Fossilised Poems | Examples

Grief

I remember the grief in Samuel
when Saul failed,
like the grief in Nile
when blood crept into it —
just like it creeps into the bones of
this earth.

The rage in grief is distant but distinct,
escorted by bits of frozen nuts
and wizened grains of desert sand,
white assembly of killing spectres in
a background of black eclipse with
lunar talons
and swords of claws
and jars of cold tears.

Oh, how Samuel grieved for Saul!

The mourning is immense . . .

Sempervirence fossilised
along abbeys forayed with hot silt
and Dane guns of lewd hunters

Pulsations and acrid fever,
with the disease of camels, are frequented by
a recrudescence of the mastodon,
In liaison with his extended kinsmen the dinosaurs.

We are livid with mourning,
for the soul of a toothless one
gone from us
this grey day of elegy
and season of potent grief.

Fetters exist, and persist, swinging in
our faces like treasures of hell
where we hear that bug-ridden mats
are spread for us;

there, chants of elegy
hoot,
and black furnaces boil
and smelt
the repast we are to devour.

Romantic or Sexual Love

Romantic or Sexual Love

Romantic or 
sexual love produces 
yellow clear fossilised resin utilised in 
jewellery.

Earth Interval

     Typecast pivot rips past apart
     Scars inflicted by the furnace 
     Scatter derma with war stars
     Astronomy faraway magnifies 
     Little shards of light filaments
     Filtered shadow breaks brittle 
     

     Tucked amongst terra, tubers
     Crowd needy until seeker turns
     Space ahead academy shunned
     Parallel gripped group tightens 
     Outrage stoops, begger’s plight 
     Entombed below fossilised earth

 
     Dust skull sockets consumed
     Grazing on ash grain garbage
     Gamma ray gardener unfazed
     Leans into lambent movement 
     Moonbeam harvest penetrates
     Microscopic split creates twins


     Mind unbound by tribulations
     Scales ether, nova knowledge 
     Constellation inured in growth 
     Reaches for chaos, apex prime
     Shivers bravely beyond Pluto
     Fragility faces future undiluted





      First of October 
        Flying Over

Perpetual Motion

A live T-Rex, but should I stand and fight
It’s foul breath and it’s drool made me take flight
I just couldn’t bear
That if I stayed there 
I’d be forevermore a coprolite


[Coprolite = Fossilised Dino Poop]

6 November 2022
Contest: A Funny Limerick - Make Me Laugh
Sponsor: Tania Kitchin

Big Foot

Gigantic footprints there on the beach
So big that a dozen men could stand in each
Yet what made these footprints did not simply stand 
But went every which way all over the sand
The emperor came and because he was wise
He noticed the footprints were not fossilised
Nor in a straight line for they’re trod all about
He asks for some quiet to figure it out
And things become clear when he talks again
Is Gulliver practicing waltz again?

Aq50

They say that any dream is organised around a wish.
That a dream can often be the fulfilment of a wish.
Last night I dreamt.  I dreamt that we were gone.

Palaeontologists declared, after
years of painstaking escavation
that remains found tamped,
under a long dried sea were
fibres of make believe, washed
to the oceans floor from the faces
of a corralled people driven down
the trails of unbridled emotion;

Complicity secreted, streamed along
sensory tributaries scoured deep
by generation of tears, fossilised
into masks fated to be held up in
white coated Neuro-typical wonder,
so called evidence of genetically
unmodified strangers never enabled
to root in unyielding earth.

A dream can also be organised around a fear.
Last night I dreamt.  I dreamt that we were gone.
Proof of my fear that tolerance, for us, would come too late?

Water

life without water
could not ever be sustained
thank the spring showers

water cascades... rain
distilled... early morning dew
winter confetti

no water... no frogs
deathly silence... then it rained
the sound of splashes

all life dependent
some dance for water... it rains
sustaining splashes

the shape of water
drips in profusion... shapes rain
land submerged... flooding

the shape of water
precipitation... shapes rain
land submerged... flooding

water... anhydrous
nature now fickle... confused
life... it has no choice

clean water... yes clean
stop polluting... life's dying
each spring... disasters

LIFE
oceans...earth's mirrors
past images... memorised
of life... fossilised ...

Anc and Joe Slovo

ANC and Joe Slovo  

ANC took on the white -run system and won, we hoped 
for a new free country an apartheid- free land
The “Rainbow Nation sprung to life reconciliation, dancing
in the streets, which have become crime-ridden by now.
But the ANC cannot rule forever, and it is fossilised
And has of lately written history that leaves out many.
Indian and white people who helped to end apartheid 
Are being pushed aside like it was only a black affair.
Do you remember Joe Slovo and fought for a free Africa
For forty years, ah, but, he was white and a Jew, he gave
All he had for the cause, but now slowly like many Indians
Are pushed into the background.
I think the leadership ANC have been corrupted it will sink
To the level of Zimbabwe, they broke their promise to help
Soweto, but it is still there, Joe Slovo is no more.

I see it is difficult to get American readers to take an interest in
something that is not about the USA and sugar-coated love stories
"house on the Prairie stuff"

Anc and Joe Slovo

ANC and Joe Slovo  

ANC took on the white-run system and won, we hoped 
for a new free country an apartheid-free land
The “Rainbow Nation sprung to life reconciliation, dancing
in the streets, which have become crime-ridden by now.
But the ANC cannot rule forever, and it is fossilised
And has of lately written history that leaves out many.
Indian and white people who helped to end apartheid 
Are being pushed aside like it was only a black affair.
Do you remember Joe Slovo and fought for a free Africa
For forty years, ah, but, he was white and a Jew, he gave
All he had for the cause, but now slowly like many Indians
Are pushed into the background.
I think the leadership ANC have been corrupted it will sink
To the level of Zimbabwe, they broke their promise to help
Soweto, but it is still there, Joe Slovo is no more.

Sahara Dreams

Time crystallised into every golden grain 
Fine as the flakes off my skin 
For a thousand years void of rain
Rising to Rah with the slope of the dunes

Crocodile tears fill the Nile
For they flourish for a thousand miles
To nourish – with sacrifice - Pharaoh in his tomb 
Then deposit the salt off your back into the desert storm

In the shade of a hundred degrees of sun
Chiselled into a hieroglyphic sign 
Sahara dreams rose with the pyramids of Giza
Ensured to succeed under the Sphinx’s gaze 

Carried on the back of camels
To churn their milk into caramel
The sands hide a bullion of molten gold
A haunted dynasty were souls are fossilised into a mould

Under the crack of the whiplash
The God’s sweat pores brimming a mirage
To align boulders with the sunspot in agonising screams
Pharaoh now rests for eternity in his Sahara dreams



31-07-2015
Thabang Jan Ngoma

Sponsor: John lawless
Contest Name: How Hot Was It!!!

A Timely Dig

The worst has yet to come,digging up fossilised feelings of mammoth proportion which way a ton,years of emotion wraped in lares of flesh an dirt,exhumed over a billion century's of prehistoric pain and hurt.

The Centre of Love

In the southern hemisphere
At the tip of the eastern hemisphere
Upside down, opposite from most around the world
To find your true location I point to the ground
Past the molten magma and the fossilised death
We meet in the centre of the earth

Our connection is the core
The intense heat we glow
The poetry we pen
The artistry we burn

Inspired by: 
PoetrySoup

Canaries In a Mine

Kisses from insolvent grave,
Stole the dying breath away
So dizzyingly fast,
It escaped as fleeting vapour;
The hackles bristled, raised,
Clouds of ink on sunny days,
As scratching quills engraved 
Upon white paper

Who among the sprawl could feel
If it was or wasn’t real,
The secret of the dream
Beyond the ruffle of the curtain?
Beggar soup and furtive fate 
And how long we wait and wait,
Until all that yet may be,
Remains uncertain.

Someone gasped but never said
If the halos ‘round the head
Needed either polishing 
Or a surreptitious breaking,
I don’t at length suppose 
That at the naming of the rose,
The parents knew the thorns
Would be the making.

And like canaries in a mine
We are running out of time,
So dizzyingly fast
We are encroached by our inactions;
All we were and were not told,
Fossilised by freezing cold,
And all that was or passes by
Were scant distractions.

Eventide

Brushed with the languorous strokes of sunset
  The landscape touched by a sinewy fire,
Breathing beneath the purple haze sky
  As electrical dusk tugs molecular wire.

Bats from the caverns jerk black on thermals,
  Bouncing their radar off structures and ground,
Charred blots of rag flap through the ether,
  Guided in following echoes of sound.

Lights gleaming yellow in dullish convection,
  Pale at the windows of ramshackle bars,
Shadows drop slowly in gutters and roadways
  Silhouette snowfalls burying cars.

On the spire of the church a weathervane creaks,
  Fossilised cockerel of iron and age,
Pointing to something that lay in the distance,
  Something to which light could no more engage?

Eventide comes with a lonely delivery,
  The cloak of atonement spread onto the day
As the hours that burned fade into the past
  And scenes that once anchored have drifted away.

The Last Kiss

The last kiss is blown 
into the Sanskrit winds, 
passing indecipherably, 
planted on the sky. 
All that is discerned 
are emotions bared therein 
the calm of clock towers fossilised 
to claim what hurries by. 

So time sinks feet in instants 
of merciful prayer, 
locking down the shoulders 
bowed in reverent grief. 
Yet the smile her memory carves 
on the stone entreated lips 
pays homage to sweet life 
stolen by a jackdaw thief. 

The last kiss is made 
into the fade of day 
and shimmers in remembrance 
of a beauty without taint. 
That she catches it with laughing eyes 
and wipes the tears away, 
and conveys it to the heavens
to bestow upon a saint.

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