Long Oracle Poems
Long Oracle Poems. Below are the most popular long Oracle by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Oracle poems by poem length and keyword.
If he had boarded the frail proud lady,
My ancestor would have been a hysteric.
It would have been nothing new to him, though —
Boarding such a mighty vessel
With an unsinkable testimonial.
He had been on board Noah’s ark
For more than 40 days and 40 nights —
The first-ever lockdown in the first-ever
Flood pandemic.
He would have consulted an oracle before boarding
Lady Titanic,
To ascertain the position of the sinking stars,
And of course the position of the damned iceberg —
That monstrously frigid, vengeful, whitish monster,
Sitting like a proud humongous harlot on
The wavy vestibule of the docile North Atlantic.
He would have winced loudly from the cruel cold of
A bland and unforgiving April.
The Atlantic would have seemed so small to him,
Having floated on many oceans-in-one during
Uncle Noah’s wayward flood.
Things would have been different.
He would have sent off a dove and a raven
Before The Titanic set sail, to survey the grottos of the Atlantic.
The birds would have returned with news of the ocean,
Bringing tales wrapped in olive leaves, of any old
Scrimmage between the waves
And the iron foot of the jealous iceberg.
That would have been BREAKING NEWS,
Written BOLDLY in RED,
The colour of sea-danger, sea-terror . . . .
Things would have been different!
Perhaps The Titanic would have plied the reverse side of
The Atlantic . . . You know! . . . The less slippery side.
Less frenetic and less troublesome, and with no icebergs,
No matter how frigid the weather, in that flustered April,
Which my ancestor would have primarily called The Fourth Moon.
Yes! . . .
Sailing stealthily behind the Atlantic; the other side of it less travelled,
Cautious of the envy of the destroyer known euphemistically as Iceberg.
True . . . !
Like visiting the moon via the reverse side . . . ! Where the craters are
Perpetually on night shift . . . .
And things would have been different.
Lest I forget: a Greek ancestor would have brewed coffee with seawater.
And if greenish bubbles bobbed about, he would rather have hailed a barque.
Final Prophecy
by Michael R. Burch
Listen to me now and heed my voice;
I am a madman, alone, screaming in the wilderness,
but listen now.
Listen to me now, and if I say
that black is black, and white is white, and in between lies gray,
I have no choice.
Does a madman choose his words? They come to him,
the moon's illuminations, intimations of the wind,
and he must speak.
But listen to me now, and if you hear
the tolling of the judgment bell, and if its tone is clear,
then do not tarry,
but listen, or cut off your ears, for I Am weary.
***
Published by Penny Dreadful, The HyperTexts, the Anthologise Committee and Nonsuch High School for Girls (Surrey, England)
Keywords/Tags: Listen, heed, prophet, cry, crying, wilderness, voice, vision, visionary, dream, prophecy, judgment, judgement, warning, apocalypse, belief, baptist, baptism, proclamation, teacher, black, white, gray, moon, wind, speak, speaking, speech, instruction, teaching, omen, illuminations, intimations, ears, hear, bell, toll, tolling, peal, pealing, tone, I, Am, god, messiah, religion, spirituality, oracle, seer, sage, precognition, foretelling
Note: The poet as a "madman, alone, crying in the wilderness" is likened to John the Baptist, foretelling a momentous "second coming": his own, with no other Messiah in sight.
A faded white shirt
accents his rumpled brown suit
He takes his place unobtrusively
sits content, quietly
His preferences pedestrian
narrowly bourgeoisie
Guests sample exotic liquors
His pleasure is tea
He cares not for flaming duck, nor for pheasant-under-glass
His pudgy fingers put a chokehold on a peanut butter sandwich
For dessert, the raspberry tort was recommended
~ Buffett pockets two mints, peppermint-scented
____________________________________________________
Of course, it's 'The Oracle of Omaha!' Is there any other Buffet
on the world's radar?!
The Drive-Thru Oracle
Kevin Davis, 2024
At sixteen, I turned into the glow
of a fast-food drive-thru—
stomach echoing, thoughts unfastened.
The menu board flickered,
numbers rearranging themselves,
prices breathing in and out.
I rolled to the speaker.
It watched me.
Static. Then:
“What do you want?”
“Uh… a chicken sandwich and fries.”
The night held its breath.
Grease-sweet air pressed through the window.
Then the speaker again, slower now,
as if tasting each word:
“What do you really want?”
I glanced up.
The pictures had changed—
burgers replaced by ladders,
a compass,
a pair of open hands.
“A… chicken sandwich?”
“No.”
The word vibrated in the metal pole.
“What do you want to do with your life?”
My hands tightened on the wheel.
It felt warm. Almost alive.
“When I was little, I wanted to be a fireman.
Maybe a cop. Now…”
The parking lot stretched longer than it should have.
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m sixteen,” I said.
My voice sounded borrowed.
“I haven’t lived enough.”
The speaker crackled
like something burning far away.
“That is not an answer.
What will you be?”
The answers fell out of me like coins:
“A soldier. A psychologist.
A husband. A father.
A minister. A friend.”
“Good.”
The word rang
like a bell dropped down a well.
“How will you arrive there?”
“I… don’t know.”
“Then that is your work,” it said.
“To not know.
To move.
To fail.
To gather days.
Do not begin
before you have begun.”
Above the speaker, the clown leaned closer,
its paint cracked into maps.
I smelled smoke.
Or salt.
Or time.
I opened my mouth—
—and the world snapped.
“Hi there! Can I take your order?”
Fluorescent light.
Asphalt.
A plastic clown, sun-bleached and grinning.
The menu: burgers, fries, shakes.
Nothing else.
I sat very still.
“I’m not ready to decide right now,” I said.
No one answered.
I drove forward when the car behind me honked—
past the empty pickup window,
past the blank-faced clown,
back into a night
that felt slightly unfinished.
My stomach was empty.
My life, suddenly, was not.
Running from the big Illuminati,
Oracle thoughts for every footstep.
Bound by several false circumstances,
Earth is my home, though does scares me to death.
Running from this dark world with nowhere to hide,
Tarot card readings spread from multiple decks...
James is who I am, why cannot you see?
Loving all, release the noose on my neck!
Ignorant; a society of evil,
Gathering by waiting on when to attack.
Uninvited, I ask that you leave this place,
Orion is the hunter; not his track!
'Ridiculous'... all I can really say,
'Imbeciles'... tainting another day!
Saturday, October 9, 2021
He wrapped his remains into his souls’ coffin at the cemetery
An oracle told him to be aware of gravediggers at the boneyard
Under cover of a midnight moon he sought solace and closure
Removed the wooden cross of too many forks from his greatcoat
Stared half naked and shivered into shadows of marble shrines
Recalled the good omen bestowed by the witch dressed in praise
Turned out to be a good day after all
He reminisced at promises of fortune and privileged birth sign
Money power and acclaim had never been far from his cradle
As one of society’s beacons he had feathered fortuitous gifts
Enhanced his standing in false virtue and belligerent strides
Never shied away from proffering prosperity in greedy pursuit
And yet approached necropolis and the grim reaper’s calling
Bad premises and yet change for conclusion
As he slowly pondered on benevolence and benediction he tripped
Near a wide open vault and tumbled into the tomb of reckoning
Ripped a scrumptious veil of superior misconceptions into tatters
Bled repentance and remorse onto the bottomless pit of lost hope
He was mortal after all and not oblivious to what riddled his mind
Vowed to be given one ultimate chance before he would demise
A special day just in time for healing
23 February 2020
(for: them who are ever there!)
these branches and roots
that cord to the grave ancients
should be free from man’s swords!
both oracle and priest held for days …
I
Your voice speaks in the silence of the night
To the deep still shady earth
That once held a great zest for our childhood
Here in the once thick wooded land
Where progenitors strewed their rustic huts
Yes! where, sang tho’ unseen those sonorous kin-spirits.
2
Ah! Happy and keen folks were the ancients, then;
But their sons? what a sad lot, now! even
Demented hearts aching from those drinks of dizzy times
Raw anguish, sorrow, painful hemlocks of death-lines,
The slow songs that tune softly to the mirthful graves
That still hold the ancestors like prisoners in the wild caves.
3
O! for your unravished wave of primal welcome,
That bade the sonorous weaver come
To make loud greeting of blue azure with song-fleet
O! for such uudecoded song that for the sagging flesh bear ointment
Secret balm from the rhyming unsteady palm leaves of the winds
That flute clearly to ancestors those eternal silent songs.
4
Known are those festal spirits of your night
From whom many lives readily spring forth:
Mused thru’ the voices of strong mortal compeers –
Priests, priestesses, praise-singers, warriors, dancers!
That with gusto, flounder across the space of time;
O, for those festal moments of flush! o, for the celestial clime!
5
You are the unseen bridge of the world,
Like Nturukpa, that elder amongst our ferry trees;
Your bark exhumes the bright colours of the past;
And carried thru’ the festal wings of your night
We desire to be mused to the ethereal clime;
Of uncurbed equanimity and euphoria of the divine.
6
I now know the anguish of these festal spirits
Who take refuge on the water-void banks
Of the topmost branches and leaves;
I now know the noise of their feasts in sacrifices:
Doleful sacrifices in the gods’ swollen foot!
Then adieu! adieu! from the cloyed humans in advent!
7
O farewell! with all your festal spirits,
Who coaxed to the night of sacrifices, priests,
Priestesses, dancers, praise-singers, warriors of the land;
Adieu! with these cold celebrations and coax-throated songs heard,
Thru’ the voice and echoes of rain’s thunder,
In the day of the panther and his noble twin, the hunter.
Oracle
(Noun : a priest or priestess
acting as a medium
through whom advice or prophecy
was sought from the gods in classical antiquity.)
He speaks in Virtue
She is a sign language interpreter
He delivers in messages
Sad news. Sad news. Sad News.
It is all about an old scarf; old, but a nice one,
An almost invalid try to cherish a long-forgotten memory,
As life talks in many ways, through ups and downs, glum and glee,
Also, in a subtle tone, through the tremendous lens of wiser perception,
Only to find…
That fine line…
Between memory and fascination….
As time goes on…
I realized slowly…
In all the last efforts to see her glowing in my mirror,
In all the extra time of stirring to make the dish as perfect as her,
I was a mere shadow of a proxy, figuring a rather twenty-four-hour job
Never quite touched the finish line, never got spirited enough to cope up.
A sigh of relief, a deep memory of belongingness, could, still, hold the essence
An old scarf, an embroidered one, only enough to hold on to the long, long lost one.
It is all about an old scarf; old, but a nice one,
An almost invalid try to cherish a long-forgotten memory,
As life talks in many ways, through ups and downs, glum and glee,
Also, in a subtle tone, through the tremendous lens of wiser perception,
Only to find…
That fine line…
Between memory and fascination….
As time goes on…
I realized slowly…
In all the last efforts to see her glowing in my mirror,
In all the extra time of stirring to make the dish as perfect as her,
I was a mere shadow of a proxy, figuring a rather twenty-four-hour job
Never quite touched the finish line, never got spirited enough to cope up.
A sigh of relief, a deep memory of belongingness, could, still, hold the essence
An old scarf, an embroidered one, only enough to hold on to the long, long lost one.
"Hear your fate, O high-dwellers of the airy, wide open
Spaces and fertile plain, your rugged and enclosed
Lands, Sparta, untouched by that of hard-grinding war".
Thus, the fraught Oracle of Delphi had so spoken.
Now only I alone am left to ponder on all that was before...
And, which, wrongly, ignorant peoples should all suppose.
But Sparta should lose in victory -- whilst noble Athens
Would become more wondrous than any could ever
Have imagined! And although I am of Sparta...I think of her
As home. For I have hunted in the sprawling woodlands
Of Phelloe, dallied with the plodding tortoise in coy Arcadia;
Alalcomenae's giant oaks offering shelter from inclement weather.
I gave up tears when listening to ancient, groaning pines
On the sandy coast of Elis, marveled at white Blackbirds
In Cyllene, ate the dates of Aulis, tasted olive oils
From Tithorea; when sat at the table of the Gods dined
Upon wild strawberries from Helicon! The flashing roils
Of Saronic dolphins. The Six Caverns that none dares disturb.
Alas, in my distress I am more troubled than Menelaus;
And have known a hundred-fold more greater a jealous pride...
All his murderous heartaches. Same, sudden, gut-wrenching blow
At first encounter; this which serves no man any good cause...
Apart to live in melancholy. Skin as perfect as untouched snow.
A wilful deceit that can hide behind an unemotive woman's eyes.
Forgive me, Pausanias -- there is beautiful poetry in your words my friend!!
She came upon me in a dream deep down from within my destination
Which coursed the mind and soul of years for my memories' inspiration
The path was crowded with bouncing hooves and wagons decorated
With fantasies ornaments adoration painted with merriment unabated
Echoes' subconscious sound of wild horses drawing cart wheels' canter
A symphony's reminder of nectar's flow from a coloured glass decanter
Bewildered I reminisced on sentiments nostalgia and what lies ahead
Fanfares of homeliness adventure passion to pounding of a drumhead
Heated stallions ran wild with mares and took my innate flight of fancy
Less trodden though in modern times a covert path offered me fragrant tansy
Potions of wild garlic lavender and bouquets of aromatic blue sage scent
I grabbed the message by the horns and galloped to my heart's content
One face stood out and reached my fired feelings as I took off one blinker
A nomad girl dressed in rags whistles bells whom you might call a tinker
Olive skin and amber eyes beyond all reason teasing all sensual needs
Her hair like forests full of tangles I must touch her locks lest she proceeds
Around her neck dangled an amulet crafted from ivory and ancient oak
Grant me a whiff of freedom give me one chance to embrace and stroke
The skin's wilderness and passion which may save me from my strife
A single breath or little smooch from cherry lips to give me the kiss of life
She shone as bright as ruby petals and took her path along the lane
Of elderberry flower and hawthorn hedges which made me go insane
Her chest adorned with orange curves she wore a crown of quince
She's been imprinted on my summer screen for more and ever since
And still the magic rings hooked on her ears of nectarine shaped silver
Stir the image when I hear a voice singing the praise and beauty of her
A scintillating Roma bride sculpted from nature of the purest sense
Prophesy omen oracle and metaphor in one quite magically intense
When sunshine arises red and purple with violins and tambourine
I pinch the moon in thanks for right next to me slumbers my Fairy Queen
Once upon a time I handed her a golden peach an oath and sacred bond
She calls herself a gypsy and kindly waves to me with her magic wand
11th April 2020