Best Thereto Poems
The sunflower stretched
With its stalk and its neck
As far to the sky
As it could – reaching high,
Pushing its golden face
With clumsy, awkward grace
Trying, with all its might
To reach the highest height
That it could ever muster
So it could be like Custer
Or like a grand ole redwood
(I think it thought it could)
It reached into the atmosphere
Inhaled the biting air
Looked about in wonderment
High above the firmament
But slender was its frame
It did not have the strength
To stand as so unaided –
It weakened, and degraded
It towered, then bent over,
It leaned a little lower
And found the earth up close
Had just as much to boast
As did the open sky
It wondered at up high –
And thereto did it stay
Forever and a day
A little bit hung over
As if it lost its lover
Or better yet, had found
Upon the hallowed ground
Some cosmic explanation
About its situation
Which held it in its thrall
High above it all
And made its hanging there
That much easier to bear –
Is he really political.? I mean he runs no party of that ilk.'
Yet I see 'the descriptive given' woven in like silk.)
Is he being held as a terrorist.? Or charged? He pleads
Guilty of journalisam.? Yet has he been pushed into that
Yard.? Guilty he is saying ' yet should that be the case.?
Or is he just tumbling in a fervid word mill-race.? Is any
Body thinking.? Or is it sheer brute force.? How can reason
Be introduced? Measured analysis, rebuttal and thereto
Unto fair discourse.'
The holidays is often a time of heightened feelings and emotions, whether light or dark. Please take care and try to be kind to yourself and others. There is no need to abuse anyone. The greatest gift we can give each other is love and light, and all the wonderful feelings and emotions that are related thereto.
feeling small
by Michelle Morris
24/12/2022
when you're feeling small
and cowering in the corner
try to let your highest self
guide you with its power
you are so much stronger
so much wiser than you know
try to believe in yourself
and find your inner glow
you may not be able to
stand up against the bullies
but at some point you'll find
you can walk away for good
the festive season is often
so dangerous for many
the masks come off when
demons are aplenty
for happy families is a situation
that is not reflective of our society
so many trauma bonds
are formed in family surroundings
and the abusers make excuses
so much more during holidays
they'll blame everyone but themselves
for their lack of human qualities
but maybe if they took some pause
drank and took less drugs
they'd be able to better control
the dark demons in their hugs
if you are being treated badly
i hope that you'll remember
that somewhere out in this world
there are constant prayers and blessings
live to thrive another day
try to avoid fighting every moment
but if it really comes to that
fight tooth and nail and body
i hope that you survive this
i hope that you'll find justice
i hope that in future holidays
you'll experience peace and love
blessings for a safe and good home
always
© Michelle Morris, 2022
Dearest,
There would be no nightfalls
thereunto your eyes but partly goosebumps
nor would be nightscapes along your brows
even an inch above their shorelines
where darkness heaves
no. When shadows dance in tip-toed pirouette to the tune of your hairfall
whose breaths breathe nothing but the fumes from your sigh.
You are but a psalm
the Tibetan monks hymn and a mantis prays with a vengeance
for three full moons bedecked with diphthongs and rhymes
only to show beyond doubt
that every squint of the lids of your eyes
is proof of all the gods' existence.
There are no sundowns
thereunder your limbs but scarcely woundscars
nor dimlights throughout the length of your nape
all the more onto its coastline
where thoughts
bloom. When crickets perch and croon
whose hymn chants heretofore each syllable of your name.
My breathe rests each time your eyes meet mine, my love,
for nothing falls thereto except my heart.
Tears herewith,
Samson
Author's note: Finalist September Poetrysoup International Poetry Contest
Contest Sponsor: Poetrysoup
GRACE GROWS BEST IN WINTER
I had but one joy,this apple
of my eye, to preach of Christ
,my Lord.Now I hang but by
a thread,but if I may say,
it is all of Christ’s spinning;
Day by day the bloom fell
off my branches and joy did
cast its flower.And yet I might
still meet with joy up in the
rainbow’s bower.There the
good Husbandman does pick
His rose and gather His lily.
The night will close the door
And hasten my anchor within
the veil and I shall go away
to sleep,leaving others,now
to tell my tale.
An phrasis epitaph of Samuel Rutherford
using phrases selected from his letters.
Listen to me read this phrasis on youtube under the name ichthyschiro
.*A Phrasis is a structured verse where the poet uses selected prose phrases of another writer’s(not a poet) to compile unique poetry therefrom as a tribute thereto,the word phrasis is Greek for phrase.Samuel Rutherford was a Scottish pastor (1600-1661)and one of the author’s of the Westminister confession of 1647.
SCENES OF A CARELESS BOYHOOD
The sound of water,escaping dams
willows,old rotten planks,slimy
posts,brickwork,old timber props
wet ditches,sedges and silvery nets
towpaths without gates,horses that
tow barges collared with crimson fringe.
Wheat and thatched cottages and cornstacks
grasses in flower,bogrush bulrush and
teazle,so tall.Bindweed,wild carrot,
hemlock in bloom,cow parsley,plantain
bramble in June.
Poppy,thistle mallow
and hop.Purple heath,hills and swift
running streams,true clear freah and
brisk as champagne about to pop.
phrasis form ( From Constable letters to Rev John Fisher)
*A Phrasis is a structured verse where the poet uses selected prose phrases of another writer’s(not a poet) to compile unique poetry therefrom as a tribute thereto,the word phrasis is Greek for phrase.
Listen to me read this phrasis of mine on youtube under the name ichthys
By Humber in a drowsy afternoon,
When for my love long lost alone I pin’d,
My heart itself did sing a saddest tune
For woeful swain I was to be destin’d.
And I in pain then lov’d this timid croon,
That disposition of mine redefin’d
Against the verdure that beside had grown,
And yon bare land where Autumn crops been mown.
Th’ immediate surface expos’d a tiny fish,
And came thereon somewhence his entire train,
That blur’d my eyes, did vision diminish;
In azure ripples solace I did gain.
And every bird that flew out of his niche
Demulc’d mine ears that on the bank had lain.
I think of her and of the friends that me
No more confront and give me company.
My head upon a tufted ground takes rest,
And sees the pallid clouds stoop’d from above
To obfuscate the Sun that veers towards West;
These equalise the woe of futile love,
Thus empathise with youthful mind deprest,
And slothful healing thereto do they serve.
And lo the Hills! whence wafts the coolest breeze
The sole wanderer’s weary limbs can please.
The Lark so tiny that a blob he seems,
For he hath sor’d in unrestrained joy;
And scoffs the pensive man by blithesome whims,
That his gay mind with exultation cloy;
Flutters his wings ‘neath sudden Phoebus’ beams,
That through the pregnant clouds have found their way,
Like beams of Hope enkindle morbid heart,
O lucid Stream, now jocund as thou art!
(Theme--Oblivious)
7th May, 2017
The golden grain stretched out like sheets
upon the Kansas plain, like birthright, innocent
behind the festered sun.
Some were unaware of upstarts
in the rolling Minnesota countryside,
defiant to the blistering avalanche of corn.
There were the sidewise glances,
prudent in their reticence, worn pencils
tucked behind their bibs, the markets'
vagaries aswim, Chicago far the east of home.
In Iowa as well,
the warriors of the plough,
the timeless men of bread,
the conquerors of earth and sinew,
beast and baronet,
to thread the cloth of motherland
before our birth.
Thereto in Illinois, my cradle sanctuary
nested from the mountains
and the alien sea; I was the listener
within this deep midwestern ground.
It is not still where I have been;
the voices and the footfalls
make their print in time
and may not be erased.
And though my ashes fly in space
my breath, my bliss, my bower
rests forever in the heartland of the earth.
~
Frederick Waddell
1893-1919
Kathrene Mary cojoled me not to blush.
Blush as red as a boiled lobster.
Kathrene Mary insisted that I not touch.
Touch and grope as a feathered Jove.
In the eternal equinox of April evening,
She gave me a signet ring,
With my initial engraved thereto,
As a token of our tryst together.
“W” reminded me of her,
Her voluptuous facade,
Her voluminous assemblage,
Her robust vanguard,
Of desious daydreams in the suave shadows,
Of amazing nocturnal delights,
Of lickerish ravishments and
Private investigations,
In the astonishing membranes
Of abject titillation.
But let it be known:
I died devastated,
Devastated that I never beheld
My sweet son and daughter,
Devastated that I never beheld
The sagging bosom of old age.
And now here in my grave,
I blush for the worms.
LEISURE FROM LISTFULNESS
A long & dreary time,exquisite
delight has passed.A perverse
unaccountable feeling.A moment’s
reflection,a store of recollections
a painful task to concentrate upon.
Questions come thronging my pen,
difficult to convey,a matter of doubtful
expediency,leisure from listfulness,
dreamy,beautiful,inconsistent,reflective.
Passion and affections a mute sense of
attachment,yet gratifying. The end of a struggle
From Letters of Charles Dickens
A Phrasis is a structured verse where the poet uses selected prose phrases of another writer’s(not a poet) to compile unique poetry therefrom as a tribute thereto,the word phrasis is Greek for phrase.
Listen to me read this phrasis on youtube under name of ichthyschiro
UPON THE SEASHORE
Off the blue Nantucket
music of laguid hours,emerges
from the labyrinth,delicate
snail-horn perceptions of beauty,
thronging this world of sensible
things.Stirred by majesty,soft
flowing surging impressions
where sea meets sky.Infinite
purples,fragments of rainbow
gleam in the spindrift,sensuous
lively,lovely,many-hued restless
gossamer,abysm of time in a
dancing throng,slow recurrent
the rhythm of the sea,sifting the
illusion upon a seashore.
SOJOURN IN THE EXOTIC
Penetrating imagination,restless
intellect’s perverse ingenuity
and worse, in imperishable
lines eerily luminous corescate
like brilliant pyrotechnics.A wind
that blows aloof,ebbs and flows
of the familiar and the strange.
A picturesque protracted sojourn
in the exotic,a periennial longing
to be what we are not.The paradox
reasserts itself and glamour fades.
A phrasis verse from - John Livingston Lowes
Convention& Revolt
From John Livingston Lowes
Convention& Revolt
*A Phrasis is a structured verse where the poet uses selected prose phrases of another writer’s(not a poet) to compile unique poetry therefrom as a tribute thereto,the word phrasis is Greek for phrase.
Listen to me read this and other of my phrasis on youtube under name ichthyschiro
Many souls linger therein pity's pot.
Many minds subcomb thereto th' Addler's.
O, shall we permit ourselves hereto rot?
So challenges white waters -- the heart of Paddler's.
I was adopted . . .
one morning in the mists of yesteryear
when the sun glimpsed over the pallid shone house
next to the abode of my mother and my father
on came a harbinger of desolation. . .
I died that day though I knew it not,
nor was I to understand,
comprehend
this death for many winters past and fallen to the way side.
I was five summers new,
five winters older . . .
I was born Patrick . . .
I was to have my name usurped
by those wretched things called Free and land
and this is all I have to say about them . . .
Therein lies the beginnings of my cursed life as it was to become,
and thereto
you have the birth of my coined out naming of Mishiimin (apple).
I was raised by whites,
in a white town,
had white friends, white schooling,
white church propaganda indoctrination,
and there under the unseen
but felt
fist of white society
was I to be remade into . .
apple.
My dreams were white,
my legends white,
my desires always for white,
my voice spoke and bled white,
my body was red,
my face red,
my hair red,
my past long forgotten,
lost,
ripped,
shredded,
. . .
torn from my heart,
my mind,
and thus eviscerated from my soul was red
and long thereafter
did this one Miskó Ki'zis (Red Sun) bleed and bleed
until
this screaming throat was heard no more,
nay
not even from my own lips,
my own ears
my screaming was silent. . .
And gone one morning did the red from my people slip away,
slip away till all was vanished leaving all this shell behind. . .
one barely breathed two legged apple.
So it was in hell,
I found my shattered soul,
splintered mind and ravaged heart
and there in the bells tolling of sorrows raked across all there I did see, found I,
of all things,
in hell,
that abyssal helix of despair dredged was . . .
this one sighted a glimmering whisper of hope . . .
It was in hell I learned to breathe,
it was in hell I learned to live,
it was in hell that I was remade into all that I am now,
will be,
ever aspire. . .
and never once did I dream. . .
In the city of desolation
I became one
all over once more as I was born to be
many empty nights of winter past;
from seven shattered corpses
I found
my way back into the whole of one . . .
ALL IS SIMPLICITY
Create a little business for
the Eye to be drawn from
trees, to return them with more
glee.Variety, lively touches,
surprising effects to make
the heart dance so pictures
walk out from their frame.
All is simplicity and elegance
almost motionless plainness
in a grand style.The eye may
be cheated by appearance and
size, as a tune confused by a
false bass, a fictious bundle of
trumpery in poetical impossibilities.
Fools talk of imitation and
copying, all is imitation, what
makes the difference,not genius
or conception but performance.
From Thomas Gainsborough letters
*A Phrasis is a structured verse where the poet uses selected prose phrases of another writer’s(not a poet) to compile unique poetry therefrom as a tribute thereto,the word phrasis is Greek for phrase.
Listen to me read this phrasis of mine on youtube under the name ichthyschiro
INNER NEEDS
This inner Harmony,an
abstract message,its meaning
lost ‘til unconsciously heard,
unfettered,beyond its boundaries
becomes a picture to reproduce
the divine.Inward vitality,the
stress of inner need to outer
impulse,scattered upon canvas
shrinks not from innovation.
From Kandinsky Art Of Harmony
CREATIVITY
Art,transitory & isolated
purposeless in the unconscious.
A mystery,its meaning
springs from the soul by an
inner need ,outwards &
upwards,a melodic composition,
simple line,a common motion,
complex in flavour.Symphonic
in scale,impressions improvised
uttered with maturity.
From Kandinsky Art Of Harmony
*A Phrasis is a structured verse where the poet uses selected prose phrases of another writer’s(not a poet) to compile unique poetry therefrom as a tribute thereto,the word phrasis is Greek for phrase.
Listen to me read these phrasis structured prose of mine upon youtube under name ichthychiro