Poetry – Unspoken Politics

Renee

I know you loved me,

so much

like I was your own child.

I miss you, and even if

I don’t believe in god

I hope you’re in a better place now.

You didn’t deserve the pain.

Hadrian

Stone, baked by summers
long since forgotten by
the living and the dead
races furrowed fields
across countryside lanes
as a spring-dew sunrise
reveals its scars

Reave

When there was no more
land to steal

and the people were made
wraiths

the last syllable of
the old tongue had been spoken

it was not enough.

Liberate

Rise like a single ember
caught in ecstatic swirling
tendrils of soft smoke

Rise like the first shoots
of a tentative spring

Rise like the Sun
greeting the East

Rise, rise together.

god never died;
was never alive.
except in human hearts
where the embers glow
and crackle upon
gentle pressure
to warm a biting
winter morning
where the lake stands
still, awaiting spring
so it may sway and churn
to let us know it
teems with life

Eternity blood

No one remembers when
the eternity war began
though the elders will
whisper stories that the
young dismiss as fantasy
as they put on tan fatigues
assemble their carbines
and head into a land
they have never known
to meet a people
who know not
peace

Irish (summer?)

Slate-grey winds beckon
an inauspicious August
marking the end of
a moody Irish summer
the starburst sunshine
long since past
more legend than memory
as rain falls in silent sheets

Two thousand and five

Moments long past
come forth, afresh
as if they arose
incorruptible, from the crypt
oblivious to the passage of time
each year since no more than
a mild nuisance

the bell rings on the dot
clear as dappled dew in the shade
8:30, first period geometry
on top of the hill, seven staircases up
the first day of the rest of my lfie
on an August day, unsure if school
means that summer weather is now
somehow improper

a continent, an ocean, a decade apart
yet no more distant than
the tips of my fingers

Uncertain spring

each droplet
falls from sky to soil
divergent paths
converge to nourish the loam
where the ever-yearning shoots
of an uncertain spring stretch out
to bid the world a hearty
hello.

Tanka: winter leaves

Once green and verdant,
winter leaves sit and decay
methodically
on mud-caked concrete, gazing
up at their former glory

Category: Poetry