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Best Poems Written by Michele Rossi

Below are the all-time best Michele Rossi poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Copyright © Michele Rossi | Year Posted 2013



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Straw Men- For Patrick and Others

Straw Men (for Patrick and others)    

There are scant few of them now, standing
In the rows of my memorably failed crop.

They came dressed as they were.
I always complimented them.

Counting on them to dispel
The crows, the starlings, black eyes

That have circled since before my days
At a miserable piano, black keys

Black notes, black words, scorched screams
From the nest, mothered with a smoking tongue.

My straw men would shoo those winged
Sooty moments, with their stuffed smiles.

But a lost girl, losing time, mind gone
And more birds lined up on the sagging staves

I trusted my straw men to silence my blank-eyed 
Arias of despair, as straw men should, yes?

But fickle winds and wounding skies
Dissembled the men. Sometimes they climbed

Down and walked away, trailing their stuff
As the caws and cackles mocked their shuffled exit.

So many years, and my fields are picked over
One last man barely held his own stiff spine.

His straw swept and scattered by a tantrum storm, a terrible
Fugue of quick black notes, bird song and magpie laughing,

Left me again in my fallow place, face down
Tears feeding the aging soil and spoiled seed. 

Goddamn them all! Damn all the straw men.
Let the black wings come and do their best.

I will sing some semblance of a single bright
Melody, my own, soaring as a scratchy drone
Over a black chorus that is now mine to direct.

Copyright © Michele Rossi | Year Posted 2013

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Morning Cremation

Morning Cremation  #2

 
Morning Cremation

Soul treading water
 
A butterfly pinned
Cruel trophy
Not even under glass, discarded
Exposed to what the sky can give
 
Powdered wings, dusting lost
Pulled off in a gust, dropped
In the tall grass of complex dances
Caught, I swing and sway, mute to questions
 
Even I had my limit, now all gone but
My quiet rage
An ember set to ignite, the wind
Picks up a stilled wing, I catch 
a thermal, a tiny fireball
 
I'll look pretty as I tumble by though.

Copyright © Michele Rossi | Year Posted 2013

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The Enormous Silence

The Enormous Silence

And now the enormous silence
Dark clouds, dark day, dark eyes
Stare back from my watery mirror.

The silent treatment.
Bitter medicine
heals neither of us.

No malice of forethought.
No premeditation.
Only the criminal called best intent.
Walks quietly on the road to hell

That is this enormous silence.

Copyright © Michele Rossi | Year Posted 2013


Book: Shattered Sighs