Best Lodged Poems
Blindly..
I beseech you
for my eyes won’t adjust
to this shaded maze of despair -
neither the lantern’s flame
nor a compass rose can help me now
in disrepair I need to find you
with fingers outstretched I raise my arms
groping for you like a eyeless babe for her mother
..but you’re not there —
a cunning thief this despair
for stealing my sight for a way out
Why won’t the summer solstice light this darkness
nor warm this anguished atmosphere..
am I to die here where I lie?
my undressed soul exposed to the wind-chill of your loss
naked in biting throes beneath a stony sun
desperate to thaw ice dams lodged in my bloodstream..
the winter sallow of my heart’s shallows a skater’s delight —
a cunning partner this despair..
ice-dancing with my pain
Where is the air I need to breathe..?
it’s evaporated with you and the dreams we used to dream
the weaver a double-dealer stealer..
life no longer lives in my poker-faced lifestyle
nor in fantasies long gone from sleep’s clouds
moth-eaten desires and grit and tears
too holey and harsh to knit a warm reason to swaddle in -
just let me close heavy hope-chest-lids of empty eyes
and take my last shrinking violet breath —
a cunning spy this despair
for infiltrating my will to survive..
Susan Ashley
October 11, 2020
N/A
Premiere Contest: 2022 Poetry Marathon Mile 22
Sponsor: Mark Toney
(reformatted)
~ First Place ~
Contest: Will To Survive
Sponsor: Silent One
Love is an authority.
It dictates choice and consequence
and joins together all the wayward lamenters
who grieve at their loss of purity.
Love is an actuality.
It breathes new life into masochists
who wished to die a thousand times over
and prey upon the weak and fragile.
When you let love in at first, it may seem out of place,
like a foreign object lodged in your chest, a parasite
feeding on the brains of its host, thriving in darkness,
blood-letting leeches drain this swollen heart...
But love does not enforce kindness; only offers a gentle reminder
for anyone who's forgotten how great it feels
to give for the sake of giving
and not be afraid of his own shadow.
What wondrous goal makes tiny planet Earth
a stepping stone in life's eternal sea?
What spectral promise gives its journey worth
as it conforms to cosmic destiny?
What tireless pulse gives rhythm to its flight
beyond the steady rule of moon and sun?
What answer to the never-ending plight
of why and where and how it was begun?
Alive within my beating human heart
there dwells solution that can end the quest,
for born of God, I know the truth in part...
He lodged it there with grace within my breast.
From earth-life end, I step to hallowed lands,
where my Creator waits with outstretched hands.
Sandra M. Haight
~1st Place~
Premiere Contest: Contest No. 231
Sponsor: Brian Strand
Judged: 11/01/2016
~2nd Place~
Contest: Where To You Think You Will Spend Eternity?
Sponsor: Laura Leiser
Judged: 09/15/2015
This evening called passion
“Moonbeams now blushing ‘pon soft heavens ashen,
love flowing deeply, this evening called passion”
Ensconced in effervescent lingerings
sifting through moonlit seams
Soft flavored drippings of ecstasy
melting slowly within the fever
dancing across my skin
as your fingers trace
the outline of my deepest secrets,
mysteries lodged in seductive breaths
Your love my opiate, addictive enchantment
Stimulated senses heightened
Moon drenched quivers, silver lined
adrift on satin sighs
Floating delirious within
hypnotic eyes,
seducing my mind in eternal desires
Trance infused emotions
cling to each nuance of mesmeric longings
Swirling smoke ringlets
penetrate stardust cosmos,
culminating in sensual motions
atop gilded sheets
drenched of our rapture,
etched in euphoria
Two silhouettes entwined
on this evening called passion
Good night Soupers
Have a great weekend
See you on Monday
I wish I was...
I wish I was...the sun
so I could keep you warm...
my heat would dissipate your storm
I wish I was... the sun
I wish I was ...the blood
that courses through your veins...
inside you I could feel your pain
I wish I was... the blood
Chorus
I know that...if you came back
we could start again...
but, I know you'd... never do that
'cause our love has reached the end
All I can say is...I'm sorry
for making...a mess of...
our life and happiness
Bridge
There's not another love,
that could ever take your place,
'cause all I can see...is your face
I wish I was... a star,
so I could shine on you...
I'd lead you home to start anew
I wish I was...a star
I wish I was...the air
that passes through your lips
I'd feel your warm and tender kiss
I wish I was...the air
I wish I was...a thought
lodged inside your mind...
I'd help you happiness to find
I wish I was a thought
Chorus
I know that...if you came back
we could start again...
but, I know you'd... never do that
'cause our love has reached the end
All I can say is...I'm sorry
for making...a mess of...
our life and happiness
Bridge
There's not another love,
that could ever take your place,
'cause all I can see...is your face
I wish I was... the light
I'd brighten up your day
your darkness would just fade away
I wish I was the light
I wish I could be with you
I wish you would be with me
we're supposed to be a family
I wish I was...with you
I wish I was... with you
I wish I was... with you
repeat and fade
John Derek Hamilton
March 29,2019
She passes the place
where I sit some mornings,
her slow, sure gait pads
a gentle elegance across
the grass carrying
just a hint of indifference.
Retired from racing,
she has been adopted out.
She seems contained within
herself, ignoring the yappy terrier
and the playful retriever
that bounds towards her
on her right, not shifting
her gaze as if transfixed
on some vision
she holds in her head.
Nothing of the morning
disturbs her meditations.
I often wonder whether
she is playing out a trauma
that has lodged in her memory
or can't fit the past and present
together into some reconcilable
whole or her aloofness
is just the nature of the breed
and the interpretation
of her manner
has more to do with me.
There is a solitude in her
that I cannot fathom and troubles
me. Sometimes I feel
like bending down
and putting my arms around
her lovely neck but a reticence
holds me back as we both
go our separate ways,
each with our own solitude
held locked within.
Inarticulate as the morning air when it flows to and there
this cognitive essence of rebirthing, is a true blessing
this knowledge that perhaps didn't come easily
is lodged inside my memory like a rooted flower of old
enabling the gift that keeps on giving
to regenerate, restore, like a swimming soul
Be it a spring day or a golden Autumn afternoon
Be it a winter bejeweled with light or a summer of sun
This time belt of knowledge has provided
and given me, a place to hang my heart
Onward in a journey both as healer and the healed
giving in to rebirth, time and time again
I ventured forth, knowing nothing ever gets lost.
In sleepy
synaptic
catacombs
theorems dream beneath calcified floors
neurons stretch filaments of light
paleontologists of lost certainty
tracing the memory of what
once
coruscated
alive
each recovered syllable rises in luminosity
trailing sediment from older visions
when knowing shifted
steering truth by
extinguished
stars
their light arriving as memory does
late and changed
waves breaking against my palms
sometimes a word returns
with
a
quiver
a neuron long faded suddenly firing
unmasking me
language has a pulse too
memory susurrates in its syllables
tissue pressed beneath the skin
a word returns and with it
a face
already
fading
In dementia's neural ossuaries
they slowly resurface
refracted through time's
fossilized
strata
what returns exceeds what departed
yet what returns also slices us
so softly
with its incompleteness
a small lance lodged behind
ribs and bone
each restoration births knowing
part excavation part genesis
claimed by no century
reshaping me in return
moth-wings brushing my cheek
We become the archaeology of ourselves
hands cupping reverberations
charting the contours of our hearts
hearing again in the filamented dark
the pulse of neurons stretching
filaments of light
spelling the names
we thought
we'd lost
Feeling lost, in an emotional maze,
anxiety saps both body and soul;
stumbling mindlessly, through a foggy haze.
Staring deep into your eyes, in a daze,
I lament the innocence that time stole:
feeling lost, in an emotional maze.
Impressed by flattery's flamboyant ways,
I ignore reality's costly toll:
stumbling mindlessly, through a foggy haze.
Bullied by deceit and the tricks lust plays,
I cling to whatever makes me feel whole:
feeling lost, in an emotional maze.
A pyre of doubts can't rekindle love's blaze,
lodged deep in my heart like a lump of coal:
stumbling mindlessly, through a foggy haze.
Tangled in a web of lies and clichés:
I admonish trust, regretting its role.
Feeling lost, in an emotional maze:
stumbling mindlessly, through a foggy haze.
You'll not see determination
like it...
this spirit sailed across
seven seas...
even as a child I fondly
recall it...
I knew I was different...
for what I believe...
for instance rich kids
down the road for their
Christmas a trampoline
they received...
they refused me entry...
so I took to hills...
walked off all disharmony...
whilst up there I found a
bog in it a dead cow lodged...
this cow bloated like any
fair ground balloon could be...
so I climbed aboard her and
I bounced all day...
cost me nothing my soul
in tact...
...thinking back...lucky
the old cow didn't burst
or crack...
it's the universe you see
the higher power understands
watches over me...
I often think of that day...
the spirit of the poor...
is rich...
Where there is a will there
is a way.
anyhow those same kids
they got tired of jumpin
up and down...
so they came to our house
we teamed up played rugby
instead...
for I knew from an early age
as young as five it is not t'ings
that bring fulfillment...
it is other people and love that
bring us this full of life...that we
feel inside...
Tis the Irish in me...
this spirit I believe...
the spirit that sailed
seven seas
...the spirit from above
Tis the Irish in me...
Nyx opened black arms
threading her twilight fingers
and cradled my awe
to turn my hair, white
she filled my eyes with stars
firing a comet to
the core of my heart
my second breathe
carved dragons of fire,
as Aeolus filled each lung,
Terpsikhore sang music
into the life and death
of this epic
~~~~~
I taste a southerly breeze
catching it on the tip of my tongue
rolling it into my lungs
I sing appegio
to throw a shadow of night
the circle of her arms
has tightened,
and the nebula
in my eyes,
threaten to shoot
from their sockets
I have finally
felt the meteor
lodged in my heart,
move in its longing
for one last blaze
of release,
only the breath of God,
holds for revelation
~~~~~
TERPSIKHORE (or Terpsichore) was one of the nine Mousai,
the goddesses of music, song and dance. In late classical times
--when the Muses were assigned specific literary and artistic
spheres--Terpsikhore was named Muse of choral song and
dancing, and represented with a plectrum and lyre.
AIOLOS (or Aeolus) was the king of the winds who kept the
stormy Anemoi Thuellai and Aellai locked away inside the hollow
heart of the floating island of Aiolia. At the command of the gods
he released these to wreck devastating storms. Since the Winds
were often conceived of as horse-shaped spirits, Aiolos was titled
Hippotades, "the reiner of horses," from the Greek hippos ("horse")
and tadên ("reined in tightly").
Raven was Death. She dwelt in death. She lived on death. Ages past, she had worn
the blue-black, purple, feathers of the raven and dined on royalty at Tower hill. A
tumble from grace had lodged her here in this fragile form. No more would her maw
drip ruby red, no more would her caw fill the mourning, or her soaring flight slice
the air like a Frenchman’s sword. A Raven, with clipped wings, was she.
Centuries had passed since she, in her feathered form, had feasted on the King.
**Bran the Blessed, giant, King of Wales, had been her down fall. Cursed was she,
as she dined on his eyes, in the field of battle. Ah, what did a raven know
of the curses of man. But, she knew now. Bran's head was placed,
as a talisman, on the grounds of Tower Keep in Londontown. She,
transformed, cursed, walks the night in this beautiful, weak, human vessel for
as long as, Bran's name is remembered.
Her satin-sandaled feet hold her earthbound. Just as superstition
holds her clip-winged brethren in the Tower courtyard, Bran's Curse holds her here.
No longer can she fly, but, she is free to roam. The churchyard calls her. Ashen skies no longer welcome her, but the gravestones, spade-shaped like the tails of carrion feeder, beckon. The evening corpse has arrived. Draped in mourning weeds of black, her death-like pall, luminescent in the moonlight, her lips a tell-tale crimson, she arms her self with a firebrand. The bluish steel glistens. Death with a gun, certainly, one could see the
over kill? She laughs. Looking skyward, she calls. “Husband*, children…”
she mimicks the caw of her unfettered kin. “Come to Ma Ma..dinner is served.”
*Raven's mate for life...or death? ;)
**Bran is the Welsh word for Raven/ King Bran the Blessed
***A NIGHTMARE
She counts the seeds
Of my pomegranate heart
The same, always the same
No matter how many times she counts.
Her fingers are stained
And though she may wash and scrub
There I will be
In her skin, lodged in places
Where she cannot wash me out
[Poem read at Sekoto’s inhumation ceremony at the Neuilly-sur-Marne-93 Cemetery, near Paris. Channel 4 in London recorded the reading as they did the funeral rites in the presence of his close relatives come from afar for the nonce and based their documentary - as far as I can tell - on my lead cover article on the South African self-taught painter and musician Gérard SEKOTO, published in The Journal of Comparative Poietics, Vol. 2 (Paris), 1993. Both the article and the poem were re-published in my book on “poietics/la poïétique”, entitled: Poietics: Disquisitions on the Art of Creation. Allahabad: Cyberwit.net, 2008, 214p. There ensued a general scramble for his canvasses at the Maison des Artistes where he was lodged in his declining years, and even the sketches he gave me for publication disappeared from my studio.]
III
Long are the years you have lain your easel down
Longer still the sun at Botshebelo burnishing your skin
In the soft autumnal retreat of your heart
You could still hear children playing in the mission station
You saw with what glee they jigged in Sophiatown
And bled for your brothers enchained in District Six
Away in the quiet slumber of a land you loved
You wrought the blazing colours of a secret rage
of man's will thriving in his limbs
of an enduring passion for hope
in the dance of stoic joyousness
in the embrace of a Mandela
Not a shaft of light escaped your hunt for
traces of your childhood
nor
were lost the spare airs that filtered through shanty-towns
Your world was a world of people
simple people
going about their chores with premeditated caution
oppressed people
endowed by need with the guile for survival
People for whom you lived
People who live on in your veins
uninterred in your carved canvasses
(Poem read by the author at Sekoto's funeral in Neuilly-sur-Marne, France)
(c) T. Wignesan, Paris - 1993. (Pub. in the Journal of Comparative Poietics , Vol. 2 & 3 (Paris), 1993 & in Poietics: Disquisitions on the Art of Creation. Allahabad: Cyberwit.Net, 2008.)
Two men went to spy Jericho
Before Israel conquered it;
They lodged in Rahab's house,
She hid them on her roof.
Their only means of escape -
A line of rope that led them down the wall
To safety.
They embraced that line of rope red,
They embraced life.
Rahab, a not-so-honourable woman of Jericho,
Feared the God of Israel;
She hid those spies,
She saved their lives
By giving them that escape rope -
Their lifeline.
When she wanted to save herself and her family,
They gave her the same rope
Of safety.
She embraced that line of scarlet thread,
She embraced life.
From my childhood, I've read such stories,
True stories of faith and life.
When I wanted solutions to my problems,
I got the same lifeline
For safety.
And when I embraced these lines I read,
I embraced life.
----------------------
8.7.16
{Rahab got her name etched in history (Matthew 1:5) by this act of faith. She is one of the four women mentioned, in whose line Lord Jesus Christ took birth}
{Her story is found in the book of Joshua 2 and Hebrews 11: 30,31}