"epigraph" poems
XLII
‘My future will not copy fair my past’—
I wrote that once; and thinking at my side
My ministering life-angel justified
The word by his appealing look upcast
To the white throne of God, I turned at last,
And there, instead, saw thee, not unallied
To angels in thy soul! Then I, long tried
By natural ills, received the comfort fast,
While budding, at thy sight, my pilgrim’s staff
Gave out green leaves with morning dews impearled.
I seek no copy now of life’s first half:
Leave here the pages with long musing curled,
And write me new my future’s epigraph,
New angel mine, unhoped for in the world!
3.8k
When she died,
I thought I'd just grow old
Shutting myself in the old house
alone,with memories and the mirror
that she had looked in one bright day
like gold in the miser's chest.
Aug 19, 2014
Aug 19, 2014 at 4:56 AM UTC
Her heart is cracked alabaster hidden in undergrowth.
Nobody notices the epigraph.
Even if someone did, it wouldn't matter much:
the lettering and filigree have entirely faded.
Feb 1, 2013
Feb 1, 2013 at 1:11 PM UTC
All things were together. The mind came and arranged them.
–Anaxagoras
We have placed you here and you there.
You have a name and a group.
Do not stray.
To choose is to judge.
To understand is to label.
Out of Chaos we have borne you
And your clones,
And the clones of these clones.
What once was a jumble of harmony,
Is now a sectioned map with directions
And a compass to point right or wrong
Everything was given to us as one,
We have chosen to understand.
Feb 13, 2012
Feb 13, 2012 at 5:31 PM UTC
“And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same.”
unity
or
insignificance?
living for the weekend
dreading the week
but going through it
because it’s required
drowning in a sea of decisions
that won’t matter in a hundred years
finding self fulfillment
inside your own mind
to escape the emptiness
forced through a path
willingly
because it’s good enough for everyone else
zoom in
splashes of color
zoom out
shades of gray
May 15, 2012
May 15, 2012 at 5:48 PM UTC
The room… it held in the darkness; a self-encapsulating prison…
Silent echo.
Cautionary tales, shared through a cautionary glance, half inferred cautionary advice, to be paid off with a cautionary stone.
The serpent held its place, dangling on the sill, whispering half concoctions to the man known as death… hell followed.
The guise of honor, shown in the stare of cadaverous ghosts, with pecked out pupils.
Respect suppressed in shame
Reverie found in pain
Obfuscation in the wake
Engrossed epigraph held over the stake
Dec 23, 2014
Dec 23, 2014 at 7:21 PM UTC
Turning each pages back and forth
We've found the path which we've rode
I have something special
But you have something more
It sure is a fateful destiny
Of our path intercepting with inspiration
I was the epigraph and
You were the episode of our destiny
We were the front and the back
Together we made our story
Let's snap the memories which we made
And complete the set of our story with fate
You were the day and I was the night
You were the dark and I was the light
We made our future
Despite our differences
We travelled our own paths
But finished our story together
I had followed you and
You had followed me
But little did we know that
We were following each other
It sure is a surprise that
It is our beautiful story
Aug 3, 2018
Aug 3, 2018 at 11:21 AM UTC
so you sew your melancholy shut –
pour your father’s ***
on the stitches
like you always do
i turn my back and bend over –
ache descending my backbone
where your kisses used to rest;
it recoils in instinct
as i keep on digging for the same mistakes
on skinfolds and chromatic bruises
and thin walls where i hung
my tendency to ache
scrubbed out of me like dead skin,
as i lie, washed, stripped, and tender
in these soft, celestine sheets;
i pepper bits and pieces of myself
to diffuse the hurting
but my pain is blinded;
yours, all-seeing
as i draw my three of swords
from my deepest deck of cards
but there’s already an epigraph
of your name on my clavicles
and you see how your all-elysian, moon-drenched lover
is all tainted, all this time,
and darling, how alive you felt
when you fell in love with this disaster
but the truth is staying in love
will always be your death.
and what i know to be deathless love
is now lost in our ghastly lights
and how we danced with liquid fire
long enough to feel it burn
but all roads lead to rome, darling –
all roads lead to ruin
and all the letters i wrote you are banners
burning in its cathedrals
as roman gods watched us
pick our limbs apart.
and do you think
we can love each other through this,
touch our way out,
love our way out of these
wars we waged —
burning houses,
mess we made
kisses dead in our stately wake
this love — this feeling
spilling like ether, leaving
squandered poems
all over the place.
had you known it all along
had you walked away?
but darling how alive you felt —
how alive we felt in love
but one day you’ll call it crucifixion
and i’ll call it back my death.
and we fall like sacred dust,
a bedlam of debris.
and i draw my three of swords:
dead-cold steel
and paper-soft sorrows.
do you think we have it in us to love each other out of this?
Nov 18, 2021
Nov 18, 2021 at 12:15 AM UTC
There is no such thing as to be ready or not ready for love. If you are afraid of commitment it is because you haven’t yet kissed the lips of true blessing; the spark that will burn with light and passion has not been yet cast. No fear can be victorious in battle against love. No rational thought can eradicate the heart’s desire. The body’s court of justice will be biased towards tender affection and any judgement will rule in favor of it. When genuine love is put into a scale, even the smallest bit of it will make its side heavier. Like energy, passion and attachment cannot be destroyed and like a Star, it may take a lot of time for love’s warmth to fade into an icy corpse of absence. But who can say the end will not be blistering cold?
Jan 13, 2021
Jan 13, 2021 at 2:46 PM UTC
US Verse, after Auden
by Michael R. Burch
“Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.”
Verse has small value in our Unisphere,
nor is it fit for windy revelation.
It cannot legislate less taxing fears;
it cannot make us, several, a nation.
Enumerator of our sins and dreams,
it pens its cryptic numbers, and it sings,
a little quaintly, of the ways of love.
(It seems of little use for lesser things.)
Published by The Raintown Review, The Barefoot Muse and Poetry Life & Times
The Unisphere mentioned is a spherical stainless steel representation of the earth constructed for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It was commissioned to celebrate the beginning of the space age and dedicated to "Man's Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe." The lines quoted in the epigraph are from W. H. Auden’s love poem “Lullaby.” Keywords/Tags: Auden, unisphere, lullaby, verse, revelation, cryptic, legislate, enumerator, sins, dreams, value, love, sings, quaint, quaintly, lesser, greater
Mar 25, 2020
Mar 25, 2020 at 10:20 PM UTC
Epigraph:
LET CONVERSATIONS CEASE;
LET LAUGHTER FLEE.
THIS IS THE PLACE
WHERE DEATH REJOICES
IN HELPING THE LIVING.
— Inscription at the entrance
to the New York City Morgue
She was just a little girl,
and she tried to make the scene,
but they threw her down and she died —
broken on the pavement,
naked and alone,
with her beads around her neck.
She had these amber beads,
and she wanted to “make the scene,”
but it was the wrong scene
and the wrong time
and nobody loved her,
and nobody cared,
and she died there, on Mott Street,
with her beads around her neck.
From a little shabby house
near a cornfield in Ohio
with a barn
and a horse that died
and a couple of old trucks out back —
She wanted to be “where it's at.”
She was only playing a game;
they buried her three weeks ago —
she would have been fourteen today.
It was a hot night in July
when they hitchhiked to New York.
In Washington Square Park
everybody was making it
even the mosquitoes were making it
and they bit her as she slept.
But she wanted “kicks,”
so she went off with two men.
And they found her, broken on the stone,
with her beads around her neck.
Her parents, they worked hard,
and they ate their bitter bread;
her father, he drank and he fought —
he'd been in trouble with a girl
and was in jail last year.
It broke him, too.
“I felt like I just got
picked up and dropped,
broke like a glass.”
They buried her three weeks ago;
and Death cannot rejoice
that she made his scene, —
for she was just a little girl,
and they broke her and she died
with her beads around her neck.
Oct 7, 2016
Oct 7, 2016 at 11:46 AM UTC
O brave new world,
You wait for me,
Lest in this one forever all we be
(Running on the waves, S. N.)
Dec 6, 2020
Dec 6, 2020 at 8:20 AM UTC