’s. I turn my collar to trudge outside for cordwood. There, outlined within the doorway’s arch, I see the tree that holds its boughs aloft, as if to show they harbor neither love, nor enmity, but only stars: insignias I know— false ornaments that flash, overt and bright, but do not warm and do not really glow, and yet somehow bring comfort, soft delight: a rainbow glistens on new-fallen snow. Over(t) Simplification by Michael R. Burch “Keep it simple, stupid.” A sonnet is not simple, but the rule is simply this: let poems be beautiful, or comforting, or horrifying. Move the reader, and the world will not reprove the idiosyncrasies of too few lines, too many syllables, or offbeat beats. It only matters that she taps her feet or that he frowns, or smiles, or grimaces, or sits bemused—a child—as images of worlds he’d lost come flooding back, and then . . . they’ll cheer the poet’s insubordinate pen. A sonnet is not simple, but the rule is simply this: let poems be beautiful. The Lingering and the Unconsoled Heart by Michael R. Burch There is a silence— the last unspoken moment before death, when the moon, cratered and broken, is all madness and light, when the breath comes low and complaining, and the heart is a ruin of emptiness and night. There is a grief— the grief of a lover's embrace while faith still shimmers in a mother’s tears ... There is no dismaler time, nor place, while the faint glimmer of life is ours that the lingering and the unconsoled heart fears beyond this: seeing its own stricken face in eyes that drift toward some incomprehensible place. Keywords/Tags: modern, sonnet, sonnets, free, verse, song, traditional, romantic, romanticism, art, artisan

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