Clapper Poems | Examples

How Long Will I Wait Before I Come Back To the Light

How long can I wait in the blaze of the sun,
Before shadows drag me down from the height?
The stars are a choir, but they do not speak,
And the sea keeps knocking with a blind white fist.

I am held by the flame, yet I ache for the dark,
Where my bones know the cool and the silence is loud.
I have wrestled with angels whose tongues were of fire,
I have drunk from the well where the dusk must still rise.

Do not ask me the hour, for time has no hand,
It unravels like smoke through the teeth of the night.
My voice is a bell, but the clapper is gone,
Still it tolls in the marrow of my mind and my bones.

How long shall I wait with my back to the sun?
Till the earth calls me down with its patient green mouth,
And the worms write my name in their winding script—
Then perhaps I’ll return from the light to the dark,
Or perhaps I will burn into nothing at all.

I Have Been

I have been 
A grain of sand
A wisp of froth
Above a wave and then gone.

I have been 
A shark’s tooth,
A piece of azure glass,
 The clapper of a bell,
The bill of a falcon,
A feather floating.

I have been
The sound of children, 
A nail in the barn,
The snore of a pig.
I have been sky,
Day, even night
And the receding arc of the world.

I have been 
The hazy light
From a street lamp
In a misty eve.

I have been
A mouse, a blade,
A comb.
I have been 
The base of a jug
And the pin in a cushion.

I have been
A sail
And the wind,
The bow, the hull
And even the wake behind
Spreading out.

I have been
A star long ago
Burnt out
Whose light yet arrives 
To us now 
To lead us
To Be still
Talk,
Be still again
And remember love.

tin pan's corners

i'm whiskey beats outta country
jazz, too classic
old's city in LA
high damn
runnin up you like water
all most hiding skin

and overatures 
lest i grieve through absurd
trist's with confi, daunting
clapper town

east block alter girls
choired saints lost frames
too paint
sorry bouts 
runnin up like water's mam

Sunday Treats

The ice-cream parlor
is just across the road
from a small white clapper-board church.

I sit in a window seat,
watching the little town
and the sidewalk
as it moves people around,
thought-reading their directions,
as they go to, or come away
from predictable starts and arrivals.

Now the congregation is filing-out
of the narrow church door.
The pastor, has somehow
teleported himself,
to get up in front of them,
he shakes hands and pats backs,
knowing them all,
perhaps knowing too much
about some of them.

Kids are corralled quickly,
strapped into booster seats,
or marshaled across to this store
for ice-cream treats.

It's just a little township,
on a side-road to nowhere special.

The ice-cream is homemade and delicious.

I could trash-talk this hamlet,
these people, these families,
I am naturally cynical by nature,

but I am in love with them all,
and the ice-crem is always so good.

Don'T Look Blind

Don't Look Blind

The flowers I bought you are still in their vase
Dried out and dropping their petals like tears
The hours we wasted were never a waste
But now this house is as empty as the last 20 years

To love and have lost, not a question at all
Hopeful despair posing riddles, unmatched
This silence answers a never placed call
Rings like a bell with no clapper attached 

I love you, I'm sorry, I'm coming undone
No consolation for my error of ways
Trapped in between the fire, and sun
The way out is through, the cure, the malaise

You'll always find what you're looking for
If you're always looking for what you find
You'll never lose what you don't have anymore
But if you should find it again, don't look blind

Bridge

I think of my ancestors building you,
Tying and placing tree-trunks, like girders, in queue;
They constructed you, then, with stones,
Twisted, turned, criss-crossed, hung, dangled in zones;
Road bridge, railway bridge, gate bridge, bay bridge,
You  resembled longest and tallest mountain ridge;
Clapper, beam, truss, arch… you became suspension, 
Cantilever, cable-stay, movable, floating, and high-tension;
How fond designs you are in, today, like miracles,
Magic of marvelous magicians waiting for oracles...
Travelling from place to place, and meeting people,
You build up relationships from valleys to hill steeple;
Though, through you, communication is continually created,
Has communion betwixt hearts clemently elated?
Connecting, interacting, do you construct relations?
Beyond hills and cliffs and national foundation…
Socialization, cultural extension, and environs easy,
You’re sometimes breezy and other sleazy and queasy...
Cognition, senses, sensation, and sensitivity, 
Once broken impulsively, aren’t you in vainly pity...???

15 March 202

Poetrysoup

Pen over paper

Over your body is a caper

Exhibits a clapper

Twists like a rapper

Rendition of a writer

Your style peps and ponder

Soup that heals not wither

Outshining like a saber

Unleash your power

Power of poetry... in you!

Weather Beaten Faces

This year the farmers are celebrating
the greatest full moon harvest 
they ever had in the past hundred years
with a special field they sowed
to be reaped before the arrival of winter,
in the meantime, off in the distance
the church bell rings by way of a clapper 
who strikes the bell with a farmer's hammer 
signaling to the villagers it's time for work 
they all line up in procession 
with grit and determination
with weather beaten faces 
turned into rawhide skin,   
with shovels over their shoulders 
they march to the beets and to the yams 
to the fields loaded with rich phosphorus deposits 
that washes down from the hills into streams 
that irrigate the crops into super giant
beets and yams the size of watermelons  
just bulging out of the rich soil,
the farmers came to dig and dig. 
They worked fast and furiously
to beat the first frost digging reaping 
and piling up the yams and the beets 
into several mountain peaks of yellows and purple

Fancy Ann

Her name was fancy Ann flapper Bell
they called her the bell of the ball
the story goes, she was a flapper
who married a clapper,
a fine banger of the bell.

Crooked Tooth Joy

Crooked Tooth Joy

When I was young and hadn't a care,
I once wished I had curly hair.
But now I see what would've been misery
for the valiant true who would've tried
but failed to love me.
 
At the crack of the clapper
before I don the Sunday best,
I run my fingers through the never-tresses.
I have no know of the fancy man’s soul,
but I've tasted the fear, that cold sweat,
hardening the heart and splitting the soul
of golden lads uncapped of spiral locks.
 
Crooked teeth at least tear meat.
So important ripping flesh from bone.
And two eyes are oh so fine,
but one'll do in a pinch.
 
The curse of the curl,
denied the affections of a homely girl,
seeks the flaxen sanctuary.
How fleeting the comforts of moment,
half-lifing into delusion.
Standing before the darkened mirror
the gray is fair, the wisp a shock.
Assuredly Luke and the locks are in collusion.
 
Out the door and off to church,
I welcome the morning light.
Leave me the vices of tradition.
The curly-haired damned? … the virtues of fashion.
Time steals from everyone,
but I had so little to lose.

Bell Type Is Here Yeah

well
at last
after delay
bell poem form is here
recognised as new poem type
and so give it a go, in shape and mode
remembering to add clangor
clapper
ding

Rural Glimmers

In the country, we do not have city shine,
we have luster, 
we have the glimmer of voles,
the fumes of turbid crawlers
under the slow burn of iridescent woods. 

We who night-watch
see from sunken waters,
gather light from luminous cisterns.
We understand black;
how it sheens the clapper claw.

On the pitch of the concealed
a country ken leads us to a quickened vision,
we see as a horse sees
fleeing from a fire breathing barn.

Taller Tales

"Clapper Rail, Condor, 

Loggerhead Shrike and a lost,  

Whooping Crane, rarer..."

"Stop!" "Did you make the chess team?"

"No, because I am too short."

No Clapper

A Zen Koan

 A bell that has no clapper
can still be rung!

Peal of a Bell

"Ring the bells that still can ring  Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in"
                                                             Leonard Cohen

No sweet sound is ever heard
in the pealing of a broken bell
or when darkness weaves through 
the mist to cast a mystical spell


Nothing in life is granted freely
All things have a tariff price
The devil demands too much
With evil wiles he will entice


Life is covered in stains and flaws
Tatters and crevices abound
Where there is a modicum of light,
darkness will always be found


Hold the clapper in your hand
Let it sound from lip to lip
Be heard before death arrives
sailing the night on a ghost ship

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