"vasty" poems
Your words dropped into my heart like pebbles into a pool,
Rippling around my breast and leaving it melting cool.
Your kisses fell sharp on my flesh like dawn-dews from the limb,
Of a fruit-filled lemon tree when the day is young and dim.
But a silence vasty-deep, oh deeper than all these ties
Now, through the menacing miles, brooding between us lies.
And more than the songs I sing, I await your written word,
To stir my fluent blood as never your presence stirred.
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Who is to say,
we cannot break our bond with the earth,
that we are too strongly tethered?
Not I for one.
Nor stone age man who leaps to death in mimicry of the birds,
nor the prisoner who, in confinement,
looks to the sky,
framed with the walls wherein he lies,
and says to himself, or herself, nay, I cannot fly.
And could I fly, I would touch the earth again,
or else burn up in the stratosphere.
Nay, nor the wild fowl, who may traverse 100 miles at a stretch,
ere they return to the earth.
Nor ashes carried in the air and bourn away upon the trade winds.
Who would admit an eternal debt to the earth,
which by every step we repay?
Least of all them overcome with wonder,
at infinite depth, at scale, at cold beauty,
at the splendid simulacrum of the cosmos.
Who then would hold me back by a leg or an arm,
who would through envy deny a splendid assimilation with the vasty domains of the other,
for what word, what momentary vocalisation of the earthbound
can in all justice give it name?
But in good faith, commit my body to it,
and I shall move throughout the eternal regions,
and circle in infinite revelry.
Deny me not this wild vanity,
commit not my body to the earth,
and I shall not call you cur, who walks upon the earth,
and there for evermore is tethered.
Dec 29, 2014
Dec 29, 2014 at 2:13 PM UTC
Thy mother's bounty bundled in thy swaddling
Took up the cry to capture mine own craft,
And taking arms, thou plundered of my coddling;
Enslaved, I toil to serve upon thy raft.
Thy word is law, thy captaincy commanding,
I sleep not lest I miss my master's call;
Thy will is served, thy drudgery demanding,
Through foul and fair I weather all thy squall.
Thy institution has me fear the looming
Of pirate vessels, renowned for their shrift,
Majestic sails billowed in handsome pluming,
Looting thy spoils and setting me adrift.
Surrendered now unto thy vasty sea,
I dread the day thy heart will mutiny.
Apr 5, 2015
Apr 5, 2015 at 11:14 PM UTC
I want Neptune
to come out
of the Gulf
reining
pale
untame
charioted waves
I want his imprint
on the brined wash
and
I want to ask him questions.
Do mermaids dance?
(for example)
Are hippocamps?
(for another)
Are starfish fallen celestials, antic?
Is drowning frantic?
I want the vasty deep to erupt
into answers, synaptic explosions
connections
connecting
to
me
I seek myself in saltwater
Creation's alphabet soup
to swallow me
to disconnect the disconnection of me.
Come Neptune. Come from my primal self
into my Self and connect me to me
and me to you and us to them.
Push your wild beasts from the sea
and come into me.
c. Roberta Compton Rainwater 2014
Mar 31, 2014
Mar 31, 2014 at 11:35 AM UTC