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.

Blue veins that pace from on high
Or saunter, streaming in a drowsy
Way, day napping light into ocean
Sleep, carousing with slides of time
And dearest travelers to keep—
Where do you come from?
What is your source, a holy well
Or mountain tarn, the fallen cloud,
The rising waters that bursting sun
So ordains, what the wistful, traveling
Birds are want to herald by all thy names
As they speak from above on spry wings?
In my final day shall I know such peace
That your drifting lay delivers?  Or shall
The moon unface me as I dive into
Lost cloaks of the eternal oceans?
River, my final driver, take me on
Those pathways to the seas,
With open eyes welcoming
Under the lacing lakes,
Of greatest garment,
The bedding nights
Of gentle stars.

Oh Lord, why have you taken my happiness from me?
It was needed, important, oh why can't you see?
The smiles, the laughter, the woes and woe-nots,
Weren't all taken stride, more often than aught.

With its life you took mine, it is sad but it is true.
The time we had was far from few,
My pride and joy was in the womb,
But oh dear death, your sadness loomed.

I understand why your time was short,
You were needed somewhere, a high court.
Oh child of mine who'd never see day
I know I couldn't have asked you to stay.

The Blue Falcon, cross the spire,
Waits in the gables of the white
House.  Wounded in youth by crush
Of air, spent, a wisp perched
In the aerie dark with a view of mountains
Blue as ice under glacier.  The wooden
Church from the other side clutches
The sky but the Falcon blue is lost
In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never
Kills.  On this strike he is sheathed in stealth
The dull talons slip as they dry
In the tented air, the songbirds at play
In the high-ground underneath warble
And chide but the Falcon cannot hear
The Falcon near.  His heart is soft
And muted in the breast, his ears
Are dumb to their tickling-songs.  

Before the Falcons time, over
The tilling fields, dropped his world
In the spoils where splendour burst in green,
Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods,
A banquet of game, were bounty's breach
Fording blue currents he was
A fisher in the sun, but the sun
Sank in his drowning sky no store
From plateau to quarry the drought of days
Moved a castle felled in the dancing
Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered
Eye of the sun and etched his form
Into grey silhouette.  

Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered
In the branches of the rooted air
Above the yellowed grass, under the pines
And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid
Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron
Of the attic in the white house
A throw of stones crossways from
The sacred yews of the steeple spire.

Love’s progress does not wait
For Elegies or romantic verse
The right true end of love is
Carried over, in the next generation

For how long, whose to say?
Until our children are born immortal
Until our machines talk back to us?
By our new nature, from planets

Harvesting stars, equally at peace
Love’s progress no longer rests
In the story between a ‘you and I’
Love is a thing for society

To share like virtue, soft and free
Perfection to unite, and value more
Than gold, more than wealthy
Or any physical kind of security

Although we see the celestial bodies move
Love and time have their own marriage
These swelling lips that sing of passion
And these serene hearts that dance
For a brief lifetime, that went too fast?

— for Seamus Heaney*

Forging scaffold and wells of tongue,
Whose every word— rung to the stars,
One sprite, born a new heart to Ulster,
Tanged in sounds of the beating sparkle,
Now the leftover sun, a light in absence,
Falls with leaves of the turning autumn,
Tears, sloping, in a feathered arc, so fair,
Splitting to the shores of a western isle.

intoxicated
from the soft touch
of your lips

infatuated
from the way your hands
intertwine perfectly with mine

hypnotized
by the smell of musty cologne
that your clothes drown in

how sad, that your memory

is my addiction

By the dawn's early light,
Casual ties of warring pride,
Who wear the fit of uniforms,
Creasing down the seamy streets,
Who once in his sights were called to order,
By arrow clutching eagles, sandbagged
By the rivers heart of darkness, *****-
Trapped by bootstraps pulled, torn apart
In tiger eyeing fields that lied
In wait while choppers dived, delivering
Payloads of giant dragon flied fire
And this unction was to be their balm
And the swordless Dons were spit out
Of skull hunting windmills, Jonah
Beached to thy kingdom cong.

And over their heads cried the phantom
Jets, bat out of helmet, to the straw
Pulling hairs and these heroes, we
Abandoned without bonds nor blindfold
And lashed them to the flagging pole
With guns saluting while the sirens
Wailed, no wonder they should crack,
Our green jaded Gods, our Greek
Journeymen, due south of lotus land,
No wonder they should break on the China
Seas in that cold, ******* land.
O say can you see, that it is we,
The people, in anger and in shame
Who have no mettle, to give, but tarnish
Foisted on the brave and they
Are worn, like trinkets to dishonor.

And over the deep non-ending sank
Our heroes, betrayed by ism's, discharged
By ghosts in the machining guns,
Unspirited by a corporeal world,
Bamboozled in the muddy thickets
And dropped to the fray on ****** wings,
To foreign soil, where children are lost
In the man eating groves and they
Were thus dutifully numbered by their own
****** arms and all were made
Guilty cold in that sliver of uncivil
And polar eyed land, O say can you see,
The burning of twilights last gleaming?
And, we sutured a wall for the trigger-
Happy dead, we dammed the bleeding,
But can there be no bridges?

And further from those chilling fields
They are casting us letters, address
Unknown and mid adrift are messages
In drowning bottles by the waysides,
They are swimming to our doors,
Where, we the people, have built a wall,
Made of stone, black and shiny, it will
Not smear— and we are polishing off
Our dead, say the cold blooded
Behind that face and in front runs a red
River running down the vane, glorious sun,
Yet, this humble partition, in stories and tears,
Is deconstructing grave white heads,
Quartered in pride and darts to the ground,
That warring bird, crowned to his vacant
Lots.  O— say can you see, the turning
Of twilight's last gleaming?

Depression has finally turned around for me,
Picked me up from mine broken spot,
Shattered heart, the cage my soul lay trapped in.
Pretty butterflies were left by me to rot,
Thine song has ended, the violin crumbling, my dance crooked,
Don’t pull me in,
Let me be.
Thou sweet decay, this paradox on my sun burnt-skin.
Depression and I, woven tightly, as if in a tin,
Now I dance like this,
Song for myself,
Don’t pull me in,
Let me be.
Awaiting mine lovely, silent day,
When mine own breath is free, the last, single, rotten breath,
And when the salty tears no longer wet my tongue.
The air has lost,
Forgotten, the wetness of thou lips,
Eyes closed, still, lo the frost.
Standing, no longer me,
Thus a ghost,
Muddy silhouette,
Always in the background,
Always trying,
To appear less and less.
                                           -**Firefly