Long Atrium Poems
Long Atrium Poems. Below are the most popular long Atrium by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Atrium poems by poem length and keyword.
When love leaves, taking your home and walls,
Let the elements beat you down
No job or acquaintances to shield you
Nothing but waiting as your friend and foe
For a home with love buzzing in the hive
To be a lucky one with honey waiting
Others wait days, some a lifetime, without a roof
You take a little bit of my love where you go
Something I thought couldn’t be taken away
When they drag you to that windowless room
Remember you’re homeward bound
Back to where love never leaves
Where a roof over your head is steadfast
It’s not in the drywall or joists held by nails
Home is the blueprint etched in the atrium
You can start again and again from there
You can rebuild Palestine as a home again
You can make heathen Babylonians pay
With each brick of Jerusalem rising
When love comes, rebuild your home
Preserve your good foundation for love
We’re all nomads waiting for home to return
After eons we still doubt home is where hearts are
When you’re heartsick, know love happened
Even for a second out of your home of a womb
You can be a home to a trimester of hope
When love expels you as broken, build
When no one knocks at your frameless door
Keep your engineered door ajar
An invitation for love’s design
Be a recalcitrant faithful
Waiting for no carpenter
Be a chance for love to rebuild
Unable to imagine attempting the steep descent before me;
I furtively follow a turquoise topped Canadian cabinetmaker
and her Aussie friend discuss a chair lift down?
With a grumble and groan
I realize there must have been a chair lift up!
After one aborted boarding of the lift
Pay, pay, one had to pay!
Where to pay? How to pay!
Ahhhhhhh, here silly Gaijin, pay here!
I grab the circling chair; hold tight to my “go bag”
and clamber to the seat.
And away we go. Echoes of Jackie Gelson!
I watch the wee ones whoosh and bounce by
swinging their stocking covered legs
adjusting their baseball caps “Go Tigers!”
“Take me out to the ball game wheedles its way
into my frontal lobes
The lyrics printed on the wall of a building
beside the train station (in English)
running pell-mell from mind to hum.
The lifted landed me with a running stop.
within an atrium on the top floor of a modern building.
Somewhere?
Oopps.
One glorious, sun-drenched, thirsty December day,
I sat, numbed with the agedness of a visitor, and
Fumed eloquently with joy for the benefit of the
Seine – the ointment of Paris.
Somewhere along the gritty line laid bare by sere weeds
Of winter,
A restless tranter eulogised:
“Ce est Paris!”
From the whistling, grating metro to the navel of
Elevated Eiffel, the tall, metallic maiden,
I saw frantic beauty.
I inhaled the peace of the atrium, sighting
Our Dame....
“Ce est Paris!”
The voice, girly, and with the earnestness
Of chivalrous youth, came again, cold and soft,
Just the way of a sprightly winter.
Turning, I saw Paris in full nakedness of her beauty, like
A priceless fresco hanging from the sky.
“Do you need company?” The tranter anglicised her French.
In one gulp I swallowed the pride of Paris.
“Hmmm!” I grunted, wincing loudly from brio,
Counting my woes should I plod away to the red light areas,
“Give me Shakespeare and Company”.
Black panther
Striped tiger;
Stray cats challenge
~~~~~~~~~
Takeaway meal
Fast food dinner;
Family feast
~~~~~~~~~
Street bazaar
New offerings greet;
Dazzling array
~~~~~~~~~
Crowded mall
Strangers congregate;
Celebrities entertain
~~~~~~~~~
Busy walkway crowd
Strange faces meet;
Loneliness loiters
~~~~~~~~~
Tired old couple
Sun drenched faces;
Hair greying with late bus
~~~~~~~~~
Child care centre
Noisy kids mingling;
Care-giver disciplines
~~~~~~~~~
Hotel atrium
Tourist traffic brisk;
Coming and going
~~~~~~~~~
Supermarket shelves
Global brands assemble;
Mini United Nations
~~~~~~~~~
Morning kung-fu
Martial arts dance;
Healthy self-defense
~~~~~~~~~
Mirror image peeps
Self-realization stare;
Grey hair and wrinkles
~~~~~~~~~
Leon Enriquez
31 August 2014
Singapore
Fantasy Library
Xanadu was embraced with philodendron,
Palace-like architecture, the plant went on,
and on, weaved its way around the corridor
Light luminated thru high ceilings of grandeur
As I entered the bookstore’s library atrium,
A quick lesson was gifted me on consortium
Books stacked in no discernable sequence,
encouraging readers, inviting intuitive, for instance
Systems Dewey and the congress classification,
outdated, I used the browse method simulation
Running my fingers across ridged book spines,
By published authors with classic story lines
Eyeballing velveteen varieties of book covers
Sneaking-peeks at blurbs for fantasy lovers
Sashayed my way to Banned and Challenged Books,
in the clutches of pop-up trendy chic-cozy nooks
Skimmed Ann Frank’s The Diary Of A Young Girl,
and turned satin gold-leaf edge pages of Rebecca,
gilded and burnished 24k, a gothic romance unfurled
Consortium—The new call # will begin with a 4-digit finder number. No more decimals, no more books on the same topic in several sections of the collection, or even the same title on two different places on the same shelf. Spine labels will use language of your choice and color coding. Browse your collection without having to search for a librarian
Saints, gargoyles, Kings and imps,
mix, match and mingle.
The beatific and the ogres
hang over slate roofs
like drunks at closing-time.
The stone-masons were subversives,
they must have drunk on the job,
yet Remigius de Fécamp, Bishop Alexander,
and St Hugh of Lincoln
all signed off on this unholy riot.
Fire and earthquakes only encouraged
more irreverent flamboyancy.
Gradually `Mary Mother' took over the house
sweeping granite spiders out of the atrium,
boxing the ears of errant goblins,
yet much medieval and Gothic dangle remain.
The sheer effrontery of it all,
all those capricious aberrations,
lead us to believe, not so much in God,
but the immensity of our
rebellious and disorderly minds.
OLD AND NEW 1 : CIRCUS
Giraffe on anxious heels
bought in Sandton, toddle
along with intense haste
a dream point unheard
lipstick smudges, mascara
leaks of AK47 dust she rifled
Bullfrog madly croaks
vying for a place in a stagnant
pool, scoffing brandied chocolate
pinched nerves, heart infested
throat on a tightrope
Is the net below safe ?
Doe dark-eyed, hips to sink
into, marbled beauty stuck
in corner stage believing that
the circle offered freedom, unable
to move for want of a thatched
roofed house, chrysanthemumed
Lions and lionesses rounded pillars
new regal maned performers
late for debate, entrance timed
for a precise shapely attack
on buck across the atrium who
practiced prances early morning
In the middle stood Pharaoh
with invisible crook and flail
a sleek panther serpent eyed
veils of disinterest, ears on end
at plebs in the arena, acts like
phantoms danced along a
smooth mental screen
Fidget they would on
maroon re-upholstered
benches over which not
even Bach could flow
mints popping pockets
On the horizon they
disappeared into an African
circus becoming marula trees
on our border
©GhairoDanielsPoetry1996
The young generation, who believe in dissolution,
promulgating the manifesto
“tradition is the grave of the banality,
only solecism is the quickening of new life…”
yell upholding a flag similar to a bad check
which is unable to secure the needed guarantee for the debt.
They are sycophantic speculators hopping on the bandwagon
of the time, they are nothing but a product of a certain moment
of the swinging pendulum, their unfounded thought changes in consonance with the direction and the amplitude of the pendulum.
Although they think highly of themselves,
they assert themselves as the forerunner of the times,
actually, they are unbridled reckless colts jumping, hopping,
and running blindly in the wilderness.
They consider heteronomy as a shackle,
they, therefore, rush to a smithy and heat the shackles to cut it off,
they insist upon autonomy as the beat of the heart,
they, therefore, lay on the cold operating table to cut it open
to see the inside of the heart bearing an excruciating pain
but they found it full of red and blue blood
clotted in two atrium and two ventricles, the blood
contaminated with filthy and turbid human minds
which carried on from generations of generations
of past unchanged.
They try to ascend their thoughts, nonetheless,
above the traditional ones, it’s nothing more than
a word game, a disgusting prank.
Are they mad? Though they cannot even jump
nor have wings, they try to fly,
ah, poor generation, ill, crooked, lost,
who were not even touched by a drop of Medusa’s
poisonous blood, flap wings imitating Pegasus about to fly.
I sip compliance from a cardboard cup. Tight fine steel lines, hoist five lifelike life sized paper mache white swans. The birds seem to wing from sunlit atrium up and over an oak railing to the mezzanine. Dazzling beneath skylights, they depict ascent, flap, glide, brake and then descent towards wrought iron tables. They mimic our trek from mall entry up the escalator to feast at the food court. I sit alone at the railing, gliding swan overhead, and pretend to eye my phone. Today I secretly study humans. Food court stuffed with youthful staff, bargain hunters, transit transfers, mobility scooters, mothers, babies, bags, phones, the braggadocio of men meeting, gaunt faces of the needy. Bodies milling, streaming, yearning. The bubbling cocktail of pop rock, chit chat galore, languages, slanguages, giggles, and that one guy yelling. The carnal essence of commercial cookery. Unspoken competition for tables, at times nearly a blood sport. Each of us tiptoeing through our daily hopscotch. Only children wonder at the swans. Do mall swans search for lost wetlands, or do they strain to join us? Mythology has it that swans shift between human and avian form. The enchantment of Tchaikovsky’s swan, princess by night pirouettes into swan by day. In the wild, sudden bright white, raucous landing, huge bold birds calling, splashing power and grace. I wish we each burst into swan. But flight feathers do not anchor to my bones, nor contour feathers pierce my skin. I vow to visit the wild ones, and leave.
published in "Unbroken" 2025
Capsizing the Costa Concordia
Divers wreathe silently through
the submerged corridors of a
140,000-ton wreck. Little fish
dark haphazardly through
the juxtaposition of tilted ballroom,
granite bars fixed in place.
Black waters lit green by headlamps
provide a surreal spotlight
for a loveseat drifting by
A vase of Chinese dollar plants poised delicately
on a marble counter.
Across the underwater tomb,
toppled chairs, tumbled together,
wait patiently to be repositioned
outside the dance floor.
There was nothing graceful about the dramatic demise
of this giantess,
listing to her death.
She was fatally wounded, being coaxed
too closely to the coast.
A hidden reef stood ground to gore
a 70ft gash, portside.
There was the moaning of mangled metal,
the shrieking of splitting steel,
as dark torrents were unleashed into her belly,
extinguishing her light.
“Go back to your cabins!”
and corridors flooded
“Go back to your cabins!”
and pumps failed.
“Captain! The passengers are making their own way to the lifeboats!”
echoes pointlessly through the abandoned bridge.
“Vada a bordo, cazzo!”
The Coast Guard thunders across dark waters
and the captain is stealing into his own lifeboat
to listen from the safety of shore.
Listening to the chaos,
interrupted by the agonized silence of passengers
too terrified to scream.
They hold their breath and try to calm each other
in the absence of authority.
“Vada a bordo, cazzo!”
But it’s dark, he pleads, and I can’t see anything...
A rope ladder is flung over the bow,
drowning passengers slinging, and
crawling crablike to Coast Guard boats
as the ship sinks to her side,
gripping 37 passengers in a horrifying embrace.
Scuba clad stewards of the dead
open the possessive clutch
of an atrium elevator
to extract bodies
protectively closed and sealed
in a grisly pantomime of protection.
The remains of the deceased
are floated to the light
to break the surface one last time.
The Costa Concordia shudders heavily,
sliding into her death repose.