 Free Verse & Prose Poetry Pg.1
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. William Butler Yeats - (1865- 1939) Lyrical Passion Poetry E-Zine © 2007-2012 P.O. Box 17331 Arlington, VA 22216 |
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SONG OF AUTUMN by Ute Carson (2007; 1st Place Winning Traditional Poem) I like the melody-shifting season best! No longer the bursting greenness of summer, not yet the resigned hibernation of winter. It's the fall that carries a magical tune, when the sky embraces the earth with one last ardent desire and its desperate kisses ignite nature's most fervent colors, blood-red, flame-gold-orange. My heart too sings with the rhythm of creation knowing it can still find a home before its doors close again against the voices of the cold. 
COFFEE by Omar Majeed Sitting outside the café I stir coffee and watch the brightly colored fairground ride move round in circles, the fiberglass vehicles chasing tails. Something strikes me as amusing – me watching, still stirring my coffee laughing to myself at the empty ride swirling alone. I MUST GO NOW by Stephen Pain I must go now, before the rain that clouds shoulders on the horizon, the wind that will blow the being, cold and autumnal, the tail end of a hurricane, I must go now, before the bus that carries the strangers to a destination unknown, and I will depart with them, my eyes averted from the aisle, and I must go now, before the message that through the spectral dust comes from afar, the message printed in the particles of the big bang, and I must go now, before the swallow returns to warmer climes, taking with it the energy of summer, wound up tightly in its compact heart, the beat of lovely afternoons, now I must go. Off I-85 by Danny P. Barbare Breakfast in the evening. Winter darkness in the windows. Lights as the flame of an oil lamp flickers. Conversation at Cracker Barrel. My wife says, after I ask all these antiques on the wall are made by a factory. She once worked here as a waitress. Pictures and signs, an old vacuum broom. A fire burns in the fireplace. A shotgun and moose's head hangs above the mantel. The next level by Jane Williams as if all it took all a long was fishing from the right side of the boat to encourage miracles as if he had been given the exact date and time of his death though perhaps not the random cause not the butterfly effect a man is hauling up old friends old flames telling each one how good they've been how he loves them still and still … this unexpected urgency to take life to the next level what if he added say the old school bully to the list what if he were the old school bully no mud lover but a bottom dweller nonetheless luminosity the stuff of science fiction until now this day with the light cast just so ... One of a kind by Jane Williams all his life he was known and all his life he dreamed of a place peopled by strangers where his name was his own and not his father’s where the sky was a thing to search for a prize to be won not the omnipresent eye of ages where he would come upon the smell of cut grass suddenly in small packages holding the memory of it there just under his industrious nose if he chose to where he could sit in a train carriage and stare at changing faces all day not once discovering the exact shade or kink of his own hair or the way his mouth twitched as if anticipating a kiss where women and men falling would believe they saw eternity in the endless plains of his eyes and think him finally one of kind Almost... by Joan McNerney As if you could come so swiftly unnoticed like butterflies tapping wild flowers with soft yellow wings. Appearing before me quietly while morning mist curls through coolness of mint-green spring. You walking over roads through fields where tree shadows make heavy slants against the sun. As alive as day...saying my name... filling me up with the taste of you... kissing my mouth awake again. By touch and whisper how we would imitate long leaves weaving, undulating and finally surrendering to silence. The Swimmer by Amelia Cotter There is a curve down the middle of the arm Bending toward the audience A beautiful slice of geometry Fine sample of art and evolution Thick and heavy by your sides Like Greek columns they guard your Olympus Look at what the gods can do— Make a boy into a man Cultivate a garden of unimaginable interest Turn a little And the shape changes But it still belongs to you Growing more magnificent Filling the whole frame of my world As I envision Every gentle stroke. New Year at the Door by Taylor Graham Time ticks in your pocket, a broken watch you keep, believing it might be restored to life; each tick echoed by a flutter against the pane: wind with its fluent, enigmatic word. What journals hold the news you keep, believing it might be transformed at last from war to peace? A stepping-stone across Time’s current, enigmatic word. What journals hold as news – datelines, deadlines, casualty reports – harkens to an old year’s clock run down, a stepping-stone across Time’s current. Who knows what waits on the other shore? Its silence rings like song. Harken to an old year’s clock run down, its nicks and tricks of history. Time ticks in your pocket, a broken watch. Its silence rings like song restored to life; each tick echoed by a flutter. A Pair of Boots by Taylor Graham I finally gave it up: that left boot, almost brand-new. I’d kept it for years, hoping the right would reappear. I imagined its left-foot march through aspen woods, the gritty scrunch that vibram makes on granite up a switchback trail; over the pass to a nameless meadow. Do boots delight in larkspur? Do they wait for me to slip them off at midday when I wade out in pearling water? While I let my feet dream fins, do boots inhale mountain air and speak together with their leather tongues? Did that lone boot yearn for its mate? At last I threw the left boot gently away. I keep my pair of old worn Vasques. They know my feet like their very soles. Now, when I pull them off at the end of the hike, I tie their laces together. Panning for Gold by Sue Scalf Sometimes a phrase and again an image of something, someone forgotten, remembered, a longing for someone gone, times past . . . all lure, beckon: Here, here. But you cannot be sure. Through shadows of trees, poplar, pine, you go along a footpath down the mountain to where the river slips toward sunset, to where the river becomes a sluice of light, molten and moving. Here your spirit can rest in birdsong, insect hum, the slow thrum of waterfall, the shallows and rocky beds until, unbidden, words come, slivers of song that rise like river-foam, notes falling across the tongue, tumbling into a flume. And if there is no river? Then remember the way you knew it, the way it curved, the place you swam, the trail at night the moon left, the way you loved someone, his face leaf-lost, forgotten. A deft shift of the mind, and it appears, that summer shimmering, sifted until all dross is gone except for this remnant that catches upon the page, that catches upon the breath, gleaming, pure, afire, lying there, the poem you always knew, and it is yours. Tyne Cot by Jan Theuninck toen jullie naar het front trokken waren jullie levende helden en nu liggen jullie op de heuvel waar alleen papavers bloeien Tyne Cot by Jan Theuninck when you left for the front you were living heroes and now you are on top of the hill where only poppies blow.......... |
Friendlier than Secret by O. Emmanuel Jakpa These three students sit in computer room of WIT library. Their whispers cling around them friendlier than a secret. They laugh aloud as if a finger tickles their armpit. And time is a cut-out paper flames they feed to the fire. I hurry over. They take in the sound of my footstep like a fallen coin. They are talking about a student who left his books on the desk out of depression or whatever. The Salesman’s Son by Darryl Willis The returning always seems swifter than the leaving until you get closer to where you leave again. Then time expands, stretching out like thick rubber bands that bound his mileage books together. I hated his leaving: never there ever present eyes that followed me every day of my life. They haunt me even now. I don’t remember a day hating him, not really; no animosity there— just a pained and plain indifference. Ever-present-always-absent. I used to want to wish him to Hell. But I could not bring myself to care that much. Might as well curse the moon last night for not being as bright as the sun today. The room still carries the scent of urine reminiscent of my father on his eighty-sixth birthday two weeks before he said goodbye the last time. The leaving now somehow seemed longer than before. The regretful ragged breath could never express his hazel eyes. Time expands, stretching out and then he is gone once again. The Literary Lion by Darryl Willis We wander into an old book store: into a palace of pages, this tomb of tomes— and there we drink tea surreptitiously stealing words. Feeling the guilt of my theft and to make amends I procure a lean chapbook of poems. Baptized into the bright light flooding through streaked window pane I find myself crying out with Isaiah over prison cells, saying Kiddush for a day old child, wandering empty down the streets of old Manhattan: an immigrant friend of homeless children. Double Take by Jack Galmitz In the afternoon daytime television The light is enough casts chiaroscuro To light the earth on the walls I do not touch and on my hands and arms The leaves of the oak the veins bulge Soaked in mist arrested by the drama I missed my life of the characters lives In pursuit of the life entangled and in danger Of someone else I find myself I might have been crying as if it were my own The Missionaries Toil in Africa by Martin Lochner scraping in the base of a cauldron collecting the last bit of soup scum wondering how he will feed them adding water diluting the nourishment dropping two three cubes of stock hiding and thickening famine despair looking at the runway staring into the sky when shall it arrive? manna from heaven parachute maize doing what we can cheating a empty stomach saying the Lords prayer. Everything seems solid: the ice, my smoky breath and strangers'. It is winter in New York and the tree branches tough it out with their fruit of sparrows. I feel weightless as I walk in the pastures of the sun, the way the tan wayside does. Expectant for the moment. At the marketplace, I meet a congregation- men and women in black attire aspiring to the mood of weather. Some old men in shabby coats, beards yellow as carambola, press the pulpy fruit to test its ripeness, as if touching scroll paper. Behind the counter, men in blood-smeared smocks hold cleavers ready. Then an order and a choir of quick strokes commences that separate the sinews from the bones of bird, fish, and mammals. It is beginning. A man grabs a net and strands a sea bass that struggles on the sawdust floor with the spirit of the letter. He beats it with a wooden club and I grow silent with it. We are all waiting in the moment to see how it will be altered. Flesh of ours is flesh of theirs and so we walk in timeless wonder. We are the strangers. Our breath the clouds come from the runnels, brambles, and the weightless song of sparrows. A field pressing forth young green swords. Ella Street Baby by Amanda Hempel “I didn’t do nothing.” — Andrea Curry-Demus Kia Johnson, 1990-2008 They said my first baby died inside me. I didn’t say nothing about hearing babies crying down the hall, even though I knew wasn’t none there. So many more die inside I don’t always know how many. So much crying. But it was peaceful a long time before I got my last-chance baby. Saw an angel in my dream just like Mary. She say to do right. And, Lord, I try. But when he slip away I hear that crying, and this time it wasn’t gonna stop. So when I see that girl Kia, I know somehow she got my boy by accident. And all the time she don’t know I know she got my baby inside her. And when I hear him again, so loud, saying, Mama, come get me, I’m ready, I only do what my baby need me to do. Only taking him back, only taking what mine. Eastern Coyote by Amanda Hempel It ran like a wild thing because it was, silver-gray ferocious over the guard rail down the ravine, gone. Something deeper than my heart pounded, feral as its thick tail, held straight down instead of ruddering the gravelly turn. At home my dog whined and spun, pressed her paws to my chest, nuzzled and nipped my neck. She could taste it on me, proximity to something untamed. Can’t let me have it by Jennifer Didier We were wearing our favorites bickered but stroked each other’s egos first impressions I love that Miles Davis tee We cut the tag off itchy on his pimpled neck I cut a hole scissor slip and he apologized Let me sew the faded fabric back together An ugly bird fainted on his porch We were watching the fog laughed but admitted we had seen “something beautiful whatever that is” had a dream about him did not know he was dead fantasy world I wish I was there He said he was afraid to let go cliché truths I pressed my palm sharp shoulder and breathed three two one Two yapping dogs tied up across the street We pretended they were ours with a turkey in the oven He apologized “let me have the wish bone whatever that is” The Down Town, by Jane Banning The town crouches its main street a dirty brown dog head on paws storefronts with clouded eyes the sweaters for sale smell of furred basements Leaves mat the gutters men in overalls hunch over coffee leave thick mugs half empty then sleep afternoons away chins dusky hair flat against bony brows No one wakes them. Down the street in an empty bumpy lot a lone tom turns around and sinks down. The Ditch by Simon Hayward I scrambled up the edge Of the Blue-Rock crag And perched On the cusp of the gully. Comrades soon flanked me on either side. Enclosed by contorted branches And crumbling rock face, Our minds accelerated Along the same latitudes. Together we gazed At the moon; still part visible Through smokey clouds, Still shimmering a silky glow. Together we acquiesce: There is No produce in that grove No shaman in this canyon. Just us; The boy crowd, Pie-eyed and entranced, Watching the city lights Pirouette on the horizon |
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