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natalie Nov 2013
I. Amazing Grace, How Sweet The Sound

Dear Jesus
I’d pray while curled up
late at night, in my twin bed—
Thank You for my salvation.
Thank You for leaving your Father,
and enduring such cruel betrayal,
and dying such a wicked death at the
hands of Your own people on the cross

and so on, and so forth.
Thank you for my family,
for my Mom and my Dad,
for Madelyn and Josh,
because, even though we don’t
always get along, we love each other.
And thank You for my dog, Max.
He really is the best!

This is where I’d smile,
picturing the happy, chubby Beagle,
gray fur just starting to creep in.
Thank You for our house, and our cars,
and our church, and Pastor Amsbaugh,
and my friends Ashley, Danny, Amanda,
Jonathan, Laura, Alexa, and Josh

et cetera, et cetera.
Thank you for all of your blessings.
There are too many to count, Jesus.
I pray for Grandmom and Granddad Parrish,
please watch over their health, because they
need Your healing touch, and please,
please, please, save Granddad,
before it’s too late.
I also pray for Grandmom and Granddad Spicer—
even though they’re healthy,
they need to get saved too.
Heaven won’t be the same without them.
I ask You to help me with school,
help me to study hard and get
good grades, and to be a good student
for Mom, and to always honor You.
In Your name, Amen.

Then I would ***** the lights,
and stare at the ceiling,
sometimes for hours,
hoping my thoughts,
my prayers,
broke through the layers
of paint and plaster and wood,
made it all the way to Heaven,
to Jesus,
who’d be sitting in His throne,
listening so intently,
just waiting to answer each
and every request.


II. That Saved A Wretch Like Me

The first time I got saved, I was four,
too young to understand the implications
of raising my hand and following my
Sunday school teacher’s repeat-after-me,
rinse and repeat prayer.
I lived my childhood as the good little
Christian my parents needed me to be,
following the Ten Commandments,
attending church three times a week,
even trying to enjoy the dull services,
the endless sitting and standing,
the same hymns every week—
but I was no different than that prayer
nearly a decade before,
just going through the motions.
At twelve, after an evangelist spewed
fire and brimstone for an hour,
my Mary Janes were trembling,
and I prayed again, hoping this time,
maybe, I would feel that peace
that passeth all understanding.
But still, I was lonely and searching—
my salvation was hollow, useless.
So, at fifteen, while tucked away at a
summer camp in the Appalachians
I prayed again, begging,
This is the last time, God.
I’m trying, but You’ve got to help me
.
The bitterness at my abandonment
rose in my heart like the pretty balloon that
a child has grasped onto so tightly all
afternoon, but their fingers grow tired
after a long day in the heat, and
so the helium carries it up, up, up,
into the atmosphere,
into to the sun.


III.  I Once Was Lost, But Now Am Found

I was seventeen, staring at my grandfather’s
lifeless body; he was clutching a decaying
photograph of my grandmother,
who had died only two years
before in this same bedroom.
He could have been in a deep sleep,
but then the old, rotted windows
would have been rattling from his snores.
I thought of the last prayer I ever said—
God, he’s dying. Just take him to Heaven. Please.
But God was never listening, was He?
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2022
Thu. Aug 11 2022
7:16 AM


~ for Julia and Joanne~
good neighbors

<>
a renewable habit apparently, again, a first poem of the day
(FPOTD), comes early, this old practice, me-bedded and mugged, with music ear installed drowning the noises of television blah,
iPad rests on left leg, left hand pointer finger ejects capsules
of letters, charmed into existence by the Barber adagio.

the Weather Channel forecasts morning-rain and my window
to trample and shuffle this deteriorating body rapid closes,
and the sun, weak, in concession speech, begs pardon, throws
off a few miscellaneous rays by way of apology, fooling no one,
except for the hopeful, itinerant poets, & the bunnies-neath-the deck.

know now you understand the poems entitlement, as is my wont,
you’ve been invited inside, sharing eyes and senses, you journey
today from a vantage no one else possesses, just you and me. Later,
we will drive to the Parrish Museum, studying modern painters,
each will inquire, a poem for me please, I nod sure, perhaps?

promise little, deliver less, is this your best? A travelogue of the
mundane, the little things, that do not stir your heart, smile tears,
and make you think wish I was there, or this, being
just too-me-boring?
The brain growls, no one making them read this perfunctoriness,
nonetheless, you apologize, pardon the no-angst trivia of daily life.

like the acid reflux bile, swallowed and returned to whence it came.
before it invades, tarnishes the peace of our surroundings and
the pleasure of your company, as I read your writings,

worth so much,
filled with so much angry pain,
I want to easy-soften the everything,
if this missive, takes you-nearer, to the calmer~closer,
this  poem, you transform it from perfunctory, to just, simply


perfect.


8:18 AM
Shelter Island
Owen Phillips  Jan 2011
Overman
Owen Phillips Jan 2011
Overman—
Follow you the music of a generation
Premonitions of the culture
Constantly unseating one another
At the throne beneath your soapbox?
Quarrel you with Parrish Priests and
Local Lords and
Moneyed Many and
Other Overmen?

Overman—
Speak you in uncommon tongue
Through veils of bourgeois idols
Through clouded visions blinding you to pleas from those beneath
Through impenetrable barriers about your plywood castle?

Overman—
Reject you any god lain at your feet,
Any miracle as trivia,
Any sincerity as foolishness,
Any ethnic pride as blasphemy,
Papal Pagan figureheads as absurdity?

Overman—
Have you children born unnaturally,
Brothers cross the moonlit gulf,
Sisters of incestuous intimacy,
Fathers of musical prowess,
Mothers of a warm genetic lab?

Overman—
Your day is coming
One hundred million of you
In synchronistic harmony
Of uniform variety
Of classless social rigidity;
Becoming one with the orbital network,
A single entity to govern life among the planets,
An immortal computer god
Expanding past the reaches of
The spent and worn-out orb
That keeps revolving, spiraling downward,
Closer, closer to the sun—
Overman, will you outlive them all?
Overman, you were there first,
Will you be the first beyond?
The term "Overman" comes from Walter A. Kaufmann's translation of Nietzche's *Also Sprach Zarathustra*
sunprincess  Feb 2018
Heroes
sunprincess Feb 2018
Dear Poets and Readers

This poem page will be dedicated
to our men and women in Blue
To those who have given their life
for me and you

These are only a few of our fallen

★ Heroes ★

Castle Rock, Co
Deputy Zackari Parrish - 29
December  31, 2017

Harrisburg, PA
US Marshall Christopher Hill - 45
January 18, 2018

Brighton, Co
Deputy Heath Gumm - 32
January 24, 2018

Colorado  Springs, Co
Deputy Micah Flick - 34
February 5, 2018

Locust Grove, Ga
Officer Chase Maddox - 26
February 9, 2018

Westerville, OH
2 officers shot in the line of duty
February 10, 2018

Chicago, IL
Commander Paul R. Bauer
February 13, 2018

Mobile, Al
Officer Justin Billa
February 20, 2018

These officers were true heroes
So very sad they are gone,
And now we are left to carry on
Without them
Many prayers and thoughts for their families
and friends
SøułSurvivør Mar 2014
The sun rises in a
Mayfield Parrish
peacock
palace

The moon has
not yet learnt

to set

~~~
minimal
Soul Survivor
Have yet to sleep...
Seberg

(mon amour)

from the Novel by Shaw,
flawless
direction by
Parrish

rich and
my heart
once vaguely unruly
becomes lawless

meet me
down
in Montmartre
let us sip
absinthe
and talk.
Micheal Wolf Apr 2019
There was a widow who volunteered to clean the pews and dust the knave. All the jobs done in the church for the love of God in her spare time.
In summer time she cut fresh flowers, from the garden her husband tended now departed, to brighten weddings and communion masses.
She arranged them for mass each week but no one noticed who she was, just the cleaner in the shadows, thanked each week in the vicars sermon.
She had lived in that village by the church all her life, schooled and raised and married there, it was in many ways her church, her life revolved arounds its works as nothing else was left.
Then came the day she passed away and the funeral mass came and went. At the mass were very few, just the older Parrish folk and the fifth vicar she had known who sent her to her heavenly home.
As to her home here and all her worth, she left it to her local church the church she loved as much as God himself, her church from birth to death.
Versus me
(chilling as an outsize ego freezer)
profusely perspiring
and heavily panting
experiencing one after another
stuff whet dreams are made
frolicking in autumn mist
(think Maxfield Parrish painting)
while skirt chasing
and playfully tackling,
a gamesome gamine with verve
mercilessly coquettish ingenue
"precociously seductive"
overgrown ****** wannabe.

Solitude and introvertedness
mebbe made more manifest destiny
courtesy severe nasal notable twang
(otherwise known as split uvula)
yours truly wittingly drew taunts
and unutterable pang
to escape being bullied as scapegoat
entering magical world
of mine imagination
fostered learning about
all creatures great and small
by age appropriate books.

Logophile lusts ever stronger after
twenty six letter combinations
(analogously surrendering to mistress)
that yield an estimated 171,146 words
currently in use in the English language;
according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
an additional 47,156 obsolete words exist.

I luxuriate engrossed
with choice reading material
and out of desperation
to slake insatiable thirst
(to discern syllabification)
yours truly doth read aloud
intently hearing cadence
of vowels and consonants.

Up until I entered six grade
(at Henry Kline elementary -
a one classroom per grade - school)
classmates bullied, derided,
and feigned to hammer -
jabbing leering, nasty
pimping ragout as a rule
which boyhood self of mine
availed a perfect bullseye target
with combination of diminutiveness,

being painfully quiet,
essentially remaining mum the entire day
except when called upon to answer question
thence utterance emanating between lips
produced and emitted
a strong nasal sound to boot
grist for the mill
sans malice meted, mimicked,
and mocked mashup
of mine warped congestion

ah, twas only by a fluke conversation,
whence a speech pathologist
informed my parents about
the Lancaster Cleft Palate clinic,
where oral an examination
revealed minor birth defect
identified as a submucous cleft palate,
which explained the severe pinched twang
somewhat mitigated by wearing
a removable prosthetic
fashioned by Prosthodontist

Dr. Mohammad Mazaheri MSC, DDS
fastened with clasps to upper teeth
whereby a makeshift miniature
plastic protuberance closed the gap
so air would be prevented
passing thru my button nose
and thus gentle and soft as a shutterfly
shunted air out thee oral opening
though congenital defect disallowed
returning merchandise back to sender
nor could blame be affixed

at either father nor mother
who both harbored the genetic mutation
now such admissions
re: aforementioned impediment allows,
enables and provides boasting rights
if in a mood to temper
any curiosity or satisfying a rumor
whispered down the alley,
whence I said “ah”
left nagging nincompoops
as if pie hole filled with a gobstopper.

— The End —