"tennyson" poems
I sometimes take words that were first used by others
(I'm About to admit I'm a bit of a crook)
Re-hash and re-use them, and make my own covers-
Stealing little known lines from an eloquent book.
I've stolen from Shakespeare, yanked words off of Yeats,
And pilfered from Plato and Brown;
I've probably swiped stuff off all of the greats,
And many of zero renown.
There's more to be heard in the wise words of Wilde
Or took from a Tennyson line
Or the thinking out loud of an inquisitive child,
Than could spill forth from this pen of mine.
So if I've stolen from you, and perchance have offended,
(Yes- I'm about to steal Shakespeare again)
Just think but this, and all is mended;
Nothing original came from my pen.
Which means that, eventually, all that I've ever done
Will be lost in the shadows of time,
Skipped over, or lost, and simply outdone
By your works original shine.
Oct 27, 2018
Oct 27, 2018 at 6:05 AM UTC
Had I the choice to tally greatest bards,
To limn their portraits, stately, beautiful, and emulate at will,
Homer with all his wars and warriors—Hector, Achilles, Ajax,
Or Shakespeare’s woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello—Tennyson’s
fair ladies,
Meter or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme,
delight of singers;
These, these, O sea, all these I’d gladly barter,
Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer,
Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse,
And leave its odor there.
7k
I come from haunts of coot and hern;
I make a sudden sally;
I sparkle out among the fern
To bicker down a valley.
By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.
At last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
I chatter over stony ways
In sharps and trebles;
I bubble into eddying bay;
I babble on the pebbles.
I chatter, chatter as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a ***** trout,
And here and there a grayling.
And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel
With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel,
And draw them all along, and flow
To joing the brimming river;
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
I steal by lawns and grassy plots;
I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.
I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeams dance
Against my sandy shallows.
I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;
And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river;
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
~Alfred Tennyson 1809-1892~
Oct 31, 2012
Oct 31, 2012 at 9:24 AM UTC
The old order changeth, yielding place to new
-Tennyson, Idylls of the King
Like dinosaurs our institutions gasp
In spasms of existential death; they pass
At first unnoticed by the casual unobserver
Who trips over a covenant that isn’t there
If you vote they give you a sticker
The ephemeral Constitution changed
Like sweaty skivvies by each president
Law libraries catalogued for pulp
By obedient functionaries in tees
If you vote they give you a sticker
The faithful escorted out of the cathedral
By a bored security guard on overtime
The altar linens for sale at Goodwill
And the sanctuary repurposed on T.V.
If you vote they give you a sticker
Some of The Just Plain Folks cheer for the Reds
And the others cheer only for the Blues
As the reincarnation of Jack Chick
Blesses their four-wheelers and plastic caps
If you vote they give you a sticker
Election placards on abandoned buildings
Promise again prosperity for all
The **** lab cooks behind The Kute Kidz
Private Academy of the Dance and Math
If you vote they give you a sticker
An outreach of the Bright Light Free Will
Missionary Temple of the Lord Jesus Christ
Of the Lamb Sanctified 501C The Reverend Doctor Master Bishop Billy-Bob Hairdo PhD, DD a-brangin’ Messages and His Esteemed Lady Apostle Heather
If you vote they give you a sticker
And blessed be the Holy AR-15
God gave to His People to defend themselves
Here in the freest country in the world
Which you can find behind the barbed-wire fence
If you vote they give you a sticker
While fleets of luxury presidential jets
Arc high over our public housing projects
Reminding us of our prosperity
Here in the richest country in the world
If you vote they give you a sticker
And them Jews for Jesus I guess they’re all right
But them other Jews they just ain’t no good
Nor them Cath’lics nor them Mormons neither
And don’t you get me started on them Baptists
(We seem to have been otherwise engaged)
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new” –
(But neither cares at all for me or you)
But if you vote they give you a sticker
Nov 6, 2018
Nov 6, 2018 at 7:30 AM UTC
…These men are worth your tears:
You are not worth their merriment.
-Wilfred Owen, “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”
When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean? Paradise Lost? Probably not
Nor Saint Paul speaking on the Field of Mars
The Kalevala, Hagia Sophia
With its pendentives lifting up our prayers
Horatius fighting to defend his bridge
And Wilfred Owen dying bravely on his
Lord Tennyson and Idylls of the King
Chapultepec, Henry V, Becket
The paratroops at Arnhem, Saint Thomas More,
His King’s loyal servant, but God’s first
The Stray Dog poets of Saint Petersburg
The brave last stand of Roland at Roncesvalles
Lewis and Tolkien and glasses of beer
Montcalm and Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham
Hildegard von Bingen, Siegfried and the Rhine
Magna Carta, HMS Hood, the Thames
The Grove of Daphne, “The Old Rugged Cross”
Beatrix Potter and her little pet rabbit
El Cid, Anne Frank, John Keats, Saint Benedict
“I Have a Dream,” Dostoyevsky, and Greene
Viktor Frankl, Dag Hammarkskjold, and Proust
Good Chaucer’s naughty pilgrims telling tales
The Gettysburg Address, Willie and Joe
Stern Saint Augustine of North Africa
Wodehouse writing a jolly bit of fun
Saint Corbinian and Bavaria
The ancient glories of Byzantium
Pius XII contra the bombs and lies
The 602nd TD Battalion
Saint Joan, the Prado, and Robert Frost
And far, far more.
When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean?
Nov 4, 2018
Nov 4, 2018 at 4:06 PM UTC
The Kraken
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
3.8k
HOW UNPLEASANT TO KNOW MR. CROW
"Hello!" said the crow.
"Hello?" I answered
thinking: ("Talking to crows
is a bit of a no-no?")
"Do I know you?"
I asked politely.
"I'm Ted Hughes' CROW
....you know!"
"I didn't know that!
I admitted.
"You look like every other crow there is to know."
I impolitely pointed out.
"Every crow is CROW!"
it pointedly pointed out.
"Say...something Ted Hughes-ish then!"
I challenged it.
"In the beginning was..."
"...scream!" crow screamed
and then a load of begatting
to give the Bible a run for its money.
Nothing and Never both begatted
to make crow.
It made me remember the only time
I had been in Mr. Hughes' presence.
One shift leading into another shift and yet another shift so that
it was falling with tiredness I was.
Was it on Thursday I was
to meet the girlfriend
on Friday Street or
Friday I...just didn't know no more.
Ted grasped the podium
with crooked hands
as if he were Tennyson's EAGLE
or a Heathcliff grown old.
He glared down on me.
I trying not to fall asleep.
He like a cliff come alive
as if rocks could talk.
His words....CROW'S words.
Ted now
merging into the crow
gazing upon me as if
I were carrion.
Crow now losing his human voice.
His raucous caw
echoing inside my head
as he takes to the skies.
I should have listened to
what my mum said.
"Don't talk to strange corvids!"
Sep 7, 2018
Sep 7, 2018 at 3:35 AM UTC
Ring Out, Wild Bells
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkenss of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
3.4k
Mariana in the Moated Grange
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The **** sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "The day is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary
I would that I were dead!"
And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then said she, "I am very dreary,
He will not come," she said;
She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!"
3k
Should Heaven send me any son,
I hope he's not like Tennyson.
I'd rather have him play a fiddle
Than rise and bow and speak an idyll.
2.2k
Demon from Depressed Depths
Horror lurking in the murk, squirting myself through liquid nightmares, paranormal animal portrait
The walls of my bedroom are black, the ceiling navy, ****** sun above me winks in mockery
My friends are few in this frozen almost-society; I wander the briny fog in boredom, purposeless
Eyes swollen from swimming, swallowing so much salt: dehydrated underwater, skin pasty and ill
I hide from starving sharks and their terrible tiny teeth, but duel the diving whale: he I can drown
I can ***** forth literature; the pens of Whitman and Carroll were filled from my blackened innards
From fingertip to toetip I am nearly biggest, in a world without fingers or toes, primitive appendages
I am all knowing: I commune with the dead: I can operate a Ouija board alone with all these arms
I was killed off by Tennyson after just 14 lines, but Lovecraft made me what I am: heathen deity
Wonderful creature, yet I find myself here: battered next to chips in a polystyrene tray: Beach food
Apr 24, 2013
Apr 24, 2013 at 4:10 PM UTC
Read Shakespeare and Milton and all of the rest
Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth are some of the best
Read Ted Hughes and Sylvia, Motion, Duffy
They say what I want to say better than me
Read Homer and Ovid, Basho and Su Shi
Chaucer and Boccaccio they've stood the test
Read Donne, Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson and Raleigh
Read Shakespeare and Milton and all of the rest
Read Swift, Pope, Blake, Tennyson, and Rossetti
The two Barrett Brownings are of interest
For feelings romantic as true as can be
Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth are some of the best
Read Larkin and Betjeman if you're depressed
Read Wendy Cope to enjoy all of life's zest
Yes please don't think I despise modernity
Read Ted Hughes and Sylvia, Motion, Duffy
And how about all those I haven't addressed
Yeats, Auden, Joyce, Longfellow, Poe and Shelley
And all of the others I'm bound to have missed
They say what I want to say better than me
But what of the poet, with poets obessed?
In prose I am prolix, in speech stuttery:
So where will you find my emotions expressed?
On MySpace, on Twitter, read my poetry
It says what I want to say
Oct 7, 2009
Oct 7, 2009 at 11:12 AM UTC
Touch
You cannot lift or load it,
over your shoulder, throw it,
to best assay its weight -
is it ponderous, full of big *** gravitas
or a snack, a parfait desert,
a haiku delight?
You cannot touch it,
but it can touch you,
It can grasp both your shoulders,
shake you from complacency,
put its hands upon thy throat,
gasp emit, a scream demanded,
paint whimsy lines on thy face,
from ear to ear.
See
With yours eyes, by a mere glance,
true reveal its length,
stanzas multiple or an itty bitty ditty,
but this gives no value clue,
Ogden Nash vs. Tennyson,
in two minutes make you laugh,
in twenty, make you beg, mercy!
Smell
Some Poe poems do stink,
befouled mushrooms in
a dank place, some require nerve to read,
but your olfactory be ill suited for
poetic deconstruction and criticism.
Hear
Wake you with kisses upon thy face,
inject love poems into thy ears,
straight to the brain verbal crack *******
yet even the hearing the whisper
of words from my lips,
is an insufficient,
sensorily speaking methodology,
of how a poem, to best comprehend
How then?
If touch, vision, smell and cursory hearing alone
can't essence capture, what then, weary reader,
is the supposed Laureate's approved analytical tool?
Taste
Each letter, a morsel in your mouth,
Each phrase, a fork full of pleasure,
Each stanza, a full fledged member
in a tasting menu,
Perfect only in conjunction
with the preceding flavor,
and the one that follows, and the one that follows.
Taste each poem upon thy tongue and then pass it on,
you know how....
Each word, whether chewed thoroughly,
or lightly placed upon a bud for flavor,
needs the careful consideration of your mouth.
Feel the light pressure of the tongues tip
upon the roof of your mouth
and the exalted exhalations of
air rushing past thy cheeks
as you messenger breath from
your chest to be shared with the world,
over the poem's interpreter, your tasting lips.
*As I lay each word down,
a brick by brick edifice construct
of mine own design, I am sated, fulfilled only,
when with I see your lips move
as you savor my words,
my taste you share,
and we are closer for it.*
***Deaf, dumb and blind,
all such travails can be conquered, assailed,
but when I cannot, no longer anymore taste
my poems upon thy lips, then I breathe no more.***
Mar 14, 2014
Mar 14, 2014 at 4:22 PM UTC
"Write fourteen lines on Growing Up, a sonnet,"
the teacher told us. "Don't forget, the rhymes
must make a pattern; I've told you several times.
The subject's easy. You've all got ideas on it."
Who does he think I am? Some second Milton?
Another Shakespeare? An Eliot? A Tennyson?
Compared to theirs, my mind's as dead as venison,
slightly less fresh than over-ripened Stilton.
"A poem's the equivalent in words
of something I once felt," the poet said.
Clues to another's feelings, like the sherds
of ancient pots, or jigsaws in the head.
A few curt words my feelings clearly tell,
one simple sentence: Growing Up is hell.
Aug 20, 2018
Aug 20, 2018 at 3:30 PM UTC
I entreat you, Alfred Tennyson,
Come and share my haunch of venison.
I have too a bin of claret,
Good, but better when you share it.
Tho' 'tis only a small bin,
There's a stock of it within.
And as sure as I'm a rhymer,
Half a **** of Rudeheimer.
Come; among the sons of men is one
Welcomer than Alfred Tennyson?
1.8k
*Where is that inner child,
why did it depart-
And take with it the stories,
That were close unto your heart*
From Mother Goose to Tennyson's
"Idyll's of the King",
folklore and fairy tales-
Of which the minstrels sing
Knights in shining armor,
atop their steeds of grace-
Protecting king and country
as they ride from place to place
There’s Jack and his stalk of beans,
“Lil Red and her hood-
Hansel, and his sister-
traips'n thru the wood
Rainbows and leprechauns,
elusive pots ‘o’ gold,
Oh, how many, many times have these
tales been told-
Fairies ‘neath the mushroom caps,
elves in their acorn hats,
Dancing 'neath the moon-ring light-
as fireflies flicker, to the “music
of the night”
And from the heavens, a horse appears-
adorned with wings of flight-
And from its head, a single horn-
the pure, and blessed, unicorn.
The minstrels, with their lutes and lyres-
amused the population-
But, could it be, these tales be true,
or just your imagination?
*That inner child, it's still there
It hasn’t gone away-
It just needs to be awakened-
on perhaps, this very day.*
r.riddle December 18, 2010-Copyright
Aug 28, 2013
Aug 28, 2013 at 10:25 AM UTC
Up on Church Hill
I think of my love
& Tennyson, long gone
Up on Church Hill
Up on Church Hill
I look out at Steep Holm
and then at Clevedon pier
Up on Church hill
Up on Church Hill
the last swallows are soaring,
last summer days calling
Up on Church Hill
Up on Church Hill
by the poets’ walk
I sit as it gets dark
Up on Church Hill
Up on Church Hill
I shall leave my heart
& then depart
Old Church Hill
Aug 23, 2015
Aug 23, 2015 at 10:59 AM UTC
Love is a roller-coaster with volatile emotions emerging from within.
To deny its existence will inevitably cause irrefutable sorrow guiltier than a sin.
Tis’ is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Oh, the wise words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, how you enlighten us from afar.
An unfathomable angst intertwined with a euphoric state of passion.
Caged with inaction yet stupefied by its glorious reaction.
This volatility is not confusion, you see.
I am witnessing myriad waves of emotions emerging from the abyss within me!
Is it true? Could it be?
Has my unconscious decided to compose a poetic tragedy out of me?
Triggering aloofness and indifference to the goodness it perceives?
Have I become too jaded to feel real love literally?
This tender feeling deriving from my soul,
Yearns to journey beyond the engrained barb-wired pine road.
However, the universe continues to reverse the roles.
Now it's apathy that causes the heartache of this man’s soul.
By: Michael M. De La Fuente
Nov 6, 2014
Nov 6, 2014 at 10:03 PM UTC
HOW UNPLEASANT TO KNOW MR. CROW
"Hello!" said the crow.
"Hello?" I answered
thinking: ("Talking to crows
is a bit of a no-no?")
"Do I know you?"
I asked politely.
"I'm Ted Hughes' CROW
....you know!"
"I didn't know that!
I admitted.
"You look like every other crow there is to know."
I impolitely pointed out.
"Every crow is CROW!"
it pointedly pointed out.
"Say...something Ted Hughes-ish then!"
I challenged it.
"In the beginning was..."
"...scream!" crow screamed
and then a load of begatting
to give the Bible a run for its money.
Nothing and Never both begatted
to make crow.
It made me remember the only time
I had been in Mr. Hughes' presence.
One shift leading into another shift and yet another shift so that
it was falling with tiredness I was.
Was it on Thursday I was
to meet the girlfriend
on Friday Street or
Friday I...just didn't know no more.
Ted grasped the podium
with crooked hands
as if he were Tennyson's EAGLE
or a Heathcliff grown old.
He glared down on me.
I trying not to fall asleep.
He like a cliff come alive
as if rocks could talk.
His words....CROW'S words.
Ted now
merging into the crow
gazing upon me as if
I were carrion.
Crow now losing his human voice.
His raucous caw
echoing inside my head
as he takes to the skies.
I should have listened to
what my mum said.
"Don't talk to strange corvids!"
Sep 7, 2016
Sep 7, 2016 at 3:39 PM UTC
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The **** sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "The day is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary
I would that I were dead!"
And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then said she, "I am very dreary,
He will not come," she said;
She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Jun 10, 2013
Jun 10, 2013 at 2:11 PM UTC
Black moss and flower pots.
She cometh not, she cometh not.
Lonely and moated,
Rusted nails broken.
Dew with tears,
An hour before sunlight.
Cold winds wake,
A greyish mourn.
Clustered marish-mosses,
Silver green bark.
In a dreamy home.
Among wainscot,
Door hinges creak.
Like a mouse,
She shrieked-
She cometh not, she cometh not.
Mar 16, 2019
Mar 16, 2019 at 8:06 PM UTC
It had been four months since I started
reading his favorite poems aloud
to crack through congested silence.
I memorized the way
his nose crinkled up when I stuttered,
his husky chuckle after I read
one of his favorite lines,
the smell of yellowed, dog-eared pages.
I got to know this man
who had seemingly lost everything
and was just waiting
for his children to visit,
his medications to be dropped off,
to be with his wife once more.
I wore his favorite burgundy scrubs;
it was almost his birthday
and I had a new book to add
to his collection.
They didn’t tell me before I walked in.
It was bare:
the room reeked of bleach,
there were no sheets on the bed,
his few belongings were stuffed
in a cardboard box in the corner of the floor.
I sat on the mattress and wondered
why his kids were not here
mourning or making arrangements,
why I didn’t get to see the slight tug
of his lips to form a smirk when
I showed him the new Tennyson
that would now just gather dust.
He left me his anthologies in his will.
November 30, 2014
4:41:38 PM*
Dec 2, 2014
Dec 2, 2014 at 1:28 AM UTC
literate legends of the past
wordsworth, tennyson, shakespeare, poe
philosophers preaching wisdom
whilst churning words of woe
if born a century onward
their genius contribution
would re-direct thought
and our retribution
clever wit, used correctly
relays a message indirectly
be loud in voice
be strong in deed
plants that blosom
have nurtured seeds
learned men, with miserly souls
different values, different goals
hypothetically speaking, if resurrected
could this system be corrected
past vision blurred, future masked
the valley victim duly asked...
what make thee of my vale?
once vibrant, now lies stale
thine vale like a garment, tightly twined
sceptical of progress, wallow in decline
thy forefathers fester in premature tombs
martyrs to masters, grafted in gloom
thy dwell on the dead, thou should view ahead
though mystery of history must ever be read
tread forth with vision, or stumble ye blind
don't dwell on the dead, or land once mined
Mar 9, 2010
Mar 9, 2010 at 12:56 PM UTC