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onlylovepoetry Aug 2016
"Love...
It comes,—the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,—
       In silence and alone
       To seek the elected one."* Wadsworth Longfellow

<>

forgive me, Henry,
for tampering with thy perfect,
these words provoke
a restless, hard earned, smouldering and enflaming,
imperfected, unasked, unsought,
yearning

to explain, share, complete, abbreviate, lengthen and explicate,
my version, my coloration,
my coronation,*
from the end of ceaseless, repetitive waves of wanting
completion

forty years in the desert,
four hundred year in ******* in Egyptian exile,
boul
der chained, uphill climber,
amazes me even now, how
did I desire to breathe,
arose to contemplate, perplexed,
why was I placed on this star,
skin branded dissatisfied, a human being,
unratified, unconstituted

just another love song, just another poem,
certainly no better, and surely worse,
than the  thousands of thousands that preceded,
and the thousand more that will come by
nightfall

surrender - I cannot surpass
what lies below

acknowledge respectfully,
the luckless, the loveless

despair can dissipate, as hard to believe,
as hard as the unendurable, I counsel not
hard patience,
instead,

awake forever impatient, irresolutely
hardy and ravenous,
for what will come your way,
when I cannot say,
but this I know,
you are an elected, selected one, and

It comes,—the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,—
       In silence and alone
       To seek the elected one


8:21am Aug. 27, 2016

<>
Endymion (by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
The rising moon has hid the stars;
Her level rays, like golden bars,
       Lie on the landscape green,
       With shadows brown between.

And silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
       Had dropt her silver bow
       Upon the meadows low.

On such a tranquil night as this,
She woke Endymion with a kiss,
       When, sleeping in the grove,
       He dreamed not of her love.

Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,
Love gives itself, but is not bought;
       Her voice, nor sound betrays
       Its deep, impassioned gaze.

It comes,—the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,—
       In silence and alone
       To seek the elected one.

It lifts the boughs, whose shadows deep,
Are Life’s oblivion, the soul’s sleep,
       And kisses the closed eyes
       Of him, who slumbering lies.

O, weary hearts! O, slumbering eyes!
O, drooping souls, whose destinies
       Are fraught with fear and pain,
       Ye shall be loved again!

No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
       But some heart, though unknown,
       Responds unto his own.

Responds,—as if with unseen wings,
A breath from heaven had touched its strings
       And whispers, in its song,
      “Where hast though stayed so long!”
Tony Feb 2021
Terminal landscape of necrotized cities
Grey spectral sidewalks ending in splinters
Streets paved with gravestones
Roving children reared upon barbed wire dreams
Their hollow teeth filed down
And stilettos in their boots

A malignant sky like an open wound
Bruised with an exhausted moon
Skyclad women
Wanton and feral
Spilling syphilitic nightmares
Within vacant doorways
High priests of unconstituted religions
Spelled out in cuneiform shorthand
Myopic prophets foretelling wars already lost
Prognosticating futures already passed

Dead end highways congested with traffic
Neon lights leading nowhere
Muted streetlights casting shadows
And always the unrelenting silence of inevitability

This is how it is.
This is how it ends.

— The End —