Best Participles Poems
I was punctured by punctuations
The words you wielded with such disdain
A ravenous revolutionary
Pitilessly piercing deep into my vein
I pretended such positivity
Holding happy forward as my shield
Your attack so precise and persistent
cold and calculated you would not yield
You left little to the imagination
Expressive expletives flowed from your lips
The harmonization of my horror
I was firmly nestled within its grips
Attacked by your callous conversations
Skillfully white washing every event
They were but measly misunderstandings
Never the nouns that I thought you had meant
The truth is that I perceived your pleasure
Within that capacity of your cruel
Heading towards a cliff like a lemming
Dancing dangerously close like a fool
So I sought out new triumphant treasures
Better lines lead to a more complete me
No more would I dangle dangerously
Halting hearing you speak helped me to see!
Every time something breaks
like the pipe in the wall
we heard gushing
this morning
my wife wants to call
a repairman because
I can’t fix anything
except split infinitives
and dangling participles
and I usually agree
but this time
I mention the kayaks
in the attic and say
why don’t we hop
in the kayaks
open the front door
and sail down the street
wave to the neighbors
cutting their grass
planting their peonies
worrying about crime
and shout best of luck
we’re tired of the good life
we’re sailing away.
Donal Mahoney
in the silence
of the night
ring loudest
words unsaid
the gaps
the hesitations
admissions left
half hanging
AP: 3rd place 2021
Grammar raised walls where forgotten tenses slept.
Keeping tomorrow where yesterday had wept.
Dangling and drifting, right out of the frame,
Who taught the future to answer its name?
Walking through commas, still searching for doors,
Borrowing echoes from uncharted chores.
Turning, returning, refusing to mend.
Each sentence bent, before it learned to end.
Counting the silences while speaking aloud,
Wearing the sunlight disguised as a cloud.
Breaking, unmaking, remembering the strain,
Who taught the footprints to walk back again?
Grammar cried, "Stay, where your own tense belongs."
Poetry answered by unresolving its songs.
Leaning, unfolding, changing its key.
Is this a wooden doorway—or only the tree?
When all the walls had forgotten their place,
Time lost its verbs, but remembered your face.
Lingering, wandering, never quite through,
Perhaps every participle, was writing to us too.
Walking beyond where the full stops had gone,
Having been written, the sunrise came on.
Turning the corner, up the down-hill;
Dangling forever, tomorrow stood still.
Undoing tomorrow before it was through,
Having been broken, the old became new.
The ashes rehearsed becoming seed—
Grammar looked back... and entropy agreed.
No petal knows the flower it helps become.
Yet every edge contributes to its net sum.
What petals cannot see, the bloom makes whole.
Each separate curve completing one shared soul.
A boundary gives every petal, grace and form.
Its edges hold through sunlight, rain, and storm.
We cannot grow by leaving limits far behind.
We grow between the lines that shape within the mind.
Perhaps transcendence isn't traveling so far away,
But opening wider to what's within today.
The bud becomes what folded silence knew,
By letting what was hidden freely move through.
So nothing leaves the pattern we pass through.
Bud, petal, bloom keep coming into our view.
Transcendence is to become, not to enclose.
Beyond the petal, yet within the waiting rose.
No petal knows the flower it will help create.
Each keeps its edge, yet joins a larger state.
What petals cannot see, the flower makes one.
The whole emerges as all the parts are spun.
Beauty needs boundaries; edges give each its place.
Petal beside petal slowly shapes the flower's face.
We need not break the borders that limits define,
But meet between and through them, to yours and mine.
Becoming, opening, flowering as we grow,
Participles trip wherever changing currents flow.
No finished noun can truly tell us who we are.
We're verbs still blooming, reaching past the bar.
So nothing truly leaves, and nothing stands alone.
Each petal joins a pattern never fully known.
Transcendence isn't escaping, what we yearn to be—
It's opening just enough to find, what we can't see.