Historical Grief
A perpetual war between
frame and content feeds
the fire!
I step outside the house of thoughts.
The death begins the counting and
jasmines start crying.
I hear the over-worn desert
blowing the sand.
A raw stone throws up a sculpture.
Midnight knocks on the door were loud.
Rain was banging, moonlight drifts in.
The huge cloud outlines
the ceremony of deluge.
Abstract ideas have to be clothed again.
The naked truth stops the clock.
A proxy death shatters me.
I also die in a dome.
Night melts in hissing sounds,
time becomes a paper weight.
The splender of quartz cracks.
Demolition is complete
historical grief now takes over.
poem by Satish Verma
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Disingenuousness
Here lies another box for nature,
Carbon ready;
Black to eyes down here,
Where death is at its job.
Up there you’ll hear a rhythmic sob
Or two from living yet-to-dies –
A humming lacrimoso –
It all but cleans the eyes:
Forget it –
The dismal show of grief –
Life is only chemistry –
Our stay is only brief.
It’s we who hype it up!
Diaphragms jerk again;
The jet monotone of hearses
Feeds the disingenuousness
Of undertakers –
They seem to stare at something up ahead –
For them, it’s in the blood,
To taxi off the dead.
Copyright © Mark R Slaughter 2011
The March of Death
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poem by Mark R Slaughter
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Footfalls
It was in you,
the beast.
Reading your private thoughts:
tribal instinct-
to gather tools.
Dwindling belief.
You are left high and dry
after the deluge receded.
A big fire
erupted in your house
to burn you alive.
Footfalls of disquieting roar
breaks the empty silence.
So thin was the salty air,
it spewed the fire.
Death of the moment.
You sit down on the rocks
outside your body
and start counting
the winks.
poem by Satish Verma
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Death
The journey of death, I think of dying as it were
a sleeping process which it brings our thoughts
the illusion of angel's, heaven, clouds and paradise,
we see ourselves in a utopia dream world,
that brings us peace and harmony. Death is a
sad word; a word that is continually present with
melancholy thoughts that haunts the mind. I always
dismiss it from my mind, but always comes back.
It's there always trying to torment me, maybe if death
wasn't so enigmatic and dreadful, our thoughts would
change. We wouldn't think about it at all. When I think
of the old age, is like thinking, death is near, it's the
nearest thing to old age. Death, death is like a cold
and lonely sigh, Death, it comes like thieves in the
night, it takes you and it wont give you a notice nor a
warning. A deep anguish takes over our feelings;
death is a sad word, An empty sensation and a huge
grief, that torture's the soul and mind. Death we can't
defeated, escape or make it null. A reminder each
day that time will eventually stop and become eternal.
Death the only sure thing we inherit from the second
we are born, death, death, I cannot comprehend the
purpose to all, we struggle in our journey in every way,
to at the end, become dust in the wind, and then after
time has past, not even a vestige of us.
poem by Elenushka Toledo
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I Start Counting
(basil kirchin / jack nathan / james coleman / patrick ryan)
This year, next year
Sometime never
Paper dreams tied up
With bits of string
Darkness comes
Flowers grow
No-one knows
I start counting
I start counting
Sitting by myself in a secret
Chasing thoughts through rainbows in my mind, yeah
Changing time
Tomorrows dream
In between
I start counting
Counting, yes I do
Counting, counting, counting, counting, counting
Ooh-hoo-oo, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve etc.
song performed by by Dusty Springfield
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I Met Death
I was waiting, watching one day
When Death came along, looking
As if there was something he wanted to say
His hair was as black as the sky at night
And in the wind it blew like smoke
He had come a long way in his worn black cloak
So I invited him in and I did say
If you’d like to you can stay
But Death said:
“I’m only passing through
For the clock’s hands they say
They are ticking the seconds of my life away”
And I answered,
Thinking I’d misunderstood
As Death’s dark black eye gleamed under his dark black hood
“If your Death, how can you die? ”
You see, Death didn’t seem the kind to lie.
And Death wasn’t phased at all,
“No longer Death I may become,
Or so says He if I don’t complete
The most horrible, horrible, feat.
“The most horrible feat? ”
I had to say
Could it be so horrible,
That Death couldn’t say?
“Death, ” said Death, “is the horrible feat.”
And then he faded away, like smoke into the blue, blue sky
But I think, before he left, I might have seen him cry.
I had never in my life, seen Death again
Until the night I stood outside in the rain
When he said, “I’m sorry miss, but this is good bye.”
And I found out what it’s like to die.
So we went, and parted, to each our own way,
But one more time I want to heard Death say, “I’m sorry miss, -“
Marking the end of the day
poem by Jinny Tikanus
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It's Death Again
It's Death again - He's always there -
Watching, waiting - e'er the stare!
Every time I look behind
Or reach to pull the window blind,
I catch a glimpse of grubby hood -
A little clue to where he stood;
The glint of light that caught the scythe.
Perhaps if I could pay a tithe…
But O! no use, he'll never go.
The adamant phantom; don't you know
He will but wait until it's time
For me to hear His fateful chime? -
The toll that claims my destiny,
To Hail: 'You're next, it has to be…'
Copyright © Mark R Slaughter 2009
The Reign of Death
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poem by Mark R Slaughter
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3: 02....
the rain finally stops,
soothing silence hushes
until
the main door of the neighbor's house
fronting ours
is banged
the usual drunkard husband
and the nagging wife
midnight, dawn,
banging.
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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A Handful Of Victories
Where death
and exotica meet,
life stands naked
in midst of our sacred hymns,
Shadow fighting is not actuality.
An essay on truth fades.
Someday I will pull down the curtain.
At the end of the road, death waits,
apologizing for coming unannounced.
A white cloud drifts in our arms.
The deep sorrow walks with us
and the empty home,
now belongs to moonlight.
In nothingness our achievement claims.
A handful of victories,
tossing here and there.
The empty words transport
the dark lies.
The truth lies bleeding,
and we flee,
from our predictions.
poem by Satish Verma
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Grief-Stricken Eyes
To many
My tears are nothing more
Than a stain
An anoyance
To their daily lives
It makes no difference
How hard I weep
No one is willing
To help a grief-stricken face
I walk in a cloud of darkness
Shrouded by a shadow
Of death
Each step I take
Takes me one step closer
To the edge
The brim
Which will allow me
To face my death
To honour the pledge
That no one cares
So why should I
Be willing
To take each day
To walk every path
Knowing that no one
Has me in their thoughts
To survive yet not live
knowing no one sees inside
Through this facade
They all prefer the mask
No one wants the grief-stricken girl
No one cares about the grief-stricken face
They'd all rather forget
My existance
And carry on
While i blindly
Wallow in sorrow
poem by Blessing Msiza
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The Threshold Stone
WHEN I went to live in the little house,
That stands on the hilltop alone,
What touched me most of all
Was neither roof nor wall,
But the smooth, worn face of its old threshold stone.
For when I entered that little house,
With its four rooms cool in the heat,
And its windows clean and bright,
There it lay, new-washed and white,
With its tale of the coming and the going of feet.
Then I lost count of time in that little house,
And the world and its things all about,
And I hearkened there, alone,
To the footfalls on that stone,
Of the young coming in and the old going out.
And the folk that had dwelt in that little house,
They were mute, spectre-mute, at my side —
The young man, strong and bold,
And the grey man, wise and old,
And the little, pinched woman and the new-made bride.
Oh, often in haste to that little house
Came love in the night-time alone,
And dallied there a while,
With a little, wistful smile,
And with feather-weight feet on the old threshold stone.
And men hurried home to that little house
When the round of the daytime was o'er
With its worry, heat and noise,
And kissed their girls and boys,
And the patient little mothers that waited at the door.
Though I dwell now no more in that little house
That stands on the hilltop alone,
Yet this I got from it —
This human story writ
On the smooth, worn face of its old threshold stone.
Though they take stone from stone in that little house,
Making litter of all it has been.
Yet they shall not destroy
All the grief, all the joy,
All the youth, all the love that its threshold has seen.
poem by Roderic Quinn
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Senseless Death
Death is blind
Death is deaf
yet it is dumb
Death is senseless
Absolutely at that
So much so
To the kings door
It knocks upon
From a mother's womb
It feeds thereof
If death had a way
Heavens gate it will shake
The chains of hell
It will break
Searching a new soul to take
Senseless
As death may seem
Upon every soul
Still it sneaks
Taking from any
As it wills.
poem by Emeka chunye Okaforudeji
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Be a cloud
Be a cloud, which is light in weight,
Which moves at ease, takes it shapes
To fill the space and flirt with winds.
It takes in vapour without greed
And gives out as rain without strain.
It floats, drifts and wanders at will.
Live like a cloud to feel no fall.
05.01.2009
poem by Rm. Shanmugam Chettiar
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Battle
1.
Noon
It is midday; the deep trench glares….
A buzz and blaze of flies….
The hot wind puffs the giddy airs….
The great sun rakes the skies.
No sound in all the stagnant trench
Where forty standing men
Endure the sweat and grit and stench,
Like cattle in a pen.
Sometimes a sniper's bullet whirs
Or twangs the whining wire,
Sometimes a soldier sighs and stirs
As in hell's frying fire.
From out a high, cool cloud descends
An aeroplane's far moan,
The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends….
The black speck travels on.
And sweating, dazed, isolate
In the hot trench beneath,
We bide the next shrewd move of fate
Be it of life or death.
2.
Night Bombardment
Softly in the silence the evening rain descends….
The soft wind lifts the rain-mist, flurries it, and spends
Itself in mournful sighs, drifting from field to field,
Soaking the draggled sprays which the low hedges wield
As they labour in the wet and the load of the wind.
The last light is dimming. Night comes on behind.
I hear no sound but the wind and the rain,
And trample of horses, loud and lost again
Where the wagons in the mist rumble dimly on
Bringing more shell.
The last gleam is gone.
It is not day or night; only the mists unroll
And blind with their sorrow the sight of my soul.
I hear the wind weeping in the hollow overhead:
She goes searching for the forgotten dead
Hidden in the hedges or trodden into muck
Under the trenches or maybe limply stuck
Somewhere in the branches of a high, lonely tree -
He was a sniper once. They never found his body.
I see the mist drifting. I hear the wind, the rain,
And on my clammy face the oozed breath of the slain
Seems to be blowing. Almost I have heard
In the shuddering drift the lost dead's last word:
Go home, go home, go to my house,
Knock at the door, knock hard, arouse
My wife and the children - that you must do -
What d' you say? - Tell the children too -
Knock at the door, knock hard, and arouse
The living. Say: the dead won't come back to this house.
Oh… but it's cold - I soak in the rain -
Shrapnel found me - I shan't go home again.
No, not home again - The mourning voices trail
Away into rain, into darkness… the pale
Soughing of the night drifts on in between.
The Voices were as if the dead had never been.
O melancholy heavens, O melancholy fields!
The glad, full darkness grows complete and shields
Me from your appeal.
With a terrible delight
I hear far guns low like oxen, at the night.
Flames disrupt the sky. The work is begun.
'Action!' My guns crash, flame, rock, and stun
Again and again. Soon the soughing night
Is loud with their clamour and leaps with their light.
The imperative chorus rises sonorous and fell:
My heart glows lighted as by fires of hell,
Sharply I pass the terse orders down.
The guns stun and rock. The hissing rain is blown
Athwart the hurtling shell that shrilling, shrilling goes
Away into the dark to burst a cloud of rose
Over their trenches.
A pause: I stand and see
Lifting into the night like founts incessantly,
The pistol-lights' pale spores upon the glimmering air…
Under them furrowed trenches empty, pallid, bare….
And rain snowing trenchward ghostly and white,
O dead in the hedges, sleep ye well to-night!
poem by Robert Nichols
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Dessert
(Carly SimonMike Mainieri)
I was in the desert
Amazed by all that sand
I as in a sea of white
Swimming through the land
Nobody shocked me
Nobody locked me up
Nobody took my time
Nobody shook me up
All that happened was the white night
The endless sand in the moonlight
I was in the desert
In the opalescent moon
Watching the horizon
And waiting for the moon
Nobody talked to me
Nobody looked me up
Nobody walked up to me
Nobody shook me up
All that happened was the white night
The endless sand in the moonlight
I was in the desert
Free to live or die
Looking in the mirror
And seeing just the sky
Nobody got to me
Nobody said what to me
Nobody shoved me
Nobody loved me
All that happened was the white night
The endless sand and the moonlight
song performed by by Carly Simon
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Desert
(carly simon/mike mainieri)
I was in the desert
Amazed by all that sand
I as in a sea of white
Swimming through the land
Nobody shocked me
Nobody locked me up
Nobody took my time
Nobody shook me up
All that happened was the white night
The endless sand in the moonlight
I was in the desert
In the opalescent moon
Watching the horizon
And waiting for the moon
Nobody talked to me
Nobody looked me up
Nobody walked up to me
Nobody shook me up
All that happened was the white night
The endless sand in the moonlight
I was in the desert
Free to live or die
Looking in the mirror
And seeing just the sky
Nobody got to me
Nobody said what to me
Nobody shoved me
Nobody loved me
All that happened was the white night
The endless sand and the moonlight
song performed by by Carly Simon
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Gardener LXXXI: Why Do You Whisper So Faintly
Why do you whisper so faintly in
my ears, O Death, my Death?
When the flowers droop in the
evening and cattle come back to their
stalls, you stealthily come to my side
and speak words that I do not
understand.
Is this how you must woo and win
me with the opiate of drowsy murmur
and cold kisses, O Death, my Death?
Will there be no proud ceremony
for our wedding?
Will you not tie up with a wreath
your tawny coiled locks?
Is there none to carry your banner
before you, and will not the night be
on fire with your red torch-lights,
O Death, my Death?
Come with your conch-shells sound-
ing, come in the sleepless night.
Dress me with a crimson mantle,
grasp my hand and take me.
Let your chariot be ready at my
door with your horses neighing impatiently.
Raise my veil and look at my face
proudly, O Death, my Death!
poem by Rabindranath Tagore
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As I Went
As I went, as I went
Over the mountains,
I heard, I heard,
Through cloud-wreath and mist,
A hound that was baying -
Death . . it was death.
As I went, as I went
Over the meadows,
I heard, I heard,
From thicket, from shadow,
A hidden bird fluting -
Death . . it was death.
As I went, as I went
By rocks and by sand-dunes,
I heard, I heard,
At the dea's bottom
A silver fish swimming -
Death . . it was death.
As I went, as I went
In my house, in my house,
I heard, I heard,
A footfall, a footfall
Closely behind me -
Death . . it was death.
poem by Adelaide Crapsey
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Legend Withers
I do not display, but am.
Where the heart lies.
In truth. I try to discover the centre
of sorrow and bliss.
Life has not given
me full text of death.
The shadows are larger than reals.
You will not remember me
in endless night.
I am going on a long journey
to find out what is death of a name
the death of a prayer,
and ending of self.
The naked helices of truth are blazing.
Death of a dawn
some thing dies in me.
I don’t grieve.
The frozen pain melts,
legend withers.
The shadow is liberated from image.
The sadness leaves the fingerprints on my face.
poem by Satish Verma
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Frame
Frame
I could frame my
mind to what my
thoughts become,
"words spoken"
or I could frame the
night to think my
agony is gone.
I can frame almost
anything I quess,
from a heart in grief
looking for some relief,
the mailman,
the milkman,
and everything
that passes by,
A kitten at my doorstep,
is funny isn't it?
you can frame your
way through a
dragons throat.
Anything you want,
even your heart,
your truth your lies and
even the clear skies.
The hymns I sing,
my eyelids to fall asleep,
an ability not yet control.
Everything I long for
has not yet pass through,
so I keep framing
the truth the lies and all
I can think of.
But framing is not my
escape is just a lie
I keep telling myself,
and I can keep doing
it for eons.
But not yet complete,
for I can't frame my
eyes of what I see.
©ElenaToledo2009
poem by Elenushka Toledo
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When Death
(Yet another early work - one month shy of 17)
When death is coming up your walk,
And you're unaware of his escence,
You invite him in, and have a talk
Which reeks of omniprescence
When death is sitting in your home
And you're enchanted by his smile
He's been to places like Paris and Rome,
You ask him to stay awhile
When death is leaning very near,
And your house is all aglow,
He whispers something in your ear,
You know it's time to go
When death is touching you all around
And he plays within your head,
You cannot see, nor hear a sound,
You know you'll soon be dead
When death becomes a part of you,
In the still of night
There is nothing you can do,
Until you see the light
When death takes you to the place
Where you'll see the light,
You will not find a familiar face,
But you'll be too tired to fight
When death begins to say good bye
And says you're on your own
You watch the light, and then you sigh -
You see how bright it's grown
When death gets up, and walks through the light
(Which feels like half-melted ice)
You follow him through to discover your plight
And find you're in paradise
poem by Michael Troy Buffo
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