Best Contrary Poems
Snow fell in dollops, in kite like laziness
too wet to stay white except in the margins.
The contrary air kisses each flake
melting each heart of ice.
Bittersweet the temperature falls.
Teardrops cling to greedy braches
reminiscent of hand stitched jewels
on a queen's gown.
The matted margin of lingering grass
crisps like spun sugar
snow flakes on the lash of night.
Categories:
contrary, inspirational, introspection, nature
Form:
Free verse
Time can be counted in milliseconds
Pay attention
To the cracks in the pavement
Where the sand grains no longer held their cement
The proverbial elephant
Resides in a matchbox of contented intent
And measure by micrometers
The distance of hairs
As a tiny mote floats into a sea of stars
Still wondering where the hell you are
Within the fluidity of atomic constructs
Or thought
To reach beyond all eternal
With the tweezers of a contrary telescope
So lost in the tiny vastness
The insignificance evaluated by the little presumptuous
Internal sees with a tunnel focus
Discerns the explanatory pores through its magnifying glass
Do not count the blades of grass
Or imagine a beach to be anything more
Everything else inconsequential
Outside the front door
The prodigal elephant
Struggles inside the matchbox of its purpose
While an entire universe contained within a single cell
Remembers how to construct a flower
And each breath is a hurricane
Between the footprints of forever
Time can be measured in dreams
In all those forgotten hours
Of sleeping
Where the grains of thought no longer held, to their cement
And wander upon the waters of one
The unified electrical fields of creation
With all the names it has born
Still waiting for the sleepers to awaken
The elephant inside a matchbox
Categories:
contrary, time
Form:
Free verse
Mary, Mary quite contrary, tell me, how does your garden grow?
Please tell me why you are so successful - I really need to know!
I hoe and spade and fertilize and sow the very best of seeds,
But try as I may, all I can grow are slimy slugs and weeds!
Robert L. Hinshaw, CMSgt, USAF, Retired
(c) All Rights Reserved
Categories:
contrary, humorous,
Form:
Light Verse
A social worker bashed in my door,
seizing my kids on rumors
of bath time photographs.
On my trek to court
to rescue my children,
they forced me through
a biometric scanner
recording every detail
of my naked flesh.
I was lambasted by a judge garbed
in flowing black vestments
for exploiting innocence.
He paraded my babies
into the courtroom,
all three donning
fresh, hot-pink rags
promoting the latest
Disney tween idol.
When asked why we hadn’t yet
enrolled our oldest child
at their public school,
my wife confessed
we educated our kids
with attention to truth.
The judge decreed they’d
need a head start with
foundation trust books.
We journeyed home despondent
with teary eyes bleeding to
find our garden scorched.
Our organic source
was no longer allowed
do to civil statute,
so we wandered off
to mega mart to buy
death off the shelf.
Categories:
contrary, loss, social
Form:
Free verse
Our world of existing contraity
compression,depression,high anxiety
as the complexion changes our society....
Categories:
contrary, philosophy, social
Form:
Contrary Mary
There once was a boat named “Mary”
She towed many a barge as a ferry.
One day she was mad.
She groaned; she was bad.
And that's why the folks call her, "Contrary.”
© Dane Ann Smith-Johnsen
March 7, 2010
Poetic form: Limerick
Categories:
contrary, funny
Form:
Limerick
I am a liberal conservative
who is confident when nervous.
Living as a pessimistic optimist,
I imagine what the worst is
only to quickly dismiss this.
As a depressed, joyous person
my moods are rarely self-chosen.
My dumbness is quite intelligent
and both are often equally lent
to my love I freely see spent.
Fragile coats all my strength.
So shy is my boldness length
it forms soft iron clad links.
I love to both dance and sing,
but have no rhythm or tune zing.
My content is being domestic,
but I have lived life on the brink
causing my calmness to be hectic.
I make serious, snap decisions
within many days of quickness.
My passionate love of mankind
equally hates society’s bind.
I dislike things modern and new,
though current kitchens are cool
There are many, well lots, I have bent,
but the world surely does need rules.
I dream of life in the eighteen-hundreds,
a fantasy including modern plumbing.
On and on my contradictions go;
like a seesaw I was made to be so,
well, maybe, see – I don’t really know -
maybe my stride was meant to be a slide.
Categories:
contrary, identity, me, perspective,
Form:
Free verse
Number 17
CONTRARY WAYS
Pun and paradox frame
The extra serving of wit
Ego retains fake name
In surge of lies that fit
Leon Enriquez
04 January 2015
Singapore
Categories:
contrary, character,
Form:
Epigram
Watch wise words wave well
Do describe dream dwell
Touch teary tensed tell
Attract apt allure
Phoenix plunging pure
Spread something so sure
~~~~~~~~~
Placid peace pulse pours
Dye dying death's door
Glimpse glamour galore
Dusty days dreaming
Final form fleeting
Ghost grasps grin going
~~~~~~~~~
Leon Enriquez
04 April 2015
Singapore
Categories:
contrary, allusion,
Form:
Alliteration
Fate flavours forfeit
Primal play proceeds
Sly street-smart succeeds
Move meek memory
Stains streaking slowly
Echoes end easy
~~~~~~~~~
Fuss freaks form frozen
Dig deeper dozen
Meet miasma molten
Lead laughter lumpy
Brine bleaches bumpy
Seek sure sobriety
~~~~~~~~~
Leon Enriquez
21 March 2015
Singapore
Categories:
contrary, allusion,
Form:
Alliteration
Freeze-frame final fate
Lust losing life late
Grandeur grooming gate
Tensile tact treats take
Soon soaring sweepstakes
Wonderland waits wake
~~~~~~~~~
Breath bursting boom bloom
Grasp greets grouse's grim gloom
Ripe rest retrieves room
Troubles taking toil
Style solemn sad spoils
Broken bearing boil
~~~~~~~~~
Leon Enriquez
09 April 2015
Singapore
Categories:
contrary, allusion,
Form:
Alliteration
I am the vastness of the cosmos,
Made to be mortal from parts of Immortality
I live within spirit and my body's a host,
My Heart is home and my mind in endless journey.
I am an observer, a listener.
A machine of filters, receiver and transmitters,
Burn out my resistors and capacitors,
that has been engineered to deceived,
Programmed to resist what needs to naturally be conceived.
I am the music and dance of the wind,
That nudges and sway the trees held by false roots,
I am the pulse of rain and whispers of the stream,
Eroding whilst expanding banks of spruits.
I am a child and a father in ecstatic action,
Playing in wisdom, wise in infraction,
Passion ignites with past's reactions and future's satisfaction,
Lessons teaching that only one truth is left,
Death is near, though not the end. Now, is all we have.
I am bare without and bearing within,
I am silence aloud in calm violence of the diminutives,
I am the limit of an infinite Universe in sync,
I am a contradiction to all popular beliefs.
I am every prophecy, every omen,
Every heart that is broken, every soul that was stolen,
Close but yet open. A prose and yet a poem.
I am falsely true. I am the old and I am the new.
I am forever, in a moment. I am me and I am you.
Categories:
contrary, life,
Form:
Rhyme
Brave bold butterfly
Wander wonders why
Strange sadness supplies
See swirling smoke stacks
Lustre's loss looms lack
Sense sublime shore slack
~~~~~~~~~
Time tells trouble tales
Hurl hoarse hefty hails
Sad story soon sails
Pride paints pretty prompt
Reap ripe richer romps
Death dazzles dry dorm
~~~~~~~~~
Leon Enriquez
20 March 2015
Singapore
Categories:
contrary, allusion,
Form:
Alliteration
Arabic: (Alam) meaning "world" or "universe"
A character of a madman has a role in the play.
Henceforth, the casting was done,
Alam, the madman, to mentor in the acting,
the wanderer in the graveyard area
his folded sleeves hold the world, in fullest.
Throughout days, one might notice
his gesture, in talking, in walking, in waving
The way he solves all those problems in this lowly world
Within just a blink of an eye.
A face, covered with beard and mustache reminds often
The magnificent Karl Marx.
One might wonder if Karl Marx was himself a mad person, or not!
An absent-minded thought like this brings me smile
Through ages, men, way ahead than their time,
Preachers, revolutionists for a greater change
Falsified in their cults of blames of being “mad”,
more or less.
In midst of all this, a pair of fatigued, absent-minded eyes
Wander beyond the sky
faded songs of tragedies, lives.
Turbulent river waves ensure overflowing hypes
Ebb tides,
And Alam , one madman.
With him, I also reach my predestined tears, bursting ones
A drag of memorable gems!
Some of those days, graveyard walls Index finger, boasting higher,
All that loudness in noisy speeches, acted up, yet no lies
Alas! Utterance of these intrepid, bold truth, yet
Abandonment for ages!
Tonu, Muniya, Sundarbans, Black money, Tears of Mountains
How all those synagogues and worship places
are burning into ashes for race and class
Cities are burning down,
Neighborhoods, Maps, Palestine, Brussels, Paris
Angry fire of greed is burning down countries
Alleys and unknown cities.
Men are getting killed in broad daylight
With his proud civilization.
A saddened soul, I, return to my window
The tree branch, on the other side of windowpanes
greets my forehead, with its shadow, gently
And I simply wonder,
Everyone is acting quite fine these days
except
the one and only, Alam , the madman.
October 14, 2022
Tribute: This is an effort of a translation of a poem of poet Ehsan Nazim
Categories:
contrary, world,
Form:
Free verse
Mary Mary quite contrary
Stays inside when it is dreary
She won’t water the plants
Or pull the weeds
She won’t thin the carrots
Or sow the seeds
She doesn’t till the soil
Or push the plow
She just sits on the couch
With her cat Meow.
Categories:
contrary, humor,
Form:
Rhyme