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Day-colored wine,
night-colored wine,
wine with purple feet
or wine with topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the day,
nothing is left
of your immutable soul.
Wine
stirs the spring, happiness
bursts through the earth like a plant,
walls crumble,
and rocky cliffs,
chasms close,
as song is born.
A jug of wine, and thou beside me
in the wilderness,
sang the ancient poet.
Let the wine pitcher
add to the kiss of love its own.

My darling, suddenly
the line of your hip
becomes the brimming curve
of the wine goblet,
your breast is the grape cluster,
your ******* are the grapes,
the gleam of spirits lights your hair,
and your navel is a chaste seal
stamped on the vessel of your belly,
your love an inexhaustible
cascade of wine,
light that illuminates my senses,
the earthly splendor of life.

But you are more than love,
the fiery kiss,
the heat of fire,
more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I like on the table,
when we're speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
Drink it,
and remember in every
drop of gold,
in every topaz glass,
in every purple ladle,
that autumn labored
to fill the vessel with wine;
and in the ritual of his office,
let the simple man remember
to think of the soil and of his duty,
to propagate the canticle of the wine.
Robert C Howard Aug 2013
In memoriam Asher and Franklin

Farmers flocked to Blossburg's mines
    willing their abandoned plows
    to perpetual dust and rain.

Burrowing into the Tioga hills
    with Keagle picks and sledges,
    they filled their trams with rough cut coal.

Black diamonds - carved for waiting boilers
    of New England mills and trains
    and Pennsylvania's winter stoves.

Brothers, Frank and Asher swung their picks
    in tunnels deep beneath the hills
    and brushed away the clouds of soot.

Their coughs at first seemed harmless
    enough as from nagging colds or flus -
    but deepened as their lungs turned black.

Pain and choking drove them to their beds
    where no medic's art could aid them.
    Then the coroner came to seal their eyes.

A stonecutter's chisel marks their brevity
    on an marble graveyard obelisk
    that pays no homage to their sacrifice.

September, 2007
Asher and Franklin Howard were my great grandfather Sam's brothers. Both died of black lung disease working the coal mines in Blossburg PA.  Ironically Sam was a railroad engineer who mainly delivered coal from the Blossburg mines to Elmira NY.
Ian K Mar 22
The bone dry
hand of stone cutter
works away.
The clink
of metal on stone,
scraping,
dull and full,
How many strikes have they laid
trying to form a new passage?
Humans taking up the work
nature left unfinished.
But they might disagree
saying nature did the hard work
bringing the stone to this point
from a miles deep furnace
and all they’re doing
is hitting a stone.
Satsih Verma Jul 2018
Sleeping on pavement―
looking at the stars.

I try to reconstruct―
the manikin, you had
flung away like―
an antique plaque.

We were supposed to
talk as equals in this
moment of truth.

Was that not― the
trading in flesh, when you
ask the stonecutter to make
a shrine of an unknown god?

What was your grand
design O love?
Touch my face, I am
burning like a coal.

In a massive blast I
will break into myriad of seeds.
Satsih Verma Nov 2018
When the stonecutter
becomes genderless, I will ask-
who was the master of sky,
as sun goes down to sleep
behind the hill.

Deep and strange, beginning
always held the charm. You don't
want to age.

No oblique answer will satisfy
the sorrow of centuries.
Why the man was still wandering?

I touch you in full moon,
when it hangs on the tree,
and you shiver like a yellow moth.

Maple and sea don't learn
from history. The ache of bending
to shed the past for forgetting
the future. There was none to walk with.

— The End —