Long Repose Poems

World's Longest Love Poem (second edition)


Title: My love my all

Edited by Izunna Okafor


Editor's Note:

Out of their ardency, eighteen poets and poetry lovers identified with the need to give the 2020 Valentine celebration a poetic taste...

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The tears flowed and I still smiled,
My body and spirit and mind,
Were still in that state of residual bliss,
Soaking in your sweet smile,
And savoring the moonlit skin before me,
But my soul was being torn asunder,
And...

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One day not so long ago 
I walked
Never alone
For the world 
Is always my home

It was a late
Spring snow
Yet I felt
Invisible red roses
Offering sweetest perfume
To my nose and soul

There’s such warmth 
In snow-filled winter
No bitterness
No...

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Life is like that extent 
     Live that moment 
                   to full extent...

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Alone

For in the end it's just one soul that's passed.
Alone I'll lie in sod of greenest grass
to answer for the sins that I've amassed
at gates of gold I'll see if I may pass.
In to this...

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Hard driven by the embarrassment,
                              ...

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In London Town, a girl was born
Who lost the crown, but won the scorn 
Of Lady Margaret's deep disdain
For something proud, she cannot reign

Her daughter's name was Mary Grace
An angel with a beaming face
Who blessed...

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A society
culture
religion
humane species
forgetting,
or more likely under-valuing,
how to regeneratively suffer loss
may never have learned to face our universal fear of death
as a badge of permaculturing respect,
dignity through suffering sacred absence
where once we knew nondual co-arising relational...

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Youth

When orchids bloom in beauty life's aglow
to hold emotions locked in deep repose
in young desire and love warm thoughts will show.
Affection holds its ardor as it grows
to burn inside young hearts in evening tide.
In darkest...

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With the Trolls passed out on the grass...the regrettable task
    now fell to the brave Talkalot.
He moved to the gate and taking a sip from his flask...
    he stared...

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This is my translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's second elegy from his Duino Elegies, which he began composing at Duino Castle in 1912. 

Second Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch 

Every angel...

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Her back never faces the door

“I’ll only need you on certain days”

she says
(absently)

“I’ll have to write them down
my memory doesn’t work so well
especially when I am caught up”

she’s thinking
(a lovely stare)

“Who is that in the...

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(after Edgar Allan Poe's "The Angel of the Odd")

It was a tidy day and I sat, replete, under vellux blankets.
Sadly, my tea was weak, the bottle of cinnamon whiskey
tantalizingly low, and my feet swelling above...

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1) Preamble

As breath’s created, sustained and destroyed,
we see trika, threefold aspect at play
through life, where we are by ego decoyed,
until we choose to make love our mainstay.
Beyond religions, scriptures and folklore,
let’s explore the direct path...

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We all feel like
dying to get out of here
at least sometimes;
a meeting
a relationship
a job
a car or bus or airplane
a house or apartment
a nation or state
a Party or clan
a faith community or PTA.

This is about the...

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Take me to the tombstone 
let me touch the gray stone that stands
where life could not
I will put my face to that touchstone of deaf thunder,
What happened  to your breath baby brother,
what happened in...

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As dawn unfolds today beyond my fractured windowpane,
a breeze beguiles the ashen drapes. Like snakes they slip aside,
revealing wanton worlds that race and run aground, insane,
immersed in scenes obscene that savants strive to mask and...

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Gloriously luxuriating in eternal sleep

Forlorn; bereft of golden
(slippered) opportunities I weep;
Three score and four years
replete with mailer daemons,
hence mindset adrip
with self denouncing expletive filled bleep
unwritten expressed recriminations
wielded upon figurative head of wimpy blip;
decades elapsed at...

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Those evil thorns of bitterness
That couldn't bear to see
This child so loved and so adored
By their father
Captain Lee

Until one day in early May
When she went out to play
In  fields drenched in morning  dew
Above...

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Another shift ends. I'm dead on my feet.
Too shagged to even eat.
The word leads (inevitably) to you...
I slipped the timesheets from work today.
Another incident occurred...
Sweetie, please be there, and say you care.
I loved working alongside...

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I.

Espy, distinguish divinely made lively, lovely Trees
He or she, inhales carbon dioxide, then breathes
out for us humans, life given clean oxygen
Stout roots run deep, holding God's earth
Also, with you we were taught our first lesson

II.

Animals...

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Beddie bye boo ski time for yours truly and/or the missus

Found us abed thee twelfth day
of December, cuz yours truly 
still felt dehydration, physical 
fatigue and soreness,
which possibly linkedin
to using stationary bicycle.

Our bed (mine and...

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I love women who gracefully dance
And sweetly sing; and women who 
Avidly read and who brilliantly think;
I love women who love to love—

And who despise to hate—and who 
Receive and give of themselves, as well....

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"No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
                        ...

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I.
GRAIL OF TIDES

from the brewing storm’s steeping chalice
the breath of death’s journey awakens in quiet tides 
beckoned by the stirring whisper of mortal winds
furrowed by stoic angels in pallid temporal skies
on wings they dance with...

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