Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Jim Davis Apr 2017
In the last
three decades,
after we became one,
I touched
amazingly beautiful things,
horribly ugly things,  
unbelievably wondrous things

I touched nature's majesty;
hued walls of the Grand Canyon,              
crusty bark of the
Redwoods and Sequoias,
live corals of the
Great Barrier Reef,
dreamlike sandstone of the Wave

I touched magical and strange;
platypus, koalas and
kangaroos Down Under,
underwater alkali flies and
lacustrine tufa at Mono Lake,
astral glowing worms
in the Kawiti caves

I touched holy places;
Christianity's oldest churches,
the Pope's home in the Vatican,
Hindu and Sikh temples and
Moslem mosques in India,
Anasazi's kivas of Chaco canyon,
Aboriginal rocks of Uluru and Kata Tjuta

I touched glimmers of civilization;
uncovered roads of Pompeii,
fighting arenas of Rome,
terra cotta armies of Xian,
sharp stone points of the Apache,
pottery shards from the Navajo,
petroglyphs by the Jornada Mogollon

I touched fantastical things;
winds blowing on the
steppes of Patagonia,,
playas and craters of Death Valley,  
high peaks of the Continental Divide,
blazing white sands of the  
Land of Enchantment

I touched icons of liberty
and freedom;
the defended Alamo,
a fissured Liberty Bell,
an embracing Statue of Liberty,
the harbor of Checkpoints
Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie

I touched glorious things
made by man;
the monstrous Hoover Dam,
an exquisite Eiffel tower,
a soaring St Louis Arch,
an Art deco Empire State Building,
the sublime Golden Gate Bridge

I touched sparks from history;
the running path of an
Olympic flame just off Bourbon,
the last steps of Mohandas Ghandi
at Birla House before Godse,
******'s Eagle's nest and the
grounds over Der Führerbunker

I touched walls of power;
enclosed rings of the Pentagon,
steep steps of the
Great Wall of China,
untried bastions of
Peter and Paul's fortress,
fitted boulders of Machu Picchu

I touched strong hands;
of those conquering
Rommel's and ******'s hordes,
of cold warriors of
Chosin Reservoir,  
of forgotten soldiers of Vietnam,
of terrorist killers of today

I touched memories of war;
the somber Vietnam memorial,
the glorious Iwo Jima statue,
the cold slabs at Arlington,
the buried tomb of USS Arizonians,
Volgograd's Mother Russia  

I touched ugly things;
shreds of light in
Port Arthur's prison,
horrible smelly dust
in the streets from 9/11,
ash impregnated dirt
in the pits at Auschwitz

I touched oppressed freedom;
open ****** plazas
of Tiananmen Square,
smooth pipe and concrete
of the Berlin Wall,  
tall red brick walls
of the Moscow Kremlin

I touched constrained freedom;
heavy ankle and
wrist slave chains
in the South,
little windows
in Berlin's Stasi prison,
haunted cells in Alcatraz  

I touched remnants of madness;
wire and ovens of Auschwitz,
stacked chimneys and
wooden bunks of Birkenau,        
Ravensbruck, and Dachau,
the tomb of Lenin,
toppled Stalins

I touched hands of survivors;
of Leningrad's siege,
of German POWs and
of Russian fighters
of Stalingrad's battle,
of Cancer's scourges  

I touched grand things;
deep waters of the Pacific and Atlantic,
blue hills of Appalachia,
towering peaks of the Rockies,
high falls of Yosemite Valley,
bursting geysers of Yellowstone,
crashing glaciers of Antarctica and Alaska    

I touched times of adventure;
abseiling and zipping in Costa Rica,
packing Pecos wilds and Padre isles,
flying nap of earth Hueys to Meridian,
breaking arms in JRTC's box,
fighting Abu Sayyaf, and Jemaah
Islami in Zamboanga City

I touched through you;
wet sand beaches of  Mexico and Jamaica,
mysterious energy of the monoliths of Stonehenge,
rarefied air in front of the
Louvre's Mona Lisa,
ancient wonders of Giza,
Egypt's tombs and pyramids

We shared soft touches;
drifting in Bora Bora's
surreal waters,
joining hands camel trekking the
Outback's dry sands,
strolling along Tasmania's
eucalyptus forest trails

basking in swinging hammocks
under Fiji's bright sun,
scrambling in
Las Vegas' glittering and
red rock canyons,
kissing under the
Taj Mahal's symphony of arches

We shared touching deep waters;
propelled in gondolas
through the city of canals,
Drifting atop Uru cat boats on Lake Titticaca,
Swooping in jet boats
up a wild river in Talkeetna

Racing in speed boats
around Sydney's great harbour,
skimming in pangas in Puerto Ayora,
paddling the Kennebec for
East's best petroglyphs,
cruising Salzbergwerk's underwater lake

We touched scrumptious things;
Beignets and chicory coffee at DuMonde's in the Big Easy,
Hot *** with sesame sauce
in the walled city of Xian,
Peking duck, dimsum, scorpions,
snake and starfish on Wangfujing Snack Street

We touched delicious things
Crawfish heads and tails at JuJu's shack
and ten years at Jeanette's,
Langoustine at Poinciana's, Fjöruborðinus and Galapagos,
Cream cheese and loch bagels
at Ess-a' s in the Big Apple

I touched your hand riding;
hang loose waves of Waikiki,
a big green bus in Denali's awesomeness,
clip clopping carriages of Vienna, Paris,
Prague, New Orleans, Krakow,
Quebec City, and Zakopane,
the acapella sugar train of St Kitts

We shared touching on paths;
the highway 1 of Big Sur,
the Road of the Great Ocean,
the bahn to Buda and Pest,
the path to the North of Maine,
the trail of the Hoh rainforest,
and time after time, the way home

Yet,
I could spend
the next three decades,
in simple bliss,
having need for
touching nothing,
other than you!

©  2016 Jim Davis
A poem I wrote last year for my wife!  Posted now since it matches the HP' theme for today - "Places"
Gourab Banerjee Oct 2015
The Sword of Non-Violence
The time we born
Is a age of war-mongers
East to West
South to North

Throughout the World
There's not a single moment
You can't heard about a war
It's a must in our daily life
May be in lieu of civil war
But it exists
None can disobey it's presence
And,where there is a war
There must be a weapon
And,in true sense war can't be without weapon
There're so many varieties of this weapon
Even may be countless
But,once a person made exception
Yes,he invented a sword
The SWORD OF NON-VIOLENCE
Strange it seems to be
But,it's fact
And,we should proud of him
Because,he's an Indian
We all know him as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Also renowned as Bapuji i.e Father of Nation
We celebrate his birth anniversary as a holiday
But,did we even use his weapon once in our lifetime?
Surely,the answer would be no
But,if we really respect him
We should do so
Isn't it?
Think it off!
And,last of all I would like to conclude with
If he can so we too-Written on 02.10.2012
Isaiah Johnson Nov 2014
As I let my mind wander into time, and release these binds that have me confined, I began to feel a great energy, like the sun had been compressed and put into me, and as time tic tocs and unwinds into its trail of infinity. I realize a trinity mind body soul, they burn as a whole, for the mightiest of goals. and as time unwinds it'll leave you behind. unless you get your spot in, a line of legacys never to be forgotten

Confucius, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr, George Washington, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Nelson Mendala, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawkins, Leonardo Da Vinci, Wolfgang Amedeus Mozart, nikola tesla, Wael Ghonim, Jimi Hendrix, Joseph Stiglitz, Reed Hastings, François Rabelais, Archimedes, Sigmund Frued, Charles Darwin, Aryabhata, Bob Marley, Garrett Morgan, George Washington Carver, Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Plato, Galileo Galilei...and many many more...
Stand for something. Think outside the box. Evolve and express yourself. Make a difference  #STEM #LegacyToIfinity
I recite this every morning to keep me motivated and keep the big picture in mind.
LJW Jul 2014
The Top Ten Epigrams of All Time

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.—Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.—Catherine the Great

If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and his impersonators would be dead.—Johnny Carson

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde

To err is human, but it feels divine.—Mae West

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.—Mohandas Gandhi

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.—Virginia Woolf

I'm not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb, and also I'm not blonde.—Dolly Parton

He does not believe, who does not live according to his belief.—Sigmund Freud



In April 2014 A Poet’s Glossary by Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch was published. As Hirsch writes in the preface, “this book—one person’s work, a poet’s glossary—has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its classical, romantic, and modern movements, its various outlying groups, its small devices and large mysteries—how it works.” Each week we will feature a term and its definition from Hirsch’s new book.

epigram: From the Greek epigramma, “to write upon.” An epigram is a short, witty poem or pointed saying. Ambrose Bierce defined it in The Devil’s Diction­ary (1881–1911) as “a short, sharp saying in prose and verse.” In Hellenistic Greece (third century B.C.E.), the epigram developed from an inscription carved in a stone monument or onto an object, such as a vase, into a literary genre in its own right. It may have developed out of the proverb. The Greek Anthology (tenth century, fourteenth century) is filled with more than fifteen hundred epigrams of all sorts, including pungent lyrics on the pleasures of wine, women, boys, and song.

Ernst Robert Curtius writes in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953): “No poetic form is so favorable to playing with pointed and sur­prising ideas as epigram—for which reason seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany called it ‘Sinngedicht.’ This development of the epigram necessarily resulted after the genre ceased to be bound by its original defi­nition (an inscription for the dead, for sacrificial offerings, etc.).” Curtius relates the interest in epigrams to the development of the “conceit” as an aesthetic concept.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the epigram in epigrammatic form (1802):

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity and wit its soul.

The pithiness, wit, irony, and sometimes harsh tone of the English epigram derive from the Roman poets, especially Martial, known for his caustic short poems, as in 1.32 (85–86 B.C.E.): “Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why? / Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

The epigram is brief and pointed. It has no particular form, though it often employs a rhymed couplet or quatrain, which can stand alone or serve as part of a longer work. Here is Alexander Pope’s “Epigram from the French” (1732):

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Geoffrey Hartman points out that there are two diverging traditions of the epigram. These were classified by J. C. Scaliger as mel and fel (Poetics Libri Septem, 1561), which have been interpreted as sweet and sour, sugar and salt, naïve and pointed. Thus Robert Hayman, echoing Horace’s idea that poetry should be both “dulce et utile,” sweet and useful, writes in Quodlibets (1628):

Short epigrams relish both sweet and sour,
Like fritters of sour apples and sweet flour.

The “vinegar” of the epigram was often contrasted with the “honey” of the sonnet, especially the Petrarchan sonnet, though the Shakespearean sonnet, with its pointed final couplet, also combined the sweet with the sour. “By a natural development,” Hartman writes, “since epigram and sonnet were not all that distinct, the pointed style often became the honeyed style raised to a higher power, to preciousness. A new opposition is frequently found, not between sugared and salty, but between pointed (precious, over­written) and plain.”

The sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and sometimes sweet-and-sour epigram has been employed by contemporary American formalists, such as Howard Nemerov, X. J. Kennedy, and especially J. V. Cunningham. Here is a two-line poem that Cunningham translated in 1950 from the Welsh epi­grammatist John Owen (1.32, 1606):

Life flows to death as rivers to the sea,
And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

Excerpted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



collected in
collection
A Poet’s Glossary
Each week we feature a new term from Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch’...
Gourab Banerjee Oct 2016
The time we born
Is a age of war-mongers
East to West
South to North
Throughout the World
There's not a single moment
You can't heard about a war
It's a must in our daily life
May be in lieu of civil war
But it exists
None can disobey it's presence
And,where there is a war
There must be a weapon
And,in true sense war can't be without weapon
There're so many varieties of this weapon
Even may be countless
But,once a person made exception
Yes,he invented a sword
The SWORD OF NON-VIOLENCE
Strange it seems to be
But,it's fact
And,we should proud of him
Because,he's an Indian
We all know him as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Also renowned as Bapuji i.e Father of Nation
We celebrate his birth anniversary as a holiday
But,did we even use his weapon once in our lifetime?
Surely,the answer would be no
But,if we really respect him
We should do so
Isn't it?
Think it off!
And,last of all I would like to conclude with
If he can so we too-Written on 02.10.2012
Qualyxian Quest Oct 2021
Headache again
I'm up early
Got a few ideas

Gratitude for my new used car
Freedom to move about

Ishmael
Jackie Bird
The calling of the seas

It came last night
A bit dangerous
Maybe, but I still have doubts

                     India
Qualyxian Quest Mar 2023
Un Escritor, Un Escritor
Richard in Mexico City
Me in Gamla Stan
Where the women are so pretty

Marguerite Porete
Definitely not a fake
Maybe she will let ...
Nothin' but love to make

Un Escritor, Un Escritor
Jeovanni from Honduras
David from El Salvador
Green lights still allure us

Mandy is my bartender
Dino plays Brandy
European licorice
Carmel. Monterrey. Gandhi.

                    Mohandas!
☎ ☎ ☎ ☎ ☎
In this weird America we jump back to pray, mason Ronald Reagan
could've "married" Clancy, not Nancy, making ****** ****** okay
as fellows laying men hearkens back to the hidden hand's occultical
rites of jabbing ritualistical plant mendicants stylized entheogenical
from graphical zero-order marks that temporize ape traits eugenical
It is on the rug from the litter box so I am self-assured that it is crap
which is easier to ret up than rhyming verse which ain't no easy nap
with veins popping out my head through this back assward ball cap
Attack-strikes against ******* can't lift Iberian Moors from the mire
nor re-animate homosexy Mohandas Gandhi from his funereal pyre
so that I could make bread selling his burnt-up ***, enough to retire
like that Nancy-boy: the forever-prancing-man-kissin' *** Jon Cryer
whose romantical lust for John Travolta entails proctological desire
that digs northwardly east from Oceania's fantastical rim-job of fire
to recruit boys for **** movies as Kelly Preston's a pig-***** denier
regarding her husband's penchant for tweaking her 2 **** with pliers
to make 'em more pointy like the pointy knobs that are Talia Shire's
guns that try the souls of reverends known to be well-practised liars
who fly in the face of pilots uncertified to be bona fide blimp flyers
despite the love-child ******* lazy Jimmy Swaggart begets or sires
as he has got the street-smarts that knocking up a ******* requires
& the fatherly touch that, for girls just off the bus, calms & inspires
when they get $10 from a John named Billy amongst *****-buyers
The flat Earth is the repository of human life-force & soul reflectin'
God's list of Man's anatomical parts that puts a *****'s eyes & hole
on an equal plane that rises to eye-level along a line that's horizonal
I fell off the toilet in mid-**** twistin' my ankle sprained, hey let us
fund ditzy N.A.S.A. with its nutty assumptions stupidly ascertained
via Antarctic moon rocks that Wernher von Braun secretly obtained
to ensure that the orb Earth masonic joke could be widely sustained
in the boyish minds of men with whom a Boy Scout logic remained
as a black blemish on the pox-scarred lame & the tattoo-ink stained
& the hepar-diseased mufflers diving with mermaids who refrained
☎ ☎ ☎ ☎ ☎
Qualyxian Quest Oct 2022
Most people do not have my anxiety level
And that's a good thing too
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Muslim Christian Jew

Harper's Ferry today
Fall 2022
Halloween. Things Not Seen.
Reno Rendezvous

            Sage Ridge, John, y tu
Qualyxian Quest Oct 2022
?
Maryland is kinda quiet
My son plays basketball
Korean grocery store
All Walls Fall

Midnight Train to Georgia
I hope she understands
53 and falling
E Street rockin' band

Mystical graces come
Mental illness too
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Muslim Christian Jew

I keep writing
Keep posting
Keep sending
But I don't know what to do

                    Do you?
Qualyxian Quest May 2020
Yes, Mohandas.
But waiting, waiting, waiting
For it to begin.

"First they ignore you.
  Then they laugh at you.
  Then they fight you.
  Then you win."
Qualyxian Quest Aug 2020
I have brought no new teaching.  All I have taught is Truth and non-violence. Truth and non-violence are as the hills.

Even violence is better than cowardice.

                 - Mohandas K. Gandhi
Life is suffering
Help me suffer through
Vegetarian fajitas
Pondicherry Zoo

Als Ick Kan
The best that I can do
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Muslim Christian Jew

Lonely in the night
Carolina blue
My Irish eyes are green
Horton Hears a Who

                  Do you?

— The End —