They're Hanging Flowerpots From The Lamp Posts Again
They're hanging flowerpots from the lamp posts again
like a change of stars every spring, and between
the young trees that held their allotted postage stamp of ground
on both sides of the street, through a long winter,
they're turning up the soil in the whiskey barrels
as if they were digging up the corpse of a drunk
to see if he died sober or not or just accidentally fell in.
And I remember a man, used to live up there,
the second story window on the right, at the top
of a flight of sway-back stairs from carrying
two hundred years of the weight of the world
like the worn chakras and vertebrae
of a beast of burden that never woke
the serpent fire at the base of its spine
in time to free itself, but as the Arabs say
the donkey at the end
is in the lead when the line or the spine
which ever comes first, turns round.
May it be so for him who lived in a single room
for thirty years, cutting out pictures from magazines
and filing them according to their themes.
A testy, paranoid man, the black sheep of his family
who kept breaking his Faberge heart
on street girls who needed a place to stay for the night,
who could read his kind of sheet music
like an open violin case on a corner,
busking for the short end of the stick.
But it was love to him, and there were always
real tears at the end when he went back to his magazines
each time more bitter than before, to clip
the eyes out of the picture-music of his dreams
like dead flowers out of his bower of bliss in the spring.
He was a nocturnal man, half raccoon, he came out at night
to scavenge the streets as an unlicensed living off the grid.
Drugs, wallets, money, cigarettes, keys, condoms,
fancy jewelled watches with gold expansion bracelets
that had slipped from some drunk real estate agent's wrist.
And then he was told he was going to die,
fifty-five, kidney cancer, six months at the most,
and I was awed by how he accepted his death
with the silence and dignity of an everyday affair
people have been doing unnaturally for millions of years.
And he gave his clippings and collages
and the most precious treasures of his lost and found
away like pressed flowers to people all over town
and when I asked him, sitting on the sidewalk
on the front step of his place, what he was going to do
in these last six months of his life, he said
I want to eat in every restaurant in town before I'm dead.
And he almost did, except for Mexican,
before I last saw him as I imagined he looked
under a closed coffin lid at a shabby wake
that pointed out which one he was
in his high school year book
with all the eyes cut out.
And you could live here for a hundred and fifty years
among the tribal locals of the highlands of Lanark
like an old testament prophet on a hobby farm
and still be considered too weird to sit at their table
without realizing you're still not one of them,
though you're tolerated like another fieldstone
in the wall with the steel gate that separates
one cemetery from another, not according
to how you died, or what you lived for,
but who you lived with on Foley Mountain
or in the back woods up around Fernleigh and Ardoch
where the people look up at the stars and wait like rocks
for the last two and a half centuries.
He wasn't one of them, hardly anyone here is
where only the black flies are drawn to the smell
of an outsider until two days of intense heat
kills them off at the end of May, and you're free to stay
as long as you like in the tiny one room
apartment of your mind, trying to make
strays and runaways stay awhile, linger a bit
on the last step of the stairwell
they're climbing down from heaven on
as if life were the bannister of a free ride to the bottom
and that was the best a furtive creature like he was
could expect to snatch from life for him and his cat
and exaggerate into an expanding universe
from a single random atom of love
before it all imploded in on him under its own mass
like a black dwarf with nothing left to look forward to
but a black hole they lower you into like a dead lifeboat
into the oceanic awareness of the starless sea before you
with an admiral's hat made of old magazines
that took the journeys you should have taken years ago
like the paper boats of Li Po down the Yangtze River.
Wary of bliss, because you've made your happiness
a nest in the depths of your desperate solitude
too important not to bobble the ball or the cosmic egg
like a translucent bubble smeared in sticky rainbows
out of fear of its loss, you can turn into the very thorn
you've feared most of your life is going
to burst your bubble into tears
that you made yourself in a hall of mirrors
look so foolish chasing it like the eyes
of beauty in the beholder with a butterfly net,
and when that doesn't work, just as often as not,
stairwells of flypaper trying to catch the falling stars,
and put them in your pocket, and never let them fade away.
And he wasn't a good earner with lots of candle power
so he had to traffic his experience for their lost innocence
like a blind lighthouse in love with fireflies
that could see him better than he
could ever see them or himself.
Love loses the mystery of the inconceivably real
once it becomes a deal in life, a tit for tat.
Most young women know that by the time
they're fifteen these days, and especially the runaways
couch surfing in the archives of ardent stamp collectors.
But it strikes me as too facile for those
who are luckier in life and love to judge him
from a few snippets of gossip on the local mill wheel
grinding the gist of the issue down to something digestible,
and barely a mention in the paper worth cutting out.
And, who knows, maybe if he had lived as he had died,
offered a last meal, he should have tried
everything on the menu that life had to offer him,
stood astride himself like a colossus of a lighthouse
in the face of the storm on that dangerous coast
he never got to see, instead of sitting in his room
waiting for some mermaid who wasn't singing to him
call him to the rocks as if she were coming to his rescue
like a black and white issue of a pin-up movie queen
in an old back issue of Life magazine.
And there's plenty of people with more rocks around here
than they know what to do with to cast the first stone,
like the kissing stone of the Kaaba in the filthy hands
of the local Taliban at a romantic man and woman
trying to find some love in life in Afghanistan
just the same as they are in Ompah tonight.
But the only rock this delinquent would throw
through his window if I were ever going to
would be the full moon at the ghost of the scarecrow
breaking bitter bread with himself
at his own harvest table, to get up out of his grave
like a lunatic with a happier appetite for life and love
and like the longing of the crow and the wolf on the moonlit hill
call out for more than he ever knew how or what to ask for,
except in the way he died, nobly, without a word of reproach,
as if a long-standing empty prophecy
had been at last wholly fulfilled by the menu
of almost every restaurant in Perth,
where a blue moon in late October
served second helpings of a last meal
to a condemned man of no little worth to those of us
who admired the equanimity and grace of the way
he pushed his chair away when he'd had enough
and left the table like a pair of scissors
on the cutting edge of life for good.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes
The Dead To The Living
Work while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.
IN the childhood of April, while purple woods
With the young year's blood in them smiled,
I passed through the lanes and the wakened fields,
And stood by the grave of the child.
And the pain awoke that is never dead
Though it sometimes sleeps, and again
It set its teeth in this heart of mine,
And fastened its claws in my brain:
For it seemed so hard that the little hands
And the little well-loved head
Should be out of reach of my living lips,
And be side by side with the dead--
Not side by side with us who had loved,
But with these who had never seen
The grace of the smile, the gold of the hair,
And the eyes of my baby-queen.
Yet with trees about where the brown birds build,
And with long green grass above,
She lies in the cold sweet breast of earth
Beyond the reach of our love;
Whatever befalls in the coarse loud world,
We know she will never wake.
When I thought of the sorrow she might have known,
I was almost glad for her sake. . . .
Tears might have tired those kiss-closed eyes,
Grief hardened the mouth I kissed;
I was almost glad that my dear was dead
Because of the pain she had missed.
Oh, if I could but have died a child
With a white child-soul like hers,
As pure as the wind-flowers down in the copse,
Where the soul of the spring's self stirs;
Or if I had only done with it all,
And might lie by her side unmoved!
I envied the very clods of earth
Their place near the child I loved!
And my soul rose up in revolt at life,
As I stood dry-eyed by her grave,
When sudden the grass of the churchyard sod
Rolled back like a green smooth wave;
The brown earth looked like the brown sea rocks,
The tombstones were white like spray,
And white like surf were the curling folds
Of the shrouds where the dead men lay;
For each in his place with his quiet face
I saw the dead lie low,
Who had worked and suffered and found life sad,
So many sad years ago.
Unchanged by time I saw them lie
As when first they were laid to rest,
The tired eyes closed, the sad lips still,
And the work-worn hands on the breast.
There were some who had found the green world so grey,
They had left it before their time,
And some were little ones like my dear,
And some had died in their prime;
And some were old, they had had their fill
Of bitter unfruitful hours,
And knew that none of them, none, had known
A flower of a hope like ours!
Through their shut eyelids the dead looked up,
And without a voice they said:
'We lived without hope, without hope we died,
And hopeless we lie here dead;
And death is better than life that draws
Pain in, as it draws in breath,
If life never dreams of a coming day
When life shall not envy death.
Through the dark of our hours and our times we lived,
Uncheered by a single ray
Of such hope as lightens the lives of you
Who are finding life hard to-day;
With our little lanterns of human love
We lighted our dark warm night--
But you in the chill of the dawn are set
With your face to the eastern light.
Freedom is waiting with hands held out
Till you tear the veil from her face--
And when once men have seen the light of her eyes,
And felt her divine embrace,
The light of the world will be risen indeed,
And will shine in the eyes of men,
And those who come after will find life fair,
And their lives worth living then!
Will you strive to the light in your loud rough world,
That these things may come to pass,
Or lie in the shadow beside the child,
And strive to the sun through the grass?'
'My world while I may,' I cried; 'but you
Whose lives were as dark as your grave?'
'We too are a part of the coming light,'
They called through the smooth green wave.
Their white shrouds gleamed as the flood of green
Rolled over and hid them from me--
Hid all but the little hands and the hair,
And the face that I always see.
poem by Edith Nesbit
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Single Step
As I stand at one end of the long path my heart beats with anticipation. Now as the door sling open and you a wait at the other end for the music to begin my thoughts drift. I began to think with one single step life as we knew it will be done and a new life shall begin. A life that may span I hope for fifty years or more. A life filled with laughter, but also sometimes there will be sorrow. A life filled with millions of smiles but also there will be thousands of tears. A life were our beauty will shine as bright as the morning sun yet as the years go on in most eyes hopefully except but our own our beauty will fade like the sun into the night. Our life together will go through many changes; except for our love for one another. Woo the wedding march has started and you have took that first single step to our life of love.
What A Life Ive Led
(hicks / lynch)
There never was a man so doggone mean
I wore only black and my eyes were green
And I can tell you now that Im very old
Id kill any man for a piece of gold
Oh what a life Ive led
Ive been a real bad man and I oughta be dead
Oh what a life Ive led
Ive been real mean man, full of cheating and lying
Left a lot of men dead and a lot of girls crying
Yes I did
I rode into dodge on a sunny day
I went there to steal all the railmens pay
And when I left town all the streets ran red
I had ten grand in gold, and three guards lay dead
Chorus
I was a bad man with a heart made of stone
If you were a wise man, you wouldve left me alone
Ive lived all my life, such a lonely one
Just me and my horse and a fine six-gun
Ive lived and Ive loved and I knew great pain
But I know now Id do it over again singing
Chorus x 2
song performed by by Hollies
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I Have Become My Own Season
I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
that sometimes stop by the gate
to talk about the garden blooming late.
Some flowers wait for the moon to open,
to throw their arms around space
as if they could encompass everything
in the brief embrace of their petals,
and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids
as they burn like jewels in the night
to keep it all shining and bright.
But I've worn out the elbows
of my insatiable longing
on the windowsills of a different insight.
Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,
delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles
like green apples on a dead branch in winter,
withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men
who have died like sons
and now must die like fathers,
mine is the darker radiance
of the faint halo of light
around a black hole
that summons everything
down into it like the sea
sitting below its own salt
at a stranger's table.
You can't look into
the black mirrors in my house
with your eyes open
because they only reflect
what's on the back of your eyelids
where the only light is your own
and you are the road
and the lantern you go by
and everything you feel and think and imagine
is your own true face without skin
not the gate between outside and in.
How could I ever recognize you
in these dark spaces
if it weren't for the trees
and the stars and the moon
and the night stream that runs through me
like a lifeline on the palm of my hand
down from the mountains
in a rush of diamonds and gold
that pour out like the pent-up emotions
of a sword that's just been pulled from a stone?
And how hugely alone the night is
when you love someone as they are
and you realize without effort
that if you hold them a moment in their transience
you hold them like a star in a locket of water
that tastes like the past.
There are people
like treebound barrels of rain
and then there are people like me
who leak out of their lives
like radioactive water
that couldn't pool the pain
long enough to stop the meltdown
long enough to cool the brain,
long enough to let it kill me.
Now in the darkness
seeded with the dust of black dwarfs
trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds
my auroras are weeping neon dew
like a cheap enlightenment
all over the watercolours of dawn.
And I'm wondering
what kind of an afterlife is this
that I might have foregone
if I were indifferent
to how my solitude deranges me
like a lost continent
wandering through its own mindscapes
like an extinguished star
that wants to make up
just for one luminous moment
a constellation of its own
that doesn't wait upon anyone's eyes
for the themes of its seeing.
And though the skies have changed
like the slides of childhood dreams
with every blink of an eyelid
whenever night approaches me
and asks to sit by my fire
and let the flames and the smoke
of our past lives
speak for the both of us
I look up to give my eyes
like two drops of water
back to their oceanic immensities
and it's always unattainably you
that is shining
like a woman in the window
of a secret house of the zodiac
far off the beaten path
that leads everywhere like a firefly.
And your stars speak to me
as if my flesh were light again
and my heart
that bumps its way through the dark
already a lamp beyond
the Lazarus of wax
that's buried in his own lucidities
like a candle I left for dead.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Horse Show
Constantly near you, I never in my entire
sixty-four years knew you so well as yesterday
or half so well. We talked. you were never
so lucid, so disengaged from all exigencies
of place and time. We talked of ourselves,
intimately, a thing never heard between us.
How long have we waited? almost a hundred years.
You said, Unless there is some spark, some
spirit we keep within ourselves, a life, a
continuing life's impossible-and it is all
we have. There is no other life, only the one.
The world of the spirits that come afterward
is the same as our own, just like you sitting
there they come and talk to me, just the same.
They come to bother us. Why? I said. I don't
know. Perhaps to find out what we are doing.
Jealous, do you think? I don't know. I
don't know why they should want to come back.
I was reading about some men who had been
buried under a mountain, I said to her, and
one of them came back after two months,
digging himself out. It was in Switzerland,
you remember? Of course I remember. The
villagers tho't it was a ghost coming down
to complain. They were frightened. They
do come, she said, what you call
my 'visions.' I talk to them just as I
am talking to you. I see them plainly.
Oh if I could only read! You don't know
what adjustments I have made. All
I can do is to try to live over again
what I knew when your brother and you
were children-but I can't always succeed.
Tell me about the horse show. I have
been waiting all week to hear about it.
Mother darling, I wasn't able to get away.
Oh that's too bad. It was just a show;
they make the horses walk up and down
to judge them by their form. Oh is that
all? I tho't it was something else. Oh
they jump and run too. I wish you had been
there, I was so interested to hear about it.
poem by William Carlos Williams
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The Grandmother
I.
And Willy, my eldest-born, is gone, you say, little Anne?
Ruddy and white, and strong on his legs, he looks like a man.
And Willy's wife has written: she never was over-wise,
Never the wife for Willy: he would n't take my advice.
II.
For, Annie, you see, her father was not the man to save,
Had n't a head to manage, and drank himself into his grave.
Pretty enough, very pretty! but I was against it for one.
Eh!--but he would n't hear me--and Willy, you say, is gone.
III.
Willy, my beauty, my eldest-born, the flower of the flock;
Never a man could fling him: for Willy stood like a rock.
`Here's a leg for a babe of a week!' says doctor; and he would be bound,
There was not his like that year in twenty parishes round.
IV.
Strong of his hands, and strong on his legs, but still of his tongue!
I ought to have gone before him: I wonder he went so young.
I cannot cry for him, Annie: I have not long to stay;
Perhaps I shall see him the sooner, for he lived far away.
V.
Why do you look at me, Annie? you think I am hard and cold;
But all my children have gone before me, I am so old:
I cannot weep for Willy, nor can I weep for the rest;
Only at your age, Annie, I could have wept with the best.
VI.
For I remember a quarrel I had with your father, my dear,
All for a slanderous story, that cost me many a tear.
I mean your grandfather, Annie: it cost me a world of woe,
Seventy years ago, my darling, seventy years ago.
VII.
For Jenny, my cousin, had come to the place, and I knew right well
That Jenny had tript in her time: I knew, but I would not tell.
And she to be coming and slandering me, the base little liar!
But the tongue is a fire as you know, my dear, the tongue is a fire.
VIII.
And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise,
That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.
IX.
And Willy had not been down to the farm for a week and a day;
And all things look'd half-dead, tho' it was the middle of May.
Jenny, to slander me, who knew what Jenny had been!
But soiling another, Annie, will never make oneself clean.
X.
And I cried myself well-nigh blind, and all of an evening late
I climb'd to the top of the garth, and stood by the road at the gate.
The moon like a rick on fire was rising over the dale,
And whit, whit, whit, in the bush beside me chirrupt the nightingale.
XI.
All of a sudden he stopt: there past by the gate of the farm,
Willy,--he did n't see me,--and Jenny hung on his arm.
Out into the road I started, and spoke I scarce knew how;
Ah, there's no fool like the old one -- it makes me angry now.
XII.
Willy stood up like a man, and look'd the thing that he meant;
Jenny, the viper, made me a mocking courtesy and went.
And I said, `Let us part: in a hundred years it'll all be the same,
You cannot love me at all, if you love not my good name.'
XIII.
And he turn'd, and I saw his eyes all wet, in the sweet moonshine:
Sweetheart, I love you so well that your good name is mine.
And what do I care for Jane, let her speak of you well of ill;
But marry me out of hand: we two shall be happy still.'
XIV.
`Marry you, Willy!' said I, `but I needs must speak my mind,
And I fear you'll listen to tales, be jealous and hard and unkind.'
But he turn'd and claspt me in his arms, and answer'd, `No, love, no;'
Seventy years ago, my darling, seventy years ago.
XV.
So Willy and I were wedded: I wore a lilac gown;
And the ringers rang with a will, and he gave the ringers a crown.
But the first that ever I bare was dead before he was born,
Shadow and shine is life, little Annie, flower and thorn.
XVI.
That was the first time, too, that ever I thought of death.
There lay the sweet little body that never had drawn a breath.
I had not wept, little Anne, not since I had been a wife;
But I wept like a child that day, for the babe had fought for his life.
XVII.
His dear little face was troubled, as if with anger or pain:
I look'd at the still little body--his trouble had all been in vain.
For Willy I cannot weep, I shall see him another morn:
But I wept like a child for the child that was dead before he was born.
XVIII.
But he cheer'd me, my good man, for he seldom said me nay:
Kind, like a man, was he; like a man, too, would have his way:
Never jealous--not he: we had many a happy year;
And he died, and I could not weep--my own time seem'd so near.
XIX.
But I wish'd it had been God's will that I, too, then could have died:
I began to be tired a little, and fain had slept at his side.
And that was ten years back, or more, if I don't forget:
But as to the children, Annie, they're all about me yet.
XX.
Pattering over the boards, my Annie who left me at two,
Patter she goes, my own little Annie, an Annie like you:
Pattering over the boards, she comes and goes at her will,
While Harry is in the five-acre and Charlie ploughing the hill.
XXI.
And Harry and Charlie, I hear them too--they sing to their team:
Often they come to the door in a pleasant kind of a dream.
They come and sit by my chair, they hover about my bed--
I am not always certain if they be alive or dead.
XXII.
And yet I know for a truth, there's none of them left alive;
For Harry went at sixty, your father at sixty- five:
And Willy, my eldest born, at nigh threescore and ten;
I knew them all as babies, and now they're elderly men.
XXIII.
For mine is a time of peace, it is not often I grieve;
I am oftener sitting at home in my father's farm at eve:
And the neighbors come and laugh and gossip, and so do I;
I find myself often laughing at things that have long gone by.
XXIV.
To be sure the preacher says, our sins should make us sad:
But mine is a time of peace, and there is Grace to be had;
And God, not man, is the Judge of us all when life shall cease;
And in this Book, little Annie, the message is one of Peace.
XXV.
And age is a time of peace, so it be free from pain,
And happy has been my life; but I would not live it again.
I seem to be tired a little, that's all, and long for rest;
Only at your age, Annie, I could have wept with the best.
XXVI.
So Willy has gone, my beauty, my eldest-born, my flower;
But how can I weep for Willy, he has but gone for an hour,--
Gone for a minute, my son, from this room into the next;
I, too, shall go in a minute. What time have I to be vext?
XXVII.
And Willy's wife has written, she never was over-wise.
Get me my glasses, Annie: thank God that I keep my eyes.
There is but a trifle left you, when I shall have past away.
But stay with the old woman now: you cannot have long to stay.
poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Love
I love Thee in the sky,
After long, hot summer days,
Like to run through the fields,
When they've finished makin' hay.
I love meeting people,
I've never met before.
And I like it when my friends,
Come knocking at my door, yeah.
Ooh, I love the sky at night,
Just to sit and count the stars.
I like to mess around,
With bicycles and cars.
I love to see the moon,
When it's up and full.
And I like it when a fish,
Gives my line a pull.
So, it's easy to see,
Just how good You been to me.
Oh, you made life's mystery,
An open book for all to see.
I love stone ground bread,
And I like it when I get my breakfast in bed.
I love little old ladies,
Who make funny faces at brand new babies.
So, it's easy to see,
Just how good You been to me.
Oh, you made life's mystery,
An open book for all to see.
I love St. Judy's comet,
I love to break bread,
I get a blessing from it.
And I love to see a Bible,
That's been well used.
'Cause when a Bible's well used,
The devil's not amused.
So, it's easy to see,
Just how good You been to me.
Oh, you made life's mystery,
An open book for all to see.
So, it's easy to see,
Just how good You been to me.
Oh, you made life's mystery,
An open book for all to see.
Yeah, yeah,
Anyone can read the book.
Oh, the feel of a long, hot summer day.
I love, I love,
Little old ladies, who make funny faces at brand new babies.
You made life's mystery and open book for all to see.
I love breaking bread.
I love to see a Bible when it's been well read,
When it's well used, you know the devil's not amused.
I love, I love, I love, I love, yeah,
I love, I love, I love, I love.
song performed by by Cliff Richard
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Love Letters
She held a pack of love letters tied with ribbons and bows.
these were the love letters that she would never show.
Every one of them was dated first to last
These were the letters that held a life past.
Times may pass and things may change
But memories stay the same.
The writing of love letters had slowly disappeared
But she held on to them from year to year.
She sat with the letters in her lap.
As the tears rolled down her eyes
He had said he would be with her
Till the day he died
And fifty years later
He met his maker
And was carried to the cemetery
by the undertaker.
The letters had been written
with tenderness and love
Proclaiming every thing
Even the stars above.
He said life was meaningless if with her
His life he could not share.
And losing her was something
he could not bear.
Now that he was gone and she
Was left all alone.
The house didn’t seem
like much of a home.
She knew her children would not understand
Why she held the love letters in her hand.
These were the memories that kept her alive
And on that she couldn’t deny.
But her mind and body was fading fast
And she knew she could not last.
So to her children she bequeathed
The letters that she cherished all her life
For that was her husband, and she was his wife.
These are the love letters that your father
Wrote to me when we were young and carefree.
He told me of all that life had to offer.
And of all the love he had for me
And that he wanted to raise a family.
When you read his letters you will know
Why I loved this man so.
And now it’s time for me to go.
Because your father awaits me on the other side
And we’ll be together for all of time
poem by Louis Rams
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Sorrow
I walked into the park and saw a young man sitting by a flower bed
I asked him why he looked so miserable and this is what he said,
“Sixty years ago I fell in love with a beautiful girl and now she has to die
I knew her time would come one day, but the years have just flashed by.
I knew that it was wrong to love her, but my heart ruled over my head.
I was there when she was born at home and I stood by her mother’s bed.
As the years passed I watched over her, and proposed when she was sixteen.
She was so young and beautiful then, and everyday we lived a dream.
She didn’t know that I was different and I just couldn’t bear to tell her so,
but she had suspicions as her hair greyed, and my age didn’t show.
And now my heart is breaking because I want to die and be with my wife,
without her my life isn’t worth living, and I no longer want this life.
For sixty years life has been wonderful for me and my only true love,
but soon I must take her up and leave her in the heavens above.
I don’t know how I’m going to take the woman I adore from my side.
I’m sorry for sharing my sorrow with you, ” and as he left he cried.
poem by Orlando Belo
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Living On The Cutting Edge Of The Lunar Waste
Living on the cutting edge of the lunar waste
I made of my last moonrise. A truce
with underwhelming circumstances for awhile,
no apparent pitfalls on a Saturday night in Perth,
too cold for snakes, and the leaves playing their cards
close to earth and the air a knife at your throat,
I can remember when I tried harder to exist,
and it's still a holy war every day just to subsist
and not let it scar your spirit into being cauterized
like a bad tattoo of the moon you had effaced,
but tonight I seek the ease of a solitude older than humans
down in the wetlands of the Tay River just off
Sunset Boulevard before you cross the first bridge.
Waist high in the broken antennae of the brittle grass
yellow as the fossils in a graveyard
of green praying mantes, decultified romantics,
I pad the skull of rock I usually sit on like a prophetic throne
with the old manuscripts of fallen maple leaves,
recalling lines from poems like lyrical snippets of chromosomes
I'd written many years ago to adapt my heart
to the changes it had to go through to recast
the cannon it was into the life of a shapeshifting bell
with the pulse of a nightbird lamenting the dead
instead of a twenty-one gun salute like a firing squad
aimed at the stars. Death is the saddest loss of discipline
the spirit will ever be called upon to master in order to survive.
It was sitting here one night, staring into the eye socket
bored into the albino nugget of a crow's skull,
the boney harps of its wings torn off their hinges
like gates that weren't strong enough to keep something out,
as the black flight feathers of a long eclipse slowly passed
across my eyes, that I realized, dead or alive,
existence is an interactive creative medium that doesn't care
whether you live it like a seance or an exorcism
and there are untold ages of the shining left
even in the oldest ashes of a star strewn on the path
of these long nocturnal firewalks through the mind
and that hello and farewell were the two wings
of the same waterbird, beating in unison
that empowered it to fly like a phoenix of imagination
out of an aviary of urns of its past lives
that might not sing for awhile but never lose their voice.
Cultivate the kind of spirit that can sing to you in the silence
when you're down, about the beauty of just being here
to live it, though you don't want to hear it,
you want to drown in your sorrow like a bell
but somehow the sound of life cuts through you
like a lunar blade with a growing edge
through wounded water and you can't help but wonder
what your ghost would give just to be here again
if only one more time, to resonate with the pain
like a back up singer to the universe,
who knows all the loneliest lyrics by heart
like a waterbird out on the river late at night.
If only to hit one perfect note of sadness, one tine
of separation and suffering like a phantom waterlily
adding its shining to the light like the art
of knowing how to paint starmaps on your tears
indelibly on water for light years to come
to let people know you were once here,
you listened as they will by the side
of this river of life to the same songs, hurt and alone,
as they must if they want to step out of the chorus
and sing solo through their tears in their own voice
before they're gone to a hundred billion stars
that are listening to the same echo
being whispered in their ears like the fires of life
carried away by the desire to live on
like the empty lifeboat of a song full of moonlight
drifting down river to an ocean of awareness
where the gateways of the crow are refeathered
like the exit and entrance of an eclipse of wings
still keeping time to the picture-music that shines
like a new moonrise in the voice of a mindstream that sings
its way through the woods at night alone like a wild grape vine
sustaining the tears of its spiritual high notes until they turn
into the euphoric lunacy of a poetic wine aged in an earthly urn.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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But You Know I Love You
When the mornin sun
Streaks across my room
And Im wakin up
From another dream of you
Yes, you know Im on the road
Once again it seems
All thats left behind
Is a chain of broken dreams
But you know that I love you
You know that I love you
Oh, I love you
And how I wish that love
Was all wed need to live
What a life wed have
cause Ive got so much to give
But ya know I feel so sad
Down inside my heart
That the dollar sign
Should be keepin us apart
But you know that I love you
You know that I love you
Oh, how I love you
And if only I could find my way back to the time
When the problems of this life
Had not yet crossed my mind
And the answers could be found in childrens nursery rhymes
Id come runnin back to you
Id come runnin back to you
Mmmmm
But you know we cant
Live on dreams alone
Got to pay the rent
So I must leave you all alone
cause you know I made my choice many years ago
And now this travelin life
Well, its the only life I know
But you know that I love you
You know that I love you
Oh, I love you
But you know that I love you
You know that I love you
Oh, how I love you
But you know that I love you
You know that I love you
Oh, how I love you
Fade:
But you know I love you
But you know I love you
Oh, I love you
But you know that I love you
But you know that I love you
Oh, how I love you
But you know that I love you
But you know that I love you
Oh, how I love you
song performed by by Dolly Parton
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Your Eyes For Awhile
Your eyes for awhile
were the only eyes
I could see through
to catch a glimpse of god;
were windows into my own soul
that I could look through from the outside
without throwing the moon
through my reflection like a stone
in the hand of an angry boy.
And it was always as true
as the way your heart grew
that you could love strangers
easier than I do even now
after all these years of learning how
to talk to mirrors in their own language.
And you were not one woman
but all women forever
when I saw you once
bending down like the dusk
to touch the last of the flowers
as if you would never see them again.
As serene as the evening
there was no labour in your beauty
and I swear when I saw you that night
I felt as if I were the whole world watching
time put a finger to its lips
and pour its fountain
into the flow of your body
as if it were the sum of all passage.
And though I was your friend in all things
every evening since
the candle went out
in the lantern of a lost tomorrow
I have walked out into abandoned fields alone
and asked the saddest questions
of the most distant stars
knowing there is not enough light sometimes
even in the eyes of God
to be a companion of our sorrows.
And the questions grow longer
as the darkness deepens
the echo of my longing
in a well as dry as my skull
and closes its gates like scars.
And then those nights come
like a life or a day
or even just this moment
when I stop asking
why human suffering
is always indescribably true
and joyful as an irreproachable buffoon
sword-dancing alone with the moon
who writes me dangerous loveletters
as if she were the Lady of the Lake
receiving me back
like a funeral ship
into this mysterium of you,
I can almost believe that you know
even though the night mocks the crow
that pines for mercy
and turns its lightless face toward you
as if it could still feel
the warmth of the sun at midnight
in your eyes again
like the afterlife of light
playing with fireflies in the abyss
now that the summer constellations have gone down;
that somehow you must know
like a guitar
on the far side of a room
where someone is singing
as if they had their ear
to the womb
of your irrevocable absence
that binds me to you with every breath
I take for two
as if I had learned to live on death
to keep you alive in me
where you still flow through the seasons
on the nightstreams of my blood
like blossoms and leaves and stars
and the moon leaves no scars on the water;
must know. Or a demon’s a kinder face
to bestow on the darkness
than a black hole without eyes,
though it’s taken many, long, painful years
for the night to share the light with its jewels again
and as many schools as there are fools to fill them
that even just one
of those slightly compassionate smiles
you would send across the room
to cool the furnace of my heart
with the lightness of one snowflake,
one feather
gracing a change in the weather,
knew more about love
as a raindropp knows the sea
than all of us
who have been washed up
on this cold, lonely shore together
thinking we may have been saved
for something more
than this tidal longing
to brave the sea again
and even if doomed to drown
as I have learned
from this shale of pain
that has carbon-dated the eras
of my missing you
like a life that didn’t
flash before my eyes
as I went down for good with everything,
to thank-you, o, yes,
with nothing but love and light in my heart
and your face in the eye of my solitude
as I stand before the sea in gratitude
to thank-you
as you well knew one day I could
for the generosity of the wound
that has run like my life
down these eyes
these windows
this page
these empty mirrors
of autumn rain
that have wept for years without you
just to see you again
for one moment more
than the time I have left
to know that I never will.
poem by Patrick White
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I Walked Last Night In A District I Lived In For Almost Twenty Years
I WALKED LAST NIGHT IN A DISTRICT I LIVED IN FOR ALMOST TWENTY YEARS
I walked last night in a district I lived in for almost twenty years
I came back after being away for a time
To visit an old and ailing friend
The streets were empty and lonely as they often were then-
I thought for the first time I understood how lonely the district itself is-
‘A lonely district’
I wondered how I managed to live there all those years
And how anyone still manages to live there-
I looked up at the sky and wrote in my mind a small poem of a kind I wrote many of in my years there
I remembered teachers and friends who had lived there
No longer of this district or any district on earth
I wondered how life goes and how from so many years so much life has been lived without having any place in my memory
I felt as empty inside as the district without
I did not have to wait long for the bus
And relieved inside it I put my heart to home
So many years had been lived there
I remembered taking my small children to the playground there
Now they thank G-d have children of their own
Oh the years go by and the life we have lived in them largely dies
Forever to be unknown again-
I put my heart and mind in a different direction
And began to do what I always do – not think of the district again
Life is this mystery and question we live through and never wholly possess even as we are experiencing it
How long before all will be gone for me
Including the district I live in now?
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Virginia Wolf
some will strut and some will fret
see this an hour on the stage
others will not but they'll sweat
in their hopelessness and their rage
we're all the same the men of anger
and women of the page
they published your diary
and that's how i got to know you
the key to the room of your own and a mind without end
and here's a young girl
on a kind of a telephone line through time
and the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend
so i know i'm all right
life will come and life will go
still i feel it's all right
cause i just got a letter to my soul
and when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
empty pages for the no longer young
the apathy of time laughs in my face
you say "each life has its place"
the hatches were battened
the thunderclouds rolled and the critics stormed
the battle surrounded the white flag of your youth
if you need to know that you weathered the storm
of cruel mortality
a hundred years later i'm sitting here living proof
so you know you're all right
(all right)
life will come and life will go
(life will come and go)
still you'll feel it's all right
(all right)
someone'll get a letter to your soul
(someone gets your soul)
when your whole life is on the tip of your tongue
empty pages for the no longer young
the apathy of time laughed in your face
did you hear me say "each life has its place"
the place where you hold me
dark in a pocket of truth
the moon had swallowed the sun and the light of the earth
and so it was for you
when the river eclipsed your life
and sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me
and it was my rebirth
so we know we're all right
(all right)
though life will come and life will go
(though life will come and life will go)
still you'll feel it's all right
(all right)
someone'll will get a letter to your soul
(someone gets your soul)
then you know you're all right
(when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue)
then you feel you're all right
(empty pages for the no longer young)
and your hear dry you eyes
(you said)
and you know it's all right
(each life has it's place)
and your hear dry your eyes
(you said)
and you know it's all right
(each life has it's place)
and it's all right
(it'll be all right)
words and music emily saliers
copyright 1992 bmi virgin music inc and godhap music (bmi
song performed by by Indigo Girls
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Do You Remember?
I left my life with you, do you remember?
That hollow day of sharpened rain and even sharper words.
Each step I took away from you, each leaden pace, defeated me.
Your voice, once soft and lyrical, now cold and forged from steel.
I left my heart with you, do you remember?
The days of love we'd shared lay smashed and littered with accusations.
Those eyes in which I'd often bathed, now but a swollen tempest,
Your smile, which made the Sun shine bright, now turned to blackened stone.
I left my dreams with you, do you remember?
Sweet promises we'd made, of carefree days and endless love,
Now turned to words that liars speak, meaningless and empty.
Your touch, once warm and gentle, now sharp as razor blades.
I left my faith with you, do you remember?
The trust entwined with love and understanding,
Now mixing with the sodden earth to build a final resting place.
Your kiss, once sweet with promise, now poisoned with Goodbye.
I thought that you would seek me out one day, and bring my treasures back to me,
But No!
I've lived bereft of life
I've lived with silence in my breast
I've lived with black and dreamless sleep
I've lived a faithless, loveless life.
I left it all with you.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
poem by Owain Glyn
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Back In Time
Last night; I went back in time
To see my wife if we never had met
I saw my ways, and my upcoming days
And my soul, was full of regret.
She wasn't there, but was in my prayer
As I surveyed the new life that I lived
And I walked alone, in my empty home
As my love for her I couldn't give.
I looked for her, and she couldn't be found
Last night when I went back in time,
So I searched her world, left nothing unfurled
But for her, nothing about her could I find.
So without me she took another path
Because then we had never met
But I stayed on that road, until I died old
Because no other woman in my heart would I let.
Then I had my thought when I awoke from my dream
And my woman she couldn't be found
So I closed my eyes and I sat down to cry
As my world was flipped upside down.
I remember now that she had left me
To be in the arms of another man
She was my love my life, my woman my wife
Now she's holding another mans heart and hand.
Why she left me; GOD will only know
But the love I felt once will never be mine,
I did nothing wrong, just loved her to strong,
Now again I wish, to go back in time.
Randy L. McClave
poem by Randy McClave
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To my dear expensive
'To my dear expensive'
Princess dreams to the picturesque beauty
I try hard to be out to you across continents
But destiny is written
To be away from each other
I will not forget throughout my life until the day I die
I have lived for days with you expensive
I do not know why you left me simply at the end of the road
You left me alone in the darkness of the road
We were living the story of romantic love has not lived them one by
I am now sitting alone among the trees cry
I did not find one comforts me and raises my morale
You are only estimated to forget me forever my sorrow
I have loved you love blind
I love quiet
Description forever and ever
You're The one you live inside my white heart
I will pay you love after love
I will grow up in my loving for you day after day
I will never forget you in whole my life forever
For days and long years you will stay my lovely princess
I hope to see you soon honey
God bless you in wholek your life
'Sincerely Your Lover Forever'
'The Romantic Man'
'Ali Sabry'
A Grieving Widow
From the cemetery in Cameron Street she's a short walk away
And often at her husband's grave for his soul she does pray
An old miner of the black coal two years ago he died
Soon she will go to join him to lay forever by his side.
Her husband in his mid seventies when the Reaper for him came
And without her one true soul mate life for her not the same
They migrated to Wonthaggi in their early twenties in nineteen fifty three
He was her childhood sweetheart back home in Italy.
The saddest time of her life has been the last two years
She still grieves for her husband for him she still shed tears
Even at the mention of his name the tears come to her eyes
The stonger the bond of love is the sadder the goodbyes
Her son and daughter in Wonthaggi to her they live quite near
And stories of her old Homeland her grand kids love to hear
She tells them of the happy times their grand dad and her did know
When they were young in Italy so many years ago.
At her husband's grave in Cameron Street she says a silent prayer
A woman in her mid seventies with a silvery head of hair
And tears are welling in her eyes at her memories of the past
But no one lives forever and nothing ever last.
poem by Francis Duggan
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Two Different People
Two different people
Black people, white people
Black world, White world
A black person thinks different from the white people
White people thinks highly of himself
White people works very hard for his living
Black's are lazy
They don't want to work, they just want the money
You have to work for the money, they just don't get it
White people knows that there are no free ride in life
Black's want a free ride, there are no free ride in life
Nothing is free in life except for the air that you breathe
The white people have to be careful of what they say to the black People
Whatever you say to the black people if they don't like it they will say it Is discrimination
We can't understand them
They have a mind of their own
The white people are loving and caring
What about the black people?
Not a hope in hell
I don't want any part of the black world
The black world is not safe for me
So I rather stay in my white world where I feel safe
We can't trust them
The reason why there is violence in this world is because the black People cause it
Now they don't like it because they have to live with it
We want a safe world for our people
The black people don't care about it because the only thing they know And seen is violence
There is too much violence on TV
They like it
They like the feeling of danger
We white don't like the feeling of danger
The blacks hate the white people and the white people don't like them Either
The white people knows when to shut up
The black people never knows when to shut up
There is why there are always problem with them
They make life miserable for us
The white people will always be a good friend
The black people can never be your friend
They will take everything they can get from you for free
poem by Aldo Kraas
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The Bride
The book was dull, its pictures
As leaden as its lore,
But one glad, happy picture
Made up for all and more:
'Twas that of you, sweet peasant,
Beside your grannie's door --
I never stopped so startled
Inside a book before.
Just so had I sat spell-bound,
Quite still with staring eyes,
If some great shiny hoopoe
Or moth of song-bird size
Had drifted to my window
And trailed its fineries --
Just so had I been startled,
Spelled with the same surprise.
It pictured you when springtime
In part had given place
But not surrendered wholly
To summer in your face;
When still your slender body
Was all a childish grace
Though woman's richest glories
Were building there apace.
'Twas blissful so to see you,
Yet not without a sigh
I dwelt upon the people
Who saw you not as I,
But in your living sweetness,
Beneath your native sky;
Ah, bliss to be the people
When you went tripping by!
I sat there, thinking, wondering,
Abut your life and home,
The happy days behind you,
The happy days to come,
Your grannie in her corner,
Upstairs the little room
Where you wake up each morning
To dream all day -- of Whom?
That ring upon your finger,
Who gave you that to wear?
What blushing smith or farm lad
Came stammering at your ear
A million-time-told story
No maid but burns to hear,
And went about his labours
Delighting in his dear!
I thought of you sweet lovers,
The things you say and do,
The pouts and tears and partings
And swearings to be true,
The kissings in the barley --
You brazens, both of you!
I nearly burst out crying
With thinking of you two.
It put me in a frenzy
Of pleasure nearly pain,
A host of blurry faces
'Gan shaping in my brain,
I shut my eyes to see them
Come forward clear and plain,
I saw them come full flower,
And blur and fade again.
One moment so I saw them,
One sovereign moment so,
A host of girlish faces
All happy and aglow
With Life and Love it dealt them
Before it laid them low
A hundred years, a thousand,
Ten thousand years ago.
One moment so I saw them
Come back with time full tide,
The host of girls, your grannies,
Who lived and loved and died
To give your mouth its beauty,
Your soul its gentle pride,
Who wrestled with the ages
To give the world a bride.
poem by Ralph Hodgson
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