The State of the Art
by Michael R. Burch

Has rhyme lost all its reason
and rhythm, renascence?
Are sonnets out of season
and poems but poor pretense?

Are poets lacking fire,
their words too trite and forced?
What happened to desire?
Has passion been coerced?

Shall poetry fade slowly,
like Latin, to past tense?
Are the bards too high and holy,
or their readers merely dense?

Keywords/Tags: poetry, art, rhyme, reason, meter, form, sonnets, fire, passion, Latin, stale, outdated, past, tense, readers, readership



The Stake
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Love, the heart bets,
if not without regrets,
will still prove, in the end,
worth the light we expend
mining the dark
for an exquisite heart.

Originally published by The Lyric

Currents
by Michael R. Burch

How can I write and not be true
to the rhythm that wells within?
How can the ocean not be blue,
not buck with the clapboard slap of tide,
the clockwork shock of wave on rock,
the motion creation stirs within?

Originally published by The Lyric. Keywords/Tags: poet, poets, poetry, write, writing, rhythm, meter, motion, ocean, tide, wave, waves



Ah! Sunflower
by Michael R. Burch

after William Blake

O little yellow flower
like a star ...
how beautiful,
how wonderful
we are!

The People Loved What They Had Loved Before
by Michael R. Burch

We did not worship at the shrine of tears;
we knew not to believe, not to confess.
And so, ahemming victors, to false cheers,
we wrote off love, we gave a stern address
to things that we disapproved of, things of yore.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

We did not build stone monuments to stand
six hundred years and grow more strong and arch
like bridges from the people to the Land
beyond their reach. Instead, we played a march,
pale Neros, sparking flames from door to door.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

We could not pipe of cheer, or even woe.
We played a minor air of Ire (in E).
The sheep chose to ignore us, even though,
long destitute, we plied our songs for free.
We wrote, rewrote and warbled one same score.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

At last outlandish wailing, we confess,
ensued, because no listeners were left.
We built a shrine to tears: our goddess less
divine than man, and, like us, long bereft.
We stooped to love too late, too Learned to *****.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

Keywords/Tags: traditional, poetry, meter, rhyme, reason, music, song, form, love, loved, monuments, bridges, unpaid, free, verse, score, classic, classical, Romantic

The Harvest of Roses
by Michael R. Burch

for Harvey Stanbrough

I have not come for the harvest of roses—
the poets' mad visions,
their railing at rhyme ...
for I have discerned what their writing discloses:
weak words wanting meaning,
beat torsioning time.

Nor have I come for the reaping of gossamer—
images weak,
too forced not to fail;
gathered by poets who worship their luster,
they shimmer, impendent,
resplendently pale.

This poem was originally published by The Raintown Review when Harvey Stanbrough was the editor, then later by Mindful of Poetry. I wrote the poem out of dissatisfaction with the strange idea that poetry should consist entirely or primarily of concrete images. Would the “experts” who espouse this bizarre idea junk the great soliloquies of Shakespeare and Milton and the direct statement poems of A. E. Housman? It also bears noting that the twin titans of English modernism, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, did an awful lot of “telling” rather than always “showing.” Keywords/Tags: Harvest, roses, images, imagery, imagism, meter, time, beat, rhyme, shimmer, gloss, perfume, reap, reaping, gossamer

To Please The Poet
by Michael R. Burch

(for poets who still write musical verse)

To please the poet, words must dance—
staccato, brisk, a two-step:
so!
Or waltz in elegance to time
of music—mild,
adagio.

To please the poet, words must chance
emotion in catharsis—
flame.
Or splash into salt seas, descend
in sheets of silver-shining
rain.

To please the poet, words must prance
and gallop, gambol, revel,
rail.
Or muse upon a moment—mute,
obscure, unsure, imperfect,
pale.

To please the poet, words must sing,
or croak, wart-tongued, imagining.

Originally published by The Lyric. Keywords/Tags: musical, poetry, rhythm, rhyme, meter, sing, dance, waltz, emotion, catharsis, passion, music, adagio

Discrimination
by Michael R. Burch

for lovers of traditional poetry

The meter I had sought to find, perplexed,
was ripped from books of "verse" that read like prose.
I found it in sheet music, in long rows
of hologramic CDs, in sad wrecks
of long-forgotten volumes undisturbed
half-centuries by archivists, unscanned.
I read their fading numbers, frowned, perturbed—
why should such tattered artistry be banned?

I heard the sleigh bells’ jingles, vampish ads,
the supermodels’ babble, Seuss’s books
extolled in major movies, blurbs for abs...
A few poor thinnish journals crammed in nooks
are all I’ve found this late to sell to those
who’d classify free verse "expensive prose."

Published by The Chariton Review, The Eclectic Muse, Famous Poets and Poems, Poetry Life & Times and Trinacria (where it was nominated for the Pushcart Prize)

Keywords/Tags: Sonnet, rhythm, rhyme, meter, traditional poetry, metrical verse, poetry journals, literary journals, number, numbers, feet

In Praise of Meter
by Michael R. Burch

The earth is full of rhythms so precise
the octave of the crystal can produce
a trillion oscillations, yet not lose
a second’s beat. The ear needs no device
to hear the unsprung rhythms of the couch
drown out the mouth’s; the lips can be debauched
by kisses, should the heart put back its watch
and find the pulse of love, and sing, devout.

If moons and tides in interlocking dance
obey their numbers, what’s been left to chance?
Should poets be more lax—their circumstance
as humble as it is?—or readers wince
to see their ragged numbers thin, to hear
the moans of drones drown out the Chanticleer?

Published by Poetry Porch/Sonnet Scroll, The Eclectic Muse, The Best of the Eclectic Muse 1989-2003, Famous Poets & Poems, Poetry Renewal Magazine, Mindful of Poetry, Sonnetto Poesia, Trinacria and Poetry Life & Times

Keywords/Tags: Rhythm, rhyme, meter, beat, music, octave, heart, pulse, watch, numbers

I.

Eyes taking survey
of immediate surroundings.
Habitable? Yes.
Presentable? No.
At least not to anyone
lacking the neuroses which
with such resplendent ecology
were given perennial bloom
in the mental landscape
of this peculiar creature. . .  

Dwelling, as he does
within plaster walls
upon concrete floors
beneath fluorescent lights, as they
quietly hum a low B flat and illuminate
filth and fur amassed in quantities
sufficient to reconstruct entire animals,
and perhaps even ecosystems...

Drugs in their various guises and dis-guises
paraphernalia indiscreetly proliferated
Musical implements, instructions, and instruments
supinely littered, almost as profusely
as the mountains of literature courting
avalanche from the rigid repose of
each supportive surface where they rest

Brooms weeping in neglect of their sweeping as
spiders nest betwixt the bristles, but
at least they keep the bugs out...

Records in crates and stacks with
no particular organization. Hmm.
That last line sums it succinctly.
"No particular organization."
Yet he still unaccountably knows
within this squalor where
the minutest of objects reside

His thoughts and actions
are sporadic, leaving linearity
in want of apt expression
For him, it seems the shortest
path between two points
is a frenetic scribble

Getting things done
in a timely manner? Possibly.

Getting sidetracked and forgetting
the original plan? Probab-  HEY
                                                         DID
                                                  YOU
                                                         GUYS
                                                  SEE          
                                                  ­       THAT?!?!?!?!
 

II.

                                And    ­                  
"Whoever lives this way, cannot be well!"
Someone might say, or, perhaps even yell.
Erelong might this assertion be dispelled
                 With them and their opinion. . . . .
                STRAIGHT TO HELL!

For now the music of Debussy fills the air,
  and now this vagabond has found a locus
  a flag and bond of jouissance and care
  arresting him  in implacable focus

Inhaling the aroma of the night
  he raises up his quill with great delight
  and sets the implement in fervent motion
  and bathing in the passions it ignites

He yields to it in rapturous devotion
  and as if under spell or magic potion
  his brain and nerves and muscles all engage
  in spilling forth the fury of an ocean

Society has trapped him in a cage
  ensnared him in frivolity, it seems
  but his ink abounds in freedom on its page
  and guides him to tranquility from rage  

As Luna pours her iridescent beams
  into this weary poet's dreary head
  his mind illuminates with fate's esteem
  and ruminates through labyrinths of dream

As everything he's seen, done, heard, or said
  becomes a tapestry of order, woven
  with chaos as the impetus that's led
  this blessed magnanimity has shed

A light to guide the way; a path to show him
  to Athens' martyred sage whom he's beholden
  who espoused the noble maxim he's now chosen:
"Look deeply in thyself and truly know him."  

Look deeply in thyself, and truly know him!

III.

"If a cluttered desk",
a man once asked,
"Is a sign of a cluttered mind?"
"Of what, then,"
he continued,
"is an empty desk a sign?"