I was once a Romeo
In gallant quest of romantic love.
For sake of which I wandered far afield,
Past mills and quarries, foundries and farms
Where good folk tend their business
And useful things get done.
As spring gave way to winter,
I found the climate daunting,
With freeze and thaw displacing by upheaval
My belief in happily ever after.
My confirmations became suspicioned,
And my satisfaction curiosified.
My ratifications were soon dutifully amended
And my achievements ambitioned
To a more sensible view of reality.
Having suffered hard time in the punishment block,
Where one’s thoughts then tend
To either stagnate or germinate,
I arrived at this one eternal paradox:
Only fools dare ever fall in love,
While only love can save the foolish from themselves.
Categories:
foundries, allegory, relationship, romantic love,
Form: Blank verse
You find yourself the master of a kingdom.
Sometimes you think it powerful.
Other times you feel its weakness.
But it is yours. Yours! Yours! Yours!
As soon as your consciousness crackled to life,
you began to trace its borders,
learn its features,
build its cottages, and its foundries ... and its walls.
A clear note sounds from a trumpet.
And a herald meekly approaches.
For there is a force beyond reckoning at your border.
A host of white.
A legion of angels.
And you are called to join it...
Your hand twitches.
Your heart shudders.
Your jealous eye wheels about.
It is yours; you cannot surrender it.
You cannot lose sovereignty.
It is yours. Yours! Yours! Yours!
If you flew the banner of light,
your kingdom would be absorbed into an unconquerable, eternal power.
All would be brighter. Better.
Better than it ever could be should you choose to remain alone.
But to fly another flag?
Submit to another will?
That's the last thing. The deepest key. The final card you have to play.
Can you really trust it to another?
Even if you know you stand to gain everything
by giving it away...
13 May 2024
Categories:
foundries, faith, freedom,
Form: Free verse
Honesty is our soul
Our work is coking coal
Midst coarse iron foundries
And steel mill boundaries
We live, love, and labor
Sing, dance, and play tabor...!
Though coal dust pollution,
Finds little dilution
We in England's Midlands
Sleep and wake on coal sands
Bobowler, snout, and shark
Are our chatting hallmark
We've no wealth, but good hearts
We excel in fine arts
Ta-ra-a bit we say
To 'see you later...' day
Though life is hard on us
We live it without fuss...!
28 June 2023
Black Country Communion Poetry Contest
Sponsored by: Robert James Liguori
Categories:
foundries, life, people,
Form: Rhyme
Always unfold to reform,
Constantly matter: fluctuate, fail, and change,
Holy mills and enduring foundries,
A release of epitomes is occurring.
I disclose that it is either you or I,
Or any known or unknown lady, gentleman, or state,
We are viewed as secure, wealthy, artistic,
However, roughly increase epitomes.
The garishness fades,
Oblation determines the disposition of a genius,
Additionally as the efforts of a myth, a saint, or a warrior,
To create his pinnacle.
Every morally exemplary existence,
The units rallied and fled the enduring force,
Its apex is general,
irrespective matter how large or small the total is.
The eternal yearning,
On the view of the worn crests,
newer, taller crests were constructed,
Field and chaos wage struggle,
The exemplar of the old cheer.
Written: June 24, 2022
Categories:
foundries, analogy, community, confusion,
Form: Free verse
Be the crime that should be abets
And I will be the accomplice
Be the case that should be tried
And I will be the jury to defend it
Our love shall be the judge of the trial
Love on this jurisdiction we vowed
We defend it today against hatred
Let me know you like legal maxims
Aphorism not found by many
The words that shows prowess
Like the black law dictionary
To be able to converse well
Before my lord at the Honorable
Gathering of the luminaries
Let's build foundries and havens
To melt down all the trouble and hide
In like metal form stood on the road
Our love that had stand out many trials
Liquid metals remolded into golds
Standing out till time indefinite
Let me be your case darling
© John Chinaka Onyeche
Categories:
foundries, 10th grade, 11th grade,
Form: Crown of Sonnets
Taken inside the bowels
of bassoons,
tropical heat from
swelling bows.
Sweat labors the brow,
full with carnal dissonance.
The throat is lunged
by a beast
veiled in foliage.
Spewed in a mass of
broken pickaxes!
Kicked again into the
thunder of claws!
In flames of foundries
lost.
Becoming Roman Candles
opening across the night.
But drinking cool women
in the thaw of glaciers,
smoothing their oblong stones,
clear cleansed lemon lime oboes.
Naked bodies bloom.
Raced around a corner
at top speed,
the pounding of industry,
a worker in goggles
forging metal.
Without notice,
still mesmerized by fire,
in the belly of percussion,
paused
by a dawning pond of sullen fog,
a brief dream
shrouded in ungrasped riddles.
Sudden conductor realized
in the grass of tones,
using his baton as a machete.
On a distant hill
A shepherd beckons.
Animated, beclouded,
a restless crow in search,
a cinematic fade-out.
Categories:
foundries, analogy, birth, creation, desire,
Form: Personification
Shadow Sprite in rebellion.
Could you not just be a mystery?
Do you have to also pour salt in the solution?
Vinegar and gaul you have, just for the occasion.
You're like a secret admirer from beyond that longs
to be in the shadow of thought.
Sometimes taking the limelight in the corners,
to be captured and sought.
When you are feeling intimate with slow learner's.
Controlling, you confound. Needy? You surround.
Do you want more. What are your bounds?
Your foundries. Your reasons to tease.
How much of me can I afford to give to
the elusive.
You want your freedom, but will not leave me incluesive.
Maybe you flirt so, because you are fickle or untrue.
I don't understand you. I want to know you.
Let me in. What are you afraid of?
?That I will see the real you??Discover the truth?
Categories:
foundries, confusion,
Form: Free verse
TRAM BELL
Steep streets everywhere you played,
Where your football would roll away forever;
And sawdust spilt out of the butcher’s onto the steep sidewalk
Among the feet of the tram queue,
All listening keenly to hear the bell sounding
From the tram which was overdue.
All gazing distantly over the rainy Team Valley
And its mills and foundries turning coal
Into steel bridges and ship hulls
For the steeply entrenched Tyne.
At the bell’s sound, everybody shuffled forward,
Leaving the sawdust footprints
To be washed away in the rain.
Categories:
foundries, life, philosophy, urban,
Form: Imagism
TWO ENGLANDS
Sinewy towns and men with tight muscles
And cloth cap against grey rainy skies
Houses, trees, open spaces blackened
And crowded urgently together
For maximum profit in
Unheard of, unsung places
Salford mills, Gateshead pits, Rotherham foundries
Pouring money into men from Bury St. Edmunds
With wives wearing velvet gloves
To flint churches on Sundays
And taking tea at cricket matches.
Categories:
foundries, history,
Form: Free verse
And the trees
laiden down their dappled hands
or bows of earth bound angelic foundries
where leaves in all their spaning handliness
cast their stained glass impressions of their souls
and dance on through the arms of fairies
their petalled gowns thrown high
will show their faces onto the heavens
to hail the kings that poise,
away above the flowered dances
another world unknown
Categories:
foundries, imagination, nature, visionary,
Form: Personification