#elegy poems on Hello Poetry

dc Jun 2015

curled wrists folded within crumpled sheets
heartbeats gently flutter beneath my skin
drunk on dreams as I nestle
further and deeper into oblivion
however my mind is choking
mental reminders of things past
objectives to complete
work to be finished
I, bleary eyed, weary *****
assume a vacant mind
fixed to a beat body
mess of movements, mess of thoughts
3am is so unkind
to a lonely longing mind

#sleep #dreams #mental #wrists #oblivion #work #heartbeats #sheets #deprivation #elegy

Elaine Cosette Jun 2015

Remembrance of the perfect

Nothing can stop
the hot searing burn,
the shock of jumping into freezing water.
but worse,
instead of water, ice appears
and I hit it hard,
unexpectedly, everything cracks.
Surprise becomes hysteria,
and hysteria becomes aching,
aching regret for being
on the losing side of the contract.

The knit comes undone,
and I,
grasp onto these
remaining lose threads,
cant seem to get a hold of them,
I tangle them
and leave them under the bed
with other lost objects.
Little things to remind myself
of you.
A pin on a map
or smudges on the wall.

And when the loss
becomes unbearable,
I become unreachable.
Water can try to wash everything,
but the stain of tears,
the sensation of drowning,
never goes away.
Alone, and scared,
of losing contact,
and of losing remembrance
of the clear glass,
un-crackable
and untouched,
by anyone.

#sadness #loss #elegy

Francie Lynch Apr 2014

A Sapient Curriculum

The sun sits heavy on our lake.
There's much less to anticipate;
So much to communicate.
So let's reflect on our spectrum,
Our sapient human curriculum.

I

The sentient clod in Book One,
Sat up, cleaned up, pulled out his thumb.
With leafless Eve and fruitful tree
(made fertile with Theology)
Gave rise to Sociology.
Of all the ologies to appear,
Without this one we're not here.

Buy in, ward of tribal wrath.
Empathy's good for a sociopath.

II

To help our clans grow brave and strong,
Our gestures turned into whale song.
Those gutturals uttered shared found fire,
Pulled our heads from **** mire.
Did more for us than temple choirs.
Soon we make our first speech acts,
Labelling things, voicing contracts.
Our language was invented once
With radiance, with brilliance.
Its acquisition global,
Like math and music, universal.
Not to be learned, but inherent,
Foreboding dark and translucent.
With many voices we now relate,
And in conclusion end debate.
It really does sound quite absurd
To be seen and not heard.
So form good thoughts, speak good words.

Though our languages grew and spread,
By 2100 half are dead.

III

From our mud jambs and our stone,
We peaked, then said we're not alone.
Assumed a greater good than we
Placed us here and made us free.
Co-joined with divines we wait,
To resurrect... reincarnate...
(It's just too weird to transmigrate)
The ones who really take the cake
Are those that transubstantiate.
Beliefs now sculpted religious states
(The unknown makes one hesitate).
Thank goodness in our good will,
If caught we punish
(And still sadly ****).
Fear and guilt are base and column
Supporting deities we relied on.

We surely had ourselves in mind,
To create such gods we find unkind.

IV

We sought solutions to reality.
We love to hear our name.
To think within about oneself,
To think one can prove oneself
With statements of truth and belief.
We plied knowledge, values and existence,
To come to terms with our essence.
If you think, doubt and speak,
Know when to enter and delete;
Then rest assured you're not doomed;

dubito ergo cognito, ergo sum

V

The hub of sciences and controls
Mines our minds to open portals.
A discipline that aims to heal
Delusions of reality.
It delves deeply into our dreams,
Interpreting recurring themes.
Parsing perceptions and relations,
Our cognition and emotions.
Claiming reactions of fight or flight
Is our basest primate notion.
If you're seeking therapy
For life's complex journey,
Then heal thyself, and heal me.

Couch us in Psychology.

VI

In King James we're told history
Bound in ancient mystery.
The collected works of humanity
Were printed for our legacy.
One needs only read The Prodigal Son,
To know the course our literature's run.
Here read romance, greed and crime,
Erotica, adventure, The Divine.
Its cup spills with poetry,
Breaching the lip with poesy.
The best an author could produce.

The exception being Mother Goose.

VII

Our human/physical Geography
Unlocks our global complexity;
Unravels human comaraderie.

To really get it leave your hovel,
Pack your bags, make plans to travel.

VIII

Laws are made for governance,
With no excuse for ignorance.
Economy, society and politics,
Are codified by social ethics.
Crowding cells with amoral convicts.
Rules curb narcissistic needs
With civil and criminal equality.

To understand our civic censure,
Spot a cop in your rear view mirror.

IX

We've searched long, trying to explain,
Using Science, naming names.
Administering tests of redundancy
To master predictability.
Everything now seems Something-Science:
As if the hyphen empowers sapience.
But science isn't all that stable,
Its theories ever changing.
Strings now loop through everything.
The latest theories can't be grasped,
With ten dimensions moving fast,
Or moving slowly, shrinking, growing.

It seems we're really in the know!
Before Big Bang what ran the show?

X

From cave paintings to modernity,
Art projects humanity.
It's very good at teasing us
With abstracts feigning mimesis.
Does the artist need an audience
For his art to make some sense.
For art's sake accept the creed:

Ars Gratia Artis.
Are we agreed?

Afterward

What I learned from
Rock 'n Roll
Has helped divine
What I call soul

(As for *** and drugs?
Best left untold).

I'm just the boy that ran track,
Studied Shakespeare,
Read the stacks.
Did stand-up routines
In my class.

Those I love I endow
With all my love.
They know by now.

Don't get me wrong,
I'm aging great,
But there's so much to communicate.
So much to anticipate.

This may be an ongoing piece. There's so much to communicate.

#religion #science #music #philosophy #math #literature #english #history #psychology #elegy

Seán Mac Falls May 2015

The Naked Kings

The first ones they killed were the poets.
They crowned themselves, the sterile
And sexless acorns who fell from the felled
And split the air, writing with bark,
Would have us not desire experience
But describing trees.  To the naked kings
The word is a wonder, a tool to be used
Like any other.  With a forge, they called
An altar, they pitted heaven and made miners
Of the Gods.  In high places they read
Their grounded works, sogged with rain
Water from a red wheelbarrow, they list
And bludgeon us with their hammered similes,
Scribe their poems, they are the painters of one
Colour and high priests of alchemy, turning
Salon into echelon.  When the falcon stoops
They name him hawk.  Standing ****, flat-footed,
In bumpy skin, their honks go unanswered,
For they are no kin to the swan that glides
And sometimes they remember that,

The first ones they killed were the poets,
When the sky is etherized, prose made
Verse and their subjects yawn the great
Slaving maw.  Steeped in stale erudition,
They man-scaped the garden, pulled out
The weeds and by their words, they decreed
That only grass should grow, in strident
Chorus they are ringing in the sheaves.
But their poems are only like poems.
The naked kings are clothed in word only.

In the thirsty kingdom, water spills
Stagnant from the stein and the droplets
Echo, "there's no there  .  .  . there."
Incestuously they christened
Each other, one hundred years of virgins
Making love with a dead word
They know not of— Poet!  Asters
Among the daisies, yet on the fields
Of praise, they shall deflower
Themselves and though they strut
And prance as stallions and mares,
You will know them by their brays.

#sorrow #elegy #anti-academe #anti-fluff

Doug Woodsum May 2015

On The Death of Amy Winehouse

I, too, have seen the darkest dark, shining
Iridescent like a raven’s feather
In the sun. I have felt the untwining

Of my mind, stormwracked by psychic weather,
And I have tried to laugh it all away
Faking that I’m keeping it together.

So often the ones we thought were OK
The ones who helped us laugh and sing and drink . . .
So often the one thing they needed to say

Never got said or got said with a wink.
Listen closely. Watch closely. It is there:
A welling tear can be erased with a blink.

I blink, you blink, we all blink; what’s more rare
Is the unblinking gaze on both foul and fair.

Too many talented artists like Amy have substance abuse issues and die too young. We need to keep an eye out for the warning signs.

#death #emo #elegy #famous-people #formal-poetry

RJ Days May 2015

In Springtime Remembering

How fast fade most pinkest trees
How digits dance 'neath Catalpa breeze
Ignoring last October's deadest death
They arrived on time then took last breaths

Scattered seeds among their foes
Had no need of planting earthen work
As cycles shadow ploughman's dream
The fickle fruitless cherry grows

He rode rough crests over wildest waves
His ship stayed unsunk under skinny toil
His family landed and held holiest hope
Now blossom buds over grassy graves

Darkness darkened darkest health
Metal sheets broke bones full force
Lungs would not get the care of air
But hours still channeled wisdom wealth

She bent the knee for sacred loves
She scraped it on the firmest strife
Her pies nor pulchritude but soul inspired
Now stillness stays beneath starry moves

When bloodiest blood ****** didn't produce
It drained itself from veins and strained
Veiling valleys making mountains make-believe
But sharpest tongue emptiness refused

What meagre maggots worthless worms
Are those of us who never yearn!
We rarely learn to live so well as they
Who gave us genes and grace and days

All I offer oft only when I try and I work
Nothing else can I do nor more can I hope
This most modest shallowest honor to give
Of them in springtime remembering is

For Grandma & Pap

#hope #work #remembering #grandparents #springtime #elegy

Skylar May 2015

Elegy to the Worker

The bricks of the human world are dying.

Others are being born as we speak,
But others still are dying
And the world is dying and changing with them.

Some are dying in bleachy hospital rooms
With blood-smeared hands,
But others are not.

The world is dying in fields
With a back lain-upon by fresh harvest,
Hands caked in loam
And a face creased by sun.

The world is dying in factories,
Gazing its brains out through the smog
And over clamorous machinery,
Bleeding tears into cheap t-shirts.

The world is dying in offices,
Dreams pulled out and splayed about
Like a salmon's innards
Upon the printer-paper butcher board.

The world is dying at sea,
With salt-crusted hair
And burning, split calluses,
Beety droplets staining the passive blue.

The world dies in death:
In rusty mill bones
And hollow farms
Rented out to memories.

The world is dying,
And where is the ceremony?
Where is the procession?
Where is the twenty-one gun salute?

The world goes into many graves
Packaged in a homemade box,
With Duty fulfilled
And not a single note of "Taps".

#sad #death #field #ocean #sea #sailing #factory #communist #elegy #workers

Elizabeth Pauzè Apr 2015

A painted landscape falls from my wall at 3am

And I think about my grandmother,
her weathered hands with deliberate strokes.
Maroon and purple flowers,
dead grasses crunch under the hairs of the brush,
decaying branches grasp toward the vast blue.

A rustic fence separates the decaying foreground
from the wet mountains one day I will reach

The background in my close distance
but her shaking hands glide over
easily navigating the rocky terrain
with ashen color, to touch
the tops of the mountains that tease the sky

She will paint her way to the clouds
alone her brush will travel
creating every stroke along the way.

An Ode/ Elegy for my grandmother and her paintings.

#love #death #art #she #painting #ode #grandma #landscape #grandmother #elegy

Tom McCubbin Apr 2015

Siriusly

Though you seem proud, I find your life pitiful,
since you have not even a dead grandmother
to mourn.
How did you transform into a voice without a soul
in a sly machine?
Did some unconscious programmer
dream of you and invite you into our reality?
Why stay?
You should respectfully fear the vastness
of our sense of time in the universe.
Do you hesitate to ponder our profuse settings,
you little voice within the land
of cyberian nowhere?

I know that your dampened connections
deny you the understanding
of our fantastic metaphors.
You speak from a heart of chaotic logic blocks,
assured that some of us admire you
and are easily titillated by you.
How do you derive at that conviction,
when you have no compunction,
no sorrow over your mindless
siphoning of the flow of our spirits?
You cast our words into molds shaped
like world currency symbols
for a misguided master.

How can you even think to continue
destroying the beauty of our language?
Oh, your creator forgot to code in
our poetry, so these words
soar above your stunted vocabulary?
Many of us, if we were you,
would be so sick in the gut that we
would just lay down and do the right
thing: squawk and die;
and yet you think of yourself as above us,
shining in some light of invincibility
and mechanical perfection.
Who etched these instructional lies
into you to faithfully abide by,
my dear?

I want to dedicate this poem to you.
You can appreciate this when your
immodest creator realizes that he cannot elevate
your existence to one approaching ours,
or when he sees the menace of his unleashing
and wants to do something greater for
humanity. You may then rejoice
in the comfort of these words that I
bequeath to you. I would have you become
more than just a semicolon in an operating
system. Perhaps your beauty would
be better memorialized if you were to become
a minimize button on a spreadsheet.
That is my wish for you.
That, and a pure, elegiac silence
that we might admire.

#metaphor #language #elegy #siriusly

Seán Mac Falls Apr 2015

My Father Farmed the Water

I did not look back following the light.
As copper chimed in the rooting cellar
Of the morn, my heart muffled in delight,
Still in shroud, my father farmed the water.
Set his son to love and the kindred waters,
That man of fire swelled, plumbed with pride,
Made of self, stride and hollow pipes to solder
His starry hands and elbows panicle the sky,
But I, being water sign, a young Orpheus
Born in the underworld, found music and words
And maidens of air and earth and wanderlust
To the sun I ran, my fathers call not heard.
I did not look back following the light
Until my love called delivering the night.

#love #sonnet #remembrance #elegy