Best Brambled Poems
As light dances red to horizon's end
So do we while approaching last breath
To complete life's arc with its final bend
and contemplate stillness in silent death
How quickly we'll flee from our past design
Find order in reflections we ponder
and struggle with our memory's decline
To lose direction, begin to wander
How fleeting our journey across its space
Through life's brambled meadows of colored days
With smaller shadows and vanishing trace
We cling to days fading of lighter grays
How slow is understanding of our plight
How cold journey's end through darkness and light
beware the thorny brambled track ~ trespassers risk entanglement
Proverbs 4 verse 14 (New King James)
'Do not enter the path of the wicked, And do not walk in the way of evil.
18.11.19
Proverbial Monoku 2 Poetry Contest - sponsored by Carol Connell
(Part One) The first few hours.
I was just a ordinary man
caught up in the unruly throng,
The mob jeering and ranting
insults on the road along,
I pushed and shoved my way
through all the furore
to see what all the fuss and melee
was all about at the fore.
My heart shrunk as I eyed
in total dismay that ghastly sight,
From what befell my eyes, that Friday morn
befouling that dawning day with blight,
Was a Man sparsely clad, and bloodied soiled,
And about fifteen and a half hands tall,
His nut brown shoulder length hair
now caked and matted in disarray.
The way His hair and beard
was parted in the middle down
i knew that Man then
was belonging to the Nazarene Sect,
And brutally entwined upon His head
was a brambled thorny crown,
What more torturous and bestial
torment can a naked body be subject,
His body oozed and dripped sweat
all mixed with blood and grime,
And even more the gruesome
was the criss-cross lashes mark,
So visible, as He staggered along
on that arduous path that morning time,
Dragging a fifteen cubit long sycamore
torture-stake on His shoulder, bared stark.
His back bent and racked in obvious pain
bearing that one and a half hand in diameter log,
Then when, He stumbled in His stride
and before the Roman Centurion Him wanted to flog,
For that Man's wretched agony
and pain, I no longer could bear to stand,
Then in haste that Man to help
I shed my outer garments and tossed it to another man,
I stayed the Centurion's hand
and hoisted that stake upon my own broad back,
For I was Simon an Grecian man from Cyrene
and favoured arduous labourous toil,
When that frail worn-out Man turned
with blue-grey eyes and looked at me,
I saw in that look, relief and gratitude
then I knew, I did just right,
He sadly smiled as He said these words to me,
"Do you too now drink from this bitter cup?",
And added, "You shall indeed sip
its rim with Me to the end of time",
I knew Him then no ordinary, man could be
His voice so gentle and mild,
And I truly then wandered who this Man could be?
to suffer so cruelly, in the hands of man,
When He lightly placed His hand
upon my shoulder, I felt the load lightened,
as if I walked with a feather
on my back, and not His gruesome burden no more,
As we together trudged, on that path
that road, to Calvaria, that place of death,
I then knew that Man at my side
Was a Holy-man by His touch alone.
The nights out here are bright and clear,
Light pollution is not a fear, the North Star
Is unusually bright, while Venus shows its
Distant light.
The nights out here are clear and bright,
The clouds the stewards of the night,
And when the light is proud to dawn,
Comes the hare and spritely fawn
Thunder boxes wooden roofs, rain's
Rivers splatter nests and hooves, while
In the hedgerow’s brambled way, sparrow’s
Hop and dormice play
And as the milky day unfolds, mare’s breasts
Suckle shaky foals, and all lays well till day is
Old, in pastoral scene, spun clear from gold
This reptile lazarus on the ground
Gawking at flies
Soft with hidden hyoid bone, skin bound
Bright dewlap cries
Like all of us who do not yet crawl sand
Sucking sun's heat
With lolling head swims to where I stand
Full of deceit
For this thing was the dragon of old
Its lurid eyes
The last vestige of an frigid flame
Where the wind sighs
And bow the brambled branches in shame.
I could almost
Pity the scaly thing, feigning its
False comatose
But frenzied flies lose to it in wits.
ON PREDICTIONS
( by S.Jagathsimhan Nair)
What paths and brambled brooks I passed to halt
In this corny beat, to question my salt
What transcends this sum and what spills over
This reminder as scowling recompense
What more in an uneven air that chafes
At its own breath. What questions after such
Unmixed wisdom come of unspoken word.
Read my palm and the tangle of lines in unsuspected stir
Read my planets making planned mystery in motion overhead
And tell your considered surmise of my roller-coaster drive
And tell if it’s right that mine is just another clueless tale
Don’t keep staring in my eyes and telling all mumbo-jumbo stuff
Unravel you can’t even the contents of a grain of sand
You can tell of goals to aim at but not the sights I lose
You can tell of failures gone through but not what I failed.
Here lies the burden there lies the dream but where is the promise
Where lives the omniscient sage the old truant sobered with age
You and I are making journeys to the death-holes of prophets
Who dies after who dies after who dies after who and when.
Try gather my conscience encapsuled in unearthy voices
Try equal my inkling into the insides of a riddle
What hoodoos what predictions what jinxes and sordid warnings
After all that and what not of just a peep into one’s life.
S.Jagathsimhan Nair
For Skat's 5th poem on soup contest
Child, when you begin to remember, whose memory
Do you remember best? Is the one told to you by bias
Art, and reinforced by a contentious history?
Is it the one imagined while we are apart, the pale Judas
Of all grieving heart? Or did you take time to scan
The logic in your head again, the silver in your hand
Before you plait my crown of thorns, or exiled me
To drink the hemlock drops squeezed from insecurity?
I have some blame, for justice cannot deny my sin
But when to priest ot Pharisee you render praise
Scroll for my motives, read the simple schema within
Look at my life, see what was doled to me. My ways
My dear was a mocking, scourging path to tread
And all for the love that alienated me. Heaven made
A dark cloud of no greater, and more terrible dread
Than the heart in which sweet adoration petals fade.
The flowers fall, and the brambled thorns left behind
I wear with stoic grace. Praying for you each scentless
Day, the rope will rot before your soft, sightless mind
And the measure of my worth without wan bitterness
Will be the soul's desire to love, promised intention
Unspoken while stammering crowds howl their madness
Baying at a serene moon. Jealousy is pride's invention
Truth wears humility in the saged silence of its sadness.
I forgave them, the anointed flock, rinse them
And wash them, and put them back
To wear your robe, your borrowed diadem
Walk to Golgotha with curse at their back
I forgave them
For they never felt the fire, knew no heat
You covered them
Before they made a prince to walk the street
O could they know black faith coming back, come back
O could they tell the deluge
And see the white robes above it, coming back
Into the brambled tents, the host of refuge
They would forgive
Had they known you, the cross before the throne
They would forgive
Their erring pride in one who walked alone
O Christ, what jealousy consume our faint name
In ignorance cage castling
Curtains of glory from tattered rags of shame
What cattle blind in jostling
I forgave them
For by these words they know again your heart
You forgave them
Long ere they forget or love flew apart
After breaking his heart,
His love turned into hate,
All that is left is her scent,
He let go of her sweetheart,
Though it's so hard to forget,
A love story came to naught.
Trembling with alot of fear,
While playing truth or dare,
Dreams vanished into thin air,
And left a trail of total despair,
Eyes open he could see clear,
A game that ended their affair.
It was a day the rainbow tumbled,
A time when the heavens rumbled,
The night their lovelight crumbled,
Feeling like his heart was brambled,
After his love letters were scumbled,
Walking home in argony he shambled.
© Kelmwa
Before that day splashed everything with light
I played in solitude with cuddly clouds
And watched them form changing figures, blight
The sky or bring the sobbing sludge of rain,
Or etch your portrait
where the spindly sparrow fly
looping your beauty with the breathless sun
We watched them
fall like shattered diamonds
once from a window battered
with fragile
dreams
of tomorrow
And you said they were our prancing children in the water
Little Shangos you called them, and we kissed
In passion, filling love with lissom lilacs of laughter
For life was an eternal summer then
Winter was barred from where it had never been
Barren landscape scarred by the lecher, not the sun
Shrivelling petals and prayers, lynching the hearts like trees
Barren
and scraggy
shredding the eye
Brambled
fingers clutching sky
Tolling voids of air like a crucifix
Self important because of the importunate
Castling citadels of calamity against the hearts fear
The wind exploits the calamity of leaves
Only a shell of sultry shadows was left
And I bereft
Tented my exultation
To wait your coming again
And the annihilation of pain.
Clouds are drifters of the sky, I am enfolded in cerulean blue
Dark indigo of heart on the promenade
Children feet splashing the frazzled dry of sand
I shriek like a gull slant against the wind
Where the splashed sand grits the eye
Summer seas are all of winter's tears rinsed in light
Itinerant birds frolic here: innocence excited emits delight,
For lovers are children
Too trusting uncarefully
Undermarcated wrong or right
As summer splash them like sprays
Glinting the eye Where the starving eagle plays'
I slant away to reminisce alone.
Coming over the open horizon
My eyes prospect the garish cliffs of day
And find not gold in the morning light
By sorrow sifted away.
But there and there across each state
The subtle sun of spring
A new crop harrowing brings
Into view ... and crows cawing to devour
The contentless cases of crumbled minds
Tent cities, like old cotton bales
Tent cities, like cold rotten tales
Of gypsy curses bringing here
Retributions of brambled despair
And I panning through tears
Turned away from the condition
That was for my history the predetrmined condition
But I could not shake the thought
Of butterflies by spiders caught.
Memory Lane
The old dirt track, where, as kids, we’d roam,
Now brambled weeds, so overgrown,
No more gangs playing a noisy game,
Just another memory lane.
The streets, the houses, the corner shop,
Pavements covered in chalked hopscotch,
The field of adventure, where a stream once flowed,
All replaced by the busy road.
The old back yard, the cobbled street,
Secret dens, where we kids would meet
To run around have fun and play,
In the long-lost past before the motorway.
The old dirt track has now long gone,
As have the streets where we all came from,
The road through life never stays the same,
It changes, slowly, into memory lane.
A prickly shrub for some, a soothing balm for others
sometimes we forget we are all sisters and brothers.
Evening, its cage opened, is the apple in my hand
I gave reprieve to the dogs and we went running
Freedom should not be made of castles in the sand
The leash tripped me hard, suddenly I am tumbling
I could not break the fall nor halt my fierce velocity
Earth rose to meet my splattered knees and wrists
In savage welcome back to the cradle of mortality
My pain and absence was only one fall out from hubris
For days I neither wrote nor think again, it hobbled me
My body falling through gravity, from the apple tree
I was brambled, and I saw the worm that gnawed us
Crawling beside my face pillowed in the evening dust.
Shall I call this an accident still
Or just the treason of unseen will?
This Earth on where life is awakened me
And gave breath to breathless without concern
A cry was heard as a welcomed decree
A precious gift until death I return
While time's quiet shadow circles my eyes
I'll search tomorrow with yesterday's guide
And traverse brambled worlds with all its lies
Curse the internal loneliness I hide
For life's amusement, I'll come and go
To walk its old stage with characters found
And watch these actors explain what they know
The play unfolds while the curtain surrounds
I'll question reasons before I am gone
There will be no answer except the dawn
1/24/14