Long Atlas Poems
Long Atlas Poems. Below are the most popular long Atlas by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Atlas poems by poem length and keyword.
Despite emotional, financial, grammatical...
any woe that doth assail
whereat early in the
morning until late at night tub bail
sinking craft, not possible
(essentially 24/7), I bewail,
where the fickle finger
of fate stationed me in life,
as if groping in the dark
unfamiliar with Braille
at heart though - directly predicted
on how yours truly did curtail
requisite healthy development of
body, mind, and spirit, yes analogous
to a train tragically did derail
in a near fatal
(scores of years ago) accident
(sorry no gory detail),
yet the impact still sorely felt
(argh...eek...ouch...all pains dovetail
actually more like subduction,
(way more powerful than deleting email),
sans plate tectonics geomorphism process
(a lengthy missive would entail)
full scale explanation, okay
in a figurative nutshell this, male
long (winded) fellow cannot Atlas
shrug off the belief he did fail,
and hopelessly embarked on
impossible mission to secure the Holy Grail
this state of mind linked to many pursuits
that metaphorically did fishtail
many objectives abandoned
finding me to flail
convincing myself at a
tender age incapable NOT gale
lent academically, athletically, avocationally...
thus many personal enterprises
witnessed a scared boy, hence best to hightail
further progress without testing potential,
I often ruminate, how aye did hobnail,
viz self imposed aversion to risk
on par with the most fortified jail
and one circumstance that
expunges burdensome junk mail
occurs basking under spray
as warm water doth prevail
cleansing, kickstarting, and
rejuvenating (albeit temporarily)
though some hours later...
back to choppy waves and torturous sail.
I am angry -
The world brings it out of me,
The constant misery,
It leaves me uneasy, with this feeling,
Of -
Will this end or is pain ongoing,
This world disappoints me,
My people deserve a better ending.
The blood we bleed -
Used to satisfy their greed,
Their need,
To control,
And patrol -
The narrative,
That we deserve it,
That we earned it -
That to kill us,
Is to kill a deadly fungus,
For the simple act,
Of being us,
Of being Black - something they call a curse
I am tired of watching -
Black men slammed down ,
Black blood spilled on the ground,
People standing all around,
With their phones out - they crowd,
And yet no one cares to make a sound -
Instead memes become normal,
And badges become unlawful,
The courts become vocal -
On who is and isn’t lawful,
No guilt, not even a morsel
In the end even the law becomes unlawful,
I am tired of this never-ending cycle
I am always full of grief,
For all Black women,
Who from the moment they are born are victims,
To an unequal system,
Built against are bodies - to kill our children,
Who are not seen as human,
Just ‘dirty criminals’,
Unworthy of equal treatment,
Our pleas for help labelled a hassle,
Instead we are deemed mental,
And stabbed with a needle -
To ignore our claims of dismissal,
And to keep us ‘civil’
The world is unfair,
And only cares,
If the colour of your skin is fair
When you’re with someone
Even nothing becomes gravity
Without someone, space is a vacuum
My Hadean era without you
When Earth had no one to love
I came home to nothing and nobody
That hollow feeling returns without you
I remember when I had someone 24/7
I could watch the news or read a book
Like old times ungrateful of your presence
But, without someone inhabiting a world
Is heavy and hard, empty and consuming
Atlas couldn’t lift this world alone
Waiting for someone to give effort purpose
Without natural selection dreaming of us
How do the old survive partners passed?
How when chicks outgrow their nest?
Someday will I be an old cat under the sun
Solitary in his last dreaming content
Like Gaia ushering in Titans' children
Divorced from someone, I hold up my planet
For someone to inhabit other than me
When they leave, there's a world in solitude
I’ll age alone without companionship
As it was before when we were new
Making my world real as stardust
I’ll become the universe looking in
Without someone’s gravity
Ground me above the graveyard
Till then there's the grind
On late summer evenings,
or upon winters chilled looking-glass sky
reality will change its mask
just for those who seek their place.
For a few magical moments
space and time will unfold its sheltering tent;
and the margins of light and dark move apart
from each other.
A person whose insight is often an out-sight
may discover his or her lane.
That path will not appear,
it is only seen by the lamp of mind
when it searches for its purpose
within an infinitely expanding atlas.
There in that roofless instant may be glimpsed
our onward road and upon it our compass-finding soul
traveling back to where all lanes began.
The wise will breathe in deeply,
gathering a tidal swell of gratitude to them.
The thoughtful will know for certain
that their lane has been mapped and charted,
and that we are all journeying
to a home we never truly left.
On the peaks of destiny where the clouds of promises are torn apart,
I offered you my heart as an atlas of fabulous worlds.
The fervor of our love, a shooting star, dazzling and then, just a pale memory,
Now I remain like a monk in the cell of contemplation, breathing life into the charcoal of the past.
Ah, how the dream that's parted from the soil agonizes me, in times past, in another world,
Where dawns are unspoken flowers and the stars, songs for the wanderers of sublime paths.
I call out to you at twilight when the evening star becomes the mistress of my dreams,
And my heavy eyelids fall like autumn leaves, a whisper of secret in the wind.
But this phantom of yearning takes flight, dissolves into the cold nothingness,
An alphabet of dreams that scatter on the wings of the twilight.
And my soul, famished for your echoes, accentuates the silence with your name,
Descending into the cavity of every longing, gearing up for a new fast.
From my knees, fallen in dust at twilight altars, no saint has answered,
Each prayer, a cry that vanishes into the celestial tear of the night.
They look away when I search in vain for the understanding of my sin,
That simple, inevitable sin: to have loved you, ah, too much.
Seeking comfort, a ray, a divine temptation, a simple burden that never ends,
But years flow, running like water in a stream, melting on the sky of my mornings like candles in the night.
Stranger in my own ode, I wander in memories, where I was in a fairy tale, an unshaken king,
Where tomorrow, I will wander among shadows, chaotically and endlessly searching.
On the foreign road of living being, solitude will be the most faithful brother,
In the finished return to oneself, I await a word from you, a sign, a leap from the great perhaps.
In this desolation that will envelop me, where the ships of my thoughts will break,
I wait, to slide into sleep on the sound of a whisper, soothing a fate that dims within me at night.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
old shelves bow
like old priests
holding up confessions~
stories too heavy to tell
out loud.
cracked leather
spine cracks yawn
paper lungs inhale time
the atlas breathes:
still lost?
insular worlds
stand guard in maple frames:
atlas of seas, botany texts, star charts.
each shelf a compass
pointing elsewhere.
empty spaces where
paperbacks once huddled—
loaned, but never returned.
absence breathes
louder than the stories kept.
new oak shelves wait,
unvarnished and expectant.
Fill me with life, they whisper.
she stacks poetry first—thin spines
bearing thick truths.
Beyond a sandstorm’s gritty veil,
A solitary Bedouin,
Like a ghost in a sea of dunes,
Rides slowly along in the dusk.
The singing of rababah strings
Mimic the cooling evening winds;
Tambourines and flutes sound sadly
From the oasis where he’s bound.
His caravans once wound their ways
From the Atlas to the Tigris,
Trudging across the somber sands
Of a boundless and barren realm.
O Bedouin, where are thy tracks?
No hooves clatter in the wadis;
No trail of rotting camel dung.
O Bedouin, where are thy ways?
O Bedouin does your dirah
Yet teem with goat and camel flocks,
Since you have settled in the towns,
Which you once heaped with scorn and mocked?
O noble herdsman once so proud,
Tightly wrapped up in culture’s shroud,
Are you bottled up like the Djinn;
Forced to serve those who hemmed you in?
The rosy mirage of freedom
Is like a scarlet evening light
That paints the clouds with fiery hopes
Which fade in thralldom to the night.
I forgive the stars sleeping in nothingness,
too afraid to embrace eclipsed spheres…..
In the midst of sweltering gloaming,
I ascend, obscured and tarnished,
like a tainted trinket lost
in the tangerine haze.
For I’ve long been burning
from the coals of stigma~
stamping labels upon troubled torrents,
using malignant metals,
mirroring the fear within lichen eyes,
consumed by ancient
arrows of anguish~
from the era of Hercules and Midas.
But if only they knew, there is
no remedy for the jaded jewels that
refuse to sparkle,
for my purity remains unseen in
growing darkness,
oblivious to the liquid gold
that flickers compassion,
as they see not
beyond their fractured vision.
O distorted colors of the sun,
I’m not your perplexed perspective;
I breathe in hues of humanity,
infused with luminous lavender.
I’m not a Medusa siren luring you
to serpentine rocks;
I swim in chromatic, evanescent streams,
brimming with blissful bioluminescence,
illuminating my way under the midnight sky.
I’m not the suffocating wintry winds
freezing oxygen in your lungs.
While it seems your tongue is silenced
and tied to the twisted strings
of broken instruments,
I ink words of hope and
empathy upon your cynical skin.
I am more than the blind rage
seeping in fury.
I’m not a heartless harpy
screeching into the emptiness~
drenched in despair,
pushing boundaries to
the ends of the earth.
I am Atlas holding the world on
his shoulders,
I am the glistening stars aching
to touch the silver ring around
the jasmine moon.
But life is like a helix fixated
on unconscious bias,
constantly critical of diverse dialects,
watching me struggle to stand
under the weight of pressure,
knees buckling as your assumptions
lacerate me, breaking me down,
burying me in your ruthless riddles.
I feel rumbling dirt beneath
my bleeding feet.
My sarcophagus is rising,
built from your putrid ideals of me.
Losing footing, I refuse to fall into
the seething seas of sorrow.
So remember, I was never
the soulless monster hiding
beneath your ignorant bed.
But I am now the skeletons
etched within the cataclysmic
aftermath of your
shallow misconceptions.
I think a lot about the world surrounding me,
As I get older,
The way I’m the bent product of two straight lines of soldier.
The way Atlas holds up the globe on just his shoulder.
The way the paint grips the canvas like a child holding on to his father.
It's strange; the way I think of the leaves,
As I get older.
But now I’m at an age where I’m thinking of adult concepts and eventuality,
I think about tax season — what what I’ll buy with the money,
I think of overseas — try and learn why people can't reach neutrality,
I think of wars, and blood on beaches,
Fake peace and victory speeches,
I think of the kids whos pain only matches the screeches —
Of tires and tares,
On runaway fares,
Paying tolls on roads I long forgot didn’t fall.
My friend got into an accident this fall.
There he sits — Hospital bed,
Wandering eyes to white walls filled with dread,
Legs broken so he can’t even wander the white halls — wishing he wasn’t stuck in bed.
And my mind is over on the side, wishing I could be dead.
I spent years of my life just wondering —
“Is this the older I get?”
Whither now hunker-shins?
You have a sweet countenance,
a squat grace,
always middle-aged
on the still edge of a speeding sun.
Another swift day has begun
yet here you sit among the traffic
unflinching, a bold
bladder quelling gravity
with low-sprung shanks.
You deep-seated recliner,
standing-pat over upholstered hams.
A lumpy Mona Lisa,
with your come-hither girth
and just a thin membrane
between you and chaos.
Your skin an alien chiaroscuro,
a candle-lit atlas,
and in the cockle and crimp
of your glistening skin
a truculent contrarian gleams
beneath your world-dismissing
Buddha smile.