Many points of light
shine through blue streaks of hoarfrost —
One star leads the way

A Christmas market —
smell of pastry, baubles shine,
bright star lights the night.

At night, a Christmas garland brightly lit —
Milky Way, spine of the sky.

Curled, dead hair
strewn across yellowing cracked porcelain
of the bathroom floor.
Cold, artificial light
tinges blond locks blue. Cracked window
contorts the sunset’s view.

Mortal pink to gray crest -
the fox sun and cloud hedge
advance thin as wax,
strew frost on the yard,
& wrist peach away,
as light leaks, hours ahead.

I must precipitate their pain;
When I pass,
their faces close like shutters before the rain.

Of where the red, blue light meet:
Children found a place to stay.
Safe in the universal land,
Awake, to the mystic sounds of silver sand.

A radiant joy houses the godly Nature,
Trees shine the glory,
Upon artists of conscience
Of will, veiled in storm shrill sails
Of consciousness, a sagacious mast of gilded pearls.

A gold-smug rain of dust,
And a jewel moon,
Songs in the attic;
Choose your sign
In the divinity, of day and night.

Of any door you choose,
The pact remains same
Fly it on the reverie stage,
A Utopian shaman dances in a blues station!

The Harvest of Roses
by Michael R. Burch

for Harvey Stanbrough

I have not come for the harvest of roses—
the poets' mad visions,
their railing at rhyme ...
for I have discerned what their writing discloses:
weak words wanting meaning,
beat torsioning time.

Nor have I come for the reaping of gossamer—
images weak,
too forced not to fail;
gathered by poets who worship their luster,
they shimmer, impendent,
resplendently pale.

This poem was originally published by The Raintown Review when Harvey Stanbrough was the editor, then later by Mindful of Poetry. I wrote the poem out of dissatisfaction with the strange idea that poetry should consist entirely or primarily of concrete images. Would the “experts” who espouse this bizarre idea junk the great soliloquies of Shakespeare and Milton and the direct statement poems of A. E. Housman? It also bears noting that the twin titans of English modernism, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, did an awful lot of “telling” rather than always “showing.” Keywords/Tags: Harvest, roses, images, imagery, imagism, meter, time, beat, rhyme, shimmer, gloss, perfume, reap, reaping, gossamer

Baking, broiling, blindingly bright, blistering sun,

super scorching, sweltering, sizzling sand

the kabob that is my body searing, skewered

Deceptively blue skies devoid of any deliverance

no cavalry of clouds coming to convey compassion

Rising balloon-like bubbles of hot air

causing distant objects to ripple and dance

shimmering in the atmospheric boil

Falling to my knees, I detect in the distance

glimmering patches of blue and green—Mirage!

A maniacal mime of molten mockery

deriding my dreadful demise




Mark Toney © 2019