Category: Poems

Come Sweetly – Poem

C.J.

What happens when you spend the better part of your day writing a paper on Alfred Lord Tennyson? You procrastinate by writing Tennyson-inspired poems, that’s what. Yet again, this is only a first draft.  It was a delightful procrastination tool, and I thought I’d share it here.  As with the others, newer versions will follow as I edit them.  Prepare yourselves for more of these.  We’re not out of the frying pan yet. 

 

Come sweetly, soft, and do tread lightly, dear.

Cruel thorns will tear your brow, your feet, your hair,

Sly rocks your ankles twist; no longer near

The sun, but frozen brambles, trees stripped bare,

Mud-choked the stream where even serpents fear

To sift.  Not e’en the frown of winter wear

The mountains’ mouths, but fleshless faces’ leer

O’er changeless plains, shaved of the seasons’ hair. 

These Nature’s bones, too long less hands to rear

Too-tender seeds, the phantom portraits bear

From careless youth, when dyads danced to hear

Spring’s feet approach out Hades’ new-shut lair. 

Lay down with me where late the stern frontier

By our hand smiled, ‘til absence wrought despair

To wilt our Eden, change our bed to bier. 

Our home we scorned to tend, your fate we share!

Our glass eyes other keepers bid beware,

That untilled soil can naught but tombs prepare. 

But let them know that we were happy here.

Seek Avalon – Poem

C.J.

So, taking this Brit Lit class has really benefitted my poetry, even though my fiction projects are still languishing in the face of travel, pasta, and RPG.  This poem was inspired by Tennyson’s fear of death in his “In Memoriam A.H.H.”  Like the last one, it is not completed but is a work in progress that I thought I’d share.  The final version will make it’s way here eventually, I daresay. 

 

If you would seek Avalon, turn back

Seek shelter in the raging storm

Your eyes may burn, your skeleton crack

But though your body grind to ash

Untried your soul won’t come to harm.

The lasting wound is not the gash

Of sword or brand, recalls offense

Once earned, concealed, where mental lashes

Find no balm, but that they burn

At every touch, destroying sense.

Gold Eden promises to turn

Mind’s ache to joy, and heal both brain

And body—if you merely spurn

Your life and limb, choose loneliness,

Embrace despair, for later gain. 

Destroy yourself, for heaven’s bliss

If sure your loss will earn your fate

For Earth’s content in vain you’ll miss

To find Forever made of glass

Where piety trades cruel real for naught,

Unconscious tomb for ivory gate.

In Sleepy Towns – Poem

C.J.

Alas, so much of my writing time of late has been taken up in my detailed chronicles of my Italian adventures for my Rome blog, or else in actually having these adventures. I’ve been working on my novels some, but with very full days, most of my energy goes to my meticulous descriptions of each day. However, I did, inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Cry of the Children” as read in my Brit Lit class, pen this poem on the train to Florence. It’s just a first draft, and I’ll post a better version once it’s edited, but I will post it here. It might be interesting to see its progression.

In sleepy town on quiet streets
Are swings the wind pumps to and fro
And dirty mitts and baseball bats
Left rainwashed sunbleached in a row.
But where the ghosts to haunt these stones?
To graves indoors they steal the sounds
Of ghastly hum and dying moan.

In plastic soil they dig their trench
To practice their peculiar sin:
That in their world so taught to flinch
From stranger, ally, kith, and kin.
By tutors, taught to self-rely
And distance keep from friends who pry
They fashion perfect graves within.

Though friends they claim, or feign as such,
And lovers doting to their whim
They earn these through not smile or touch
Or playground games and jumprope rhymes
But courtship they conduct in walls
Their voice and face in well-stocked cells
To face the world on their own time.

But “face” falls short to name the life
They own; too delicate and dear
Their parents say, for earthly strife.
Much better close to keep them here
Where words on screens their bones can’t break
And failure grind their wishes weak
For safety’s price they must learn fear.

For men strike down these tender souls
With murder, rape, and notions sick
And new. Some children raze in brawls
The pure, or teach them hellions’ tricks.
With structured play, they cannot learn
The habits that will bid them burn
Or cut their spirit to the quick.

In clean white houses on white lanes
These clean white children own the world
With blinking boxes, high-def screens
They flirt and fight and safe unfold
The games and places obsolete
For what reality can compete
When packed perfection’s cheaply sold?

Who suffers if a boy of five
Can fly on screen but loathes to run?
Or girls share secrets, songs, and smiles
In type, but face-to-face speak none?
No limit on who they can be
They’ll craft themselves a self or three
Why stop pretending if it’s fun?

For friends you touch can see your worst.
Identity demands such strain.
When ten at once you can converse
Why talk in person, one friend gain?
Just try the lot. For each a new
Persona; if these friends wear through
Just shut them off and choose again.

And outside play? Forget the thought.
It’s dirty, tiresome, tooth and nail.
Experiences can be bought
On-screen your wishes cannot fail
In half an hour traverse the globe
Don’t leave your polished room to probe
The blackened streets beyond your pale.

For caveat, think on but one,
That if these youths the world address
With Earth to hold they’ll know it none.
With thirty selves, all are repressed.
Small wonder that they lonely brood
Or raise their guns and spill their blood
When faced each day with facelessness.

Visions of Phantom Springtime: Poem

C.J.

So, between having a busy weekend and being rather dreadfully sick, I’ve been fairly silent for the last few days.  I haven’t got the energy or inspiration to write up something new, but here’s a poem I was playing around with a while back.  Enjoy. 

 

Visions of Phantom Springtime

 

Bruised fingers—

Grass stains—

Toes squishing blood and mud and

pain—

Smack leather pimple-skin against itself

running ten and twenty and down—

Breathing clouds and wind

and air like wasted years coughed up from yesterday’s gut—

Dancing whirlwinds on tarmac,

rough prints inking sunstolen memories

of heat and breath,

bodies writhing, one two three, and melting heaving into muck—

Pumping grungy rubber, rolling,

weaving through gridmarked jungles and electric stars

and dreams floating zigzag through brushing fingers

and dizzy eyes—

Crashing curbs

and pealing starry songs

with broken wheels squeaking broken time,

cheeks sick-hot and stoned and artery-red—

Screaming heartbeats and useless lines

all flower-pretty and painful and pushing hammers into bone

and words into fingertips,

heart-words and head-words,

vain words circling leather and clouds and dances and midnight rides,

and straining to stars and touching treetops—

and crashing.

City in a Garden: Poem

C.J.

(So, here’s the poem that I wrote for the Juggler, only this is the version that I edited afterwards.  I liked the original, but I think it needed some updating, so I thought I’d post the new version here for anyone who wanted to see it.  Plus I had a busy day and this might have to count for my daily blog.  Eep.)

 

I like sunshine on street corners

And the glare of urban blooms in crayon-box colors

Flashing defiance to gray grass and gunmetal grime,

            pulling cheap obscenities from lipsticked mouths,

                        pushing yellow-checked beasts into battle with neon-white men

                                    and jeering hands.   

I worship the windows,

Bejeweled in vault arches with blustery locks,

            the irises gilt Kremlin of Mint-greens and golds

                        and foul reds winking, victors flaunting starry warspoils of Eastern dominion,

                                    suffering only the name and Time’s fingers unbloodied,  

Closing steel lashes at dusk

on hard-booted feet making freckles in evening slush,

on teardrops sterilizing blacklung reservoirs in the corners of gutters,

                        sewers gaped to swallow trench-coats and cold-popping death notes 

and husks of old smoke-eyed dodgers flicking ash

across Capone’s eroding seeds.

I breath in the chill off the waters,

Gray-blue titans sunk deep into the iron earth

            running icy around the ankles of old White ghosts

                        and Technicolor giants rolling clenched hearts into clouds,

                                    weaving through monogrammed ribs black and gold like faded jazz

                                                and flowing sick-green in drunkards’ glass eyes. 

I bow to the gridlines,

The vast game of checkers hedged with glassy rows

            and pieces that spit on tiny scalding bodies spotting steam marble-prints,

                        spurt feverish Mozart and shoot steel rainbows on tar,

                                    erupt fizzing star-bombs and white-pebble pockmarks and cries of

Southern victory and Northern defeat,

flicker on off on like molten streams gurgling from the

Heart. 

To this Heart mine is owed,

The great gleaming God,

The steel tyrant,

            fervid dreams twice surpassed

                        but not broken,  

Coke-black shimmered with an old ages’ burnish like reflections of Fire,

                        of steel tubes belching lava from stone treetops,

                                    of the New World’s wonders and metal descendents,  

                                                of the wilds of the prairie and its green teeth attacking—

But the God beats back the hedges

and the prairie’s posh shears

                        and the city grows wild and tall,

                                    a giant with scraggly hair shored against the raging long grasses, 

And its crooked mouth smiles.