Best Transplanted Poems
Wondrous poems are melodies
Emancipated from live trees
Freed at last from trunk and limb
Freed at last to sing their hymn
Transplanted in the hearts they've torn
Transplanted by the poets they've borne
Echo in our hearts as rhyme
Echo through the sands of time
Written down with pen and ink
That all,
That would,
Might stop and think
How wondrous a poem can be
That's written deep within a tree
Categories:
transplanted, children,
Form:
Rhyme
hanging in the air
humidity’s heaviness . . .
the river’s slow crawl
On the Mississippi lies the beautiful little city where I once lived. How many times I trudged up inclined streets; or leaning forward, red-faced and panting, pressed up slopes with all my might, feet on pedals of my purple Sting-ray bike, urging myself not to dismount prior to reaching glorious level ground! The damp beneath my clothing in those days was a given. Simply stopped to rest. . . sipping pop underneath a tree, I would often feel rivulets of sweat that trickled down beneath my underarms, a surfeit which caused circle stains to appear beneath the arms of short-sleeved shirts or on Sundays, beneath the flowered dresses that I wore to church. However, despite the heat’s discomfort, it was summer, after all!
counting down the days
until the school bell’s last ring -
a fling with summer
Released from stifling classrooms for vacation, I eagerly embraced the sun. . .and how I played! Kickball with the neighbors, visits to the city pool with my sisters and friends, bike rides to parks or into town, where I spent my allowance on records and treats, and hours racing eagerly through the pages of Nancy Drew books in front of a cooling fan - all these things consumed me.
It was in the month of August, and more than a decade of muggy summers later that I found myself transplanted in a desert. As if thrust into a giant pre-set oven with a noose about my neck, I learned firsthand the meaning of “slow roast.” Here, in the new and different place where I've now lived most of my adult life, the heat can leave one with a burn like acid watered down, a deep sensation lingering in skin long after sun has left the sky. Perspiration may just evaporate before it has a chance to wend its way along the body’s contours. Discomfort notwithstanding, there’s no pain. Acclimated to these summers now, I find that it is easier for me to breathe in August heat than it was the first time I’d ever encountered it. Released from stifling work, I go outside into the oven, pen in suntanned hand!
sunshine reflections
so many summers have passed
writing till twilight
Categories:
transplanted, life,
Form:
Haibun
Beyond The Open Door
She stretches her arms across your abyss,
so that she can covertly open your door.
She cries as she peeks into your eyes,
for you hold onto a grief that does not belong.
She promises to baptize you with positivity.
Sadly she cannot promise you wholeness.
Eternal bliss waits until the end of a journey.
Your place is here, within this current heartbeat.
Do not fear, you will find deliverance.
Tick tock, tick tock, time whispers,
as you grasp for sanity.
Roots and branches are different
and still they are the same.
Above and below the grass,
they stretch beyond the boundaries of shame.
They know there is fresh spring water
and a blue sky to claim.
Root rot happens if you choose blame.
You will burn through obstacles,
for you are one who possesses an ancient flame.
“Ooh ooh the rain comes,
my eternal heartbeat drums,
ooh ooh my heartbeat drums!”
So she caresses your leaves
with fingers and thumbs.
She’s thankful to witness
one of the blessed ones.
She listens to church bells
singing in the night.
Under your branches
she bathes in the moonlight.
There above you is a star dotted sky.
Together you absorb that pure bright white
Thump thump,
thump thump.
You whisper her name.
You are both different
and still somehow the same.
You live on the thin line side of insane.
She feels no shame,
no need for blame.
Ooh ooh the rain comes,
your eternal heartbeat drums.
ooh ooh your heartbeat drums.
She desires to caress you
with her fingers and thumbs.
Your branches stretch across that abyss.
With your leaves, her lips you kiss.
Thankfully she opened you to more.
Not a slave to fear anymore.
Together uprooted to an ancient shore.
Yes transplanted at the edge of paradise,
just a few steps beyond that open door!
By: Richard Lamoureux
Categories:
transplanted, age, angst, beautiful, fate,
Form:
Free verse
The humid air sweats streaming curls down the toddler’s flush cheeks like Fusilli hot from the stove. The golden ringlets cling to her forehead, bouncing like Slinky’s in front of her, blue-agate, eyes. The backyard’s sounds-bat cracks and wise cracks-surround her. Squeals echo from the mounds of loam behind her new house. The homes out back form a red, yellow, blue, green monopoly board configuration.
The sand box she sits in is full of scrap two-by-four blocks. Using a naked purple-haired troll doll, she attacks the pine-block castle, tumbling the battlement. A plank spans the puddle
(created by the leaky green garden hose). The barefoot tike, troll in hand, starts across the board toward the moonscape of mud mounds; where her sister and friends run screeching armed with rotten tomatoes. She almost makes it before falling in and running mud covered to mother.
Polish Catholics, Italian Catholics and Irish Catholics, lived side by side with English Presbyterian’s and we errant, runaway, Jews. The scent of tomato paste, knackwurst and borscht wafts through the same soupy air, where we play King of the Mountain. Big Boys and Plum tomatoes flew indiscriminately through the August air like missiles. The only thing which stopped the action was the distance ringing bell of the Good Humor truck, here on Cherry Tomato Alley. Here where each new neighbor had transplanted themselves: their children, their gardens, their sprinklers, and their cars to fulfill the American dream.
First Published in Melancholy Hyperbole Spring 2015
Categories:
transplanted, childhood,
Form:
Prose
CITY GEOMETRY
I’m on big town
Inserted
Yea, transplanted
Within its swaying wave
Of box and angle
Where my self-identity
Is something throbbing
Upward gazing
Arrowing
To sky points
So, it’s confusing
The hate-love factor
Stiffness
Restriction
Formal sharpness of angle
A quite eye bewildering sight
This swirling circumference
Of a giant
Fractured
Circle
And oh!
The Stravinskyish
Jagged continuity
Of line
Of dissonance
For distance
I follow parallels
Lines receding
With absolute straightness
There a promise of
Those cherished
Fading meadows
Of nature’s roundness
Her natural sweetness
Suddenly!
I take a ninety-degree angle of turn
With mandatory city goose step
Toward sanity
Toward home
Dave Austin
Categories:
transplanted, corruption,
Form:
Free verse
G race abounds
R ighteousness astounds
A cceptance granted
C ost transplanted
E ternally saved
Categories:
transplanted, devotion, faith,
Form:
Acrostic
In the garden of poems percieved,
my dreams are plucked from ideals.
Placed on the pages of creative seeds,
where friends meet to read and spiel.
Watered images grown very tall,
patterned to my bidden ages.
The dreams for sages large and small,
paid down and read from silvered pages.
Growing in rows this, my trite recall,
I've shared my innermost feelings of heart.
An articled discourse written for all,
portrayed my own passionate song of art.
Breathing the aroma of those vented pearls,
more tender than a romantic rendition.
When transplanted these dreamed of deeds,
found perusing among poetical fountains.
Categories:
transplanted, art, friendship, love, passion,
Form:
The curse of an
inflated imagination.
An escarpment of thought
in a blistering mind.
An invasion of insolence
amidst a tempest-tossed
cacophony
of mewling memories.
A throat restricting,
heart galloping,
and eyes trembling.
A voiceless scream for help.
A crouching body
in cold defeat.
A quivering being,
gasping for an
exasperating breath.
Then, a ferociously seized breath -
transplanted
from an enchained soul,
gives birth to grave apathy.
A silent tear dissipates
into an endless ocean
of trepidation.
Categories:
transplanted, anxiety, depression, emotions, fear,
Form:
Lyric
I walked out to see my garden's beauty
Looking for vibrant colors to see
But before I could look he was all over me
Stung fourteen times by an angry bee
I was looking at a butterfly fluttering by
But a Blue Jay snatched it out of the sky
I transplanted a couple of ferns nearer to me
That turned out to be poison ivy
I stopped at some sweet blossoms to smell
But the mosquitos and chiggers were biting like hell
I also set out some vegetable plants
Soon they were carried away by the ants
I had a bagful of promising seeds
But what came up were aggressive weeds
Then I noticed a bunch of holes
Seems now my garden hosts a colony of moles
I won't let this garden get the better of me
It's now a great beauty for all to see
My new garden is quite fantastic
For now it's all made of plastic
Petal, buds, blossoms, bees, birds, butterflies! Poetry Contest
Sponsored by: Silent One
07/28/20
Categories:
transplanted, garden, nature,
Form:
Rhyme
I have always liked the hollow dark,
the cave, the sealed carcass of the night,
the lightless womb of the closed seed.
You said you were human,
and I laughed until my belly shook the earth.
I Imagined your bones cracking
from the heat of a great fire.
I ground my teeth with the ash
of a few brittle words.
"No one is 'human',
we are alien seeds replanted,
into a fertile blindness.
Humans are the shells,
the pods, the skin of a reality
they have yet to realize or reveal.
The garden,
what you call 'soul',
is a transplanted being,
it lives concealed,
within that alien you.
Keep that garden,
hidden from any who would,
proudly claim to be
remotely human!"
Categories:
transplanted, poetry,
Form:
Free verse
When death came, I declared that I could not leave soon
For I had not seen the summer flowers in bloom
Starting them from just a seed back when there was still snow.. white
As they began maturing, I could tell each one on sight
Just large enough to be transplanted that spring day
The blooms were visible in thought only, in May
The angel came in early morn to take me by the hand
I bid him let me stay because my life was just sand
Now I have a new responsibility here
Down where the flowers bloom and to me are so dear
Life is not just about the house, washing the dishes clean
It's about love, our fellowman; only a few I've seen
Thank you death angel for letting me stay that day
I'll give this life that I've got left the best day's pay
Categories:
transplanted, death, health, introspection, life,
Form:
Couplet
Looking In
May I lean on the cold glass now
and look into a world stolen from me
condensing words to cold brittle panes
obscuring my likeness
I am no longer there
And as you abide now
in the transplanted warmth of my heart
I will try to kiss the continuum
that was once so part of my life
So have I lost the feel of your skin now
have I lost your glance
now that you have disengaged your limbs
from our dance
Separated now
by the barrier of trickling smiles
left in tears on cold winter glass
I face it alone
the smiles have gone
to their home they made in the past
Categories:
transplanted, lost lovelost, lost,
Form:
Free verse
The hillsides are covered
with miles of Scotch Broom.
Pretty to see
but an allergy doom.
This transplanted weed
should not be here.
It causes allergy symptoms
most of which are severe.
Some one once decided
Broom belonged in the garden.
That person's now reviled
and should be begging our pardon.
Early Spring the citizens
with their spades go out
trying to eradicate all
Scotch Broom that's about.
But it grows and grows
and will not die.
Bad for the allergies
though pretty to the eye.
Beneath my window
is quite a display.
My sinus reaction
is the same as to hay.
I sneeze and I sneeze,
my eyes water and burn.
Lovely as it is,
I'd rather have a fern.
Oh yellow and bright
Scotch Broom you are
the most annoying plant,
and that is by far.
Go away, go away
back to your isle.
It's allergy season
and my sinuses you rile.
This ode to the Broom
is sincere and real.
Please cease and desist,
that is my appeal
Categories:
transplanted, environment, garden,
Form:
Rhyme
My 60’s
My 60’s
meant childhood.
Unaware of changing mores
or real significance of
Kennedy’s assassination,
three sisters
and I
were transplanted
to Mom’s childhood Iowa farm until
she remarried. Though poor, we had
good times!
Our family,
now ten souls, adapted, struggling, while
soldiers fought abroad. Civil unrest was
little known to me. I enjoyed
summers, friendships, radio, kiss in ‘69 -
Moon walk/ childhood’s end.
Free love, hippies, LSD
eluded me.
I thrived!
By Andrea Dietrich
Inspired by nette onclaud's Contest:
"Magic of Decade's Moods"
Categories:
transplanted, history, life
Form:
Verse
Once, something we took for granted
Now gone, forever to be mourned.
My source of awesome anime has been transplanted.
Cartoon Network, you face an enemy scorned!
-----Note-----
Though it's been so long I still miss it. RIP Tom.
Categories:
transplanted, funny, loss, nostalgia,
Form:
Elegy