Sonnets Lxi-Lxx

Sonnets LXI-LXX Erin by Michael R. Burch All that’s left of Ireland is her hair? bright carrot?and her milkmaid-pallid skin, her brilliant air of cavalier despair, her train of children?some conceived in sin, the others to avoid it. For nowhere is evidence of thought. Devout, pale, thin, gay, nonchalant, all radiance. So fair! How can men look upon her and not spin like wobbly buoys churned by her skirt’s brisk air? They buy. They grope to pat her nyloned shin, to share her elevated, pale Despair... to find at last two spirits ease no one’s. All that’s left of Ireland is the Care, her impish grin, green eyes like leprechauns’. The Composition of Shadows by Michael R. Burch “I made it out of a mouthful of air.”?W. B. Yeats We breathe and so we write; the night hums softly its accompaniment. Pale phosphors burn; the page we turn leads onward, and we smile, content. And what we mean we write to learn: the vowels of love, the consonants’ strange golden weight, each plosive’s shape? curved like the heart. Here, resonant, sounds’ shadows mass beneath bright glass like singing voles curled in a maze of blank white space. We touch a face? long-frozen words trapped in a glaze that insulates our hearts. Nowhere can love be found. Just shrieking air. The Composition of Shadows (II) by Michael R. Burch We breathe and so we write; the night hums softly its accompaniment. Pale phosphors burn; the page we turn leads onward, and we smile, content. And what we mean we write to learn: the vowels of love, the consonants’ strange golden weight, the blood’s debate within the heart. Here, resonant, sounds’ shadows mass against bright glass, within the white Labyrinthian maze. Through simple grace, I touch your face, ah words! And I would gaze the night’s dark length in waning strength to find the words to feel such light again. O, for a pen to spell love so ethereal. To Please The Poet by Michael R. Burch To please the poet, words must dance? staccato, brisk, a two-step: so! Or waltz in elegance to time of music mild, adagio. To please the poet, words must chance emotion in catharsis? flame. Or splash into salt seas, descend in sheets of silver-shining rain. To please the poet, words must prance and gallop, gambol, revel, rail. Or muse upon a moment, mute, obscure, unsure, imperfect, pale. To please the poet, words must sing, or croak, wart-tongued, imagining. The First Christmas by Michael R. Burch ’Twas in a land so long ago... the lambs lay blanketed in snow and little children everywhere sat and watched warm embers glow and dreamed (of what, we do not know). And THEN?a star appeared on high, The brightest man had ever seen! It made the children whisper low in puzzled awe (what did it mean?). It made the wooly lambkins cry. For far away a new-born lay, warm-blanketed in straw and hay, a lowly manger for his crib. The cattle mooed, distraught and low, to see the child. They did not know it now was Christmas day! This is a poem in which I tried to capture the mystery and magic of the first Christmas day. If you like my poem, you are welcome to share it, but please cite me as the author, which you can do by including the title and subheading. The Lingering and the Unconsoled Heart by Michael R. Burch There is a silence? the last unspoken moment before death, when the moon, cratered and broken, is all madness and light, when the breath comes low and complaining, and the heart is a ruin of emptiness and night. There is a grief? the grief of a lover's embrace while faith still shimmers in a mother’s tears... There is no emptier time, nor place, while the faint glimmer of life is ours that the lingering and the unconsoled heart fears beyond this: seeing its own stricken face in eyes that drift toward some incomprehensible place. Lozenge by Michael R. Burch When I was closest to love, it did not seem real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness it might dissolve in my mouth like a lozenge of sugar. When I held you in my arms, I did not feel our lack of completeness, knowing how easy it was for us to cling to each other. And there were nights when the clouds sped across the moon’s face, exposing such rarified brightness we did not witness so much as embrace love’s human appearance. Free verse sonnet published by The HyperTexts The Princess and the Pauper by Michael R. Burch for Norman Kraeft in memory of his wife June Kysilko Kraeft Here was a woman bright, intent on life, who did not flinch from Death, but caught his eye and drew him, powerless, into her spell of wanting her himself, so much the lie that she was meant for him?obscene illusion!? made him seem a monarch throned like God on high, when he was less than nothing; when to die meant many stultifying, pained embraces. She shed her gown, undid the tangled laces that tied her to the earth: then she was his. Now all her erstwhile beauty he defaces and yet she grows in hallowed loveliness? her ghost beyond perfection?for to die was to ascend. Now he begs, penniless. Album by Michael R. Burch I caress them?trapped in brittle cellophane? and I see how young they were, and how unwise; and I remember their first flight?an old prop plane, their blissful arc through alien blue skies... And I touch them here through leaves which?tattered, frayed? are also wings, but wings that never flew: like insects’ wings?pinned, held. Here, time delayed, their features never changed, remaining two... And Grief, which lurked unseen beyond the lens or in shadows where It crept on feral claws as It scratched Its way into their hearts, depends on sorrows such as theirs, and works Its jaws... and slavers for Its meat?those young, unwise, who naively dare to dream, yet fail to see how, lumbering sunward, Hope, ungainly, flies, clutching to Her ruffled breast what must not be. Keywords/Tags: sonnet, sonnets, rhyme, meter, form, words, Ireland, children, spiritual, night, shadows, write, writing, heart, wife