Best Rafted Poems
When did you enter into my life?
Was it when the crying baby in the cradle received a warm hug from her mother?
or was it when the children cheerfully ran home after the school's long bell?
When did you start sharing your creamy thoughts with me?
Was it when the baby nightingale gifted its first tune to the world?
or was it when the cutie caterpillar emerged out of its white house?
When did you take my hand into yours?
Was it when the sun secretly promised to enhance the glory of the earth with its light and warmth?
or was it when the green leaf slipped off its blanket early to get the food ready for its family?
When is that you spoke the words of love to me?
Was it when the love birds passionately kissed under the romantic twilight?
Or was it when the air smoothly carried the anther's pollen to the bed of stigma?
When did you even dare to steal my sorrow bag?
Was it when the mighty mangroves tried to stop the high rising oceanic tides?
Or was it when the fiery tigress generously caressed the lost bear cub?
When did you first kiss my forehead?
Was it when the proud mother rafted through the waters of her daughter's success?
Or was it when the nation proudly turned the pages of its history book?
When did you decide upon being my life mate?
Was it when the word "responsibility" stepped into the world of letters?
or was it when Adam took the onus of Eve in the garden of Eden?
I really don't want to be immersed in ferreting for answers to all these questions.
All I want is to live and be lost in every moment of this togetherness.
The Sittee River
Tumbling down from the magnificent Maya Mountains,
The rabid Sittee River rushed headlong,
Over-flooding its banks and the giant mangroves
On its long journey to the open Caribbean Sea.
Once forest green, the River’s color was now a dirty brown.
Hundreds of floating logs all rafted and chained together
Like creeping caterpillars lined up on a dead leaf.
These lumbering mahogany logs, once majestic living trees
Would be transformed mostly into polished furniture.
Attention captured by this rambling rapidly roving River,
As a child I sat at my window wondering,
What other dark secrets did this wandering River hold?
Could it reveal the life of the ancient Mayas, other civilizations, or more?
I may never know.
Today the old beautiful River is clear and bitingly cold,
Keenly listening –
Vigilantly watching -
Waiting for new adventures to unfold!
Note:
As a child, I grew up in the Sittee River Village in Central America, and this is
one of my earliest memories of the River.
Her hands, I see, are sweetly crafted
My hands, her hair, a river rafted
Or ruby coasts on which I sail
The shore, her face - sublime detail
With sand, so white, so pure, and smooth
Sifting as my fingers move
Her face, her heart, a new frontier
My heart, full sail, is drawing near
We tore out this hell and sank this English ship
We rafted a life till the Americas ran us dry
A sandy engagement, laughter, our world to tip
Our beats, our waves to sounds ugliest cry
In plunged your thunder to our words your stip
To have us quiet, browbeat, safe and nigh
Old masters married our merriment to desolation
Boys gauged, girls versed, and learned a false elation
The ones who would soak
the mother who drowned
her children in serpentine
seas never floated a child.
When splashed amongst
the horror-stricken,
we too feign revulsion.
Evoke higher powers and
baptismal pools: the fluidity
in the womb. The commingled bond.
But single us out, and buoys
snare our feet as we swim for
shore. Weighted down and engulfed
with load in tow – bondage.
Admit it!
Not a one hasn’t considered
suffocating that incessant
whining beneath the softness
of a comforting wave or lifejacket –
has not wished we could hurl the
wailing one at a shoreline just to make it
Stop.
That shrill that turns all heads at
a pool party where somehow
every 4-year-old but yours is
peacefully partaking in cake –
But yours must splash the dry.
Or don another’s pink towel.
Or dive off the high board.
Just five more minutes.
Drown.
This is not a topic a mother can
bring up casually over coffee.
Too fierce for me, possibility bobs to the surface.
Since the time her sucking
rubbed my areolas raw, we’ve had
our moments – times when I could’ve
river rafted her
perhaps reclaiming her upon maturity.
I need alone time, I explain
inexplicably to the baby blues
locked on with innocent revulsion.
I have drowned her out with work,
and she notes the behavior –
will avert her own children’s guilt-
provoking glare when she
demands alone time.
Craves it.
Even as I type, the whine is still there,
abutting my every keystroke,
pushing my buttons until I wish to
gurgle deep and low, like a wave that comes
up crashing then subsumed by the next
and next until their edges blur.
Toni got the blues. Allowed herself
the chance to drown one out in fiction.
She was a mother after all.
Right now, a single drop at the surface
might take hold and pull me under.
Please abandon this line
before you immerse your baby
for a poem.
Coach shouts out:
Slow your stroke and focus on form…
and try to remember: breathe.
But despite that advice,
I gurgle like she did.
And then I remember
to love.
Hello young man! I surely have heard a lot about you.
I drove here as soon as I heard the news,
And I’ve something to say if you can excuse.
God gave a bird in my nest, we call her Steffy.
She grew up fair, slim, silent but was obtuse sometimes.
Nothing made her happier than the pair of ankle bells.
She wore it like Kumudini and let her feet dwell.
Day and night she stomped her feet until the floor sing.
Everything was fine until the tables turned and fate blink,
She lost her mother.
She needed a blanket as these winds blew chill,
A mother in her father and make her life still.
While she was sinking in the ocean like black granules,
I rafted and drown myself in my Jack Daniels.
She wore ankle bells and dance to live again.
But her efforts to take my booze away were all in vein
One day she came from the school looking for her happiness.
And she found nothing but the loneliness again.
For my booze I’d her ankle bells pawn,
Shattered by this, by morning my bird had flown.
“Steffy never mentioned about her childhood and now
I know why”, saying this young man made a way for me
So I can see her the last time.
Drenched in sorrow I move towards her coffin,
And touched her feet that where as hard as dolphin.
With the tears coming from my mangled shell,
I slowly kept inside the coffin, her pair of ankle bells…
- Kunal Rathod
A tribute to all dancers. :)
Pocketfuls of my pressing prayers have known
Answers though responses never arrived by
Thursday as my anxious anguish hoped, coming
Instead at a more ideal time than I had ever
Envisioned for my prayer depth could not answers
Name as ideally as Heaven's awesome blessings,
Crafted unique for me by omnipotent love to
Effectively teach patience is timed on faith's clock
... CayCay
March 14, 2019
Crafted from angel’s tears
Calorie rich, who cares
Cholesterol? Plenty
Comfort food for many
Call me Captain Cheddar
Come hither, dearest cheese
Caress my taste buds, please
I walked along the Mississippi shoreline at midnight
Listening to distant barges groaning in the dark
And thinking about Mark Twain
Drifting down the river on a lazy summer day.
It's the same old Mississippi he rafted on,
The same course, just different water.
Those lovers heard the barges groaning, too, I think
Their inner ears occupied, duly registering
The lapping against a solid-steel plate
Restless walks the Mississippi after midnight.
While early barges growl toward another steamy
Summer day, a hint of Twain drifts through
The trees like the subtle perfume the maiden wears
They tell me you can buy anything
Along the Mississippi at midnight.
FIRST PLACE WINNER
The fleeting dawn has translucent crystal light
that shimmers and wrinkles my furrowed slack skin.
Then a temperate touch, my terrors ignite
as beneath my waves, dark currents surge within;
since time began, I have carried human kind;
but still I yearn to swallow a troubled mind.
From hell roaring creek, I was spawned and grew old,
before fur traders rafted over my rocks,
indian canoes laced through my eddies cold,
where bison roamed in the summer equinox.
My hidden weeds clutched at fractured settlers' limbs;
where battles fed all veins in death's pseudonyms.
What darkness now heaves and hauls the river's wave?
you wait to board the last ferry's creaking ship;
its gas light might shine, but I still cling and crave
as every mortal must its dark pilot tip.
Then leave all kinships behind and seek to sleep
in lethe, sunken down yet so darkly deep.
I’ve never climbed a mountain
Or gone up in a balloon
And if I never scuba dive,
Well, that will be too soon.
I’ve never rafted rapids,
Para-sailed or water-skied
And as for jumping off a cliff,
I just don’t see the need.
I’ve not trekked in the arctic
Or safaried with a guide
And if I said I wasn’t scared
Of all these things, I lied.
I marvel at adventurers;
They’re made of stronger stuff.
To read about or watch their exploits
Is, to me, enough.
Ten boats rafted together,
Wine time, no mowing the lawn,
Twenty fast friends forever,
Ready for challenges of next dawn!
March 29, 2022
Contest: Lind30 Rhyme
Sponsor: Chantelle Anne Cooke
V-erse
I-s
C-rafted
K-eeping
Y-our
O-ne
B-right
L-ife
I-n
G-lee
A-s
C-omposer
I-mplements
O-utstanding
N-ote
Topic: Birthday of Vicky F. Obligacion (January 24)
Form: Vertical Monocrostic
M-arvelous
A-uthor
D-elights
E-vent's
L-ady
E-mploying
I-nspiring
N-ote's
E-xcellent
C-onnotation
O-nce
N-oble
C-omposer
E-xecutes
P-oem
C-rafted
I-n
O-ne
N-ame
Topic: Birthday of Madeleine Concepcion (December 03)
Form: Vertical Monocrostic
A-n
I-nspiring
C-omposition
O-n
B-irthday
I-s
C-rafted
U-niquely
A-gain
Topic: Birthday of Aico Bicua (July 15)
Form: Vertical Monocrostic