Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Old World River: Before the Cities

My heart was in the budding of the blossom on the lea,
It held me like the winds could hold their triumph of the sea.
The petals that fell through the air were scented with the spring;
I wrapped the vines around my hand like several emerald rings.
It was a novel of my life, a picture of my dreams
It filled me with the purpose of the sunlight's fallen beams,
It took me to a palace of the moss and climbing rose
And left me in a haven that the angels only know.
If I could be so thoughtless as I had been that day
When all the world had bent its head and turned its face away;
The solitary road I tread was easiest to find
Amongst the poppies on the cliff that overlooked the Seine. 

Friday, May 17, 2013

Lines

Before this blog, I wrote a "book length" novel of some of my favorite handwritten poems, typed and compiled into a 167 page document. Since clapbooks (small books, usually containing only 20 poems or less) are the popular way of publishing poems, I never had the incentive to take my hefty volume to a publishing house to be decimated and torn to bits by an editor. Only the hundreds of remnants and scraps of poems I have written remain in school notebooks, next to math equations, between English verbs and amongst scrollwork of flowers and bright-eyed cartoons of owls. They never did make it to the desk of a "real" publisher, and they probably never will.

Here is one of the typed poems I wrote as a teenager.

Lines

What wondrous symmetry that made
The open lawn and the sunlit glade
The pool bathed in the silver lance
The touch of starbeam's falling glance
And frosted leaves, cloaked by the cold
That shiver in their snowy world
Or summer laced by autumn's breath
And budding daisies passing kiss
Or lanes in winding, falling rain
That sad and soft, empire refrain!
A melody of wondrous grace
That some good Lord above hath made.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Innocence

I was young, the earth was young.
It spoke to me with a golden tongue.
The blossoms edged the fallen vine,
All the breezes seemed sublime.
If only the world was always this:
The springtime sun, the windblown kiss.