Long Cliffside Poems
Long Cliffside Poems. Below are the most popular long Cliffside by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Cliffside poems by poem length and keyword.
Crow (Blackus Menacingus)
large, clever and a scavenger
found in gardens where there’s trees
good at puzzles, can be trained
likes TV shows about celebrities
Blackbird (Blackus Not-A-Pirateus)
common gardeners friend is he
perched on the handle of a spade
looking out for bugs and worms
went on a holiday to Adelaide
Thrush (Not-The-Itchyus Sortus)
light brown plumage with spotted front
easily identifiable medium bird
known for a complex, tuneful song
makes jam tarts with lemon curd
Starling (Impressiveus In-A-Large-Flockus)
iridescent all year bird
feathers change colour in the sun
swarms in huge numbers then
off to the pub for rowdy fun
Wren (Smallus Sticky-Uppy-Tailus)
one of the tiniest garden birds
surprisingly loud and piercing voice
small, round body, quick and gone
to play boardgames and other toys
Puffin (Brightus Beakus)
black and white with colourful bill
dives the water for its food
coastal, cliffside, craggy nest
sends birthday cards that are very rude
The Trembling Best
I lay my heart upon the altar of the daily, grinding task,
Trying to be everything that the world and heavens ask.
I pour out every ounce of will, I stretch the tether thin,
Fighting back the hollow voice that whispers from within.
I give the best I have to give, with shaking, tired hands,
Tilling soil that feels like ash across the desert lands.
But even as I labor, there’s a phantom at my side,
A shadow born of all the times my spirit had to hide.
I am haunted by the "not enough," the fear I’ll miss the mark,
A flicker of uncertainty that shivers in the dark.
I wonder if they see the seams, the cracks within the mold,
The shivering of a person who is trying to be bold.
It’s an aching, heavy burden to be trying with your all,
While waiting for the gravity that dictates you must fall.
I second-guess the kindness and I over-read the stare,
Searching for a judgment in the very literal air.
I am a builder on a cliffside, working through the gale,
Terrified that everything I touch is bound to fail.
Yet I keep the hammer moving, and I keep the vision true,
Even when the doubt is thick and hides the open blue.
For there is a quiet courage in the person who persists,
While fighting through the inner fog and the psychological mists.
My best may feel like glass today, fragile, sharp, and clear,
But I’m standing in the furnace, and I’m working through the fear.
I’ll offer up this effort, though it’s wrapped in worry's chain,
And trust that God can see the gold beneath the mental strain.
I am insecure and striving, I am weary and I’m real—
A soul that’s learning how to trust the very things I feel.
The blue waves smack the shore
Outlined by the oaken door.
Stand beside the cypress tree
Throw your arms out to the sea
On a mossy cliffside you can spy
The wheeling curlew, hear it cry.
Smell the cedar in the grove
See grass wave where rover's rove.
Hear the sea gull, feel the wild
White sails on silver, be beguiled.
So far from madness of the city
Cell phone rings, no longer free.
You run inside the cottage door
Find your backpack on the floor
Dig the phone out, as it plays
A ringtone singing "yesterday"
Its Chase bank, with a suspect charge
Ten thousand, that's awful large.
Text message comes from your landlord
Rats with fleas came in a horde
Your boss says he's needs you back soon
Work has come like a monsoon.
You leave the cottage bitterly
But you can't eat the scenery:
Can't throw the cell phone in the sea.
At least you have the memory...
*Image of Cherokee Piper, Four-seater single engine by Wilkie.
Lifetime Get-A-Way, A Survivors Tale
It is nineteen-eighty new years eve in less than two days,
that said--this turned a fourteener syllabic lined poem,
fourteener set of rhyming-lined poems--to paraphrase,
I had worked with his wife long before I got to know him.
Now Ruby carried on but stayed in the same line of work.
We kept in touch ever since I purchased her dad's cabin.
She said her ardent pilot spouse needed an hourly perk.
As he already owned the plane we just need some gas in.
Fundamentally, Alan purchased, Cherokee Piper,
Four-seater single engine without a pilot license,
Probable in California, but naught a car ... harder,
He's flying days only, that induces a lot of sense?
Our itinerary is, Livermore, California,
to Barstow, California--a hole, fill-up only then,
The Grand Canyon to Ruby's hotel chain, euphoria,
Cliffside cabin, wine & dine and film at Rangers station.
Phoenix, Alan's cop friend drove us to Scottsdale to my Suite
Hilton, north to a western town, rode a stagecoach, ad-lib
gunfighter, now west side Phoenix restaurant, Pinnacle's meet
New Year's Eve, no fireworks, just booze and b.b.q. rib bib
Sedona, Hopi purchased--slight loop, Meteor Crater,
Skirted unique Monument Valley, Vegas as nightfalls,
Hotel gratis tix-Music Man w/Dick Van Dyke, and dinner,
Livermore, seven p.m., sun greets us ... S.F. bay crawls.
The drive to my San Francisco home, bout a hundred miles,
The plane gas bill arrived little under nine hundred bucks,
Never stepped on a wing to board a plane--at me, Dick smiles,
Grand, Sedona, Monument, Vegas, Phoenix, again, *shucks!
2022 January 29
*9th Place*
MY FAVORITE VACATION IN RHYME
~~L MILTON HANKINS: Judged 2022 February 04
*Held hopes but it never happened again as we all moved on in life.
I lost my ability to think for myself
As I sat atop the Church of Santa Maria de Idris
Carved into the cliffside while I sat sewn into its ridges
I had spent the former sun’s passage wandering the City of Stones
The hours loosened themselves as I passed beneath canopies of trailing vines
Draped over blanched bricks steeped
In shades of beige-and-brown-and-orange-and-grey
Vestiges of the past worn
Down each wall, each path
Woodwinds whistle and beckon me from the distance
But my anticipation allows no acquittance
I remain doggedly beholden to
The eventual night that promised to keep me alone
I lie in the sky yet remain fastened to the earth
My back chiseled by the jagged rock I chose as my resting place
My head suspended beyond its edge
So that the stars sleep beneath me and the city
Yellowed by the languor of its dim-lit paths
Hangs in the balance of our sweet nothingness
Zig-zagging-every-which-way
Like an I Spy book brought suddenly to life
Can you spot the soul in a world you know possesses none?
I speak of this not with any great anguish
But with a peculiar sense of contentment
One that has itself become the source of my gravest grief
For its mere existence renders mine worthless
I strain to reach into the dimness of memory
I blacken my mind to conjure my darkest fears
I even invite you into my mind
Dressed in every shade of my maladjustment
But none can hold a candle to the sight that lies before me
Along with the sharp ache impressed on my back
For the first time, physicality exceeds my once-thought-bottomless-imagination
And my mind affords me no liberation
Though I have always sought after some chimerical escape
Only here do I realize that such elusion is but another passage through delusion
And not the good kind
The kind that leaves me feeling childish and naive
As though in leaving I had mistaken distance for transcendence
Believing myself to be rising above it all
When all along I had been looking at the whole world upside down
The wisdom of God is his secrets
the glory of men to seek them out
but until he understands his childhood
he will cloud insight with his doubt
With our faith we can move mountains
overcome every obstacle in our road
can leap like the ibex every cliffside
and reach the gold of the motherlode
You have placed within inspiration
and in our minds to reach for stars
the diversity in planes of learning
until we make them completely ours
I bow before your majestic truths
laws of the cosmos contains no lies
the direction of its course is fixed
its movements to create us wise
Every speck we don't understand
we will seek till its truth divine
our only satisfaction its pursuit
until its completed in our mind
Only you can heal a blind man
or repair the lepers skin
transform hearts made of stone
change a man who he is within
Only your spirit can touch his inside
beyond his flesh and bone
only you can reach beyond ones sight
and heal the parts to us unknown
You have given us a need to learn
until we dig into solid rock
we will analyze every grain of sand
until its secrets we unlock
Like the sun our fires are burning
it drives what we weld in its heat
your energy warms our universe
and all its secrets we do seek
You have paved the road to wisdom
showered its path with justice and love
the power of truth and foresight
will produce the life we vision of
Genesis 1
New International Version (NIV)
The Beginning
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formlessand empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good,and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning —the first day.
COPYRIGHT © 2012 C Michael Miller
Via Duboff Law Group LLC
I always imagined love to be a gentle reclamation
Of all the broken pieces
Of every brick and stone
Of every hidden secret
And every skin and bone
A solitary castle, high upon the cliffside
My heart, a fortress
Am I protecting it?
It's seen days of battle, broken all around
Stones scarred and crumbling
I have held these scattered pieces
Waiting for the day
When someone comes to claim them
Rebuild it brick by brick
Back to something beautiful
Ravaged by time now,
The walls have long since crumbled
But thorny vines and spraying roses made it home again
Made a sanctuary
Love, at last.
I stand
Standing upon the emerald landscape
posture stiff and still
Eyes like black holes
devouring the space around me
Glass horse galloping, prisms
exploding through the plainlands
Time passes faster and faster
the clouds cocoon and bloom
into a wrinkled face,
nearing a necessary wail
I blink
A cliffside abbey, tourmaline waves
crash into the fissured face
Hung to the horizon, dangling
like a Christmas ornament above the sea
A gaggle of nuns gather to practice their vespers
clasping on their ash wood rosaries
The atmosphere arranges
in etudes as the cliffside ascends
I fall
Wading face up in a bog
a common frog hops along my halo
I saw a woman I once loved
wrapped in the storm clouds, gliding
There's a murmur in the shifting
leaves above me,
the purest peatland water slowly rises
as though I’m an egg to be pickled
Drowning in the songs of the ancient
the spectral, the still unknown
I sink
Suspended in the cloudy drink
a liquid haze
a glowing quilt finds itself
around my shoulder blades
Where I imagine wings
would be surgically stitched
Adrift in the murky space,
I am an audience to an Annunciation
of marbled crawdads birthing clones
of nature performing miracles
Now I finally find a restful peace
amongst the kaleidoscopic
High up amidst a forest slope,
in bedding grounds where whitetails lope,
by ledges hidden from our eyes,
a quirky outcropping does lie.
Breaking a broadleaf canopy,
the scree-slope of an old quarry,
long ago Dibble cut blue-stone,
must be a century ago,
slab-sheets cut out with sweat and pain,
so much abandoned still remains…
But the hikers have had their fun,
make use of the work that was done,
First they built half-a-dozen walls,
some of them damn near six-feet tall,
like some medival castle large
once stood on this small mountain-scar.
Up above flat-stones circle ’round,
a spiral built into the ground,
like Celts got lost, ended up here,
or icy foes wished us to fear…
A little below sit four thrones,
tall, and built of stack-up stones,
from the top of the old quarry,
you perch, and many miles see:
Black vultures soar, looking to eat,
sniffing the winds for rotting meant,
a hawk flies by on thermal rise,
with sharp eyes rodents he espies.
To the east, the sheer gash of Platte Clove,
spattering of vacation homes,
a cliffside road, somewhat scary,
no guard-rails and turns quite hairy.
Some small meadows that once were farmed,
they still retain their rustic charm,
rounding form of the Catskill Peaks,
where vacationers long have seeked
a place to play and remain sane,
so what’s a better place to reign
then stone thrones under brilliant sun,
high up in our Catskill Kingdom.
Carved in the cliffside of the Northwest sky
Four faces rise where the evergreens lean
Legends cut from rain grit and skyline light
Generational talent brought a city to its feet
*Ken Griffey Jr.*
The Kid with the swing smooth as Puget tides
Hat tilted like he already knew the future
A smile that turned baseball into daylight
He didn’t just play in Seattle
He made Seattle’s dreams feel possible
*Gary Payton*
The Glove stitched from concrete and confidence
Trash talk sharp enough to slice fog
Defense tight as a fist around destiny
He guarded the city like it was a secret
Only he was allowed to keep
*Sue Bird*
The architect of calm in a storm of noise
Angles and vision drawn like constellations
Four banners rising behind her like steady wings
Poise so cold it could freeze a shot in midair
Yet warm enough to lead a dynasty
*Walter Jones*
A monolith in motion
A left tackle carved from glacier and gravity
Feet soft as rainfall with power deep as tectonics
13 years – 5,703 pass protection snaps - 9 holding penalties
Seattle quarterbacks slept easier because he existed
Four giants etched against a sky which knows rain well
Yet a city shines brighter because of what they built
Seattle sports Mt. Rushmore
Griffey, Payton, Bird, Jones
Stone
Story
Soul