Best Architects Poems
Your words --
Are the soft mortar
Between bricks and stones
Inside these mending walls
Your words --
Are stiff but fragile
Frames, building language and art
Words fill these empty spaces in our hearts
Thus, words are the architects of time
Musee d’Orsay grasps the hands of time.
The clock crowns; its gears move around.
Gallery-goers lookout and grin
from Paris-Orleans to Montmartre;
the clock crowns; its gears move around.
Each eye’s drawn from inside scenes
to the site of Sacré-Cœur without
then back again to the Degas.
Gallery goer’s lookout and grin
locked on the Place de la Concorde,
as the hand moves past a boat
on the still Seine, and the traffic
from Paris-Orleans to Montmartre.
Time passes; patron’s heads spin unwonted,
as the hands of the clockwork pass,
Monet’s lilies await—is there time?
*The Retourne a French form from the middle ages.
Published in Page & Spine 2015
“Oh Prisoner,”
Warned the architect,
“I mean no disrespect.
But you can’t climb out of jail;
These walls aren’t built to scale.”
Stunned I stare from a rocky shore
As eagle architects swoop and soar.
Avian aerobats stretch my mind.
Carving arcs in cerulean air
Building an aerial cathedral
Framing clear high walls across the sky
With headlong three-sixties upside down
Form gothic spandrels toward the ground
Flickering feathers turned them around
Racing sunward as a fleur de lis
In a uniting swirl upward bound,
Forming a pole for staffing a cross
Construction stopped at the sight of fish.
As if their cathedral struck the sea
Eagles spun in tsunamic circles
Diving for salmon they taloned tight
Flying swiftly off, soon beyond sight.
I shrugged, amazed by what raptors do.
Jet jockeys may but sigh and admire
Eagles flight gift with dreamy desire.
Human knowledge is an edifice built by two architects: Trial and Error!
© Demetrios Trifiatis
18 December 2021
Voltaire just Kant angle cut it
Beauvoir broad side view
abut the narrow Rousseau
gender Thoreau thought causeway
As Sarte Marx the entrance unlit —
Avicena chapiters atop da Vinci pillars,
Stuart Mill sturdily sit
Arendt spiral steps turn Spinoza
down to the Alighieri depths
Socrates ambience got a Dewey dungeon
decimal Fodio gradient affectation
Awolowo still wanna Sodipo cubit cut it,
but some Augustinus genius
won’t even Nyerere beveling make
the reed Descartes arch decision
Wollstonecraft overlaid on contoured Witt
Piper leveled with Gargi precision ...
A Solomon blueprint found in a keen closet
In the ethereal realm, where Themis holds sway,
A cosmic ballet of justice, a metaphorical play.
Yet, in our earthly sphere, reflections intertwine,
Empower women—the catalysts of progress divine.
Like Themis, with scales, a celestial display,
Let women’s worth twirl within the sunlit ray.
Respect and recognition, whispered dreams unfold,
A symphony of progress, a story yet untold.
As Themis adorns the sacred tapestry of mythic lore,
So too can women ascend, their voices galore.
Grant them the stage, society’s sacred decree,
Witness progress soaring, untethered and free.
Illusions are the answer. You are the embodied image. Are you justifying such creation? Life is a back and forth pinball of hiding and seek. We hide when we deceive and we seek when we need. Rules applied with the forgotten truth that you subconsciously are not even going to follow yourself. We are all selfish. That's just the way it is and it isn't a bad thing. If it makes you feel better to measure it with an illusion then so it is. Bearing in mind your perception of the word illusion that is fake, real is what you make it, so make it real. For real! For fakes is considered just kidding and kids are who we say that too; I see this with my ears and I hear you with my eyes, I smell your fear but that is only because I remember that smell well for; well, I wear that smell it myself. I feel that smell and I smell what you’re feeling; just kidding! I know it's, "I smell what you’re cooking." We still seek proof and we verify our judgment with confirmation of our companion senses. We allow this to pass as we don't appreciate what we have been so freely given.
- 2015
LEARNING FROM WORD ARCHITECTS
What a timely wave of a brilliant idea here,
coming from the beautiful brain of Line Gauthier,
proposing the first ever PoetrySoup convention,
a real time annual event of good intention.
The creative poets, some accomplished, some amateur,
we won’t see them in their silent and enigmatic Avatar.
Many of them we’ll be delighted to meet live instead,
in rhythm of their poems we’ll flow, listen them, not read.
On behalf of the organizers I send this invitation to all of you,
come and attend the convention notable and new,
to be held this summer in Bergen on the bank of a Nordic fjord
where the arctic sun will hardly set, you won’t be cold.
As the azure North Sea will glisten under the midnight sun
the tapestry of poetry will be spun with great elan.
To build edifice of poetry from the word architects you’ll learn,
charmed by insight into profound depth of poetry you’ll return.
March 12, 2019
Under the sky of revolutions, the architects of absolutes rose,
cloaked in the pride of dogmas, their words bleeding on the edge of new chains,
shouting freedom while forging other shining shackles,
and the air smelled of paradox, each faction a sharp blade
cutting its own throat, all in the name of continuous progress,
but how many empires must suffocate under the weight of their beliefs?
A circle of fire that consumes itself, preaching the destruction of the old world,
stones fell, virtues disappeared, leaving only the threads of chaos,
in their eyes, ideals were not mirrors, but sharp weapons,
fragile when faced with harsh truths, they forgot that pure light also casts a shadow,
radicalism blooms where doubt dies, but the roots rot unseen,
any doctrine, absolute in its marrow, becomes a noose for those who question,
the prophets screamed about justice at any cost, but without mercy, tyranny only changes its form,
the ground trembled not from the weight of righteousness, but from ignored cracks,
history is a wheel, oiled with blood, spinning under blind convictions,
they danced blindfolded to the music of their own destruction, a question floated in the ash:
what use is a kingdom of rubble when the architects are buried beneath it?
In the end, they did not fall to enemies, nor to gods, nor to the passage of time,
but to their own reflection, a thousand truths warring until nothing remained
but silence and smoke rising from the ruins of a shattered dream.
Friday night approaches, well deserved.
We'll sit together... talk into the night.
Gather gingerly plans and dreams.
Wordku: 5-7-5 words
AP: Honorable Mention 2026, Honorable Mention 2026
Looking at My Hands
By - Roger White
Pallid skin, once luminescent, now brown and stained like husks.
Gaunt fingers, once straight, now gnarled and twisted like twigs.
I lament where my hands have been is not where they are now.
Yet, slowly through the epiphany of memory, I see all they have done.
These trustworthy hands have guided me through the worst and best in my life.
They served this country, kept me going forward when hope seemed beyond my grasp.
On our wedding day, they clasped my wife’s hands to say…I love you.
Carried babies to bed, wiped away a child’s tears to say it will be alright, patted young
men on the back to express my pride in them, held my wife to let her know we will get
through this. They shook hands with many family and old friends to say - Hi, good to see you
again, and gently touched cold hands to say goodbye for the last time.
I now look at my hands differently than I did only a moment ago.
I feel a sense of respect for all they have accomplished and expressed in my life.
No, let them grow older by the day, they deserve that, and they have grown old so beautifully.
We must appreciate our hands. These primitive cages of
bone and skin need no evolution, they are the instruments of human evolution. Timeless artisans of human
intelligence, art, craft, written, spoken, science, toil, emotion. We engage the world with our hands. Without
them, we would be mute of words, incapable of deeds, devoid of creativity, impotent of feeling.
We would be feral creatures no more than the animals with which we share this Earth.
With our hands we are the architects of our wisdom, the beneficiaries of our existence.
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
( Eleanor Roosevelt )
When the night settles heavy on the windows--
we lean into the quiet and let hope speak softly.
Where shadows stretch and slowly settle,
the edges of tomorrow begin to form.
The thoughts we hardly admit to ourselves,
sink into the dark and start to root.
And yes, doubt comes around from time to time…
but a gentle, honest light can gather the heart.
Even if our hands shake, they still shape the road,
and unsure steps still get us somewhere.
Little by little, the day comes closer,
and we walk toward it quietly…
making morning happen,
architects of time.
written_12012025_Don Mueang
children and elders
take joy in building sandcastles,
let them not crumble
as true architects and welders.
2nd Place
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Each one arrives
with a blueprint of silence,
a geometry whispered
from the throat of the sky.
They fall not to be counted,
but to fade away—
brief architects
whose cathedrals
melt on our tongues.
Look! They refuse
to repeat themselves:
a rebellion of fractures,
no two the same~
yet all of them
willing to vanish,
to sacrifice
without argument,
leaving only
the silence
of their unfinished work.