Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
LA burns, smoke blackens sky,
people flee and abandon cars,
90 and 100 mile an hour winds
feed and fan the flames, people
losing everything, even being
rich, or famous cannot save their
big homes and life's possessions.
Someplace in that expanding,
raging inferno my son, an Oregon
Fire Chief leads 300 Firefighters
and their 75 engines and water tenders
over 900 miles south into the fire storm.
Along with firefighters from other
states. Mutual support needed & rendered.

One of my son's firemen is his own son,
and my 21year old rookie grandson
with a little over one year on the job.
His seasoned father has fought many
battles with all kinds of fires, he set to
retire in May after 30 years on the job.
He has seen it all, with never a scratch
or a "singe", but my grandson has never
experienced anything of this magnitude,
being one of a 4-man truck crew battling
side by side in the belly of a raging beast.

All these 30 years I've worried for my son's
safety, now it starts anew, for our boy barely
a man that now walks in his father's shoes.

I will not sleep well until they are all
home safely. I grieve for the victims
of this awful tragedy.
When others run away from fires,
or danger these rare breeds run
towards them, firefighters and
police unselfish public servants.
And we would all be in deep
Doodoo without them.
East...and west, are we?
north, and south?.....maybe...
we were nurtured with love,
our eyes and our minds opened
to different isms that helped shape our
values...we were brought up, bearing our
folks' customs, traditions. principles...
we have different faiths...some practice...some
don't...some, don't even subscribe, yet, survive.

we have dry and monsoon season...in
other parts, pleasant weather, cold winds,
and in some parts, snow.....turning to ice

we are  a mix of white skin, seeking for a tan,
and brown-skin, hiding from the sun;
one's night, is the other's day,
there are surfers among us, playing with the waves,
there at the cusp...gambling...daring fate...
there are those who hide from silent freezing winters,
finding warmth and comfort in long hot summers...

countless points of comparison,  
yet, we've something beautiful in common,
a connection of feelings, of words...our poetry,
flowing like blood, through our veins...endlessly
feeding, fueling our hearts and minds, with classy,
themes....sometimes bold, mushy, or....sassy...
no set skeds...we do it even through adversity...

we write......

we tell about our escape from life's banalities,
mindscapes, landscapes immersed in frivolities

yet, we await the marvels of each  morning we wake,
remembering gratitude, in every breath we take...

years have passed us by,
still, plays this soft music that mollifies
and inspires......heard only by you and i
prodding us, through hours, of day or night

while you exist in your own part of the world,
as i, in my hot, humid cosmos, long for cold.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::


Sally


© Rosalia Rosario A. Bayan
    May, 19, 2019
(a love poem, edited...for all Hello Poetry writers)
(a repost from May 2019)
You are sky and sea
beyond little me
You are inescapable
unable to be locked up
or corralled or expressed in mere words
words limit your being
yet they are what we have
for the time being
but we have music which is beyond mere words
we have light and dark
we have canvas and computers
but computers work with digits
ones and zeroes
in the sky in the ether
in infinite variety.

Infinite variety
that is who you are
always new
ageless angleless
It is what attracts me to you
you in your agelessness
I’ve always been fascinated with the new
that is one reason I’m drawn to you.
You are ever changing
yet religion speaks of your changelessness.
Why is that?

           Humans need patterns and habits,
           customs and values and norms
           to give them a sense of who they are.

          Yet what is fascinating about you is your changeability.
          You got it my boy.
          Thus the limits of religion.
I often journal in the form of a conversation with my higher power. The above is the product of one of my journal entries.
Then, there were the moments
When the air was crisp and sweet,
When you threw me funny comments
That, in truth, I failed to meet.
When the shadows of the forenoon
Shone like icicles of blue
And the mood was one of indigo
A coalescence, Love, of you.

Then there were moments
When the doubt began to seep,
Where anxiety intruded
And bled me of my sleep.
In those darkened halls of velvet
Where crimson nightmares lurk
And the horror of a memory
Where dread began its work.

But then there were the moments
Where the sunshine had its way,
Where the liquid green of leafage
In the crystal breeze would sway.
The platitudes would vanish,
Condescension's cease,
When the softened light of raindrops
Kissed your mirrored pond of Peace.

M@Foxglove.Taranaki.NZ
12 January 2025
entombed to die together.,

prisoner utters these words to
their lover~companion,
who has joined him freely, and
that conceptual, hardly casual,
resonates, pinging my sonar
brain long after the famous
opera concludes, leading me
unforced to the writing table…

Saturday 2:1l:25 9:27AM

now, after having lived and
loved for well over 25,000 days,
there is much data to review
much of it corrupt & corrupted,
and of course, it must be done
man-u-ally (manually), and
will require filtering to edit
out the natural edits that the
fog of war, time, and the innate
human desire to improve one’s
recorded history, I conclude;

Not only have I loved others
desperately,

beyond reason and sensibility,
but more than once,
more than twice,
more than my
faltering courage dare confess…

remembering the physical manifestations, is almost eerily too easy,
to recall the angst, physicality
of loving too well,
heart chested pain worthy of a doctor visit,
desperate hunger feeding on/off
of depression costuming as dreary sadness,
but so overtaking that I am the
cliche of the human berefetted of
all energy, except for periodic moaning,
visitors refused, sleeplessness my
only steady companion

writing worse poetry
than this,
dialing, hanging up, repeatedly,
paths crossing in hallways,
and breaking me down to
aching breaking pieces

later,
when all grownup,
deserted wife and children
for the restoration of another
woman’s love,
but dragged down by
actions & inactions,
she wearied of my agoniste
and left me to
treble tremble when the weight
of the load, they/I
put right on me

now, sipping my morning 3-cuppa of
Caribbean brown beans,
my fresh eyes tearing,
my internal tearing
myself up/down,
half in mocking, half in sympathy
for the lost soul once was,
no longer desperate
but nonetheless joyous that
more than once I was mired
in a state so encompassing
and compressing,
was overruled overrun
overcome
with the gain and the pain
of loving desperately
and happy contented
that it shall not happily happen again,
for my poor heart already repaired
by a heart surgeon,
but with damage left from
life’s and loving’s accidents and accumulations, muscles weakened,
parts clogged with memories
beyond repair,
if loving desperately should come back
one last time,
winking, he’s thinking, ha,
for last licks,

*!it would be in a closing act sorta way,
a great fitting fitful accomplishment to die,
one last time, desperately in love!
Earth comes out of its greenroom

I bend at the window
looking through the glass
down upon its vastness

something out there is wrong

the future's not what it used to be
a shadow tells me

I feel mysterious today
a stranger to myself
I don't recognize my voice

objects outlive us
but we are more than an accident of stars
someday we will be infinite
breaking into the distance

by serene velocity
by delicate transitions

bringing us closer
to a renewed interest in happiness
Next page