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Aaron Beedle Mar 25
This is poem written by Lisel Mueller (according to google). I just wanted to share it because I couldn't find it on here and it's one of my favourite poems ever.

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
The Trumpoet Jul 2017
Oh Jefferson Beauregard Sessions,
being bullied by President Trump
You were loyal and true
as a lapdog, but you
have been thrown 'neath the bus like a chump.

So when Donald Trump asked you to fire
Mr. Mueller, you must have thought, "How"?
From that task you're excused,
being rightly recused
from the Russian mess playing out now.

So Trump's trying to shame and demean you,
saying that you're beleaguered and weak.
What a cowardly disgrace.
He won't say to your face
that "You're fired": Those words he won't speak?

Robert Mueller's team is closing in now,
with Trump's nuts in a vice - he can tell.
Trump won't show you the door
'cause we all know for sure,
it would make him look guilty as hell!

Understand, I don't like you Jeff Sessions,
with your racist past troubling and sad,
but I hope that you'll stay,
for I so love the way
that it's driving Trump stark raving mad!
You can also see this and my other Trump poems at: www.trumpoet.com
Link to video of this poem: https://youtu.be/McBP_smglp0
Written: July 26, 2017
Prabhu Iyer Aug 2015
Bleak the rays shattered through broken panes
life, dust, dust,  future and smoke
automobiles and gunshots solitary this hour
when screams rend the air, not my turn today -
no, not as yet. Mother, I want to rest my head
in your lap. Can I weep?

Cactus in my soul, I ask, Can I, all that I am?
Lust is the death of man. Gouge your eye that lusts.
Broken void of my afterdays, that mourn
like the wind on the dunes


         Mother, I am well. There is love, there is hope, light
         hidden like nuggets in piles of the dark.
         Mother, I must be well.

It was the other night. Nightmare in loop.
Shamed, stripped beaten violated.
I am in a well, deep pit, drained
of all the essence of light
I can hear your voice echoing with the ray
shattered tumbling down the walls

free, free I am the wind mourning in the dunes
can you tame the wind?


        In the depths, and in the deaths islanding life
        mirage of oases, Mother, I have found him,
        my Senor, to whom I give my ring

Violate me, visage of the abyss,
burn me, but can you find me?
beat me, chain me, but can you enslave me?
I am not here in these nerves and veins.
I am all of Augusta, America,
I fly in the Masts above the skies

Sweet Lord, I see you have deemed heaven
for me, no purgatory but here.
I accept, I surrender, I submit. To thy will.


            Mother, do not negotiate. I am strong.

Where in my naked body have you found me?
here, in these bruises, have your embers soothed?
I am the Lamb that does not cower.
I haunt your soul as guilt.
In what little's left of it.

He finds you in the catacombs where
I haunt the crypts that no vicar penetrates.
When all is lost, when death is certain at the sea,
there opens a way and I will walk out


           Mother, I am coming. Have faith, for faith maketh.
           I hold you here in my *****, smouldering pain,
           that gets me to wake every haunting day.
           Every day that brings the sound of darkness home.

*I fly in the Masts above the skies.
Tame me, I am the wind breaking the dunes.
Ilohi, lema sebachtani sebachtani
For Kayla Mueller, the brave young American aidworker who was repeatedly ***** and then killed by ISIL terrorist organisation: abcnews.go.com/International/kayla-mueller-american-isis-captive-wrote-letter-family/story?id=28859102

'I hold you here in my *****/ smouldering pain, that gets me to wake/ every haunting day': paraphrases Kayla's letter, excerpt -

'...I wrote a song some months ago that says, “The part of me that pains the most also gets me out of bed, w/out your hope there would be nothing left…” aka -­ The thought of your pain is the source of my own, simultaneously the hope of our reunion is the source of my strength...'

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