Best Floodlit Poems
A collaboration between Paul Callus & Carolyn Devonshire
Where were you when she disappeared?
Is the moment caught in your mind?
Were you nervous as the day neared,
or to its approach were you blind?
She took the lonely winding road
towards the hills in purple haze.
The weary sun took one last look
then cast away its fading rays.
Were you watching the sun go down?
Did you grasp the consequences?
Did you see sunset's halo crown;
did waning light stir your senses?
She walked ahead; not once looked back
nor did she pause or hesitate.
As shadows fell to twilight’s touch
she came at last to heaven’s gate.
Did you imagine her entry
to God's heavenly, lasting life?
Could you see the guarding sentry
as the joy in heaven was rife?
She left behind no next of kin,
no faithful fans or floodlit stage.
The only ones who mourned for her
were a few friends of ripened age.
If no one recalls her passage,
does that mean she did not exist?
When the reaper sends his carriage,
do our thoughts of loved ones desist?
More autumns came and winters too
remaining leaves withered and fell
since her soul rose into the blue.
Is there no more story to tell?
I thank Paul for joining me in this collaboration and apologize for taking so long to post it. As some of you know, my house flooded and I've been dealing with health issues as well.
A bizarre light show streaked across the sky.
The blinding lightning seemed to explode and electrify.
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Vivid flashes of color to the clouds and everything under.
Striking blasts of illumination floodlit the night.
In total awe we eagerly witnessed this amazing sight.
Breaking the silence, more crashes of thunder came booming down.
Deafening the unsuspecting residence of our Sydney town.
A mind boggling spectacle was being played out.
Unable to hear ourselves think, we couldn't even shout.
A memorable night, never happened before, maybe never again.
Now along with the thunder, comes torrents of rain.
In the dark she is waiting, 200 kilos of velvet
separating one world from the other.
It was art to her, she was under no pretence,
she was an instrument, and she made the other instruments merge in a delicious unprecedented harmony.
A poet, a warrior, a lover, a sinner. She has tasted the divine and the melodramatic, to capture moments, photographs, for the use of summoning emotion and reality.
She had been hurt and she had hurt, she had walked towards hell and ran away from heaven. Beginning as a muse and then enslaving the musicians one by one with her whispy and sultry tones.
An electric keyboard breaks the mumbling, vibrato, a pause, a cheer. The drape rises and she peers from the darkness, masked by shadow to the floodlit mass in front.
The drums are brushed gently as the crowd softens to the figure emerging from the dark. Not knowing if they were permitted to break the spell or join it, the crowd pay their respect with silence.
You can almost see the phantoms she has witnessed being beckoned into her. Short linear smoky essences, touching her then being pulled inside. She saunters slowly towards the mic, eyes closed, and with both hands it becomes a sceptre. This will be a heartfelt song again.
She inhales, her belly fills, and she breathes life into the mic. Her tones slice through the thick air, soft yet with such projection and feel. The crowd can not contain themselves and let out a cheer as their eyes fill. She masterfully picks up her bass, as if resurrecting a lost love, and it sings for her.
Her hair is gone now, most of the crowd know why and they want to cry. But she holds them, captivated, and hypnotises a smile into them. They sway to her, some hold their chests as if covering some hole for fear of their hearts falling out.
This will be the last time we will feel her grace. But she will be summoned herself. The band know this. She sits, the treatment has taken it out of her. But her voice never falters. That chair will be kept alongside the drummer that loved her. Her bass will be his kryptonite. But he will keep it close anyway.
The curtain will not fall tonight, it shall remain at half mast. She will bow and we will fall at her mercy one last time. In homage, and respect. She will leave but she will never be forgot. She has trained herself into them, and she will always be singing.
A
son et
lumiere-
cricket fills the
night.
The Seconds
[Excerpts]
(c) 2019, Anita Lerek
Section 1/4
First Generation - Before the Holocaust
Lvov, Poland 1930s. Mother, you were a Jewish girl but you were not expected to enter history. You played outside time like a star burning for trillions of years. Hands of pleasure created fire, and tossed in rags of exotic oils and sunflowers to heighten the mingling of school yard bodies barely formed. You lived inside bushes filled with chocolates, ghosts of guardians, and boys measured by swagger and expensive shoes
Your lives were handcuffed by words, set in the grammar of racial separation. But there was no one else, just you and your friends, beauty marooned in floodlit trance
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Section 3/4
The Survivors
............
You lie on the beaches. You lie in the fields. You are bits of debris, tufts of life stuck together, shadows thrusting and contracting in search of embodiment
So many lost, beyond mouthing. What history removes, language cannot restore. Rather it is a burial ground, an anti-galaxy of boarded up stars. How many forms are there of nothing?
Ancestors cry out to you from pine trees and flowers, from buds and branches. You hear nothing. You seek out strangers. By touching them, you try to rouse a sleeping god of your lost civilization, to reach the boys, the sunflowers, the shadows begging to return
Your limbs touch, boxes smacking against each other, filling, releasing. You barely move. You let him have his pleasure. Then without a word, you leave, and return, to release the one valve, day after day; all others seized by horror. You never exchange names
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Section 4/4
The Second Generation
..........
I was of the same cloth but not the same cloth. I did not occupy the same land as you. I grieved our severed skin
I come closer now, hover at your borders. Mother, your elements are wearing down, motions slowing, your fragments crumbling
Stop, stop, stop the cycle
of trauma: its birth, hardening into splintered towers, falling apart and re-forming
Let me into love before you leave me, here in this final land
where love crystallizes
into the expansive images
that cradle me
in beds of rock,
the last images
that I send up
to mend babel’s darkness
for trillions of years
Rainforest, sparkling white sand
And friendly country towns
Man eating crocodiles
Outback and Darling Downs
The awe inspiring Barrier Reef
And tropic Moonlight nights
Bushland animals and solitude
The heat the earth ignites
Rich brown earth and floodlit plain
Earth’s bounty here we sow
Sugar cane, Wattle and Blue gums
Paradise untamed aglow
I can hear the slow
thump and thrash
of a ship's propeller
churning the dark and see
the sheer black wall
of a hull slide by,
gathering the river in
like a skirt,
then releasing a train
of wakes to run
up banks and rock
the calm.
Solitary fishermen sit quietly
in private vigils
along the river's length.
All night they stare
into an absolving still
and move between
a mind's floating absence
and the tip of a rod
plumbed to depths
beyond human.
After the ship has passed
they wait
for the river to heal
and mend the lesions
in a tactile language.
Down river
a floodlit smoke stack
rises like a spire
out of the ruins of a factory.
High above,
a great wheeling dome
of seagulls fleck
a charcoal sky
and smear noise across
a vaulted quiet.
A lifetime on I hear
the discordant hymn,
feel the menace
of something moving shapeless
below the reach of words
and wait for the river
to heal.
A pointing stick on a pointing curve is a bit treacherous especially after rain. But if a rainbow is a grinning sky and a moon is not moody then the sun would be a titan awareness of a zenith sheet. When erosion occurs it is wise to point one's nose skyward as passing sheep stalks on an abyss climb is irrelevant as picking one's nose in a floodlit arena. And so the grandeur of matriarchs meets a fascinating patriarch and patrons never wear aprons in spring. So please do all wait in an orderly fashion at a gate. Hedgerow heaving happily having heard heavyweight herds. And of course the dish of foam laughing ho ho ho. Hope no perch climbs to tame a talon of bridge.archetypical wonders like woo woo woo. Very video and wow. Interesting isn't it gong gong gong. But then a piece of tongue in a butchers is often found talking to a woodworm in a bridlers briary bridle. So bridge that then in a cape. And shovel 900,000,0009 atoms in a carless cabarnackal. Coat not a vaporised vigilant viper. And harness no trolley to a house. Meanwhile many men mingle many more mop. And a fish hook over 6 thousand kilometres'. Pound be a kiljewel then. Is it not a fashion. Good. Hahahaha. Between bloody blocks hahahaha and a antithesis antiseptic antaphy xxxxxx ambiguities z z z z and the p y q of hydrocarbons
Popplecoook met popplwwock on a jacket mending mission to a culinary planet. It was varied and various. The threads that were woven. To entice a frozen omelette to rise amidst the blackness and create a circular charm. And even when the dust Rosenthal brought from brougham it was still said to be a placid enrolment of spotty spoon stir. And jeopardy would be a jackal. An army in an oven. Baking. Benjamin beetle chuckling reading his newspaper on a train. At least his ticket was booked. One way first class. That's classified hope it arrives with a glass. Or two or three.strong super strength supping. Oh how very marvellous. And the wiggling ladybird in jar, met in a bar many a wig in a gown or a suit. Plaid frontage is a mild patrimonial vestry view of a very tall prism point of a topiary plant by an umbrella stand in a hallway. Circle no collaborating clothes in a laundrette. And take out the toothpick whilst speaking to an astronaut. Good. Ha ha ho ho and goodnight for this is the last bulletin from p y q for today. Hahaha now eat. And sleep. Good. Fantastic. Mop eating moon baked crisps in channel floodlit doctrines wearing dungarees and answering the cliff adorned in a frilly spotted nightgown. But no apron nor spacecraft here today. Just a rusted piece of jellyfish rising through the castle walls. Xxxxx uniformed unified umbrellas underground xxxxx cumbersome clapping. Xxxx astrophysicists Z.
Santa arrived on our street yesterday
spewing considerable exhaust
while riding atop a parade of firetrucks and vans,
floodlit like a nativity display at night,
full sirens and blaring Christmas carols
competing for my Fetal Alcohol daughter's rapt attention.
Santa rolls at stately parade pace,
while ever more impatiently
my troubled daughter jumps and eagerly awaits to pounce.
For me,
much too soon
Santa spots her leaning out our screen door,
disembarks with great royal dignitary pace
to walk the long quest for prey
on our front porch.
As I feared,
after an unconvincing HoHoHo?,
without waiting for introductions,
Santa goes straight to his task at hand:
What do you want for Christmas, little girl?
I don't know
Haven't thought about it.
I'm sure it's not a stinky and loud Santa parade.
Anyway, I'm still working on what I'm giving for Christmas.
That's awesome.
I don't hear a lot of that.
It's not awesome!
It's complicated!
My dad said I should only give gifts that by giving them
I will also receive more gifts.
I'm not sure I have any gifts like that.
Last year you asked for an American Girl doll.
Yes, but this year I'm working on giving American Princess me,
instead of settling for your plastic dolls.
Won't you need costuming and make-up
to become the All American princess?
You would think so,
but my dad says they don't meet his gift-it-forward
to receive back rule.
So what do you think you're going to get,
or give,
or both, I guess?
although Santa's feeling confused about co-redemptive gifts,
and I do still have far to go.
And you left your truck idling.
I'm leaning toward kindness,
'cause princesses are always kind,
but my dad is asking for greater wisdom,
which is something he actually does need.
And I know you don't have any to offer
or you wouldn't begin and end Christmas
by asking people what they want,
instead of asking us what we have to give
that might make life feel a little less snarky
come New Year's Day.
Santa returned to his royal firetruck
somewhat faster than he had arrived
on my wise American princess daughter's front porch.
Sixteen-Eighty was brutal on saints and their hissing cats.
A turgid June, thickened as it was by an immature sanguinary wine
failed to quench the civil mob.
Above the birthday cake façade,the pink and cerise porticos,
the heavenly-frocked casements, the stucco -
a tiered sibilance rises were the throng, in a sportive sweat,
begets its feverish desires.
The accused stand center-stage, as hairless as Sphinx
garnished by sheens of fear.
Some contemplate the ornate state of their theatrical ruin.
Some already lash their minds behind unfocused eyes.
That was then; I see all this through a painting,
yet I am here now, and the square still seeps
through a varnish of time.
Suddenly eveing flaps a checkered flag.
The plaza is suddenly a pitch for celebrating revelers.
Real Madrid fans have surged out of the barra.
Soccer balls are dribbled over cobbles.
I imagine my hapless head plunging in and out
of the heedless crowd.. I am their sport,
a candidate for a mocking inquisition.
Meanwhile, the cats stare patiently,
squeezed as they are into strips of sunset,
a pink Iberian tongue of light that streaks the floodlit scene.
This place could be a place for only jubilation, were it not
for the sotto voce hissing of these time-stretched
hissing shadows.
Flashback to an enchanted time in my life
So long ago forgotten any trace of strife
A dogeared corner to a most favorite page
Four rainbow budgies and an oversize gilded cage
In my youth my dreams ever waiting for a sign
It was a time of drenching floodlit sunshine
Inpouring from my kitchen patio doors
The energy from bright blue skies outdoors
The bubbly chirping happiness is what I remember
It lasted on through right until september
Four rainbow budgies who could do no wrong
How I loved each one as they sang all day long
They chanted and wholeheartedly I listened
It was as if my life just glistened
The bubbly chirping happiness is what I remember
Not the sadness when rolled around the first of december
Four rainbow budgies in an oversize gilded cage
Right before my whole life was up on stage
AP: 2nd place 2020, 3rd place 2020
Submitted on September 28, 2019 for contest WRITE A RHYME ABOUT YOUR FAVORITE PET, LIVING OR NOT (BUDGIES) sponsored by REGINA RIDDLE - RANKED 4TH
It always amazes me, the small things,
they come together to make something so big,
a snowball effect, a conglomerate,
that can be repeatedly shattered and put back together and re used.
A mountain is magnificent, but you can turn away from it,
but the little things, the swarms of pieces,
that poke and pry and invade and pursue,
are so much more foreboding when you try and sleep.
A castle can fall, completely avoiding me,
dangerous, exciting, totally predictable,
but those whispers, oh those softly spoken missiles,
painting bruises to my insides that none can see.
Where my mind is a stage mainly open at night,
and those chit-chats intend and jig,
floodlit to an incognito rabble in the dark,
that punch in with their tout acquired paper.
Goading me to sleep for your intermission,
the parts that get exciting and colourful,
where I am totally helpless to prevailing monsters,
and the unkind and uninvited mocking of my efforts.
In the morning you will be extinct,
in the afternoon you will hint,
but oh in the night you will prevail,
and act I will, again.
Auto-da-fé at Plaza Major
Sixteen-Eighty was brutal on saints and their hissing cats.
A turgid June, thickened as it was by an immature sanguinary wine
that failed to quench the civil mob.
Above the birthday cake façade, the pink and cerise porticoes,
the heavenly-frocked casements, the stucco -
a tiered sibilance rises where the throng in a sportive sweat,
begets its feverish desires.
The accused stand center-stage, as hairless as Sphinx
garnished with sheen's of fear.
Some contemplate the ornate state of their theatrical ruin.
Some already lash their minds behind unfocused eyes.
That was then; I see all this through a blood spattered prism,
the square still seeps
through a crimson varnish of time.
Evening now flaps a checkered flag.
The plaza is now a pitch for celebrating revelers.
Real Madrid fans have surged out of the barra.
Soccer balls are dribbled over cobbles.
I imagine my hapless head plunging in and out
of the heedless crowd. I am their sport,
a candidate for a mocking inquisition perhaps?
Meanwhile, the cats stare patiently,
squeezed as they are into strips of sunset,
a pink Iberian tongue of light that streaks the floodlit scene.
This place could be a plaza for jubilation, were it not
for the sotto voce hissing of these time-stretched
unforgiving shadows above us.
A desire sets off
towards a place far inland whose spires
lift like raised pikes on the horizon.
There is always a "somewhere" hanging
in the sky above your head,
an El Dorado, a glistening pot,
a floodlit dream plastered like a billboard
on a roadside hoarding promising
a better life on Paradise Island Estate.
But you never get there,
petering out on the side of a highway,
running low on fuel or finding
that you really don't want to go
to that place where you
first set out to go. A lifetime on
you should have known
the answer has always been waiting
back here, sitting at the far end
of a U turn, after the long haul home.