"archivists" poems
The Archivist are not people you could easily see,
They glide through the Grass like snakes, slowly and stealthily,
They trade with others secretly.
When the Sun goes crooked,
And all is still,
The Archivists come out and cross the Hill.
The Archivist walks past me and slips a piece of paper in my hand,
I slowly wait, then open the piece of contraband.
It is too high a price to pay for Thy own loss.
I hold it against my chest and breathe in the smell,
The scent of the sand and the rocks, I breathe,
It came from the Hill and my Lover's own hand.
The Sun goes straight and Night turns into Day,
I look at the Paper again and smile at the words before me,
These are the Archivists who's trading comes with a fee.
Dec 16, 2013
Dec 16, 2013 at 9:39 PM UTC
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
Mar 16, 2020
Mar 16, 2020 at 10:27 PM UTC