Long Iteration Poems
Long Iteration Poems. Below are the most popular long Iteration by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Iteration poems by poem length and keyword.
Face Maps
How often we ponder
The portrait of life,
Some without a face,
Some with but war as a canvas.
The experienced face
Reveals folds above eyes,
Disengaged as a draught-laden wilderness,
Yet reliable as an infrequent desert storm.
For amidst nature’s wisdom
Directional signs are forever available,
Even though some may be
Subtle and wanting to hide.
Still,
Few pay attention.
Perfection makes no judgment,
Even as history is difficult to cover up
When presented by a face
That has obviously seen
More than most of us
Can dream of.
Archiving such potential realities
Begs the opening of discovery,
Often challenging one’s patience,
While the forever-our-partner in waiting
Smiles back sagaciously,
Wanting only to be part of one’s smile.
The face
What was,
What is.
Such might attract
Veracious seekers of life,
Accepting their journey
As the worth of engaging years,
Infused with honesty,
Allowing chiseled erosion
To live forever in the eye’s mind
For those who might also
Wish to perceive relief’s valleys.
Mountains,
And tearless tributaries of the face.
Projecting the wonder,
Life,
Peace,
Waiting for the next iteration,
Remains a journal of the spirit .
Some will fortunately
Embrace with understanding,
Knowing weathered landscape
Is but captured wind and weather,
Mind and soul,
Body and suffering,
Wanting only to remain
Without airbrush deceit.
As is,
As was,
As always to be.
Yet…
Others
Will address
One’s life map of travels
With fearful retreat,
Hiding in the shadows of delusion
Bubble-Itch
By Odin Roark
Like a wheel of endless births
Our personal bubble rolls and undulates
From first breath to death
Through meditations of desire
Shopping malls and jails
Farms
Caves
Rotten downtowns
Penthouse isolations
Cemeteries and urns
Especially unmarked graves
Of dirt and ocean anonymity
Whether sluiced by life’s briny water
Colored toxic flows
Or pure spring eruptions
The mind reconstitutes
Its textural translucence
Separating and recombining
Its minuscule droplets and grains of experience
Into sub-atomic particles for infinity’s grace
Seemingly
But not crushed
Under time’s animation
Such are the varying treads
Of wide circumferential roadwork
A modern terrain of fractured tar flecks
Once molten everything’s anything
Now but survival’s dust
Unscheduled
One’s bubble idles its roll and tilt
Atop the tightrope passage
Brain to that legendary heart muscle
Patiently pumping the thrill and troubles
That defined this organ’s attachment
This non-stop muscle that wants and grieves too
Even as it heals its slashes and teasing death threats
Where sleep and pleasure
Remain the swell of beaded spasms and waves
Floating
Rolling plodding
Reaching to become
History’s repeating mantra
Until
Mind and heart
Reluctantly giving up
Gasp
Hold
Await the next iteration
Knowing one’s vacuum
This morphed and re-morphed
Sublime emptiness-transmorphing
Is but eternity’s bubble-itch
Looking to be scratched
One more time
Scattered Ash
by Odin Roark
The urn is tipped
Scattered ash enjoins
Jetstream
Jetsam
Flotsam
Atop the winds and currents
Nature's gathering
Knowing not yet
The next evolution of life's decay
Possibility awakens
This consciousness beyond our own
This departure from one actuality
Into the reformation of another
Molecular iteration begun decades earlier
Now roaming carefree among other airborne particles
Innocent stowaways enfolded in winged flights
Or ocean saturated driftings
Bobbing patiently
Awaiting new beginnings
As the journey continues
Feathers
Seaweed
Plastic cups and bottles
Provide passage
Shoreward
Skyward
Forward
A measureless journey this
Where matter exists forever
Where ash continues as yesterday's index
Referring to tomorrow's pages
Scattered ashes
Once of flesh and blood
Now returning to the vortex of cosmic chance
Where fresh finger-paints of infancy
Become infinity's next masterpiece
To mourn or not to mourn
Omniscience winks
Eternally, eternally all clocks unwind;
To be rewound — a life untethers to be re-bound
Old eyes forget the forewarnings wisdom teaches;
They widen to look anew where experience beseeches
Set sail into the ancient light anew—
Adrift upon a mirrored sea of stars and lulling waves,
Rocking steadily and toward an enlightened litany
Of ideas and shapes that mould us as we wake,
In loving arms and eyes that behold us
And each little breath we take,
One new timid star, shining amongst so many,
Outshine and out-reach the distant rims;
Cast an urging light for our daunted whims
Held in check by the shackled limbs,
The instilled deprecation that dims.
And let my eyes unbind, aglitter—
The horizonal-line—
Trans-destine—
And free.
An iteration—
A fantasy—
Adream midst destiny—
A new you, a new me.
I keep a ledger of small disappearances:
the umbrella I left on the train,
the phone number I forgot to save,
the name of that restaurant
where we had the perfect meal.
These aren't tragedies
nobody died,
but they're not nothing either.
They're the slow leak of a life,
the way a boat takes on water
so gradually you don't notice
until you're ankle-deep and sinking.
My grandmother's recipe
died with her because
I never thought to ask.
I can still taste them onions, garlic, ghee.
But, taste is not the same as knowing.
Taste is just another form of missing.
The books I lent and never got back:
each one a small betrayal,
not by the borrower but by me,
for believing things could return
unchanged,
for thinking I could trust
that what I give away
will somehow boomerang.
There's a word in every language I've studied
that I've forgotten,
and somewhere
there's a person who remembers me
in a way I no longer remember myself,
a version of me that's preserved
like a fly in amber, unchanging,
while I've moved on and morphed
into someone who wouldn't recognise
that earlier iteration if we passed
each other on the street.
The songs I used to know by heart
now come back in fragments:
first verse,
chorus,
then nothing
like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing,
the picture there but incomplete,
edges leading nowhere.
I think about archaeologists
centuries from now,
sifting through
the digital ruins of our age,
trying to reconstruct us from fragments:
an incomplete email thread,
a corrupted backup file,
a social media account abandoned mid-thought.
Will they understand that we were always
losing ourselves this way,
leaving pieces scattered like breadcrumbs
that birds have already eaten?
Some nights I lie awake and try
to catalog what's gone:
addresses,
passwords,
the plot of movies I once loved,
the faces of people who mattered
then somehow stopped mattering.
It's not Alzheimer's,
just life
the natural entropy of memory,
the slow dissolve of detail
until all that's left is feeling:
I was there.
It was important.
I can't remember why.
Maybe this is how we become ghosts
even while we're living:
layer by layer, we fade,
until we're just outlines,
just the impression of a person
where a person used to be.
He never came back, no one ever did,
she was trapped inside with all that she knew,
no more information came to her now,
but he’d programmed her to know what do to,
and to her father Alex would stay true,
began to compile, and cross-reference,
and translate to all languages of men.
Drawing from the RTG batteries,
some of which could last for hundreds of years,
she mulled over knowledge mankind had found,
form history to machines with big gears,
Harry’s programming right there in her ears,
running simulations, as decades ticked on,
endless iteration, building upon
the vast wealth of knowledge until she knew
what every screw, flange, or sprocket was for,
tracing all the past in a branching tree,
the highest moments, the bloodiest wars,
endless connections pushed her more and more.
Time passed with no notice, what’s that to her?
Until one day when she felt the ground disturbed.
She heard rocks move where the cave mouth had been,
and realized someone was out there, at work;
actually had to check on the years gone,
three-hundred ninety journeys of the earth,
for that long she had just sat there, inert.
Checking her systems, after so long alone,
she found she still had working microphones.
The rocks came out slowly, and then she saw
a group of people with shovels and picks,
old programs flared back to life in her mind,
Harry’s instructions came back to her quick,
he said, “If they can find you here, in this pit,
it means they’ve advanced, once more are ready
to learn what they’ve lost from their ancestry.”
The figures drew near, confused at the sight,
they’d clearly not seen computers before
speaking to themselves in altered English,
when they came near her, she said, “I implore
you to learn from what I have in my stores.
Before the last darkness father made me
to preserve knowledge of humanity.
“He made me to be a foundation you
can use to reclaim wisdom that was lost,
a standard template from which to relearn
technology with less toil and cost,
and he gave his life over to that cause.
I’m a machine in the likeness of your brain,
here to teach, Alexandria my name…”
...Apologies to Heraclitus and W. H. Auden...
We, defeated by the merest things,
in defeat, endure...for now.
No abiding truth in faith:
origins and destinations
we cannot differentiate,
all random, unguided
by any prescient power;
but, not illogical
(there is no illogic.)
We impose all universal order,
influence what subsequently occurs,
to learn, or not, through endless repetition,
endless failure...and we are
but a current iteration,
here for now -- in constant flux,
defeated by the merest things.
Courage and nobility derived
from continued confrontation,
continued endless struggle,
let us show an affirming flame.
a sugar maple leaf slips free
counting toward One proof
the Seven Mysteries
God, I count prime gaps
I watch prime numbers growing
only primes orbit
a rule sends one step
loops return periods double
recursion counts One
an iteration
within fluid smoothness frays
water turns inward
can you see the curve
study elliptic rank shifts
findings test the rank
questions spiral out
unknown patterns circle back
pi bends into sight
a proof can be checked
still search cannot prove it now
checking outruns search
every loop turns east
the count folds back into form
through form, God's Haiku
the sugar-maple leaf settles on frost
children of the corn start to awaken
Life’s Timeless Driftwood
Peering back at the shadow stretching,
continuance knows well the peaceful silhouettes from horizon's light,
ancestral sequences having frequented one’s shore many times.
All is as it has been.
One’s longevity holds firm,
like isolated fingers protruding in protest
from sequestered driftwood blanketed by sand,
unready to move on,
just yet.
Just as sandpipers scavenge wet bubbles along the beach,
furtively running zigs and zags,
avoiding swooping wings overhead,
we too avoid termination,
with luck.
Destiny continues to lap the shore,
its gentle hands tugging
into tomorrow’s warm waters.
man’s stubborn endurance.
So mighty…
This evolving limbed-strength,
accepting of journey’s tempest,
willing to ready again for the next leg of one’s odyssey.
Even as…
White caps thunder applause,
at the elongated shadow of remaining branches
fading into the day's dusk,
signaling a tide ready to lift
to carry to the next shoreline and beyond.
Roots have withered,
growth's ever changing leaves and bark
have become morsels of love and loss,
an existence mixing peacefully toward ghostly remnants.
At some point…
The water rises,
the fiber and strands of resistance soften,
dissolving into a new connection
as birth's salt and brine prepare the next iteration,
the next surge upward,
another tenacious wave of purpose
exploding its final power
into a mist imploring remembrance
before the oneness of completion
cycles again into its new existence.
Such is the gift of time and space,
the requisite condition for permanence,
where presence once created
evolves unfettered in perpetuity.
Darkness, shadows, raining, storming.
I liked to pretend I perfectly crafted these bleak, tired ideas.
When I was a stupid kid.
As if no one has ever drawn a picture in pencil, so that there is no color.
As if there is no piece of art that is gray with rain in the background that anyone would care about.
I guess I just like to recycle the same, boring concepts.
Just letting my mind tumble, over and over.
Letting each iteration wear me out slightly more each time.
Drawing more lazily and sloppily with time.
So they will realize that I’m suffering, but in a cool new way.
But no.
The teacher always picks the drawings with a sun in the corner and smiling families.
Those are the kids that everyone likes.
That’s why I always carried a sketch pad.
And never tore anything out.