Long Patchwork Poems

Various Heresies 3

Breakings
by Michael R. Burch

I did it out of pity.
I did it out of love.
I did it not to break the heart of a tender, wounded dove.

But gods without compassion
ordained: Frail things must break!
Now...

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Poems about Adam, Eve, Lucifer

Eden
by Michael R. Burch

Then earth was heaven too, a perfect garden.
Apples burgeoned and shone, unplucked on sagging boughs.
What, then, would the children eat?
Fruit indecently sweet,
redolent as incense, with a tempting aroma...



Outcasts
by...

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Here and Hereafter
by Michael R. Burch

Life’s saving graces are love, pleasure, laughter ...
wisdom, it seems, is for the Hereafter.



Laughter’s Cry
by Michael R. Burch

Because life is a mystery, we laugh
and do not know the half.

Because death...

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These are prophetic poems and apocalyptic poems ...






Beast 666
by Michael R. Burch

“... what rough beast ... slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”?W. B. Yeats

Brutality is a cross
wooden, blood-stained,
gas hissing, sibilant,
lungs gilled, deveined,
red flecks on a...

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Observance
by Michael R. Burch

Here the hills are old and rolling
carefully in their old age;
on the horizon youthful mountains
bathe themselves in windblown fountains...

By dying leaves and falling raindrops,
I have traced time's starts and stops,
and I have...

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Poems about Fathers and Grandfathers IV



Neglect
by Michael R. Burch

What good are your tears?
They will not spare the dying their anguish.
What good is your concern
to a child sick of living, waiting to perish?

What good, the warm...

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Let Me Give Her Diamonds
by Michael R. Burch

Let me give her diamonds
for my heart's
sharp edges.

Let me give her roses
for my soul's
thorn.

Let me give her solace
for my words
of treason.

Let the flowering of love
outlast a winter
season.

Let me...

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Sonnets XVII-XXIV

Discrimination
by Michael R. Burch

The meter I had sought to find, perplexed,
was ripped from books of "verse" that read like prose.
I found it in sheet music, in long rows
of hologramic CDs, in sad wrecks
of long-forgotten...

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MODERN SONNETS I

I prefer the original definition of the sonnet as a “little song” of indeterminate form and length. These modern sonnets vary from more-or-less traditional to free verse.


Maker, Fakir, Curer
by Michael R. Burch

A poem...

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Poems about Children V

Pan
by Michael R. Burch

Among the shadows of the groaning elms,
amid the darkening oaks, we fled ourselves

Once there were paths that led to coracles
that clung to piers like loosening barnacles

where we cannot return,...

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Gateway town, Mississippi and Missouri river flooding confluence,
with its celebration of manifest destiny, its looming, iconic archway.
Stainless westward marker, its culture flowed southward for influence
within the lawn-jockey, pink flamingo neighborhoods of moral decay. 

T.S, Eliot,...

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Yuletide pageants vis a vis merry go round revisited

healthy progeny regaled being alive
analogous to children ecstatic twenty-five
on December exhaling joie de vivre at dive 
in into neat stack of wrapped gifts, when...
what! out of thin...

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In a foreign lush green sprawling land
A patchwork carpet stitched together
In shades of tawny browns yellows and green
Rugged rock forest and wind-swept moor
Is a awe-inspiring spectacle to be seen

In summer's adorned frock adorned bushes and...

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Yuletide pageant merry go round

Panoply of mystical elements of holly day style 
breathe prez sense frostily exhaled aired
per millennia athwart 
(this terrestrial spaceship planet Earth)
two plus seventeen carousel rides resonated
veritable pantheon of pagan rituals 
and...

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Ghosts of Christmas Past

I do not fear the ghosts
of my Christmas past.
My yearly visit with each one
is a gift
a present
for this one day

I drive out to Lantzville Beach
and bring my dog along
My mother loved dogs...

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Isaiah 43:1 “But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou...

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What a game ...
he was just a jester,
and this a ghastly prospect ...

The ground lay torn open before him,
a wound in the earth that called to his dark heart,
pulled on his better judgement like lead...

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These secret silent stillnessess,
wistful wispy whisperings
which enter through the windows in my heart,
I try to softly touch them 
and they recede, far, so far away,
I try to gently hold them
they slip beyond my grasp,
and so,...

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I stand at the edge of a canvas, where the world is painted in hues of black and white, their quiet constancy my only refuge. Like the moon’s loyal reflection on a still lake, these...

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FEAR


WHAT SCARES ME
FROM AS FAR BACK AS I COULD DREAM
THIS IS WHAT Fear has done to me
This is a verse, bout’ what is cursed..
What scares you?
Is it the crossing of a busy street?
What scares you?
Is...

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What is it? That fleeting second that lingers in our thoughts like the sweet aftertaste of chocolate? The times that you want to last forever yet are made so valuable through the quality of the...

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"Wolves"



Pulchritude is not a beautiful word.

Dark can be beautiful
when walking with wolves
hearing their stories
sad songs of love lost 
soft they begin 
and then hungry
for the essential missing elemental,
they can be heard harshly calling, 
after a...

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Mirror
by Kajal Ahmad, a Kurdish poet
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

My era's obscuring mirror
shattered
because it magnified the small
and made the great seem insignificant.
Dictators and monsters filled its contours.
Now when I breathe
its jagged shards pierce my...

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  Dear grandma, 
       you were my litchi  s u n r i s e, 
  encasing stars in honeydews of  h e a l...

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Her skin is textured fabric
and a lovely pair of…odd eyes of ink
 black and sheen green.
Cherry cheeks, heavy-handed
 for his amusement.

Lips sewn to silence
just the way he likes her.
Living only through him
though she’s not alive.

Criminals...

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