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
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