Long Grates Poems
Long Grates Poems. Below are the most popular long Grates by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Grates poems by poem length and keyword.
Winter grates as the blackbird roams
through frosted limbs of trees... and shrills;
while moon hides from a brooding night
its call, the threadbare air, refills.
My eyes mirror this drowning hymn
while breaths cry out to agonize.
Deep within a starless backdrop
iced feathers cause anguish to rise.
And ebon wings defrock my mind
embedding stains on bleak frontier;
keeper of omen dares to haunt
as love’s requiem awaits here.
Though wrapping the light from its crawl,
snowflakes drop on my pallid face
till raven foul the morning breaks ;
in dawn’s arms I lose fate’s embrace.
...................
Kelly Deschler's The Raven
9/27/2014
Outside the corner market,
a chartreuse pharmacy sign
buzzes above rain-dark pavement.
Its color reminds me of leaves
caught midway
between
staying and
letting go.
I didn't notice old age arriving.
Not in the mirror.
Not in the slow
accumulation
of reading glasses,
prescriptions, and
retirement brochures.
It found me instead
standing at a crosswalk
in a beret cap I once thought
belonged to old beatniks.
Beside me,
a delivery cyclist
waits for the light.
Across the street,
young faces glow
blue-white
in restaurant windows.
The city gathers its harvest~
office towers emptying,
subway grates exhaling,
headlights filling with dusk.
For a moment,
anxiety returns,
familiar as an address
I remember by heart.
The traffic signal changes.
Steam rises from the grates.
The crowd moves on.
In a restaurant window,
a young stranger walks
beside me.
For a moment,
we wear the same face.
Then,
dusk keeps his name and
gives me mine.
Who is the man with unleashed shoes
Tap dancing on the wet grass what is he trying to do
Picking up coins lost in sewer grates
Trying to deposit them in the phone booths that no longer work
Just a minute my cell phone ringing, hold on a minute
Break dancing on the wet lawn while it's raining
As I holler my wallet scoots out my pocket
Now wet also is my dollars
I paid my dues now I tied my shoes
Inside the phone booth I got lost
Just a minute my cell phone ringing I'm no longer break dancing
on the wet lawn cuz it's still raining
11/2/20
Written words by James Edward Lee Sr © 2020
I'm convinced that if we can't be civil, we must separate.
The differences are becoming too great.
The privileged and the entitled
feeding on the exceptions to the rule.
Plucking out the worst of our races
The rotten grapes of our society.
Displayed in a crystal-clear bowl
for all the world to see.
Dirty black and dirty white laundry
hanging upon a thin blue line.
Pin-headed agitators preparing the bonfire.
It's time to separate-go our own ways,
rather than sling boulders
push each other into pits and grates.
We need a two-state solution and quickly.
But first we have to build a wall between us.
The building of bridges experiment has burned down.
But if and when things settle down
{when we grow up a little}
we could open a door in the wall.
Have a supervised play date.
With pictures of Gandhi-Martin Luther King
rimming the sandbox-to set the mood straight...
With God and the {international} guard at the ready
Just in case we start slinging sand, bricks, and binkies...again.
The word concur
Really grates my skin,
If there was a competition
For the most pompous word
It would surely win!
Don't get me wrong
I'm certain it has its place,
It's just not a word
For me in any case.
To be used condescendingly
Would be about it,
But if it showed its face
In its eye, I would spit.
Thankfully I pray it is not
Used that frequently,
And in the English language
It should remain to be.
But what really annoys me
About the word so much,
That it's generally used
By those out of touch.
Out of the mouths of politicians
I hear it being used,
And after all, we know
They are the most confused.
So next time someone says
The words "I concur,"
Inform them immediately
They need a brain transfer!
12~May~2017
For Frank's contest.
Furious wind from the north hisses louder,
banging against the gaped mouth of a sky, drenched…
Haggard, the night wheezes with quack
of birds waylaid; a time of unruly rainfall
crashing once more: and the moon grows bald,
groaning a jumble of cracked acoustics:
On and on, the roar of sleet
pierces through lush trees
in a noise that grates far into the dark horizon,
an energy fierce like a woman scorned.
How she blares a war amidst a company of men,
flowers, and all in one driven ride
that her wild thrill rasps zooms ---
until on ninth hour
a slow-motion of rhythm flows,
while she pauses to croon a mellow tune
as if... in final taps of a wail,
nothing ever happened.
For Shadow Hamilton:The Noise Contest
Written 3/9/2017
After a death, dogs stay on to lay
in a human’s cooling shadows.
Linger to gnaw their love as invisible bones
with their chow and Kibble.
They will dig under ice, even rocks
for a sight of a lost face.
The faithful have a life by a window,
they see an owner walk toward them
though he or she never quite makes it to the door.
Canines rest their simple souls
in discarded slippers and shoes.
They miss being owned
to be ownerless is a dogs real sorrow,
though the departed make an appearance
every day in a chair, by the grates embers,
or on a carefully made empty bed.
Limpid eyes reflect the bereft and the bloodless
Those that yet have a life within them.
They stay on, linger long with the dead.
A summer Saturday night brings them all out grates shining
spit polished chrome, driven by bald men with pates shining.
Candy apple red antique corvettes with white wall tires
soft topped convertibles from Isadora Duncan's estate shining.
Well preserved women with beehive hair in leather bucket seats
go out for a ride with their Romeo's down the interstate shining.
Elvis dreamed of bee bop queens escorted round the scene
down, down town in La La land on the silver screen shining.
So put on your pedal pushers, grab a bottled Coke Classic
tie a scarf in your ponytail and dress like jail bait shining.
Cause it Saturday night at the antique car show and "YO!
and I wanta conjugate on that bumper's silver plate shining.
Black girls mollycoddle,
dandle cranky babies;
some cradled on arm and hip,
some hustled along
on low-riding wheels.
Brown men lounge outside bodega’s,
some soft-soap, play imaginary guitars,
some flash smiles at the slackening sun,
dare it to glitz elsewhere.
White girls sit on the steep stoops
bare knees out and breezing,
smoke with dreamy eyes,
pass comments that time-bomb tick.
From high wires
pigeons rubberneck like parakeets.
Thin city winds dodge washing lines.
Blouses and dresses
grip their hamstrung trapezes.
Black backyard mechanics
lean over engine blocks,
imagine curvy garbs air-dancing,
blown outward from street grates
slow billowed from vents.
The brownstones take a knee,
sweat breaks over rooftops.
A scurry of hands snatch
rumbling city transports
that beep ways to late shifts.
Those that ply less punched-out trades
slip into hankering gaps,
alleys, half-way loitering’s
that flicker into sight
juiced by the scatter and clatter
of pigeon wings.
An assemblage of stones and grass
poses to reveal a canopy of clouds
trailing like petioles of luster beneath
my head, air-stroked by eve's approach.
I feel the hours passing wretchedly unhurried
as nimbus fog breathes of radiance,
not partly dim but like a tiara
warmly shimmering, glossing over its cape
in daring pink...transforming in a blink;
flare of haze bursting in the air.
Wondering if I should turn away from this dazzling
spectacle of colored skyfoam ,
I watch my body writhe in disgust, this soul raked
with discontent where the burden of beauty grates this skin :
Till cloudscape evanesces, reminding me of past anger
unfinished --which mirrors my autumnal haze,
lingering ... still.