Long Reefs Poems

Juvenilia: Early Poems by Michael R. Burch

In the Whispering Night
by Michael R. Burch

In the whispering night, when the stars bend low
till the hills ignite to a shining flame,
when a shower of meteors streaks the sky
while...

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Juvenilia: Early Poems XI

Myth
by Michael R. Burch

after the sprung rhythm of Dylan Thomas

Here the recalcitrant wind
sighs with grievance and remorse
over fields of wayward gorse
and thistle-throttled lanes.

And she is the myth of the scythed wheat
hewn and...

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Sonnets XLII-LI

Distances
by Michael R. Burch

Moonbeams on water?
the reflected light
of a halcyon star
now drowning in night...
So your memories are.

Footprints on beaches
now flooding with water;
the small, broken ribcage
of some primitive slaughter...
So near, yet so far.



A Surfeit of...

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Truth is a feather 
pushed off to the other side.

Truths are a body of feathers
within which our bodies reside.

OK, students of life’s healthiest purposes and meanings,
it’s time to regather, if you would be so kind.

Namaste.

[Silence]

[My...

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Math speaks through us
within us
of cognitive landscapes
imagined still and/or moving.

Primal metrics are rational and symmetrical,
good as true as straightforward,
complex creation story problems
unfolding with precise answers,
right as at least not not ecologically wrong,
ecopolitically suboptimal perhaps,
yet at...

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Juvenilia: Early Poems by Michael R. Burch



Desdemona
by Michael R. Burch

Though you possessed the moon and stars,
you are bound to fate and wed to chance.
Your lips deny they crave a kiss;
your feet deny they ache to...

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Patience
by Rabindranath Tagore
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

If you refuse to speak, I will fill my heart with your silence and endure it.
I will remain still and wait like the night through its starry vigil
with...

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When Earth’s self-educational story did not yet include the self-awareness resources of DNA,
when all Earth’s Tribes were RNA rooted in composting soil,
what did we learn 
to personally,
and more politically and economically,
more public sectorally,
regenerate self-governance of...

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Sunset

                                  ...

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My internal experience of depression
today shames
external ecology of elation,
all I might know as warm extended family
of profoundly peaceful impressions
still bare surviving
at end of this slow-fading thread.

This morning
one Epictetus sentence
speaks of blaming left-hemisphere dominant GodVoices:

"People are...

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To my Valentine

                              As the full...

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Treading Down the Journey of Life

                            I have...

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I want more solstice evening silhouettes.
And nights of rhapsody filled with rental stars.
To explore blurred mornings when the sun rises.
With transitions dripping through the trees.

I want to know how the seasons change.
Who makes time a...

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To love, agapic and/or erotic,
is a positive economic-political relational choice
to trust whomever
and whatever is our Other right now
with open caring empathy,
even when we may feel like withdrawing
into suffering,
self-isolating
depressive,
repressed concerns of mistrust and dissonance,
because we have...

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Offering Thanks to the Lord

                        Accept my thanks, Merciful Lord,
  ...

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     We boarded the Carnival Cruise in Miami with excitement,
our destination was Montego Bay-   with a promise of great fun;
         ...

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To my life that betrayed the butterflies~
          within my chrysalis mind, 
forgive my flawed dialect, 
I no longer look upon sakura skies,
awaiting a ray of fluffy...

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W. S. Rendra translations

Willibrordus Surendra Broto Rendra (1935-2009), better known as W. S. Rendra or simply Rendra, was an Indonesian dramatist and poet. He said, “I learned meditation and the disciplines of the traditional Javanese...

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I be a common salty once
          no captain's bars, did bear
               yet...

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The heat is blazing underneath the earth and the ocean is polluted with plastic, mud and dirt, the sediment in the sea bed has reach the depth and the sea animals that roam the ocean...

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"Asparagus Full Grown"

Now it had been said again & again...
By those who sailed way away back then when~
Whot ayre aloft shall always come down~
So's may be seen in the streets of some town!

'Twas such to...

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" Ship of Doom "

Ship of doom so sailed to sea ~
Dark her course... 'twas meant to be ~

Into seas this great ship sped ~
Her past... her history... of naught but dread ~
O'er those waves...

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Written: September 12, 2023
Ocean Poetry Contest                             ...

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O souls of the Island, 
I have silently 
heard through 
tropical torrents 
and surpassed 
a million miles 
of the milky seas, 
away from 
mint-marine 
silhouettes of my
utopian wonderland, 
as strawberry 
ripples and 
coconut-scented 
musings called...

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 Listen to the 
ticking hands of twilight,
close your eyes,
while I take your thoughts
   to an ivory reverie of 
flickering fantasies… 
there I’m cruising 
above an 
 island of mystery
in a flying 
...

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