Poems About Things That Break Iii

Poems about Things that Break III 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. The Higher Atmospheres by Michael R. Burch Whatever we became climbed on the thought of Love itself; we floated on plumed wings ten thousand miles above the breasted earth that had vexed us to such Distance; now all things seem small and pale, a girdle’s handsbreadth girth ... I break upon the rocks; I break; I fling my human form about; I writhe; I writhe. Invention is not Mastery, nor wings Salvation. Here the Vulture cruelly chides and plunges at my eyes, and coos and sings ... Oh, some will call the sun my doom, but Love melts callow wax the higher atmospheres leave brittle. I flew high: not high enough to melt such frozen resins ... thus, Her jeers. Old Habits Die Hard by Gulzar loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch The habit of breathing is an odd tradition. Why struggle so to keep on living? The body shudders, the eyes veil, yet the feet somehow keep moving. Why this journey, this restless, relentless flowing? For how many weeks, months, years, centuries shall we struggle to keep on living, keep on living? Habits are such strange things, such hard things to break! Having Touched You (The Boy in the Bubble) by Michael R. Burch What I have lost is not less than what I have gained. And for each moment passed like the sun to the west, another remained suspended in memory like a flower in crystal so that eternity is but an hour and fall is no longer a season but a state of mind. I have no reason to wait; the wind does not pause for remembrance or regret because there is only fate and chance. And so then, forget... Forget that we were very happy for a day. That day was my lifetime. Before that day I was empty and the sky was grey. You were the sunshine, the sunshine that gave me life. I took root and I grew. Now the touch of death is like a terrible knife, and yet I can bear it, having touched you. I wrote this poem as a teenager after watching "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" with John Travolta playing a young man with a defective immune system who risks death for a chance at love. 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. 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. 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. Published as the collection "Poems about Things that Break" Keywords/Tags: break, break up, breaking, breakings, farewell, shatter, shattered, shattering, delicate, fragility, fragment, touch, cruelty, brutality, abuse, stress, love, pain, relationships, society, sorrow, solitude, sad, relationship