Best Stonished Poems
I've deleted this acrostic from the competition for personal reasons.
SORRY, J. D.
G lorious was the morning I climbed the Scottish highland
R adiant warmth of Summer's sun shimmered over the trail
E mblazoned with clover, near a forested Wych Elm stand
A stonished at the scenic vista, my lofty imagination set sail
T raipsing across the North Sea, I was Captain in command
E lusive was the tailwind on my adventurous nautical escape
S cotland clamored for my return, 'Make haste. Hurry home!
C ast your notions upon the wind. Your spinnaker, undrape
A nother day will you play, when in illusory flight you roam
P erchance invite another dreamer and don your Tartan cape
E mbark upon a getaway beyond the heathered hills of loam'
What I see along the plaza
A lusterless milkyway
A blackhole of a burntout Gaza
On faces fractured by Uranium decay
I ask the men
Reeled in past my 'stonished face
Help my disconnect to ken
The ravage of this place.
In silence no eye looked up
A woman travailed
A still birth of grief
And quickly looked away.
Yet while the line was reeled in still
The impaled fluttering fish
Caught me in the obsession
Of a wish.
I asked aloud
My desperation rising
Like a mushroom cloud
Over New Mexico,
At the Alamogordo Test Range
Eyes met eyes unsocketing
Recognition
Perhaps some emotional identifcation
On this landscape littered
With metaphors of fear.
We were once the middle class
Lured by bait and dream
Of white picket fence
And something to last
And for this we made
Required sacrifice
Sacrifice of children
Where no fire burned
Sacrifice of time
Bled white of rest
On the altar of the wage
Sacrifice of worship
And any responsibility
That served no immediate purpose
But a final sterility
Where the pale horse
And sickle rider
Have coralled our depravity.
Now there is no corn
Nor Joseph here
Nothing grows from irrigation
Of the salty tear.
And then the voice
Just failed away
Into a void fill silence
And some thought
Perhaps, I was wringing
My hands
But instead I
Scrubbing them
Insistent against the indelible red
Felt my throat
Grew parcht and dry.