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Pax Apr 20
Sins, bites on your conscience
          never to your convenience.
       No salvation, No revelations.
               Unblessed the lucky
       bottomless becomes your destiny
and darkness laments, it’s quite cloudy
     wavy timelines, weary crimes
                   Brooking our doom
                  creating thy tomb
                   as deaths looms.
this was me playing with words. Yet as always there is hidden truth and meaning behind my play. I guess this is me cursing to those who are lucky enough to have sinned and get away with it. As in every truth, sins is also subjective to survival, so we should be careful who to blame.
Chris Saitta Jan 2022
So falls Greece, so falls Rome,
And in their bone-lipped tombs
Forever those still listening for love.
Michael R Burch Dec 2021
These are my modern English translations of sonnets by the French poet Stephane Mallarme.

The Tomb of Edgar Poe
by Stéphane Mallarmé
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Transformed into himself by Death, at last,
the Bard unsheathed his Art’s recondite blade
to duel with dullards, blind & undismayed,
who’d never heard his ardent Voice, aghast!

Like dark Medusan demons of the past
who’d failed to heed such high, angelic words,
men called him bendered, his ideas absurd,
discounting all the warlock’s spells he’d cast.

The wars of heaven and hell? Earth’s senseless grief?
Can sculptors carve from myths a bas-relief
to illuminate the sepulcher of Poe?

No, let us set in granite, here below,
a limit and a block on this disaster:
this Blasphemy, to not acknowledge a Master!

The original French poem appears after the translations

"Le Cygne" ("The Swan")
by Stéphane Mallarmé
this untitled poem is also called Mallarmé's "White Sonnet"
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The virginal, the vivid, the vivacious day:
can its brilliance be broken by a wild wing-blow
delivered to this glacial lake
whose frozen ice-falls impede flight? No.

In past reflections on its thoughts today
the Swan remembers freedom, but can’t make
a song from its surroundings, only take
on the winter's ghostly hue of snow.

In the Swan's white agony its bared neck lies
within a guillotine its sense denies.
Slowly being frozen to its inner being,
the body ignores the phantom spirit fleeing...

Cold contempt for its captor
is of no use to the raptor.



Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe
by Stéphane Mallarmé

Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change,
Le Poète suscite avec un glaive nu
Son siècle épouvanté de n’avoir pas connu
Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!
Eux, comme un vil sursaut d’hydre oyant jadis l’ange
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu,
Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.
Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!
Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief
Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s’orne
Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur
Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne
Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.



Le Cygne
by Stéphane Mallarmé

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui !
Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l'espace infligée à l'oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l'horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.
Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.

Stephane Mallarme was a major French poet and one of the leading French symbolist poets.

Keywords/Tags: Stephane Mallarme, France, French poet, symbolism, symbolist, symbolic, poetry, Edgar Allan Poe, grave, tomb, sepulcher, memorial, elegy, eulogy, epitaph, sonnet
Marthea Flores Feb 2021
I had a dream of you and I,
layin' on a dead poet's tomb
playing our song, watchin' the stars
and wishing one would fall into us.
Johnson Oyeniran Dec 2020
On the 15th of August,
We
Excavated the tombs of
The Queen of Obedience
And
King Gypt the Meek,
Who reigned 12 years before
Their daughter,
The Preteen Queen of Mesopotamia,
Ascended the throne.

Had the elbow of our lead
Archaeologist not have pierced
The false wall shielding
Their hidden resting place,
Their elegant tombs would have
Remained forever lost.

An ancient parchment,
Semi intact but translatable,
Lying at the feet of the Kings tombs,
Contained a marriage proposal
To the young
Princess of Obedience
From the grand Island of Righteousness,
Where he spent years on
Her island relearning the ways
Of the LORD from her Holy Priest.

It Read:
''I am Gypt,
Disciple of righteousness.

From the ends of the earth
And
Within my lush empire,
Many daughters of Eve
Have Fallen short to embrace
Yahweh's instructions.

But you are without blemish,
And perfect as can be!

So take now my golden sceptre,
And rule by my side,
Until death arrives
To
Claim our short lives.''
neth jones Nov 2020
'tomb-tomb-tomb-tomb-tomb...'
Sound of the generator
Weak light leaves the bulb
Fed into the darkness
I calm my timid heart
; 'womb-womb—womb-—womb'
Unpolished Ink Oct 2020
I have laid down my life as I laid down my gun
the battle is over
I don't know who won
their side our side
does anyone care when it's all  said and done?
Long ago and far away
at very the end of the hardest day
when silence falls on the blood red, mud red, grass
will anyone remember what came to pass?
Young men die and old men weep
for comrades lost and the memories they keep
hugged to themselves till their time is done
a long life haunted by the shadow of the gun.
I have no name
war took it from me
a symbol, instead of the lad I used to be
It is 100 years since the unknown soldier was put in his tomb.
My torch light glints off the shiny orange gem, that lies next to my friend Jim,
The poor ******* picked it up before he could flea, and now I feel it pull towards me,
The radiating heat is so soft and sweet I can feel my feet shuffling towards ultimate defeat.
As I reach down to pluck it up, the first feel of it is such a rush.
The power of it is to great, I'm going to faint my soul is no longer mine to hold and cherish it resides within the gem, now I'm with my true friend Jim.
The orange gem in the Tomb of Horrors 10, 2020
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