Category: Poems

  • An Anthem for our Times

    A nation breathes a sigh relieved

    By the comfort of the tolling knells,

    As a month of “Guiltys” ring the alarm

    Across the land alerting all

    You can’t outpace the steps of Justice.

     

    But in the distance a black man tries

    To out-run a speeding bullet!

  • Jogging in Central Park

    The blood-eyes blank in the ski-mask slits,

    A fistful of hair beneath her.

    The knife on top, its tip at her tits,

    Stilled even the faintest shudder.

     

    Beyond the hedged-in grassy glade,

    The birds oblivious winging,

    Still on her ears her iPod played,

    Her favorite song kept singing.

     

    His smell osmosed into her soul,

    Her silence rent the night!

    Her God stayed hidden like a mole,

    His God laughed at his might!

  • Stopping By Woods

    Here I’m reading a favorite of mine.  Robert Frost’s Brilliantly simple poem.

    Stopping By Woods

  • Displaced

    The sky’s so vast here in the Midwest
    Stretching like a giant rainbow reaching
    Side to side across the earth.
    Some days I wonder if I climb up high
    Could I just see my home from here?
    But there are no tall trees in the prairie,
    The highest thing a dormitory.

    On rainy days droplets hang like tiny mirrors,
    And if they’re angled right, might
    I find glimpses of forgotten faces,
    Crowded lanes and streets? Which way is east?

    I journeyed here across the rainbow’s edge,
    Resting multiple times in multiple places
    Between yesterday and the day before,
    Leaving in those liminal spaces
    Bits of me like scattered breadcrumb trails
    To stumble back before day races
    On and fatal birds of prey pluck away
    From the earth my traces…

    So here I am a hybrid mess of cultural droppings,
    A patchwork dolled up clown of no renown,
    Masquerading in a cap and gown,
    Playing the fool and fooling none
    With borrowed accents from a colonial boss
    To cover up a sense of loss

    At abandoning a diverse land
    Of ancient gods and spicy food
    For capitalism’s ugly hand,
    How could it come to any good?

    So who am I? I ask with pain,
    Bewildered by the way I’m seen,
    A muddy brown-skinned splat of stain
    Across the snowy landscape clean.

    In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
    Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
    “Indians! Indians!” Columbus cried,
    His heart was filled with joyful pride.

    In nineteen hundred and eighty-five
    I came across the ocean wide,
    A dotted Indian not a feathered one,
    But no-one cared, the land was won!

  • For Lorraine

    When Do I Miss You?

    I miss you in the morning scurrying
    With side-long glances hurrying
    Into the business of the afternoon.

    I miss you in my walkabout
    Tom’s half-deserted streets
    Filled with the bleats
    Of unanswerable questions…

    I miss you in the past when you were not,
    And yet you were…
    And in the now for we are caught
    By Time’s scythe, that dreadful knife.
    I miss you tomorrow when your life
    Slipped from my clasp to grasp a new mirth.

    And I miss you most in the silence of my hurt…

     

    A Teardrop

    I looked for you in the weeping
    Leaves trickling down last fall
    But you were not there

    In the laughter at Christmas
    I listened for your voice
    In the cadence of your children
    But you were not there

    To hear the passing comment
    That I turned to share
    With you that only you
    Would catch and smile
    But in your chair

    Only the cushions rocked
    And mocked
    My hopeful stare.

    When suddenly
    You were there,
    A teardrop
    Balanced tantalizingly
    On my nose, my tongue
    Sticks out to catch you
    But you never drop,
    Poised…in full sight…
    Within reach…unattainable…

     

    I Will Write of Love

    I will write of love, my love,

    When thoughts have reached their tired end
    And words have lost their potent sense,
    I will write to fill the silence and the tense.
    I will write for only love is left to send.

    When all the songs and every tune
    I know are sung in key and out,
    I’ll find new ways I have no doubt
    When words are gone I’ll script a rune.

    I will write of love, my love,

    At noon and in the evening chill,
    For not to write of love would freeze and kill
    My love, my love, so I must write though you are still.

    I will write of love, my love, my love…

    On Your Birthday
    Why must the leaves start falling in October?
    Why can’t I weep alone for just one year?
    Why is it always Autumn on your birthday?
    Why can’t I borrow Spring from selfish May?

    But I should stop and look around me lest
    I miss resplendent nature at her best
    And then I’d know that that’s the reason
    You were born in this great season.

     

     

     

  • City Notes

    Family Portrait
    Eight-year-old Ann-Marie drinks her milk.
    The edge of morning slices through a slat
    At the glasses asleep in pools of sweat.

    Picking her way through stubble fields
    Of a riotous night her day breaks
    Into shards of sharp memories strewn
    Cut, bruised, and sleeping about the flat
    With mum and reveling strangers and dad.

    She steps routinely over crackheads on the stairs . . .
    Outside the jagged rain rips the tired day.

    Huddled in the doorway she watches
    Her paper boat drown in the gutter.

    A Jog in the Park
    The blood-eyes blank in the ski-mask slits,
    A fistful of hair beneath her.
    The knife on top, its tip at her tits,
    Stilled even the faintest shudder.

    Beyond the hedged-in grassy glade,
    The birds oblivious winging,
    Still on her ears her ipod played,
    Her favorite song kept singing.

    His smell osmosed into her soul,
    Her silence rent the night!
    Her God stayed hidden like a mole,
    His God laughed at his might!

    Can I Play Too?
    Eagerly he stumps toward the jungle gym.
    The smile freezes. Hurt recognizes in the giggles
    Piercing familiar derisive notes, peering fingers,
    Lips curling into oohs and ahs.

    Shrinking from the bars into the yard
    Of his solitude he contemplates
    His shrunken half-made-up body
    For the umpteenth time wondering.

    Fishing
    Men with bored poles by the mucky canal
    Search the sludge flotsamming past the banks
    Packed with homebound crowds gathered
    For a look, a laugh, and a suppertime tale.

    Somewhere in the city a woman routinely
    Sets the table with her children and waits…
    For a grapnel to grasp her jetsamming husband
    As the satisfied crowd disperses excitedly.

    The Waiter’s Sub-text
    I’ll be your waiter           (hurry up, please
    Take your time               I’ve other folks waiting
    To decide what to eat     this evening.
    The fish is great              our special sauce
    Its spicy tang                  sticks in your throat,
    Is famous                       asshole!)

    Taxi!
    Keeping the curb with pacing passersby
    They prowl their bodies rough with use
    And smudged paint bored with dull anticipation.
    The desultory meandering ceases.
    A client slides in with practiced rhythm
    Man and machine plunge to it,
    Pistons chug to suck the juice fast,
    End the trip, dump the rider, and return
    With pocketed fare and silent meter
    To stalk and hustle other cabs by the curb.

    Sing a Song of Sixpence
    Sing a song of sixpence,
    A bottle full of rye,
    At hundredandtwenty miles an hour
    Someone’s bound to die.

    Sing a song of sixpence,
    A vial of cocaine,
    Fourandtwenty babies
    Born in twisting pain.

    When the day is over,
    There’s nothing left to sing,
    Except a dirge to senselessness,
    We haven’t learnt a thing.

    @desksDOTcom
    Pursed lips lock voices stilled
    By the dings and clinks of cyberchords,
    The compusymphonic requiem for Gossip
    Played by a hundred-piece orchestra
    Of a thousand fingers conjuring information
    From a netherland of flashing ciphers,
    A superhighway of connecting worlds
    Where screens glare back and cursers blink–
    Gleeful pac-men shooting brain cells
    Dead through furrowed brows.

  • I Traveled to an Ancient Land

    I traveled to an ancient land,
    Where mountains dive into the sea.
    And in the black volcanic sand
    My startled footprints followed me
    Like harrying questions nipping at my heels,
    Springing from the ground to hound
    My rootlessness with furious queries.

    Is this for me? This land of broken promises?
    Not this but that I left behind or the one before
    Or before that as well? Is this for me?
    I ask on the constricted way winding
    Like a periphrastic sentence to Cape Reinga,
    The world’s end where oceans meet and the mighty
    Tasman clashes like a hostile argument against the Pacific
    Proposition of the day before, that calm acceptance
    Of hum-drumming….

    But even in the garden where wild hydrangeas
    Range profusely by Pohutukawa trees,
    A serpentine nine-to-five-ness lurks,
    And huddled masses grunt and scrape
    Their lengthy days into much longer years…

    Only Tane Mahuta and his kauri trees
    Stand silent witness to their buried fathers
    Deep beneath Gum-Diggers Park waiting
    For the angry growl of the Last Tsunami.

  • Cruel April

    This pitiless April morning I threw open my door
    And there in a collapsed heap was an exhausted traveler,
    Her straggly hair like struggling dandelions on her back,
    And limbs splayed out like denuded twigs on a bare tree.
    I looked and saw her still alive and asked her name,
    “Spring,” she whispered, “Midwestern Spring,”
    And died as the merciless rain poured down.

  • Autumn Leaves

    In the nostalgia of fall I marvel at the red and gold of gorgeous death as leaves yield the salad greenness of their youth to the decadence of nature’s inexorable cycle. Is this not the most beautiful quadrant of the year, this “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” as John Keats called it?  How easily I respond to the beauty of aging flora yet am blind to resplendence elsewhere!

    Do I stare at the granite faces of aging humanity and notice in their wrinkles a lifetime of experience and grandeur?  Or realize that arthritic limbs struggling across my path are ancient feet nearing the mountain top for a view of the promised land?  Can I gaze into the mists of watery eyes and see in their now-blurred vision a legacy of a better tomorrow for me?

    Image, we are fond of saying, is everything and the only images I cherish are the shiny faces of youth leaping at me from the glossy covers of the chronicles of our times. I hurry up express elevators in the scrubbed steel and glass monuments of this new millennium, oblivious to the forlorn wisdom of forgotten pyramids and a tireless sphinx keeping vigil amid the buffeting gales of the sands of time.  In the traffic of morning I impatiently sound my horn at hunched figures in slow lanes and wrinkle my nose at the smell of decay wafting my way from the outhouses of homes for the aged.

    Perhaps this year, in knee-deep amazement amid the embers of dying maple leaves, I can also celebrate the lives that have struggled through spring and endured the summer’s heat.  Let me remember that true beauty lies as much in the songs of experience as in the melodies of innocence.

    

  • Winter

    Snowflakes on my recoiling cheek,
    Like an unwanted lover’s caresses
    Brushed away abruptly.

    We’ve been together too long
    And I must away in search
    Of warm embraces.

    Your lips and hands blue
    My shivering skin, keep
    My bed cold, chill
    My tropical genes…

    Every time we break up,
    You return to seduce me
    With your lacy whiteness…

    Why do I open my body to you?