Best Cropped Poems

**Back smile/smile Back **

With your heads way up your :]ssa[: 
You will never accomplish the win
I got shots that will protect me from your rabid ways
After you fell into a non-stop falling disease, 
Your movements weakened
Straight from a dried up well, 
Every day you frolic...

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What Holds More Resplendent Gifts Of The Great And Vast Beyond

Seas of poetry orations, I once took my swims
being strong in spirit, stouter in heart and lithe of limbs
What dread had I of illness or passage of Father Time
when great beauty of verse sang so...

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A corner shop, a busy street
your mother's hand, your dragging feet
I can almost set the scene.......A messy rack of magazines,
A barber pole,  some shaving cream, and jars of greasy Brilliantine

I try to picture you back then,
How many barbers have there been?
Your  rosy cheeks,...

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Was it a sheer accident that I became a poet?
Poetry, I didn’t pursue, rather it cropped up
As a late-night guest, quite unexpected.
A teacher’s career, I have been bent upon
And prefer to be known more as a teacher than a poet.

In my eyes, teachers are a...

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Gorgeous boy, your skin shines in the sun’s golden hour.
Waves of your jet-black hair, short-cropped like Caesar's 
dripping tendrils on a chiseled brow, wisps beside each ear
A bare-chested Apollo cycles in low-slung shorts.

Waves of your jet-black hair, short-cropped like Caesar's, 
my ardeur imagines eyes a...

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(Base USO club, Zweibrucken, Germany, 1963)

Of a lazy afternoon, I sit
     propped up,
Bones aching, sorely tired from
     lack of work,
And dutifully read the comic
     strips
With bored eyes while my mind
   ...

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WHAT THE!!!.........WHO IS THIS???
WHAT DO YOU MEAN I'VE BEEN PHOTO SHOPPED???
How could that possibly be?
I only wanted the picture cropped and framed!
You can't really think that looks like me!

When did I become seven feet tall?
My eyes are brown, not Malachite green!
You've made my arms longer...

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FEEDING  HORSES


She was four years old
Apples in bulging pockets from garden trees
Cold day in autumn
Stroll down to Paddy Sands’s horse pasture


Stop at five-bar gate and lift her up
Call or whistle - they come from a half-kilometre
Black, brown mares, one gelding
Jealous one tries to bite...

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Held behind cold stone walls,
In silence, marched to work.
The shabby dressed walked prison halls,
Hell waits for those who shirk.

Breaking rocks or picking rope,
Naught to eat save gruel and bread,
Pointless toil, devoid of hope,
Here worked the living dead.

Mornings in the chapel praying,
The gathered wincing at the...

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In the event that I forget
what this poem is about
I refer you now to the birds
outside my window.
They are silent – it is a sound-proof window,
but I want to speak of windows more.
I should have titled this poem ‘Window’
but then the silence and the birds...

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While in course of writing
Some words appear spontaneously
We see a new face smiling
Though not meaningful literally 

Such suddenly cropped up medium
Of expressing our thoughts and music
We aptly call them idiom
That captures the shadow elusive

Only the other day in a composition
About the picture of loneliness
I wrote...

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I know of a river of more than average 
Sorts...
Meandering, when not dallying to maunder,
Between many differing contours 
And unruly contorts;
Where a privileged youth once
Happily sought -
Pursuing about his passions
In the traditional methods 
By which his better elders
Did most insist he was thereby taught.
Reinforced throughout...

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Anticipation,
faces sparkling,
wrinkles smiling,
memories at the ready.

Friends inter-mingling, while great grandchildren run through the gathering crowd.
Sun streaking through branches, warming joints, and turned up faces seeking the rare appearance of the coastal sun.

The growing color of gray cropped heads blot out the distant green scape as...

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Oh! I wish I could spell “weirdo”! It really bothers me.
Is it the “e” before the “i”, or the “i” before the “e”?

Now, if it was a German word, I wouldn’t have to try.
I know “ie” is always eee, and “ei”’s always eye.

It doesn’t have...

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Despicable
Marie Antoine
dressed in puce
paraded
her gown,
with a queenly
high head,
the pretty
little tome
soon to be
cropped.
When the chopper 
had his way,
her head
came off
and her face 
turned puce.
Was it purple
or puke green?
Maybe that’s the 
reason puce is so
confusing.
In Marie’s case
she was not
confused,
just dead.
 

Kathryn McLoughlin Collins

for a contest about our...

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