Miro3.jpg
Joan Miro, 4/20/1893 to 12/25/1983

We were born.
Butterflies of frost
a startled night
the crickets
didn't sing
 

 

 ~~~ **  ~~~  **  ~~~  **  ~~~ ** ~~~ **~~~


                                DAD

 

Sometimes, under large oranges discs

when her distant face makes endless, sad ooooo’s,

the moon sings in pools of harmonica nights,

sad notes

wound around sinuous pickets of silence

 

light beams,

stragglers, fallen here when you left,

 

the lights of the inner valley realize

they can do nothing about it,

shrug in their brilliant simmering

 

and then I, for a moment,

allow myself you … a cool glass

of what I nearly had

 

in this motionless place

earthy darkness, a honey-sweet moon

glides its silver, strumming

along rememberance

 

and that soft brush of life

hums a nearly perfect pitch

almost harmonious

heavy with nights berries and

tentative, blue music

 

unheard but felt,

a tantalizing wisp

a quick firefly spark of

another life, now gone

 

into this breathing darkness

only faint tones,

 

a distant window

slams shut on someone’s

jealously guarded dream

 

whose tiny pieces could waft

long feathered tails, wrap around

a subconscious clothesline and

flap slowy, softly

like sheets drying hazy cotton

of the past and

I listen

 

can hear their moths

treading this illusion of light and

reality

 

and somewhere in there is

that place where I can find you,

a telephone man who played harmonica

and was nearly my dad

 

and if you failed to love me,

what was love anyways?

little more than a barren twig that shuddered

in your winter or mine ….

 

Or maybe it was even the

slowly spelled words

of a large, orange moon when

suddenly I know

 

that you will certainly appear,

smiling that guilty, careless radiance,

white doves that forgive the wind

 

yes, gone, but only because

you’ve been stringing

phone lines into empty space

(all these years!  Just for me!)

 

and on a special receiver

concocted with the fire of stars,

we will begin

(together!)

to hear

the luminous voice of the moon

 

finally able to tell us

just what he’s been trying to spell

all these years.

~~```~~~~```~~~~```~~~~```

I see pennies, pennies on the ground all around.

And I see people, homeless people hugging the sacred ground,

Holy as the water makes sound, holy as the green ground.

I see deep in the hungered eyes, as the water draws miracles

In a cup, the flies are cold as winter as summer sups.

And hunger quakes the bowels like terror shredding terror’s claws.

You gave me meat when two men walked in front of their nose, 

when two men walk a hard, hard road, the least of them my brother.

You were a stranger in a kingdom of friends, and the Lord of the mansion

Took me in, naked and he clothed me with what I will be,

Sick and the King visited me, his hands are flowers day and night,

You captured your prison in Self, and the rest of the World

Dug up your roots and burned your bridges with your cross –

And You came unto me.

The young face the young and blame the old men in their house,

They see pennies on the ground, pennies all around,

And their knees never humble – know no King.

  John Amato
Isaiah 55:11

*****

My House

I was locked in a wave of time,

a wild finger

beckoned, and I knew to

whom it called

all around me,

its dazed eye towards Jupiter,

the house turns slowly on

its thickened stem of events,

plans of well seasoned pollen

which, nonetheless, will scatter

into the canyon wind,

probably at night

while I sleep

this furrowed place contemplates

its eventual demise,

angels walk right out of

chiseled stone statues,

the crystal shatters

spilling adjectives among

the asters,

and seeds of yesterday's light

which always defy explanation

why you were always gone,

but the thought withers among

nouns, socks, and a phone ringing,

perennial sounds while

light beats its sweet way

into wings upward

scattered among

the faucet's steady drip

meandering to the canal,

to the river,

to the sea

to the green depths

of some
         November or December,

when you won't return,

when days will gently fold

around the hour

where we

will end

Please get in touch to offer comments or to post some of your own art

 

artists may post their artwork here

sunsettrees.jpg


"The Lord is my light
and my salvation
Whom shall I fear?
Psalm 27:1 

Archive Newer | Older

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Ghost Particles

great faces unbend

in pale light, breathing

a stubble of cold pine, frostmarked 

like the past

like the still curve  of dawn

since the last footprint left

vacuumed away

 

prisms or shadows

nurse neglect, those secret numbers

you kept

splinter a river into the palest thought

a thousand transparencies      

whose small voice answers:

you really didn’t care

 

so just remind me how sleep,

remind me when to breathe

 

there is nothing further than you

hoarding light from an invisible source

a point somewhere on the map, to linger

turning like slow water

certain of your destination

away from here

 

and trees paint a lenghtening

azure circle, hiding the distance

where you cough or laugh

stars remember a line or two

also all the stone verses cast like concrete

a crumbled substance

now trailing nights long arc of planets

 a long way erased

 

your diety an empty river

packed into a briefcase, under a trunk

twisted with branches

 

I had no idea about these

petals I’ve become, nothing more than

crushed in soft

falling under passage

11:40 pm edt 


Archive Newer | Older
If you are an artist and have a poem or painting to publish, please e-mail me.