The Candle
A flame leaps on a taper’s end
like a child filled with joy
or when playing with his friend –
such warm, bright light in a boy.
Categories
Tag: Joy
Categories
My Niece’s Mind
This child’s mind is full of nature and joy,
among her thoughts are rivers, leafy trees,
sweeping flocks of swallows, and scudding clouds:
a mind of unbridled imagining
that looks on beautiful and healthy things.
This girl has intelligence, unalloyed
and pure, as fresh as fragrant spring.
Such innocence sets her apart in crowds.
At five years old, this girl dances and sings
and brings sweet love like an angel with wings.
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Categories
The Mountain – A Villanelle
The Mountain
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
At the mountain’s foot are crows, black as coal;
hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
The dawn of the trial holds its mystique:
a challenge to pioneers who are bold.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
The trailblazer starts with certain technique,
but must break himself to make himself whole:
hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
By dusk of the trial, the sun seems weak.
The long day has grown dark, starless, and cold.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
But fight on, through the pain, the doubt, and shrieks.
Fight on, through the dismantling of your soul.
Hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
Keep hope inside when you’re too tired to speak,
and pay with your spirit every steep toll.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
Hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.
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A poem about lovemaking, which is like a ghost that lives in a home.
Lovemaking haunts our spirits,
The way a phantom inhabits a home.
The sex is at first tormenting,
A rattling of the pots and cabinet doors of our hearts.
What could cause our bodies to shake so?
We curse, not knowing quite what shakes us.
Then when the lovemaking, the phantom, is gone—
We miss it, we desire it.
We silently invite it back.
We miss the banging, the crashing, the confusion,
The chaos—all that the ghost, the sex, has brought.
Where could that spirit have gone?
We wonder, arbitrarily, if the ghost, the lovemaking,
Has gone to inhabit someone else’s home.
We shiver, thinking, “Someone else is fucking—and it’s not me!”
Jealousy invades our hearts,
Then we whisk the jealousy away again.
We think, “It is not productive to have such thoughts.
Not when there is work to be done—
There are chores to be attended to,
Families to be raised, and
Things to do. There’s no time to be thinking about sex.”
But still, like the phantom in our homes,
Unseen, the lovemaking anguishes our spirits.
Where could that ghost of lovemaking have gone?
And when at last we find it again,
We are soothed, for a brief moment,
And we leave our suffering, for a while,
Abandoned next to our clothes,
And we embrace the spirit, the lovemaking,
In an exultation of joy and delight.
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Here are three limericks–dark, grim, and surprising–to enrich your Sunday.
The Bright Butterfly
There once was a bright butterfly,
Who made cheerful the air of the sky,
Three wicked children of kings,
Tore off its fair wings,
Though not even they could ever say why.
The Pennsylvanian-Era Pig
There once was an archaeological dig
On which they found a Pennsylvanian pig
They said How bizarre!
This pig is too early by far!
So they baked it and ate it with figs!
The Violent Boy
There once was a violent boy
Who thought the world was only his toy
He began every fight,
And made girls weep from his spite,
And he grew into an old man with no joy.
