| The
Nubs
A leper looked for Jesus but
found me
Such things happen, such things
happen
He was a beggar, lacked good
eyes
I had two, but none to spare
His left hand had four fingers,
thumb
Worn to nubs and they were
numb
This is no parable, it happened
here
Not in ancient Palestine
In Maryland, in Maryland
The nubs were bleeding from
the ends
Cure me, cure me, heal my sight
Heal my fingers light from
light -
I have no power to restore
What was before, or not before
Money, filthy crumpled bills
Was what I had to heal his
ills
And not too many
And I too have been worn away
Jesus come without delay
Here I am, here I am
Pavel Chichikov
Mr. Eliot was right
The world will not end in fire.
It will finally decay
With the universe, in choir.
It will waste, at last, away.
With mathematic precision
Astrophysical death,
Begun at the beginning,
Will stop with final breath,
Root and rock, and wall will end,
And air, and will and salt;
While lion and while lamb will blend
In funereal song.
Silence will arise at long. long last
When all that was is gone.
It will rule. It will pass.
Then nothing will be sung.
Then nothing fails and disappears,
And memory evaporates;
And mourning, too, and grief and tears;
But none will be to celebrate.
And harrowed hell, and all within;
Rage and hate, love and heat,
Will pass into oblivion,
Will stop and not repeat.
No eye will see. No sound will say,
Nor smile will be to satisfy.
No night will fall to close the day
When dying will itself have died.
peg
February 10, 2004
|
| Creative and Constructive ..
Critical Regards
This well formed sonnet tells its tale within the
confines of your chosen form. I like it. I thought I was alone in
counting the seconds between flash and thunderclap to determine the proximity.
At the risk of being pernickety, I wonder if you
would care to look at your sonnet as a piece of prose, removing the line
endings and opening capitalizations. For example:
When golden sun has scared away the cloud, that scatters
off, chased from the summer blue, then brilliant, tells me your love is
true, here I might bask in glories of the proud.
Grammatically, we have a clause "When golden sun
has scared away the cloud" acting as the subject for the verb "tells".
This strikes me as an awkward expression, and I have trouble in legitimizing
it under the claim of poetic license.Alternatively I could select "cloud"
as both the object of "scared away" and subject of "tells" - but there
is a conjunction that has been elided perhaps to retain rhythm. This also
strikes me as an awkward construction.
My second comment is even more pernickety - punctuation.
Every line in the sonnet is terminated with comma or full stop, irrespective
of need.
As a bright young friend of mine once cuttingly
remarked: "I would like to raise an even more minor objection, but I don't
think it would be possible". Pax.
Terry
|
| Thank you for examining my sonnet. This level of
scrutiny is exactly the reason I joined this group, to help me inform my
writing and to tease out the inconsistencies and change if possible
the way I structure the work. |
Scribble
on the net
featuring
New Zealand and
International poets
Poetry, Reviews, Resources,
E-mail Discussion group.
Inspired by
New Zealand Fidonet
|
|
|
Cower Lower
When golden sun has scared away the cloud,
That scatters off, chased from the summer blue,
Then brilliantly tells, your love is true,
So I might bask in glories of the proud.
But when it rains our misery looms large,
The glower of your frown casts shadow down
And I am apt to think in storms I drown;
For rain beats patter, lightning builds its charge.
So I am patient, fearful of the drum,
Whose flash has warned with its electric burst,
I count long seconds still... will it come,
And by its passage know how I am cursed.
Each rumble of your temper like a gun,
Makes me cower lower, till it is done.
Marc Sherland
February 2004
|
THE WEIGHT
Say this: my self a stone
Heavy, cold and dense,
And this I clasp to sink
Into the ocean's depths
I clasp it to my chest
Let go of buoyancy,
Down I go to drown
The living part of me
But when I loose my grasp
I rise to breathe again,
Drowning still would clasp
The heavy sinking stone
Stone I would release
Precious mortal stone,
I would this fear would cease
To lose my self alone
Stone of precious dread
Granite of a name
You are the stone that breaks
But rising I remain
Pavel
February
9, 2004
| I'm sorry most of you are so far away. I'm having
a photography show in Maryland on September 1 - 20. It would be great to
see all of you, but I know it isn't exactly a commute. In fact, I passed
through Auckland airport on the way to Brisbane a few years ago. That was
a 29 hour trip.
---INVITATION---
The exhibit is at
Saint Mary's Seminary,
Emittsburg, Maryland,
a little over
an hour's drive north of Washington DC.
BTW, I've got a poetry web site at:
http://users.erols.com/fishhook
The site is refreshed weekly most weeks, usually
every Sunday.
|
"Talking of football, I'm reminded of the promise of the newly appointed
coach of a struggling third division team: "We're going to turn this team
around 360 degrees."" -BBC Tonight
Just going along with the tone as I perceive it. It seemed to me
that
instead of 'Death thou shalt die...'
I was reading 'In the long run we're all dead.'
But that's only a personal take.
Have no idea if Eliot had just come from Church, or the dentist.
Pavel
Night Travails
I saw you from a distance,
Wind sculpted like an arrowhead,
Rain streaming from extremities,
Bleary in the amber light of town night.
You were pleading for me to come
To your rescue,
Swearing oaths to ancient gods
That stole the week,
And still inhabit days,
But not the weekend
Of sun and moon and Roman Saturn.
Hurtling towards you;
The flick of wipers,
Beams of piercing halogen,
Illumines my path,
Yet you stretch forward to stare and curse,
As brethren choose to pass you by.
Cars pool you in wash of cresting wave,
Reflections everywhere warning in ripples,
Splattered by the wheels and tires,
Marc Sherland
|
Noel, these were not any old fish; these were genuine, one-hundred
per-cent, oak-smoked kippers packed by loving hands in Aberdeen,
Scotland. Corrupt indeed. They were and remain worthy of a sonnet!
and you
may yet get one for your trouble.
Cheers mate,
Bill
|
|
True joy to read poetry on our page,
Makes less fearful that human habit age,
For when at last to dust and nothing more,
My words still in the ether win their score.
Marc Sherland
|
The Economical Carnivore
I am the most
economical carnivore.
I fly through the sky
And walk on the floor.
I hunt wherever people go.
I go where the stock market trades
and shares
I hunt for prices
In the Bulls and Bears.
I make money where I go.
[Chorus]
Oh.... I'm the economical carnivore.
Oh.... I'm the ultimate dinosaur.
Oh.... A Tyrannosaurus is my Pater
And a Pteradon is my Mater.
I am the most economical carnivore.
I scrimp and I scrape
And try every door.
I collect whatever's going on
the way.
The Tiger and the Lion will run
away
Whenever I dance
And come out and play,
And I make an earthquake with
each big step.
[Chorus]
Oh.... I'm the economical carnivore.
Oh.... I'm the ultimate dinosaur.
Oh.... A Tyrannosaurus is my Pater
And a Pteradon is my Mater.
I am the economical carnivore.
Watch turn around
And take off and soar.
For I'm the ultimate of dinosaurs.
I wear a big blue suit and a blue
tie.
And polka dot underwear
I flash when I fly
For they match my glistening blue
red scales.
[Chorus]
Oh.... I'm the economical carnivore.
Oh.... I'm the ultimate dinosaur.
Oh.... A Tyrannosaurus is my Pater
And a Pteradon is my Mater.
[Repeat and fade]
©2004 Heather
Lennox
Blame for Pain
God?
a generic term for concepts
People worship, idolatry!
Is God to blame for pain?
God looks after us personally
some pray
But leaves us free
they also say
Is this a world of pain?
It is! they say
Are there others not?
What then do we gain?
Pain's a perception
A built in teacher
some say
Teaching the need to detach
from the forces of matter,
from which we would be free
they say
The causes of pain are in ourselves
As are the paths of liberation
the Way
© Noel Fuller
1 February, 2004
|
how to read!
yes, of course you are right! No mention of 'new beginning' in the
piece. No intent either. However on exhaling that last line "When dying
will itself have died" I had a choice to hold my breath forever or inhale
with new life...
If one is to 'feel' the words in reading poetry, sense them so to
speak, then one has to accept that readers may vary in their interpretation
of a piece and inspired in various ways. This is what makes us all unique.
One would hope that good poetry is inspirational.
Marie St Onge
Delay
Dry leaves run by the wind's cold power
Their scraping dry with pointed claws,
See them scud on the frozen river
Weightless, bodiless, bowed and scant
They sail blue ice with their crooked backs,
Flee to the south from dreadful night
Snarling head transfixed in ice
Deeper than death the fastened soil,
Ruts are covered with skins of glass
No deer stray in the wizened glen
Wind at the top of the hill's steep trail,
Yet I hear a whistling wren
Run of singing, one short phrase
Then another, then it stops,
Under and over the wind it plays
Wren in a thicket, long delayed,
Epiphany and miracle -
Song that waited till it stayed
Pavel
January 17, 2004
|
