Poems About Things That Break I

Poems about Things that Break I These are poems about things that break and/or shatter: a bubble, glass, a mirror, a twig or tree limb, a thunderstorm, cities and towers in times of war, old habits, our hearts, and sometimes Love itself. Shattered by Vera Pavlova loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch I shattered your heart; now I limp through the shards barefoot. Dark-bosomed clouds pregnant with heavy thunder ... the water breaks ?Michael R. Burch As grief reaches its breaking point someone snaps a nearby branch. ?Yamaguchi Seishi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch Lightning shatters the darkness? the night heron's shriek ?Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch Eros, the limb-shatterer, rattles me, an irresistible constrictor. ?Sappho, fragment 130, loose translation by Michael R. Burch My heart is unsteady as a rocking boat; besieged by such longing I weaken with age and come close to breaking. ?Otomo no Sakanoue no Iratsume, loose translation by Michael R. Burch Mirror by Kajal Ahmad, a Kurdish poet loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch My era’s obscuring mirror   shattered because it magnified the small and made the great seem insignificant. Dictators and monsters filled its contours.             Now when I breathe its jagged shards pierce my heart and instead of sweat I exude glass. Mirror Images by Michael R. Burch She has belief without comprehension and in her crutchwork shack she is much like us ... tamping the bread into edible forms, regarding her children at play with something akin to relief ... ignoring the towers ablaze in the distance because they are not revelations but things of glass, easily shattered ... and if you were to ask her, she might say? sometimes God visits his wrath upon an impious nation for its leaders’ sins, and we might agree: seeing her mutilations. Published by Poetry SuperHighway and Modern War Poems Second Sight by Michael R. Burch I never touched you? that was my mistake. Deep within, I still feel the ache. Can an unformed thing eternally break? Now, from a great distance, I see you again not as you are now, but as you were then? eternally present and Sovereign. Ghazal by Mirza Ghalib loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch Not the blossomings of song nor the adornments of music: I am the voice of my own heart breaking. You toy with your long, dark curls while I remain captive to my black, pensive thoughts. We congratulate ourselves that we two are different but this weakness has burdened us both with inchoate grief. Now you are here, and I find myself bowing: as if sadness is a blessing, and longing a sacrament. I am a fragment of sound rebounding; you are the walls impounding my echoes. Bubble by Michael R. Burch .................Love ..........fragile elusive .......if held too closely ....cannot.........withstand ..the inter..................ruption of its.............................. bright ..unmalleable.............tension ....and breaks disintegrates ......at the............touch of .........an undiscerning ..................hand. I believe this is my only shape/shaped/concrete poem. Because Her Heart Is Tender by Michael R. Burch for Beth, on the first anniversary of 9-11 She scrawled soft words in soap: “Never Forget,” Dove-white on her car’s window, and the wren, because her heart is tender, might regret it called the sun to wake her. As I slept, she heard lost names recounted, one by one. She wrote in sidewalk chalk: “Never Forget,” and kept her heart’s own counsel. No rain swept away those words, no tear leaves them undone. Because her heart is tender with regret, bruised by razed towers’ glass and steel and stone that shatter on and on and on and on ... she stitches in damp linen: “NEVER FORGET,” and listens to her heart’s emphatic song. The wren might tilt its head and sing along because its heart once understood regret when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on. She writes in adamant: “NEVER FORGET” because her heart is tender with regret. Published by Neovictorian/Cochlea, The Villanelle, The Eclectic Muse (Canada), Nietzsche Twilight, Nutty Stories (South Africa), Poetry Renewal Magazine and Other Voices International Break Time by Michael R. Burch for those who lost loved ones on 9-11 Intrude upon my grief; sit; take a spot of milk to cloud the blackness that you feel; add artificial sweeteners to conceal the bitter aftertaste of loss. You’ll heal if I do not. The coffee’s hot. You speak: of bundt cakes, polls, the price of eggs. You glance twice at your watch, cough, look at me askance. The TV drones oeuvres of high romance in syncopated lip-synch. Should I feel the underbelly of Love’s warm Ideal, its fuzzy-wuzzy tummy, and not reel toward some dark conclusion? Disappear to pale, dissolving atoms. Were you here? I brush you off: like saccharine, like a tear. Breakings by Michael R. Burch I did it out of pity. I did it out of love. I did it not to break the heart of a tender, wounded dove. But gods without compassion ordained: "Frail things must break!" Now what can I do for her shattered psyche’s sake? I did it not to push. I did it not to shove. I did it to assist the flight of indiscriminate Love. But gods, all mad as hatters, who legislate in all such matters, ordained that everything irreplaceable shatters. Mate Check by Michael R. Burch Love is an ache hearts willingly secure then break the bank to cure. Keywords: break, break up, leave, leaving, goodbye, lonely, loneliness, broken, breaking, breakings, depression, love, relationships, separation, divorce, lost love, love hurts, shatter, shattered