Related quotes: Even the tortoise Carries its...

Vanguard

Even the tortoise
Carries its own citadel,
The babel of voices
Can collapse to total silence,
And the song of sparrows
Don't they mean anything?

The cigarette suspended in your lips
And the lisping of your eyes
The city's sentry of lights
Or the heart's cacophonous rhythm;

Can you smell the stench of fear
One thousand stride away from your reach
But surreptitiously stockpiling bricks
Old as your flesh of stone
In the threadbare defense of heart?

Aren't we desperate with hunger?
Aren't we thirsty for safety and bliss?
What artillery can you yield
Against the famished hunters?
What armada can defeat
The enemy inside our holes?

Like an obstinate beetle
I wore an armour of a ruse
Deluding the melanin of the night
But underhandedly flickering iridescence
I dug a hole to the ground -
A grave for all the merciless struggling
The silence of the shadow was my roar
And this defense is my leonine grace

For in this savage platoon of truth
There's no chance to dodge the bullets
Unless you immolate yourself
Before the superfluity of fingers
And it takes courage to be unafraid.

poem by Norman Santos
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes

I Built a Citadel to Burn

The superfluity of adamant nights and babel of storms
Tarried and wrecked the quietude of my sleepy home
Desperately I groped for a banister, for a reeling rope
A lynch for long abeyance or a pallid streak of hope
But this town is already a wraith of its own ghosts
And perish is near, unabashed to morph a colossus form

Brick atop a brick, a tourniquet of bastion I built
Endeavoring to feign the contours of a thousand mirth
And vie I did, to an assuaging forget but not to flee
From the peremptory entice of effulgent revelries
And a shadow I casted, never shall falter nor tilt
And becoming the verve of the citadel I built

The soulless lullaby of bulwark walls err shan't
Dark shall fade, storms shall beat and die to pant
A safeguard from the descrying coruscations of light
Sequestering with its shadows, unfurling many a terror
Of veritable sorrows that yonder facilely linger
And these walls, like sleep and lullaby, only lulls my horror

The corridors protract in a labyrinthine vast
Succumbing all echoing calls in the patina to rust
The lofty ceiling looms and jarringly taunts
To beguile you of depth, and of ravine haunts
Even the chandeliers tinker mendaciloquence
To superimpose the bliss I heed for defense

Outside the portcullis, nil can penetrate
Inside the halls, beckons of lone are desperate
Nary a chance the adversary could shuffle
To bring this cordon down to its graceful topple
Such aggrandized fortress perhaps can save
The king I made from a doggedly slave

As the king that I was exultantly revels inside
Comported by the hearth and his sovereign's stride
The coals of fire beckons in charred cinders
A crown of thorns once worn that never quavers
And of the present yet remote storm and dark forlorn
Inside his simpers and under his throne

The suppressing citadel throttled inside
His black and dying heart long put aside
Insensitive to the fray of the city and of his own
The phantoms roused from their stiff reckon
How sad was he in his contrived perpetuity
Filling the void by burying all that he was in a city

Secluded and protected it was, idyllic not quite
The sedations will ebb to fade out in the blight
And lone inside his walls of salient divide
A grave, a cage, succumbed by his own tide
And so tonight, despite late and futile
The king built a citadel to burn and born his plight

poem by Norman Santos
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My mental approach is totally different. My coach predicated everything on defense. He always talked about defense, defense, defense. I took it to heart that if you play defense, you can take the heart from an offensive player.

quote by Eric Williams
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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To His Defense

To his defense, I understand the problem that is at hand.
To his defense, I understand the turmoil behind all of this.
To his defense, you'll never live the life he has endured.
To his defense, judge, I object to the inaccuracies you are spewing forth.
Be prepared to kill two birds with one stone.

Anxiety rises about the room.
As the swine feeds on frozen hearts.
A sign of treason ascends in my thoughts.
My conscience was right, the traitor exposed.

To his defense, there must be a reason for all the things he has done.
To his defense, it could easily be a coincidence.
To his defense, look at him now.
He's happier than I'll ever become.
To his defense, theres no defense.
No toleration for betrayal.

poem by Aaron Lynn
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Comfort Of Silence

silence is, and will always be,
comfortable, like a stone, mute to the
changes of the season, and no matter
who takes it, a child or an old man,
the stone keeps the secrets
of their wrongdoings.

the comfort of silence
to the wrongdoer, makes the stone,
the most trusted friend,
no one talks inside the hardness
even if it is broken, into shattered pieces
the stone carries the silence
it is numbed by the centuries
of human oppression.

poem by Ric S. Bastasa
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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