Best Earthward Poems

On the day after Christmas, they started appearing,
cast out of houses, stripped of their finery,
lying crooked in the gutter, garbage bags flanking.

My brothers and I walked to school
and halfway there, three blocks away,
was a steep ravine called The Hollow.
A place of some dark mystery in...

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A collaborative poem, written in renga format, or "linked-verse", by Timothy Hicks and Jesse Whitehead.

Verses in normal font are by me.
Verses in italic are by Jesse Whitehead.



January jest
drawing mustaches
in the newspaper

coffee to warm the hands
walking the railroad

refusing
to stay put
a child's balloon

spring in her step
red moon...

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Scarlet and golden etched,
autumn leaves reflect summer's apprehended glory
incised in deep veined images.
Released, they sigh earthward like final breaths.

Sharp pungence ripens , musty tang,
a piquant vaporous mustard milked
from forest loam's black breasts
beneath life's heavy kneading tread.

Sudden, determined winds attack
raping writhed skeletal remains;
stripped spring's green clad...

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Our fig in January, entirely denuded now
like my heart in your absence, is but
more beautiful, if possible, in its seasonal
solemnity than in summer's exacting extravagance.
The trunk, grown massive in manhood, is a citadel
of strength supporting the curving bowl of its
branches as they bend back into...

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Together, we'd swim the depths of our souls,
splashing and playing in love's limpid pools.
And we'd adopt each other's hopes and goals,
love-struck teenagers and romantic fools.

Holding hands, we'd stare at the stars all night,
stealing kisses when no one was around.
And we'd ogle the sky until first...

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My eyes are all out of breath

A day such as this
                             feels the calm fingers
  ...

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Lost, to the darkness, deep ...

This bleak sojourn I have made times on end,
dipping my eyes to the dreadful forms that mock me,
a maelstrom of words spinning my mind,
to pinch off the oppressive stench of this place.

You have beckoned me, ages hence,
howling and shrieking like...

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Solitude sounds good on balance, yet perhaps that is just me.
There is the implication of loneliness, of nobody to talk to,
and I think of the many people for whom the pain of being alone
is immense, maybe unbearable.

"Solitary" - is that a good thing or not?
Life...

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Bed time story

  Night sky stood still inky dark and gloomy
  There came a light that flickered zigzagging behind the clouds
  a sudden resounding loud sound of cymbals
  Heavy pouring rain commenced

In my pajamas with heavy eyelids it is time for...

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I round a bend in the trail ...

And gasp, literally ...
The scene before me takes my breath away
And I stop, transfixed by the sheer breadth of the panorama
The shimmering span of Crater Lake ...

Clear, crystalline ...
Pure as the tears of Heaven
Translucent fathoms of water, waiting...

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love is fatal attraction
just another Icarus
plummeting slowly earthward
as tight knit bonds fail...

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Poems about Butterflies and Bees



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

It is the nature of loveliness to vanish
as butterfly wings, batting against nothingness
seek transcendence...



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...

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THE    METEOR - SOFA   PEOPLE

Sofa pyromaniacs are skilled to put it mildly. 
Fueled fiercely by gasoline (as is fitting)	 
Or by kerosene burning wildly,
They enjoy a fire to warm their sofa-sitting.

In anger are the flames incepted on the two-seater?
Or by...

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*Image of The Collection Plate by TPW.

The Epiphany of Three Men of the Cloth

My submission is of an objective accounting that had scintillated at my workplace yond the mid-'70s. It had spun into a resplendent calling as a writer, triggered by my poem with a...

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Earlier in the month but lately begun, 
(Or was it perhaps the last one, the one before-November?
I know of a surety that it was a time uncoated by congeries 
Of most alabastrine snow, and that that which is blanketing 
All now, it was not present...

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