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Juhlhaus Feb 2019
Alone the third thing can't be known.
Alone, I am a cold, dark stone
In a universe yawning lusterless,
Spinning void of aim.

Then light shines
In eyes and skies
Of gray and blue
And I am a new daymoon.

Night leads the day
As day ushers night;
Light follows darkness
As darkness the light.

I follow, you pull;
Take my arm, check my stride.
You and I mark time and tide.

We meet.
We pass.
We kiss.
Eclipse.
Heart quivers and the heavens shift.

"Let us go then, you and I,"
Wend our way across the sky.

The unknown beckons
To me and you
Where green meets hues
Of gray and blue.
Infinite line: horizons new.

Misty islands ships drift past,
Clouds cut by spires of stone, steel and glass,
Cities bright in alley pools,
Magic light on windswept moors.

Prairie hills in gentle rain,
Northwood pines sun washed again,
Spring moss upon the forest floor,
A different green on the unopened door.

"Let us go then, you and I,"
Together take the road untried;
Wend our way across the sky:
A little sphere of green and blue
'Round which we dance,

Me and you.
For my Love, on Valentine's Day 2019. (Inspired by Donald Hall, “The Third Thing,” Poetry Magazine, November 2004.)
zebra Jan 2019
I do believe all poets must not only read a lot of poetry but read a lot about poetry. Of my 50 favorite poets, there is not one who has not written about poetry, the philosophy of their work and of the craft. That in itself is fascinating- and difficult, like the depth you find in NY Review of Books. I do about 2/3 (poems) to 1/3 (being books about poetry) From the most philosophic works of archetypes by Northrop Frye to the most public and basic questions of Zupruders good seller "Why Poetry?" .
That last book opened up a new reality for me, to I ask myself all the time who am I writing for, in context to all this reading...I realized I was really trying to communicate the poetic truths of living, of my own small life in the world so full of beauty, horror, paradox and death. I realized to do this I had to make compromises, to not try to impress or amuse myself with poems that could only be understood by me. The craft and presentation became as important as the message. That is currently my direction, I'm writing "collections" of poems with themes so a reader could enjoy a concrete theme. (The last book I just read, a signed collection by Ferlinghetti ( nice and cheap in a used bookstore) was just that- the theme of light in "How to Paint Sunlight." Accessible and very full of several poems about light)
So you are stating two different issues:
I don't like being not understood, Having people throw up there hands perplexed, I'd rather be popular.... Its lonely
But I cant write for others because than it would be feeling like a commercial venture My motivation would be destroyed.
Id rather be desolated and write for those few who get the twinge...
Well, first of all, we poets are possibly lucky because we ain't making beans for our poems. Forgetaboutit. Even our most lauded poets end up teaching to get the health care and severance. I suppose there may be 3 poets in Amerika that make a living on just writing poetry....if that many. Who's buying? I didn't see much word "poetry" once in this weeks NY Times review of books. Only some letters crashing last weeks review of Leonard Cohen, who the critic called a wonderful lyricist and performer, but an awful poet. These dialogues are important to me, but really, quite a small audience. Either way, lyrics and song paid the rent, not Cohen's books of just poetry.
I'm sure there is no immediate cure for your paradox. If you want to be popular you have to make compromises. If you don't want to alter your vision, you can get the joy of a smaller readership and forget the rest. You have to manage expectations is a world that hardly notices our craft.
It's hard to be both, I suppose you should stay true to your motivation. And if readers like me don't get it, **** em. Let it suffice we acknowledge the craft, and that we will get closer to some poems more than others be enough. For me, accessibility, the ability to engage a reader into whatever poetic truth I am feeling, is more important than in any way hiding the meaning in the poem in which I alone can understand it.
I want people who never read poetry, which is most people, pick up a poem by me and feel the poetry power without feeling intimidation which is what most people feel when they read most poems published today. For me its that fine line between letting the imagination do the work, and the poem setting up the narrative to allow it by inviting a reader into it. I get great joy reading my poems to non poets who are scared by even the idea of it, and get them to feel something new, that wonderful way Aristotle put it- that poetry provides an ultimate truth that is found beyond the boundary of philosophy.
Best Mark
…………………...

Admittedly I have gone off the rails focusing on the meta or man as dreamer. Are we not dreamers first before descending into the material, deadening the faculty of imagination or as the I Ching says "a darkening of the light"
I want to bring the reader up and when I read I want to have the sensation of ascending I try to give what I like to receive which is to be brought into greater fluency and light
Have we abandoned our inner life to such an extent that when confronted with it we find our selves strangers to it; reinforcing and amplifying a kind of cognitive dissidence?
Are we in a sense a stranger to our selves having lost the lucidity of our magical youth
Do we see the world as vacant utilitarian stuff and other humans predictable lusterless cogs in a wheel like cued robots?
Witches Seers, Voodoons , Hermeticists, Kabbalists and Occultists of very stripe know and use objects as essential to their operations and craft because they have hidden meaning and power.
Has the life of fantastical creative cognition been sacrificed to inveterate congenital pragmatism?
"Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality".
Andre Breton
To transgress is to process ones madness as opposed to the customary botched behaviors of repressive modalities we hide behind . It seems to me that poetry is a great ground for that exploration.
Perhaps Its a good thing for a reader to think about what the writer means, albeit a difficult pleasure as opposed to the instantaneous and facile modes of naming and claiming Reading towards the abstract can be a mystical experience Most people who read are shallow readers Shall I than aspire to be a shallow writer?
What surrealism (Detailed descriptive language unmoored from linear rationality) affords the writer like pure abstraction to the visual artist is a great opportunity to explore the musicality of language ie the musicality of form i.e. the energetic configurations of architypes.
Part of our craft that makes things crackle as you know well remains sound play ie the strategy of syllables ... Long vowels / short vowels...the length of words and sound of words in relationship to one another
As you know Mark to analyze the subtle abstraction of sounds i.e. words to the ear is just like music and like music although not wholly translatable has an undertow of non verbal meaning especially if exploited out side the linguistic necessity of linear prose like poems i.e. a device that most never use consciously and strategically or certainly to its fullest potential.
So when we say a poem is beautiful do we impart mean its those amazing tintinnabulating sounds that ****** with their musicality? Poems that do that well stand out to me.
Further I think we are in error when we confuse the realistic with the materialistic. It seems to me realism has magnitudinal underlying meta elements that need to be felt in poetry and to think other wise in my opinion would be a dull conceit
A good example is thought itself
When we speak our ideas thoughts impulses we have no real sense of where they emerge from The processes are so meta their incomprehensible even to neuro science and scientists have little if any understanding of consciousness or its meaning as far as I know
So perhaps the surrealist has a place of worth too; and that is to remind people of their inner life out side the cage of end product think and commodification. After all what is a life and what is a poem?
Best Z
Paul Celano Jun 2010
I became a brainless mute
My mouth droops open
Nothing but impassioned silence
For she was a giving disease

My nerves begin to intensify
Limited to a feeble breath
For my throat clenches up
As if her eyes excrete poison

If only one word would pop out
Just “hello”
But a remote smile
Would make me iced

To think the attraction of one girl
Could turn me senseless
A lusterless jelly body
A translucent emotion

To be turned down
Could explode my thumping heart
I just don’t want to be
A puddle of rejection
©2005 Paul Celano
~~
In the thick wet darkness
Purple flowers are unknown
Last songs of yellow days
As if the anger of Lost spring,
Standing at the end of the afternoon
Embraces the eclipse

Pale gray grass
Dust dough days left alone
Anguish drops around in the silence,
As deep black clouds,
That covers the sky
With the blemish

Drifted clouds drifting more
Builds water flows
Washes away
A white rose
And with the tears
My white love

Intact, Aloof
But the lusterless time
Moving with known unknown cradle
Kapok, Flame-of-the-forest,
Red Flamboyant
Everything Stuck between
Even my Eternal World

Yet who calls from another way
Not at the end of the bend,
At the end of the way
Even Earth Sun Moon,
Where's all the ways mingle
With so many different minds
For another mystic reason
~~
@Musfiq us shaleheen
....Share your comments....
Alison MacNeil Nov 2011
In her incessant memory,
Your times were black;
Always an addition
to the white smile
Grating across her lips.

It hung from your shoulders
like the curtains.

Always a separation
from an ardent breast
Forcing femininity closer.

Your clothes were black
Her blood, cold and purple;
Drying and fading in
the back of your head.

She hides among the folds;
You see only traces of her white-
Seeing her in parts.

The times were always black;
Leveling against your warm lips,
Leveling to the girlish
touch

But always in control.

The curtains just barely move, but
in time with her breath;
steaming over the window.

And only the color remains;
One thousand shades of black
Rotting in your attic, open
only to theives.

She has stolen only what she needs,
And she wears it out;

Modeling a string of your
cloudy pearls-
Lusterless against her
gleaming white skin.

She knows you will see her
And she'll break your black
all over a burning sun.
Asha Ryder Sep 2012
Sunlight, that insipid *****,
spills herself all over my desk in an open invitation.
I want nothing more than to run outside, rip off my clothes
and let her ravish me.
My open book,
ever the nagging wife,
looks at me in reproach.
"This was meant to be our day"
"you promised we's spend some time together".
That nagging shrew: I think I hate her.
I want to tell her that she bores me,
that the years have left her lusterless and lined,
full of nothing but dull words
and a dusty smell.
Little Bird May 2014
Cherry lips ripe for the taking with a pomegranate cracked hue just to the left corner
Spiced vanilla into twisted locks of dry abstinence in which filled a lusterless waterfall
Crystal and star dust weaved into the midnight ink of dead eyes
Slick satin clinging onto deadened skin, to bring out the warm glows that used to hue the soft skin
Red oak coffin barely containing the life force that once lived in vibrant life, only now been dulled
This thing, a person, the one I used too know, now a painted mask of lies and deceit
Quietly glares back at me as I close the lid to the coffin, pulling back upon rocking heels
As if I am the creator of this "disease"; conforming it to her form, breathing in her soul and life, the soul devourer, if you must
Can one so minute as myself truly have become the cause of this abominable misdeed? Yet, should I feel no remorse as tumult plays me like a startled violin?
A thousand dusty eyes watch me in pairs, two by two they came and went
Observing me kneel beside her raised pedestal, with tear glimmering eyes as mine remain an arid desert
The final riddle in which I cannot fathom, the spinning web catching me in its snare
The deer in the headlights, a fish in the proud eagles grasp, gasping for air
Disoriented turbulence on the inside, with naught a blink to show
Where did the time go, as I sit in tolerated silence, plagues me like shadows
Silence is not intolerable, but mostly, magnificently and implacably trying
My mother was diagnosed with cancer, I normally don't share my thoughts on it due to lack of word.
And this is why.
Alexsandra Danae Jun 2013
Who is this? This melancholy, lusterless, sad-eyed girl?
Sitting there, in an anguished silence, only hollowly responsive
Perplexed and dismayed by the qualms this life has rapidly unfurled
A heartbroken, lonely ghost of a woman, stripped of all treasures she wished to give
 
Who is to blame? Who forced her to board that otherwise lifeless train?
When it reaches its final stop (the end of the line...) fault shall be hung on what sorry name?
As this girl steps out on to the platform, destination-less, cold and soggy in the rain
To whom might she raise her finger, pointing out the wretched being who first began this ****** game?
 
What if an ugly truth, her answer, is a monster, too hideous to stand and face?
Might she recognize the feet that carried her, each of the steps past, leading to present grounds?
Or perhaps she'll cling to denials, fearing her sins too heavy to be lifted through grace
And regardless, what of hopes, acceptance and loves still hiding? For this girl, could they yet be found?
 
I watch while she sits, waiting vainly for some resolution; her guiding light to come take her away
Of my presence she seems unaware, and I've seen her eyes fill up behind a quiet blink, then spill
In those moments, I cry as well, and beg of God to take the chains from her soul, let her lovely spirit again play
Left to hold her own reigns of mercy and faith, her hands will create the misery-rope she'll eventually be hanged with and killed...
 
We are the same, but divided ourselves; split into two fractured pieces of one broken whole
I've held on, held out for her, yet she's all but forgotten me
And I'll never let go, because that tormented, splintered heart inside of her is a piece of me that she stole
So I'll pray, plead, console, call out to her, for without her acknowledgement of herself, we'll never be one again; we will never be free
Natasha Jan 2017
empty aching, waking
to cold feet and
grey blinds shadowing
the lusterless world outside.

deserted suburb, thoughts racing
minds fumbling, trying
to get past their persisting knots,
prying.

heavy headed, how can I not be? many conflictions, strange decisions
shadowing the small cracks
in lifes lens- I wander blindly.

silent world, technological hum fills the tense void. it is almost still
but if you listen close,
a quiet, violent noise.

a swarm of a thousand locusts; the moments before they cast themselves upon a city. we are are the waiting, herded to our daily lives- like dull, dusky sheep.

can you hear it? it is coming
change is in the air; do not hide- no, there is no use running.
for it will consume all of us inevitably.

crushed petals,
another budding rose,
smothered-
by our manifested reality.
Where is the world going in such a rush?
Brendan Watch Mar 2014
They say the night is black,
a shadow cloaking the beast that
makes horizons bleed at dusk and
flees her wrath at dawn.
But the night is grey,
life is grey,
a transitory shade,
silver lusterless, passionless like
gleaming blades too long concealed.
Inflections chart themselves across bed sheets,
worksheets, warning labels,
charm their way past sunlight and into
matrimony with patriarchal corners,
vestiges of dark upon dark.
Grey is beautiful.
Sad symphonies tender their resignations,
masterpieces monochromes occupying the dome
of the sky, storm cloud devout
leaving their stations.
Random.
Natasha Apr 2014
So much passion rests in his palms
solo's & chord's an ease
through every last song.
Sometimes I wish to
explain to him the "he"
behind every line of poetry.
Every line, typed out on
script, to give his lusterless
love-life a trip.
Imagine what we could be
if the world had been gracious
enough to unite you & me.
Through timeless days,
space above my head I pray
that soon, we will see that day.

*It breaks  my heart, all I see is we will never be. I bleed. I cry. I don't know why but something that rests so deep in your heavy eyes has just-

made me feel, again.
His soul. I feel it in the back of my throat. Embodying me as I think of him, Oh my god.
theo holland Oct 2011
trust me* she assured
in the fading glow as though
trust came tied with thoroughly tested
knots intertwined with love.

hear me she pleaded
as the past abruptly revealed
itself in the present and communications
became pantomimes in the dark.

help me she screamed
to the night stars who shone
glowering at her lusterless attempts
to be elevated and live.

hi, its me I whispered
to her as the sun crept through
the morning curtains and caused
her smile to glow.
Amber Dec 2012
A ancient man of up to date, in search for his rugous body to expire. Very sapient, in a low spoken tone. Blackening, lusterless, tone of green eyes hazed behind his glass dome to in which seeks a luminous view. Thus being no longer youthful, such man twas engraved as my forefather.
  Tis of thy ancestor hair a majestic, ash, of none of thee less than one inch grown out of his marble shaped, sphere, crown. Scars are thee faded memories, thus he shall not keep them in mined nor heart.
Thank you Chad, you are truly in my heart you're death is a tragedy yet you rome half dead among the spirits guiding me. I love you. R.I.P Chad
Natasha Feb 2014
Burnt brown sugar, sweet grass carefully caramelized.
Be blessed with few seconds of solace, the fragrance of better times.

Mother moon, always mentioned within the many stanzas to each other
is at this moment in time
a sliver of an eggshell, hanging perilously against the night sky.

A few months prior, we expressed with equal desire
to share the feelings in between words we

wrote so
faithfully, to one another in areas we grieve & aspire.



A time where,
I wasn't so in love with another.



Please pardon my newly birthed, lusterless attempts
to stay close to you.

You are still so special, so needed to me
Each sentence of your literature, brings my heart up to speed.

And darling, you are aware of my love for the ocean,
do you see how much you mean to me?

I beg of you to understand, comprehend & perhaps accept
that without your presence, acceptance & guidance

I am lost at sea
*is this my penance?
please.
A dark line snakes along the shoreline
Vanishing into a towering temple
Home to the finest Michelin cuisine
The ravenous crowd awaits, raven-clad, fangs out.

Chef Yukinosuke’s obnoxiously fragranced guests
Survived his expertly orchestrated dinner with death
They devoured his fugu main course, without remorse
******* with a familiar demon, gatekeeper to hell

Muffled screams can be heard behind the rice paper curtain
A clamor of voices arises, one can hardly maintain
The merciless knives wielders, red lips kissing bone
Eternally insatiable of sins they can’t atone

For. Yukinosuke adjusts the nori bond
Of this new victim, his room will be fond
One poised drop of noir caviar in her navel
Her scaled-tail undulates, tale-tell

Signs of her struggles before slaughter.
Queen of the seven oceans served with a side
Of whipped up seaweed cream from the tide
Her breast perspiring under a life-like lotus flower.



Before her, watering mouths stare in disbelief
***** men eye her perfectly tamed skin
A woman sadistically touches her finger to her shin
Yukinosuke’s knife glistens, still free from grief.

Marred mermaid munched at midnight
Lusterless tuffs of salt-streaked hair
Vanished into thin air.
A trampled on silky red ribbon in lieu of a gag
Remains. Her turquoise scales to be made into a bag.

April 8, 2018
Write a poem a day April challenge: Day 6: Write a food poem
Despite the tone of the poem, I'm no vegan, sushi is, sadly, one of my favorite dishes.

Inspired by
Little Mermaid by jkim121411: https://www.deviantart.com/art/Little-Mermaid-468659893
Pea May 2014
Do you know that what makes you scared
often is a big circle of rainbow?
You are
colorblind
and it runs through your *** chromosomes.
Blame your mother 'til you are
a chunk of solid, useless rock.
Rock it out, baby!

You wore your little sister's
blood red lipstick
and kissed four
corpses
on the cheek. I saw they smiled. Wide.

I saw you cried
for a lusterless, shriveled red rose
they stomped like crazy as the music got louder, louder,
louder.

Do you know that red roses
never grow like a scar?


Your father is deaf
but I heard him once
hummed you
a lullaby.
Sizzle Jun 2015
An inflating reverie,
An nostalgic memory,
A far reaching boulevard,
lingering to debacle from
my stumbling and unsteady feet.

The days are long,
But the nights could be longer.
The moon hasn't cast a single fortune smile on me,
But it is nothing there but for the grace of the sun, that I take a trip back to the
             Memory lane.

I hope you miss me as much as I do
I hope you don't go to bed with quivering hands or a distraction to keep your bed warm, or that the only onomatopoeia that remains in your house are empty bottles of alcohol clashing against each other harder than you clash your wrist over the scattering pieces of mirror that still remains on your bathroom wall.
The one you out-layed with your bare knuckles because you're tired of watching your soul bleeding in prepetuum at night.

I know the colour of crimson still remains throughout the dimness, and that the sun never sees you bleeding.
Your fragileness wilts quicker at night time than it does at daytime, and I know the moon laughs at your woe and misery.
It's been months, but I still feel obstacles stuck between my teeth and a wire wrapped around my tongue.
I feel my oralability whisking up into the lusterless sky, and the moon exchanges a hint of death and accomplishment.
Droplets of warm venom streams smoothly down my cheeks, because I remember how you haven't been crying warm tears on my shoulder in a very long time,
And it is no wonder I shiver myself to sleep every night I close my eyes.

See, we're from two completely different scenario's,
You and I.
You engage your suffery into more pain than you're likely to feel, and I allow myself to remember.
The warm, summer nights filled with love and stars.
The nights where I got hom with the light to the porch still glowing brighter than your flaunty appearance I'd acquaint myself with once I step over the treshold
When watching your yellow sundress fluttering in the open wind wasn't as bad as whirling droplets of blood spattering against my mirror reminding me of how you're bleeding from the
Outside,
And I'm bleeding from the
Inside
When we were happy,
        do you remember?
I've been working on this for the past two weeks. It still needs a lot more editing, so all feedback and confusion would be appreciated.
Bambi Oct 2013
A ancient man of up to date, in search for his rugous body to expire. Very sapient, in a low spoken tone. Blackening, lusterless, tone of green eyes hazed behind his glass dome to in which seeks a luminous view. Thus being no longer youthful, such man twas engraved as my forefather. 
  Tis of thy ancestor hair a majestic, ash, of none of thee less than one inch grown out of his marble shaped, sphere, crown. Scars are thee faded memories, thus he shall not keep them in mined nor heart.
Rambus Jan 2018
All we love is lost
in lusterless light--
like a lunar colorscale--
when care is forgot.

Take good care,
lest y' lose what y' love.
Parker J Birr Mar 2016
Dishes surround us,
Verdigris embraces lusterless metal
And I look at you with an air of vertigo
I’m on the edge of understanding but there’s
An invisible wall.  
Or is it a ceiling?
So this is what it feels like to be restrained
Shackles of my mind rattle against their firm anchor
Society crushes these spikes deeper into my skull
The taste of defeat suffuses my lungs.
I breathe in your disdain and still understand nothing
Of what I’ve done or am doing.
I go forth ignorant and blissless
Straining to overcome the walls in my head
The lack of understanding men (myself included) have of the societal issues that we assume are right or wrong and the stereotypes we don't even realize.
Tapan jena Oct 2018
After many season of wrongs, comes the righteousness storm
Beginning the end of all in any malicious form
The squall of virtue conquers the lingering souls
Destroying all things devious with its gusty hyperbole

Lest some tyrant hold you by the scruff
Turning your lusterless cheek into toxic crimson
You don’t die of it, for death brings salvation
Stuck in a dreadful loop of living and the dead
Is the best you can get,

They will tell you are human, but ask for your humanity in return
Don’t think about that, just get rid of the **** blood stains,
Leave no clues behind
**** them softly,
Look into their eyes, when they die
And leave before the light spills in those dark alleys.
Octavia Williams Apr 2018
Splattered on the wall
Lay layers of lusterless paint
That crawl under your skin small
bumps with a faint taint
of a soft yellow haul
that drags you down to a feint
filled with reality
Sunday Feb 2019
the monumental night sky
bedazzled with an ocean of twinkling stars
and a moon that illuminates the caliginous.
lusterless i may be but forever will i flicker for the moon.
Aaron Oct 2020
“Where is the rest for the weary?”,
Cried out the sappy sun.

The burden of lighting up the
world left his own soul lusterless.

His blistered fingers handed down his glow
as he stood frozen up high in
his onerous profession, keeping
a bright smile in a baby blue prison.

In his own shame, the pitiful sun covered himself,
boosting his rays so no man could beam their eyes up
To see his dreary tears.

After work he would blaze back home
Dreading the next day to come while
countless stars flooded outside his home,
Night after night
Begging for his spot and
Dreaming of his celebrity.

While the stars pounded on his door, inside
He emptied endless tears out of the well of his heart
But he could never let go of his pride.
So, season after season he suffered in the spotlight
all to hold on to his futile fame.
Jordana Jun 2021
I am so happy to come to your love again.

With hollowed heart I sought your grace
In vague friendships and lusterless affairs,
Each time left with the tender image of your face
To fill my listless, late-night stares.

It is you,
It is always you--
Any other is a fruitless attempt
To mimic your essential magic
And our irreplaceable, shared content.


No one is you.
We start anew, but nonetheless--
Again.
calix Sep 2020
The glacial air lulls our thoughts, only the two of us standing two feet apart, two words away from a broken heart.

"Love me."

I cannot even glance at those azure lusterless eyes, yet those pooling oculars peer right into mine.

   It no longer works, it only breaks you the more you say ' I'm fine.' It will never veil the lies hidden within that frozen hollowed-out rib cage.

    Your gelid lips tremble in the cold, but nothing compared to the melting of your heart, it aches.

  The warmth of heartbreak.
Zeyu Jun 2020
A *******’s son, born in the Five Grains Field
he first learned to crawl on the yellow earth
where mint and sorghum thrived side by side
then he learned to walk on ancient dikes
learned to run among wild southern geese
he learned to rein his granduncle's mule
       (it leads him through those trackless fields)
But he always loved running on millet stalks
       (when grass bends under his weight) and
through and through the mountains until
his feet scraped by uneven stones until
they bleed through the earth he stumps until
his mother lured him with supper's warmth:
        —until life was siphoned by rattles and snarls
of brutish machines and a confusing tongue
and men chanting to the flags of the Rising Sun
"One question is all I ask, lusterless swain,
where do the men sleep when the sun sets?"
No words were spoken, and no more shall
when the bayonet pierced between his lips
—a soft tongue dropped with untethered flesh
When invaders aimed at his thatched hut
—where he first cried and searched for his father
where his grandfather died and his mother born—
he turned around and ran (no matter shelling
or the swooshing bullets- nor the callous fire!)
to find that old mule brayed for his master
they ran into the sorghums, the blue mist--
vanished in silence and mint's vinous scent
I never learned that child who loved running
was also me: in ten-thousand kinds of winds
that blew through the endless yellow earth
my great grandmother's mother loved a bandit
and gave him a place by her bedside hearth
Many years later a swain will roam the same fields
to see that unmarked grave, and blossoming sorghums.
I think there is an inherently surreal aspect to all family stories: they are the product of history, but often are buried away as time goes on. This one is inspired by that sense of surrealism, and inevitably the works of Mo Yan

— The End —