1619

Not knowing when the Dawn will come,
I open every Door,
Or has it Feathers, like a Bird,
Or Billows, like a Shore—

They say to have a writer
Fall in love with you
So you will never die.
But I say
Seize the love of a musician.
Someone to write you
Into colors in the air
And star-****** behind the eyelids
Of any who will listen
To the tale of you that they wrote.

Musicians, like writers,
Bring light through a fog
With their love-speak and poems.
But music-makers
Can create flowers in winter
And warmth without fire.
Their melodies dance
Over the swish of grass blades
And between the tooth-gaps of children
Whose fingers are sticky
With sweet popsicle juice
While an oil-painted scene
Is painted in your mind.

So be cherished my a musician
And hear yourself forever;
Be sung by a hundred different voices,
Danced by fairies and pretty young girls,
Costumed in dissonance,
Etched into souls.
For you can never really die
When you echo forever in the cavern
Of a good song.

Oh, may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men's search
To vaster issues. So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing a beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity
For which we struggled, failed, and agonized
With widening retrospect that bred despair.
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued,
A vicious parent shaming still its child,
Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved;
Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies,
Die in the large and charitable air,
And all our rarer, better, truer self
That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
That watched to ease the burden of the world,
Laboriously tracing what must be,
And what may yet be better, -- saw within
A worthier image for the sanctuary,
And shaped it forth before the multitude,
Divinely human, raising worship so
To higher reverence more mixed with love, --
That better self shall live till human Time
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
Unread forever. This is life to come, --
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, -- be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

The perfect world
Would be one
Without the idea
Of perfection

I just thought of this and wanted to see where it can go. I know I don't have enough followers for this kinda thing but oh well I have 69 (Teehee). The topic is Paradise. Make your own paradise in the form of a poem. Whether your paradise is found within the smile of your crush or a world with no homework I don't care. You have all the power here.
Tag it #paradisechallenge and I'll be checking the tag occasionally to see if anyone even cares. That's all. (fades into darkness)

On a fast train straight to nowhere,
I got off at Despair City;
chock full of loathing for my soul,
and wallowing in self-pity.

I had a case of heebie-jeebies,
couldn't hold my peace for nothing;
all my calmness was shot to hell,
that my life would not mean something.

Disgust was staring in my face,
the blues were pounding on my door;
I was losing friends, left and right,
life was hopeless; without a core.

I was on a bus to nowhere,
I got off in Sorrow city;
a rundown town of broken spirits,
its condition wasn't pretty.

If there's a hell-hole, this was it,
polluted, dark and decadent;
and the turmoil never ended,
no matter where it was I went.