Best Folker Poems

The 'Beloved Community'
by
Rick Folker

One beloved community
in God's world
Where each soul honors
the Image of God in the other
Where neither Jew nor Greek
Woman nor Man
Delivers the 'manifest destiny'
From Sinai's peak

Where all are called to Isaiah's mountain
Eunuchs and lepers
Publicans and saints
Lips humbly muttering prayers
they cannot speak

Where all observe...

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It's Not My Job
by
Rick Folker

It's not my job to teach you of 
love;
to pull you, pry you from your
place of hate.

It's not my job to lift you
from willful ignorance
when you elect a president
the despot whom 
you elevate. 

It's not my job to offer you
truth and...

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The Ethical Self
by
Rick Folker

If there is evil here, it is complacency, and it is collective.
- Courtney Martin/columnist for On Being

The Moral Arc is bent
but not broken
It can be retrieved and repaired
like a shattered heart
withering in the penumbra
of great grief

If only we take back the responsibility
we...

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What Remains
by
Rick Folker
June, 2017
Kansas City, MO

When the crowd clamors
And the tocsin clangs

When the mighty and powerful
Crush the weak, the vulnerable,
The poverty that chains and shames

When fear fights fiercely
With the menacing gang
Silencing the prophets
With their poisonous slang

When the refugee seeks safety
Those sojourners are met with a
Door...

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Resurrecting Icarus
or
A Modern Moral Fable
by
Rick Folker
Kansas City, Mo


Daedalus claimed the sky,
Built a labyrinth from which
Theseus could fly
...
Minos enraged, entombed the 
Treacherous Daedalus in a tower
No sky could aide the architect’s power

On high
No land, no sea
Gave comfort to the builder's sigh
Would he hopeless entreat the silent...

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59
by
rick folker

What happened in Vegas
Should not stay in Vegas.

Such a mind-numbing tragedy
cannot be contained, nor constrained
or explained
by a simple 'summing up'.

No, never 'what happened in Vegas'
Should be termed, the new normal
Or the the new acceptance
Of a virulent form of violence
Or a fatalistic excuse for
Humanity's propensity...

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Mother Tongue
by 
Rick Folker
March 15, 2017

Words...
Words bereft of beauty
bitter words
barely concealing the 
viscious intent of 
opaque surfaces
concealing truth with 
the fake, urging us to destroy - not to make
swallowing the ashes; leaving rage in their wake

Separating the hater from the hate

But I too, have words
Words...

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Scare-City

by

Rick Folker

Here on these mean streets...
The palpable lack of love
Threads through the alleyways
of brutal loss and unanswered prayers;
The anguished cries of despair rise
with the unforgiving heat.

Here among the forlorn refugees,
the frightened and the poor,
Can be found the ones who
forgage for a phantom friend 
and beg...

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Advent
by
Rick Folker
December, 2017

"... you know the time; it is the hour now for you to awake ... the night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light." Rom. 13:11-13

The light this...

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Mimshak*
by
Rick Folker

As the Lord lives, it must be the Lord himself who will strike him, whether the time comes for him to die, or he goes out and perishes in battle. But the Lord forbid that I touch his anointed.
1 Samuel 26:5-25

David’s “honorable” moment
Is often...

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Sit Transit Gloria Mundi
Rick Folker

Our current consumptive culture
Salivates over
"Tech" and "Cell" and "Screen"
That transmits the lurid, pornographic
Apocalyptic scenes.

We long for the end
Of the endless 24/7 hollow info
Hoping, even praying that 
The Moral Arc would start to bend.

The dreadful, the destitute in their death throes
Are caught...

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Ibrahim’s Broken Dream
by 
Rick Folker

His withered hand sifts through the sand,

“My descendants, Isaac-Ishmael are like
stars that have fallen, sand scattering into a
nameless lake ...
Something causes him to wake
some voices whispering,
"Remember Isaac, Remember the Knife.

Lillith-like women laughing
they torment him,
he sobs 
the desert quakes.
Yours is a land
In...

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On Reading Akhmatova
by
Rick Folker
Kansas City, MO

...delighted in deliriums,
In singing about tombs.
I distributed misfortunes…

… But I am not allowed to forget
The taste of the tears of yesterday.

- Anna Akhmatova
“The Last One”

Awake in my darkened room
Another nightmare of doom

Entombed in this nothingness
Life has become a series of...

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That Which IS
(for Julian of Norwich)
by
Rick Folker

I came across it 
in a bookstore
As if you were standing 
right there and smiling,
"Now do you understand?  
It IS enough."

You, in your cloistered cell
assured us of the death of fear
and the inifinite Reality,
"All will be well, all...

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A Frisson of Fear
by Rick Folker

I will not bow to
your idols of
hate

I will not offer prayers to
your false gods you
create

I will not kneel to 
your toxic media of
lies, half-truths you
replicate

BUT ...

I will warm you
in the coldness of
a naked, lonely night

I will weep with you
when the...

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