Free Verse Iv

FREE VERSE VI Reason Without Rhyme by Michael R. Burch I used to be averse to free verse, but now I admit YOUR rhyming is WORSE! But alas, in the end, it’s all the same: all verse is unpaid and a crying shame. What the Poet Sees by Michael R. Burch What the poet sees, he sees as a swimmer ~~~~underwater~~~~ watching the shoreline blur sees through his breath’s weightless bubbles ... Both worlds grow obscure. Mending by Michael R. Burch for the survivors of 9-11 and their families I am besieged with kindnesses; sometimes I laugh, delighted for a moment, then resume the more seemly occupation of my craft. I do not taste the candies; the perfume of roses is uplifted in a draft that vanishes into the ceiling’s fans that spin like old propellers till the room is full of ghostly bits of yarn . . . My task is not to knit, but not to end too soon. Ivy by Michael R. Burch “Van trepando en mi viejo dolor como las yedras.” – Pablo Neruda “They climb on my old suffering like ivy.” Ivy winds around these sagging structures from the flagstones to the eave heights, and, clinging, holds intact what cannot be saved of their loose entrails. Through long, blustery nights of dripping condensation, cured in the humidors of innumerable forgotten summers, waxy, unguent, palely, indifferently fragrant, it climbs, pausing at last to see the alien sparkle of dew beading delicate sparrowgrass. Coarse saw grass, thin skunk grass, clumped mildewed yellow gorse grow all around, and here remorse, things past, watch ivy climb and bend, and, in the end, we ask if grief is worth the gaps it leaps to mend. Memento Mori by Michael R. Burch I found among the elms something like the sound of your voice, something like the aftermath of love itself after the lightning strikes, when the startled wind shrieks . . . a gored-out wound in wood, love’s pale memento mori— that livid white scar in that first shattered heart, forever unhealed . . . this burled, thick knot incised with six initials pledged against all possible futures, and penknife-notched below, six edged, chipped words that once cut deep and said . . . WILL U B MINE 4 EVER? . . . which now, so disconsolately answer . . . N EVER.  Keywords/Tags: free verse, freedom, unpaid, rhyme, rhyming, voice, write, writing, poems, poets, poetry, averse. sees, vision, sight, foresight