Long Outlives Poems
Long Outlives Poems. Below are the most popular long Outlives by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Outlives poems by poem length and keyword.
Shower me not with
Such sweet sour emptiness
From your wagging tongue of lies
For this earth beneath my foot
Could be a sinking land for loot.
Like you did told our fathers
To drop their brains back home
And walk upon your shores empty headed
For you to replace their hollow heads with yours.
Your pot of lies never ceases to boil
Like when they sat around that round table
And you dished to them meals of deceit
While their bulging bellies replaced their heads.
I can see why we the children
Like Almajiris still run to you for grains.
If I shake my head
Like I was paying heed
While you try to beautify
The essence of being a tenant in my own house
And your firework makes a mockery of the fire-fly
We shall soon see which of them outlives the other.
We have always relied on you
Like we have always relied on our legs
To be as swift as that of the fastest antelope
We even murdered our own
On an ideology over blown.
Now you are back
With the storm in your hands
And fire in your mouth
To enshrine or to consume
Of what we have left of our toil
This time we didn’t go to you
But you have decided to come to us
With Larger or is it Lagarde in your hand
Possibly to get us foolishly drunk
For this time we won’t accept a re-lie.
Do they ever sit and wonder
How the clocks weep as they spin
How centuries vanish in a flash
While children pay for ancestral sin?
They fight for names carved into dust
For borders drawn in brittle trust
For myths and maps that time outlives
Yet take from those who have no more to give.
Land! Identity!
But what is pride if it costs our sanity?
Why trade your soul for your name
Then call it home while bleeding alone?
Don’t they see? Can’t they feel?
There’s more to life than iron and steel.
More than blood spilled to prove who's right,
In a war where day is darker than night.
Not in the sanguine ordinance of the heart, nor in the fugitive embassy of breath, but in that inviolate interval where succession relinquishes its crown, Love keeps its unspoken dominion.
Who schooled the blood in scarlet mysteries,
Or taught the clay such inward majesty?
Not flesh, whose borrowed splendours fade like seas
When Time withdraws its ancient sovereignty;
But that concealed and antecedent fire
Whose silence outlives every mortal choir.
I passed beyond the ivory walls of bone,
Where marrow held a vigil without name;
Where things forgotten before they were known
Lay folded in an immemorial flame;
And there the dark, unburdened of disguise,
Looked through my soul with uncreated eyes.
The heart, that bronze confessor of the dust,
Raised its twin thunder toward the vault of years;
One stroke proclaimed the visible world to trust,
The next dissolved beyond the reach of spheres;
And in that breathless cleft between the two,
Eternity remembered what we knew.
There Chronos laid his sceptre in the sand,
And Number lost the kingdom it had won;
The stars grew still beneath an older hand,
As night confessed the labour of the sun;
For Being, stripped of all its borrowed art,
Returned to the silence beneath the heart.
Then came the vision reason could not bind:
A shadowless bird passed through a mountain’s core;
No wound remained upon the adamant mind
Of stone that had endured the world before;
Yet from its depths there trembled into air
A song that no created throat could bear.
Then I beheld what no decree could prove:
Love was not flame, nor breath, nor mortal claim;
It was the interval where all things move
Before they enter form and take a name;
The hidden mercy no beginning owns,
The pulse between the marrow and the stones.
—On Ruin, Radiance, and Return—
They counselled me: transfigure thyself, and go;
I thanked them, took their counsel, and withdrew,
for sometimes one must unhouse what they know
ere the soul bear the burden of its view.
I changed no countenance; I changed the hand
that wore it—and found alien what I had planned.
I watched the fortunate emerge from rain,
their laughter argent upon the darkened street;
some inward sun moved plenary through each vein,
whilst mine made weather of another's heat.
I did not covet what their joy had won—
I envied how its radiance needed none.
Yet I have walked as other wayfarers walk,
taken the accustomed thoroughfare at dusk,
returned with dust embosomed in my sock,
and named as providence what might be rust.
We counterfeit our gestures long enough to be
mistaken for the grammar of destiny.
There lies a waste ordained by choice alone:
stand still, and sand ascends towards the bone;
advance, and flame pursues thee as thine own,
till even thy shadow abdicates its stone.
Once, crossing it, I saw beneath the sun
a shadow walking where I had not gone.
They watched my ruin ripen into fact,
and rubbed their hands, as mourners sometimes do;
their pity consecrated the wreck to spectacle,
as though its desolation were their due.
None saw the small, recurrent blade at night
with which I pared my living down to light.
So become colour, if thy blood can bear
the burden of becoming visible;
become the fragrance that outlives the air,
the essence that survives the indivisible.
I shall not vest the world to make it mine:
I shall become the utterance wherein it shines.
Written: August 5, 2026, for a contest by Brian Strand
*******************
Artist Synopsis: Inspired by Edvard Munch, this ekphrastic work explores "The Sick Child," depicting a mother at her bedridden daughter's bedside.
her pallor smolders with fever
ethereal star ensnared
flickering amidst orbs
in hospital harsh haunted husk
her mother's vigil-worn hands
charting the astral lattice
each breath a star-shivered
seraphic benison—
soft-spun in starry status
ceiling cannot c o n s o l e
painter stands at the threshold
brush astral-shivered presciently
nebula silhouette of imminence
his sister's silence
moon-murmur mantled in mind mist
mother ministering miasma
mirrored in her mute mothering
blue room breathes its borrowed time—
but no hours borne in benediction
but layers brittle... blooming...
memory manifold memory
until astral air—
harbors hard-to-handle hazy halo
painter revisits bedside vigil
consecrating grief in cobalt
then cerulean
then ultramarine,
until silence found its color—
until blue could bear
what blood could not
child tilts toward our blue hush
pale as fledgling frostlight
her gaze a frail... flickering... frontier
fetching farewell & forever
between earth and art
behind her... mother bends
like a prayer half-remembered—
pale benediction blooming in the blue hush
everything falling—
time... breath... hope...
blooming downward
like frost-born f e a t h e r s
this is how grief becomes light—
not healed... nor forgiven...
but given enduring form,
a luminous presence
that outlives the hour
outlives its own pale hush
blue room bears witness
bright with buried breath
bereavement becomes blessing
& flame forbids forgetting
a fathomless... fire-forged haven
where ephemeral... evanescent eternity
embarked on an eternal expedition
summoned silently... sketched in stillness...
where silence
found its forever in g l o w
Set your sights well on goodness here,
Thoughts that you dwell spark fiery cheer.
Begin fond quest with a bold heart,
Focus your zest on fancy art.
Know that full store of good and grand,
Seize ever more life's spice dear friend.
Know the truth then that life is full,
The proof my friend outlives the fool.
Plenty is here if you but see,
Start wise good cheer to claim what's free.
There is a law that obeys touch,
Rise above flaws to own that much.
Align and be what you attract,
Fortune you see follows wise tact.
The law obeys the man who shows,
Think, do and say to show you know.
Affluence awaits the man who lives,
Fortune relates just what you give.
Abundance speaks of thoughts you think,
To claim the peak, fit what you link.
Rich is the man who knows he can,
Live journey grand in shifting sand.
Leon Enriquez
31 December 2015
Singapore
In a town where the whispers grew sharp as a blade..
Where anger took root in the words people made.
A boy flung a stone made of slander and spite..
And a girl threw it back in the dead of the night.
The streets became stages for venomous cries..
With truth dressed in shadows and kindness in lies.
Each rumor, a spark; each grudge, a new flame..
Till neighbours forgot even each other's name.
A garden once bloomed where the children would play..
But weeds of resentment had stolen the day.
The trees bowed in silence, the birds flew away..
The sun hid behind clouds that wouldn't obey.
Then one quiet morning, a child stood alone..
With a heart full of sorrow, a mind of her own.
She painted the walls with a bright, healing hue..
Wrote poems of peace where the wild anger grew.
Her words sang of mercy, of bridges not walls..
Of hands reaching out when another one falls.
She said, “We are mirrors, so what we reflect..
Returns to us doubled..in pain or respect.”
The town slowly shifted, like winter to spring..
Drawn close by the hope that a new voice could bring.
And though hate had scarred them and darkened their past..
They found that compassion still outlives the past.
Let hate be a lesson, not a path you embrace..
What’s sown in the heart always shows on the face.
For love writes in ink that won’t ever fade..
And those who forgive change the world they’ve remade.
—For What Could Not Die—
They say true love outlives the reach of death;
then why make war when we must say goodbye?
If wrath can keep thy shadow warm with breath,
why forge another bond before we die?
Thou lift thine eyes into the vacant blue,
as though some hidden dweller waits for you;
and sleep withdraws when evening seals the night,
as if one absent face withholds the light.
I ask the men who trade in roads and bread;
they name each street, yet cannot name thy trace.
The world wakes on; I hear its iron tread,
yet every road goes empty in thy place.
That primal word—Be—called the dark to flame;
thou mayst unmake my world, not what became.
A quiet love outlives the turning years,
It bends through storms yet never asks to rest,
It hums beneath the weight of hidden fears.
It learns to lose and still be softly blessed,
A fragile thread that will not tear apart,
Though every night it fails the silent test.
It guards a fire that trembles in the heart,
And stands against the sharpest edge of pain,
Yet yields its breath before it turns to art.
For love can war, but cannot war in vain,
It fights the world with gentle, open hands,
Till one soft word can break it like the rain.
“Stay not,” it hears and all it understands,
Is love can live, but dies when it disbands.
All the praises you pick along the streets
Go confirm before a new-bought mirror,
And if those rare glories you all find true
Then know she’s near that beauty shearer.
Who’s time, the unerring author of loss and decay.
And so while you wait for she who must deprive
Learn your immortal splendor to wisely salt away
In shrewd acts that the lay waste of time survive.
Reincarnate in yourself some elegant luster
To represent you in the ageless posterity,
And water with care the shoots that germinate
In the fecund garden of your youthful fertility.
The sagacious mother leaving nothing to chance,
Invest in an eternity of prayer, for if bootless
There’s nothing of yours to lose to time-owned eons,
For this enterprise outlives all, and gives all for less.
With these desiderata carefully appropriated,
Now your chance to savor the trappings of luck and time
With vast unapologetic bites and greedy careless teeth
Till the bells of the end give their long-awaited chime.