Gullies Poems | Examples

The Road Up

The Road Up

The road up
hugs the side of a hill 
and steep slopes fall 
into dark gullies far below. 
In places, tree trunks still wear 
the blackened scars of past fires.
Further up, you enter a long archway
of shade, trees are taller and tower 
in full height above the road - 
ferns wave their extended fronds
as you pass - long ribbons of bark
hang down through the low cloud.
The air is damp and cold
with high country breath.
You stop, leave the car and walk
a little way into the forest.

All is quiet except for muted
forest sounds playing out 
in a soft chorus on the edges
of your hearing. There are times
when you feel a sense of arrival,
that all the pathways
of your life have led to here.
No grand finale waits to mark 
the moment, just an indifference 
as if you were only ever a part
of a greater whole, the realisation
that you are not alone 
but lost sometimes 
in one of the many rooms 
of your home.

Moon

Moon, why do you taunt me?
Your haunting glow consumes all I am.
I howl at your feet as you hang majestic
from a diamante sky
I am breathless, shackled to the earth as I gaze at your beauty, your shape centred in a clustered jewel.
Your children sparkle in sibling frame.
My heart is lost, no other will pacify the aching wound that protrudes from my chest
My healing is long and painful. Will sanity return? One day, maybe tomorrow?
You stole my dream, ripped into nocturnal misery as the ghosts pose in silent masks.
Regret stirs, clinging to the winds of a toxic flame.
Beguiling, my eyes burn as sunrise shapes its day,
Tender strands of light peak through the gullies and allies of my being.
Romance still forms within me, a harmonic tune that whistles with the easterly breeze, but this tranquil sea stirs madness. Fire will again light this soul once regret has done its worst and left my shadow.
Moon, never leave, be my secret no more, rejoice not weigh me down and, I will love you forever.

Hindered Emotions

Intense suffrage ,malice behaved 
while a sullen energy, balanced 
upon, broad shoulders ,of pure 
angst, I'd remember, your tainted
humongous shift, creating wrath 

bestowed, so overtime, capturing 
long days and long nights. you'd 
yet to explore, breathing was rather
optional, I suppose, catering, to the 
sighing minds, painstaking yesteryears

morbidly crafted, to fit perfectly, into
your self righteous, gullies of satisfying
graveness, you portrayed, as self worth
I was your muse, your masterpiece unveiled
amidst tattered, tantrums colorful hues

covenanting bright beacons, blinding lights
that danced throughout, a sinking fate
raptured, completely raptured, by charm
hence a certain, tolerance for grace hidden
beneath cold, noir divine, comical mischief

Phases

Phases

 rainstorm, thunderbolt
in the desert
umbrella promise to protect us betrayed
a flash flood washed away our treasury empty – 
into capital banks of self, less of -ish democrats.

lost, disillusioned
in the forest
broom’s vow to clean up and lead us to paradise
turned messy and blood gullies trail
the paths of the delusive retro-, I mean pro- gressives.

anxious, desperate
we must awake, wait for the second or first coming
of either the rhetorician or the labourer!

The House

He had not dwelt there long,
he was a tenant
a traveler.

The stone walls carried no sound
to the outside,
but on the inside
every movement and whisper
was transmitted and amplified
through a matrix of fluting's,
gullies, pipes, and vents, etched
into the leaden masonry.

His room was a dry-walled cube.
He lived there quietly,
for even the closing of a drawer
or the tinkle of glass upon glass
seemed clamorous. The sounds
magnified.

He had not seen the other rooms,
the other tenants.
He had heard footsteps,
shuffling movements,
groans,
toilets flushing,
close sotto voce conversations
between lips and ears,
doors slamming.

After only days he moved on,
closing the thick front door
softly behind him.

Into the city street he stepped.
No one looked at him,
no one seemed to see him.
Afraid that he was alone in this
unknown world,
he tuned back to the house
but alas
it was no longer there.

A Dying Winter

The rain stopped,
Heavy bank of clouds remained,
Afternoon was dark until dusk,
No light to draw back the day,
A strong frost shock,
Gripping the land,

Unrelenting,
The trees fell silent,
Along the gullies and wet ditches,
A faint mist was rising,
Winter's last stand against spring,
The temperature descended,

The wood tightened against the cork,
As if the wasted wood might snap of the ground,
A fine crack froze over the dew pond,
The circle of the ice was finally closed.

Poem To Your Incredible Indecifrable Eyes

Abyssal, abysmal, profound,
superficial, light, evident,
your eyes change color...
Cracks, gaps, ruptures,
labyrinths, anguishes, throat
your eyes confine my desires...
Precipices, cliffs, gullies
schisms, contractions, insights
your eyes sometimes interact...
Lovers, flirts, friends,
I forgive all this because
I love your eyes
and you... !

Berkshire Stream

Born of snow on Berkshire Mountain,
winter’s beauty lies a sleeping.
Snow on snow in layers piling
Kept in place by nature’s freezer 

When the voice of springtime whispers,
days are longer, air grows warmer.
Sleeping beauty starts her stirring,
melting, moving, freely flowing.

Berkshire weeping tears of labor,
water trickles through the channels,
left by previous birthed streamlets.
Merging, melding, gently, gliding.

First a trickle, weak and feeble.
Then like ski jets swiftly skimming,
over rocks and fallen timber,
downward dashing, gullies, gashing.

When the thunder starts to rumble,
And the clouds are rent asunder.
Raindrops pour as pails of water,
Causing stream to roar and thunder.
 
After months of Berkshire weeping,
Like a broken faucet flowing,
tears abate, the crying ceases.
Summer’s ending, streambed drying.

Today

A day has come
because God brought it forth.
Creation reveals his 
diamond-like worth
even though some people
fail to see.
Green blades of grass grow to cover the
hillside, 
I wonder
just what is the purpose of these.
Kittens, stay safe 
let your mom go explore.  
Maybe later you'll join her, but
not before your eyes can be seen. 
On the other side of the hill, a
pasture complete with 
quality meat.  A grass-fed cow
roams the gullies calling out to her calf. Enters the scene, a
steed with a cowboy atop.
This day surely will end 
under skies tinged with warmth.  A
veritable display of fireworks as the 
weary sun collapses to bed. 
Xerox this day, repeat again and again.
Yes, it finds me happy, perhaps I've found some
zen.

Moorland Path

The path between myself and the distant man 
twists and turns. There are gullies and ridges
hags and troughs, a hoary dusk.

We are converging. He has my hat and clothes, 
my resemblance.

Once I miscalculated;
I was out on the trackless moors too late, 
darkness fell
I had to lose myself to find myself.

The figure is waving, not in greeting but warning.
As we draw nearer the sky darkens,
suddenly he is gone.

Later I look from a dark window and wonder 
which of us came home?

The Waterfall An English Sonnet

Water flowing downward from the hilltop
Meandering through gullies and the fell
Even bigger mountains for the backdrop
Where it really starts so hard to tell

Reaching a low cliff it becomes airborne
And plunges to the pool not far below
Down there in amongst the thriving buckhorn
Where fish live in the depths and lesser flow

Colours dance in spray that rises swirling
And wetting all the plants for yards around
Then duck and dive, and begin the twirling
Accompanied by crashing water sound

The strength of nature has me in its hold
A power that has been since time untold

January 31 2020

I am struggling a bit here, totally new to me. If I did not get it, so be it. I would like a hint where I went wrong

Approaching the Rockies

My quest to walk across the nation,
like vaunted pioneers of old,
started in Maine six months ago,
post vlogs of my progress for folks.

I am deep in Wyoming now,
and I’m on my third pair of shoes,
brown grass beneath, cropped by cattle,
in front the prairie meets its end.

It’s a spread of foot-hills at first,
low and slashed by gullies, canyons,
their slopes half-forest, half-open,
perfect space for elk to graze.

Cannot see any up there now,
though a few buzzards wheel about,
behind them loom big, granite waves,
frozen forever into peaks.

Not the first to just stand and stare,
nor am I the last, I suspect.
There are goats up there, snowy white,
and grizzled bruins, huge and brown.

Mulies with their tall, forked antlers,
and charging, spiral-horned sheep,
darting amidst blazes of aspen,
near soldier-strait ponderosas…

Snow still clings on, up near the crests,
I don’t think it will ever leave.
Nearby, a decrepit wagon,
old wood bleached by endless sun.

Is it a relic of the past?
Or decoration of today?
Who knows, but its path ended here,
mine continues, right through the peaks.

To Be Ancient

To Be Ancient

It is good to be ancient, 
As with a vintage of the eternal red, 
Sealed for the duration with an aged English cork.
Now youthful impulses hold no sway in the empty offing.
I recall them all, as I have remembered certain dreams all my life,
Undead ghosts from distant tree-lined shores in time, 
Strolling languorously in a marshy fetid fog; 
Their ancient faces I remember caressing,
Their yearning eyes and doubting smiles I recall seeing,
And the supple lips of some I can still feel, recalling,
The passionate interspersed minutes of unreal time, 
Secretly spent, behind concealing curtains and ascending ivy vines,
With no real words of crystalline memory being uttered or heard.
And now, returning from wet membranes hidden insidiously,
Inside the watery swooshing gullies inside my brain, 
Old friends and lovers appear again, like in an old film,
As they meander an astonished ancient avenue in single file.
Look at these dead pale girls here!
Girls who once spiraled to the stars in the darkness!
Now they tiptoe by my front window, perfume-scented,
Seeking their simple tombstones in the far graveyard.

The Texts Were Horrible

The texts were horrible, vile, and mean.
They were from the kind of person none of us had ever seen.
They were graphic, and horrible, a picture came that was crude.
We all could guess who sent photos of themselves in the nude.
 
We had suspicions, and we had them for quite a while
About these texts, so horribly awful and vile.
We began to congregate, and we whispered about him and his sad little life.
Determined to make sorry and horrible his weirdness, we were mean to his wife.
 
We shunned them unmercifully and put our noses way up high.
We wished them an awful future, one hoped they would die.
We were horrible, and angry, and we became bullies.
Our minds threw them in dungeons, stocks, locks, jail cells and gullies.
 
We were angry and awful for a year and a day.
Confident it was him, not caring what he had to say.
We were the avid, upright accusers, and we did not play.
Many of us were shamed to our core, when we found out today
That it was not him at all, but one of the accusers, a man quiet and meek,
A silent monster, who had riled us, whose forgiveness we did not have to seek.

Desert Paint

The two-lane road stretches
through a shimmering glaze
to the horizon, passing
smokestacks of mesas spewing
clay and maize in vaporous mass.

I hear the sibylline whisper of rain 
through emerald brush
and serpentine hiss
of slithering sand.
The acrid smell permeates
evergreen and purple sage,
carries the aroma
with fine dust.

I point my thumb west,
a prayer for a willing traveler
to whisk me away 
from the cumulative downpour
when the desert paint 
floods umber in the gullies.

• Short Gullies Poems
• Famous Gullies Poems
• Best Gullies Poems
• Read Gullies Poems
• Long Gullies Poems
• Gullies Quotes