"rucked" poems
Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' teeth wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, - but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hands' palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?
- These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lings that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable, and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
- Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
- Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.
2.2k
Touch offers the deepest clue to the mystery of encounter, awakening and belonging.
John O'Donohue
Child grips the ******
indelicate with haste and
stern impatience a
cradle of warm fleshy love
rucked in the dark of her arms.
Shiloh Harmitt
Nov 10, 2011
Nov 10, 2011 at 3:58 PM UTC
Grey. You are invisible to hungering eyes.
Except perhaps to mine. I see you with my memory.
You are anchored in my mind.
Grey. Grey. There.
The spectral photograph of your architecture.
Ensconced in mist. What have you to hide?
Your regal spine, adorned in halfsleep shades of midnight.
Rucked up around your amber skin.
There are mirrors everywhere that speak in half-light
As it gathers about you the blush deepens and ebbs.
I think of violets.
You are so very still.
I watch you magnetically with my entireness
With want of telling you tangibly
Coloured cognitions
My heart is yours.
It is all stained glass.
Jan 15, 2012
Jan 15, 2012 at 9:14 PM UTC
Sometimes all we have
are dreams like aniseed
a strange moment
we can't quite identify.
Or enjoy.
I breathe in stale air
sleep on sheets
rucked up beneath me
wake to lines imprinted
on slack skin.
I twist into them
sweet and bitter dreams
that go together
better than I sleep.
These are long nights.
Another bedtime,
slipping into darkness
or slipping away
who's to know the difference
in the light of day.
r.l.w
Feb 19, 2017
Feb 19, 2017 at 4:24 PM UTC
We sojourn
in a dying world
diaphanous
as the antecedent glow
of Virtue and Destiny
We scatter
and within and around and among
the sepulchral
Wind and Fire
of progress and evolution
a promise
breathes resolute
that nothing here may abide eternal
and in the imperious pursuit
of meaning and purpose
We sojourners
inexorably consume ourselves
Infinite and Whole
against the rucked pall
of history
like entwined marionettes
set upon a boundless stage
Into Oblivion
We dance
Apr 1, 2018
Apr 1, 2018 at 7:53 PM UTC