Long Rods Poems

Flint 
Within its brilliance gleaming
Cool black in lacquered polished silver chrome
Cranked up pistons bleached in summer’s heat
Hot steam rising as gears thundering
Beyond the crystal liquid city lights
Highways built across the land
In hearts felt pride American...

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A Stolen Memory
A Mirthful Chorus
By Sy Roth 


We surrounded him 
Asked to let go.
She stared at the misshapen face,
Unshaven sandpapery skin 
Eyelids a tabula rasa
Fluttery sere skin
And we could see the humor blossoming in his...

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The Alaskan Oil Pipeline

Nineteen sixty-eight confirmed the year
Of discovery by ‘Humble Oil’
To North America’s largest oil field,
On the North Slope of the Brooks Range;
A west to east Northern Alaskan mountain chain.
An area forty miles wide...

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Imitation! Creative Compliment, Lacking in Originality, or Plagiarism? 

This week takes me back to college days. I was taking a graduate course (as a Physics major)   in 'Modern Poets' at the University of...

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"The Depths"

From the depths
silence.

Where 
are the voices
of other 
women?

In that other place,
the monsters violate, 
they take and take
bloody all, what they want

the dreams of women
are torched, murdered, 
next to them, 
the sweet dreams of lives...

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Stood I there, that last day,
On an iron bridge...
An aqueduct by design,
Where, looking dreamily out over
The Ernes Lower Lough,
My compressed shadow 
Momentarily paused -
To contently recline:
Amidst coy Junes radiant beams 
of sweet benign!
All was stilled,...

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Chernobyl.


A nuclear disaster, in the Russian town Chernobyl,
An odor-less killer, the invisible force.
As the radiation escapes, from the crumbling reactor,
We must cool it down, before it blows.


Evacuate Pripyat, the employee’s town,
The town of 35000; first...

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OOOniversal oo

Frightened tepid antisocial ant was football training avidly but failing to attend a fragrant tailor army. Oh dear. That was sure to be put forward to the sacred sanction ship and the sacred sanction...

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THE CHIMNEY
The once fine air, refreshens with dust
Between the village horizon and crest
Since the sailing of a death chemical chimney.

Young green plants seedlings growing on slope
Are left to sip these  carcinogenic dusts, sapling
And entwined...

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      In the purple shadows of the black's monoliths, where an ancient echo calls forth, at the blurry forge of "Ralkon Dis",
a salient dragon from mystery's petra cliffs drifts you...

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I didn’t even know about the trip we were to make.
That very first adventure that old Gramps and I would take, 
I’ll not forget the way it felt when I first saw the lake.

The sunrise...

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a heave and a shove, into the ocean she goes
where she stops no one knows,
floats and floats till it may sink
you may spot it with  red ribbon bows.

message in a bottle set off to...

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I love spending nights on the lake.
Once the oven-like sun disappears,
things get suddenly quiet, except for
the occasional hoot of an owl, crickets, frogs
and the soft lapping of the lake on the boat.
When the moon rises...

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(5)   At the same time, the US was exploring space, and we were able to view the stars for the first time in space above the atmosphere. Earthbound telescopes have to look through...

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Norse Mythology, Return Of The Slayer Of Dragons

( Part One, Darkness Arrives)

I - (THE PLEA)

Slayer of weak beasts, ravager of torn breasts
Darkness from East, dragons its armored crests
What hero dares to slay this foul evil
What...

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Thanks to Muhammad Imtiaz for allowing me to work with him to create this piece. I added a bit of fantasy to his real life experience. He was moved by seeing poverty up close in...

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I still feel under the weather today April 2nd, 2023

Unseen enemy invades my body 
with platoon of green berets air
rating, and enfilading immune system viz 
Hib bully knock and sock kin me 
courtesy roebuck seers...

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We enter through the glassed-in porch
And I feel even more at ease, 
Remembering that as a child
My own room once had been a porch
But there are even more windows here
With glass on all three sides.
Old...

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"STRONG"



A child finds strength 
in the holding of his hand
The Beatitudes in his mind 
repetition 8 times cast
whispers the loneliness
in a Man -

Who held his hand?

Like Bede, venerable,
he's counting beads dropping 
like blood drops, 
steel...

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Dad was loadin' rods and tackle, I was addin' fuel, as Mom hopped on with a picnic lunch that balmy afternoon.
Another Sunday outing on the lake - our old routine - as sister Susie tossed...

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“The Church of Pasiphaë”



inside the church of me
a heart on fire blazes brighter 
than any morning star you could capture 
to wish a life away, a Lawrence forest ripped,
lit like a funeral pyre I wish...

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Albedo effect in full force after appreciable snowfall

After descent of eventide
luminescence of freshly fallen snow
still illuminates the terrestrial firma bright
even upon the onset of dusk,
when dark shadows
betoken the edge of night
analogously herald outer limits
invoking intimations...

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Marching out of the cloaked shires
Of landowners, stockbrokers, 
Hereditary Peers, and ruddy faced 
Squires:
A vast multitude of many varied 
Tribes.
Amassing in the great cities, where,
Inhabiting shadowy chambers, 
Behind nodding sighs and hushed 
Whispers, 
The Masonic...

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I loathe feeling under the weather...,

especially when nasty elephant 
(named Thomas the pachyderm)
stomping to break loose courtesy tether,
where antibodies of mine 
struggle to band together
loosely analogous to voters
standing in a queue
waiting to cast their vote
(while...

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A jailer has never two similar days
never knowing what will be next
I should know for that's what I do
way back in the days of no text

There were these two prisoners
two Christians Paul and Silas by...

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