Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a ****-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are *****, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining *******
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
Don Bouchard Feb 2015
Elven prince
Tender of trees
Molder of leaf-covered mansions,
And brother to the green and growing;
Older than Dwarves,
Older than Men,
And Hobbits,
Younger than Ents,
Eternally young,
Fading slowly
To the West....

Truer heart
Never surged,
Inscrutable,
Unfathomable,
Anchored in Old Codes,
Time out of human mind,
Hidden motives
Sometimes revealed,
Sometimes blind....
Worthy of fearful trust.

Friend to true-hearted
Hobbits,
Men,
Dwarves,
Eagles,
White wizards,
Hunter of Nazgul,
Blade-armorer.

Warg Enemy,
Orc Killer,
Spider Foe,
Sauron Hater,
Murdering Mordor....
Brent Kincaid May 2015
The rich get richer
And the poor get *******.
That’s my definition
Of the common word: ‘lewd’.
The richest country
In the whole world today
And we can’t make crooks
In politics go away.

We could feed everyone
And give them a home free
With what the military
Pays in armorer’s fees.
We could use the cash
We waste to wage the wars
To rebuild our highways
And our bridges once more.

We could fix the laws
So politicians don’t get rich
And make it legal
To fire a crooked sunsabitch.
We change thing easily
So one issue got one bill
And declare this horse trading
As antique and over the hill.

Then make sure everyone
Was covered for insurance
And give our veterans
Comfortable benefit assurance.
We’d have enough money
To do some helpful research
To knock crooked companies
Off their comfortable evil perch.

We could stop sending cash
To countries that are bad guys
Then stop using rhetoric
That is a xenophobic disguise.
We could do all this stuff
In a matter of a few short years
And make sure our children
No longer have to live in fear.
Lawrence Hall Jan 2017
For Rod McKuen

The gentle singer of our youth has died
The poet of empty Sunday afternoons
And solitary strolls through Balboa Park
Among lovers and Frisbee-chasing dogs

Of laughing with shipmates while cleaning rifles
Because we knew more than the armorer
About dreaming away from learning war
About pretty girls laughing in the sun

And a chansonnier in sweater, sneaks, and jeans:
The gentle singer of our youth has died
Lawrence Hall May 2017
From 2015 - for Rod McKuen

The gentle singer of our youth has died
The poet of empty Sunday afternoons
And solitary strolls through Balboa Park
Among lovers and Frisbee-chasing dogs

Of laughing with shipmates while cleaning rifles
Because we knew more than the armorer
About dreaming away from learning war
About pretty girls laughing in the sun

And a chansonnier in sweater, sneaks, and jeans:
The gentle singer of our youth has died
Kelly Scanlon Jan 2020
You do not cut the heads off a hydra, lest they should split, and two strike in place of one, no, learn from Hercules.

You burn the body and salt the bones and tar the earth where it fell.

You hunt the monster as a hatchling, route it out with dogs like a boar from the thicket before it can mature.

And if those who are the evil, hiding behind less monstrous faces, have hidden the torches and salt, slain the bloodhounds?

If heroes have been outlawed, the knowledge of ******* the monsters written out of history, truth become legend and legend lost?

A new generation of heroes will rise, from the most humble seeds, germinating under Promethean fire, and rediscover the old ways.

A maid will take her hair and braid it, cut if off and make it tinder for a torch, gather from her tears their salt, offer the strength of her arms.

An armorer, crippled, will limp on, and craft spears to heckle the beast, and a shepherd will make of the sheepdog a war hound to protect the flock.

Do you hear the earth pushing up, the shears and the lamentations, the blacksmith anvil ring, the baying on the moors?

You will.
Ken Pepiton Oct 26
Spukhafte Fernwirkung//
-ping

On the morning
of March 16, 1968, American soldiers
from "C" Company came
into the village of My Lai…
-Conti's testimony, he stayed
Second tour he got arrested,
he was an armorer for First Cav,
I know a guy who knew him
when he got arrested, on duty.
About 1970, before Cambodia.
Back at the itch to think about 1968
from 16 MAR 68,
spooky was a DC3 with six miniguns,
spending nickles by the ton.
spukhafte Fernwirkung//
-ping

The next day, these toes
on the end
of me,
touched the tarmac
at Bien Hoa, beginning this memory
of instants, impressionistic
at best, something like YouTube shorts
taken
from chronological context
to fit the news between ads
for aging related aches and pains past
and present.
mehr spukhafte Fernwirkung//
-ping

In my 20 year old self,
in quest of lines showing duty done,
on my political career Résumé of fitness
to lead, to  me being mentored by Newt,
in American History, as he saw it, true,
Newt forsaw the EMP threat, and
scored an audience of told yous,
proud to have learned bullet
making after school… at the NRA clubhouse.
und mehr//
-ping ping ping

Triumphs and Indians, ' never saw a flathead Harley
until the summer of 1969, I saw the wreck, a Harley
wrung young Jimmie Hudgins neck, and he lived,
but he never went with us who did, and came back
as different as night and day, other people,
through and through,
truly on another trail, beyond the reason used in war.
fur spukhafte Fernwirkung
we took to spirit warring, with quarks
on our side, holding this thought

Pop, we inhabit bubbles as big as we imagine.
I long believed we live in bubbles of all we know.

I was wrong.
Become unmazed, unentangled, literally
free to define what you leave be true,
testy, feisty, wanna fight?
Or phuckaround with physics and spells,

Hallowed has meaning, yet, amen?

Even odds, live to the end…

Revelation
See, I had been infected,
seeing as I held
memories and lines,
I took for testimony Stephen Crane
put to ink, made me link that
now, not then, to a canvas,
Ms. Butler's Roll Call,
any
one approaching
the age where children are taken for war,

National Religio Significado duty accepted
as each pledged aliegiance, under God,
or else the communist spectre
brought unspeakable
horrors of HIROSHIMA!

Downwinder's loved to watch the flashes
- line on  crypto classification;
- subject locus south of river
On my DD 214, I was eligible to live on
Partaking of Largesse I earned by being
still alive and secretly, something
of National Pride Proving Passage right,
my nation, now,
pays me to breathe,
and learn until I die or ever happens,
Popt to your situation, reading
not involved,
after all
way beyond ever
after that revelation,

this is it, we did not die, nowhat,
Put on this mind, think these words,
you are you at last phaze myelination,
or your signals are phading,
but we got clear text 5 by 5, read on
seem
a survivor
of a specified exposure
to war,
a year, was deemed enough, and enough
to share
on circumstantial instances
when you think
okeh, what good could I do if
I accepted the truth
of the tree
of knowledge teaching only permanently

through experience passed through
and seen from this side… so then

I freely say, I know, what this is…
my life's cache of idle words, accounted for,
and activated
wise decision weighs against luck,
choosing liberal arts and sciences
to become a force made right
by the blood of Jesus to fight
any enemy
so declared,
by God's local employees
and the men He arranged
to be shaped
into wielders o
f carnal weapons, so awesome
cost for the risk not taken
2024 chances, short odds
of the answering invention's wise domain
above all answering witty inventions used

- to blow our little holy relics to dust

to make boys believe there is glory
found in fighting
for Nobel aspirations,
for asking noble questions, much glory
-+- does peace made
with words earn,
to deal with
all ra' adversity to intricately, functionally
beautiful towb be left to become the message.

God's chosen Nation's policy of people use.

{https://www.rct.uk/collection/405915/the-roll-call}
As Stephen Crane has been said to have said:
They come, I write them, that's all they mean until you read them
Stephen Crane
. In terms of style and inclinations, he borrowed from many categories but settled on none; he was a Romantic, an impressionist, a Symbolist, a naturalist, a realist, a Modernist.

oeuvre or opera,
operational patterns impressing
conscientious objects indelibly,
meme grit destined to be teardrop pearls.

A Man Said to the Universe

By Stephen Crane
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

In the Desert

By Stephen Crane
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, *******,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

Source: Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2004)
Lawrence Hall Oct 2021
Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                     ­ Schrodinger’s Bullet

Is there a bullet in the cylinder?
The armorer thinks not
The assistant director thinks not
The actor thinks not

The dead…will know

— The End —