"sunward" poems
ON TURNING ONE DOWN WITH THE PLOUGH, IN APRIL, 1786
Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow’r,
Thou’s met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my pow’r,
Thou bonie gem.
Alas! it’s no thy neebor sweet,
The bonie lark, companion meet,
Bending thee ‘mang the dewy weet,
Wi’ spreckled breast!
When upward-springing, blithe, to greet
The purpling east.
Cauld blew the bitter-biting north
Upon thy early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm,
Scarce reared above the parent-earth
Thy tender form.
The flaunting flow’rs our gardens yield,
High shelt’ring woods and wa’s maun shield;
But thou, beneath the random bield
O’ clod or stane,
Adorns the histie stibble-field,
Unseen, alane.
There, in thy scanty mantle clad,
Thy snawy ***** sunward spread,
Thou lifts thy unassuming head
In humble guise;
But now the share uptears thy bed,
And low thou lies!
Such is the fate of artless Maid,
Sweet flow’ret of the rural shade!
By love’s simplicity betrayed,
And guileless trust,
Till she, like thee, all soiled, is laid
Low i’ the dust.
Such is the fate of simple Bard,
On Life’s rough ocean luckless starred!
Unskilful he to note the card
Of prudent lore,
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,
And whelm him o’er!
Such fate to suffering worth is giv’n,
Who long with wants and woes has striv’n,
By human pride or cunning driv’n
To mis’ry’s brink,
Till wrenched of ev’ry stay but Heav’n,
He, ruined, sink!
Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate,
That fate is thine -no distant date;
Stern Ruin’s ploughshare drives, elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crushed beneath the furrow’s weight,
Shall be thy doom!
4.3k
Thick is the darkness--
Sunward, O, sunward!
Rough is the highway--
Onward, still onward!
Dawn harbours surely
East of the shadows.
Facing us somewhere
Spread the sweet meadows.
Upward and forward!
Time will restore us:
Light is above us,
Rest is before us.
2.3k
I
here alone apart
I realise
we are marked by the tide’s turn
and that drawing back
long aching inhalations
intakes of more than breath:
the very filling of lungs
with white and various
sounds
of beach
of foreshore
floating
in the heavy air.
Its constantness,
everywhere
together
its everywhere and together
oneness,
though with such difference
scoured into the sand
by weather’s hand
by the wind’s rough play.
II
Shield the eyes
against the glare
against the pressing wind
spinning down and past us
out of the light noon-distant high-sunned
light,
glancing the tips of bejewelled waves,
dancing, only to fall to translucent hollows,
only to rise and follow
the wave before itself,
that, even now and finally,
breaks into a foamed lace,
a fragile flower spreading
across the sand and shore,
a coverlet for this bared flesh of land,
wet glossy shiny sun-lit wet,
yet drying beneath our gaze,
leaving the infinitely-tiny
grains of sand’s
dew to glisten,
to sparkle.
III
No pathways here
after the entrance
of footprints splayed
down the slight dune
through the ammophila
down to the hard sand the littered stone.
Only up and down
across perhaps
to the sea - from the sea.
Otherwise it’s up:
to sunward windward,
out out along the jigged line
of surf meeting sand,
a self-similarity,
a symmetry breaking on the shore.
Jul 2, 2013
Jul 2, 2013 at 3:24 PM UTC
I sometimes circle around again
Longing, growing
My story is old
And cold
I’m a gravity accident
We all fall down
Collected star-dust
Diamond, coal, rust
Periodicity reciprocity
Gravely glancing sunward
Circle around
Then outward bound
Feb 23, 2018
Feb 23, 2018 at 1:40 AM UTC
It's here again
more gentle light
a welling of spirit
the urge to move
limbs eager to
gambol and play
the song of birds
senses soaring
green growth
erupting sunward
blooms posing
both with flowers and people
my heart is singing
my outlook sunny
I feel like making
love to life
Sep 14, 2014
Sep 14, 2014 at 5:10 PM UTC
[A child of indeterminate sex--either a delicate-featured boy or a tomboy-ish girl--, 9 or 10 years old, enters the chamber where the United States Council of Artists is meeting.]
"Is this the United States Council of Artists?"
[The Chairman of the Council responds:] "Yes. Who are you?"
"That doesn't matter. Are all the high arts present? Poetry, Music, the Visual Arts?"
"Yes. . . . There are people from all the various arts here. . . ."
"The Hour of your Doom is upon you."
"What do you mean?"
"You've failed to create with feeling.
Nuclear angst no longer excuses you.
Moral uncertainty, the dissolution of society,
no longer excuses you.
The 'Death of God' no longer excuses you.
Human beings have not changed.
We are not the hollow men.
Great art
comes from the heart;
your superfluities will now depart.
"Painter! Isn't it true that the same day you started work on this [holding up a reproduction of the painting "Incongruities: White Lines, Pink Lines"] you visited a hardware store with a middle-aged clerk whose face was wonderfully sad and quizzical? That as you walked home the pattern of the sun shining through the trees onto the sidewalk was marvelously variegated?
"Composer! Tell me honestly [playing a cassette recording of "Duet in F-Minor for Flute and Woodblock"] that these rhythmless sounds move you. . . . It's made with the head, completely with the head.
"Poet! Isn't it true that you've never written any poems expressing your deepest feelings: your love of your older sister; the painful growing-apart of you and your wife leading up to your divorce; your hatred of the stuffy academics who denied you tenure; the passion you felt for that Australian girl on Corfu last summer. . . . Instead you've written these [holding up a book entitled Root Crops, No Metaphors and reading from it:]
translucent, magenta-veined root-tips
push, cell by cell, into humid grit;
dark green, dark-red-veined crowns
expand profligately sunward. . . .
"Great art
speaks to the heart;
your superfluities will now depart."
[Another Council member:] "Mr. Chairman, with all due respect to this --surprisingly eloquent-- young person, I suggest that we return to the business at hand which is" [consulting his agenda] "the allocation this fiscal year for haiku in South Dakota."
Aug 1, 2017
Aug 1, 2017 at 1:39 PM UTC
eating ice-cream on the promenade.
you sit off to the left,
staring sunward with an arm raised above your head.
the seagulls screech,
screech with their own beauty.
the ice creams melt,
resigned to their own wanderings,
liquid and alone.
and your lips, they split storm-clouds
with the lightnings that you speak,
and all the while the sun breaks bright;
the gold shines through the grey.
we stain our mouths blue,
triumphant in the dawn,
with the ice cream quite forgotten,
washed out by now to somewhere new.
May 8, 2015
May 8, 2015 at 4:52 PM UTC
even the possom's blood
evaporated sunward.
raven throws a fit.
Aug 30, 2016
Aug 30, 2016 at 1:27 PM UTC
We have travelled far since last Summer
Purple Crocuses peep upward, sunward
while buds are green tipping tree branches.
Our love is almost one year older, wiser,
hopefully we will take our chances, to love
this coming season a full cup, overflowing.
We have travelled far in our hearts, searching,
and found some comfort in the wild familiar.
Mar 12, 2015
Mar 12, 2015 at 7:14 AM UTC
Album
by Michael R. Burch
I caress them—trapped in brittle cellophane—
and I see how young they were, and how unwise;
and I remember their first flight—an old prop plane,
their blissful arc through alien blue skies ...
And I touch them here through leaves which—tattered, frayed—
are also wings, but wings that never flew:
like Nabokov’s wings—pinned, held. Here, time delayed,
their features never merged, remaining two ...
And Grief, which lurked unseen beyond the lens
or in shadows where It crept on furtive claws
as It scritched Its way into their hearts, depends
on sorrows such as theirs, and works Its jaws ...
and slavers for Its meat—those young, unwise,
who naively dare to dream, yet fail to see
how, lumbering sunward, Hope, ungainly, flies,
clutching to Her ruffled breast what must not be.
Keywords/Tags: album, photos, photographs, pictures, mementos, keepsakes, cellophane, yellowed, leaves, pinned, held, imprisoned, time, delayed
Apr 1, 2020
Apr 1, 2020 at 5:27 AM UTC
Sometimes I stop and think, “If Christ gave up, why shouldn’t I?”
There’s this haunting image of a muzzle in my mouth a flex thumb click trigger hammer snap makes spark ignite powder propel fiery lead travels lateral sever brain tissue splinter bone voyages outward and jams into ceiling brings the whole ****** mess along behind it… Then I wonder, “Whose responsibility is it to clean up that mess?? “
You see, wonder is an amusing word because those who wonder are often wanderers and those who wander are quite often the most wondrous of all!! No home no family no job; these things are what tie us to the altar just to get burned as a sacrifice to the ol’ gods of our consummate culture. Someone lights that quick fire below and ********* skin starts to boil and boil and boil I’ve heard burning flesh stinks but I’ll probably never smell it because by the time the fire dies everything else has also burned.
Tell me, what is it that makes your heartbeat double?
Is it the power that makes the grass stretch sunward or sun shimmer gold? For me, it’s her pupils as I wonder what thought might cause her fragile paper hands to shake and her clearest river eyes to water, it’s the gaunt glowing of her gaze that prompt the pen in my hand to glide at 300mph at 3:00am because I cannot cry about her anymore but this pen dares to shed endless tears of red ink all over the page all night old night bitter wind howls through this ancient, ancient oak but its felt worse wind before.
Listen, I’m lost, and I think I’ve finally lost. I lost. I lost, okay? I ******* admit it. Her empty smile now symbolizes something that spits stinging poison. Pour through my blood freeze heartbeat spasm uncontrollable spiral downward darkness hits hard hefty heaving heaven… hello ello ello llo lo o? (How boldly my inspired voice echoes unimpeded in the Cave of Madness!)
Now I’m alone except for lonely howling train whistle. Head’s heavy, hell is consciousness.
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 2:17 AM UTC
A naked face of alabaster
Brazen at day’s end
In rosy blushing hue
Smiled sunward in a knowing gaze
Stretching all her stony height
To greet her solar lover.
Such is the silent ***********
Between eternal elements:
She, brought forth from fiery depths
Where birth’s great press
Makes stone awake and shine;
He, furnace father of all that grows,
Draws a blush long suppressed
Across miles of breathless sky
In recognition of a lover’s glance.
Thus the pair perform their evening dance
In a moment’s motionless silence.
Feb 8, 2015
Feb 8, 2015 at 6:11 PM UTC
by John Gillespie McGee Jr.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling
mirth of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred
things you have not dreamed of - wheeled
and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hovr'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along,
and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up, the long, delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr., September 3, 1941
Oct 21, 2014
Oct 21, 2014 at 11:20 AM UTC