Long Shrubs Poems

As winter hazes of January spraying
While I was meditating on how
To write this riveting poem which
Seemed to be for someone who
I never cast in my sight.
Despite her name is not an odd in me
But I...

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I love you only because I love you
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
Between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates...

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Sonnet LXXXI-LXXXIX

Day, and Night
by Michael R. Burch

The moon exposes pockmarked scars of craters;
her visage, veiled by willows, palely looms.
And we who rise each day to grind a living,
dream each scented night of such perfumes
as drew...

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Every Day You Play
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Every day you play with Infinity’s rays.
Exquisite visitor, you arrive with the flowers and the water.
You are vastly more than this immaculate head I clasp...

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Yet at this very moment the cathedral was crumbling
down upon the cries of foresaken refugees, 
the monastery's walls wobbling from war's wreckage, 
and as the black bursts billowed into sun drenched brutality
with the bodies of...

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(A somnambulistic drama in four acts)

Actors:

Jean-Paul Marat; 
Charles Barbarou;
Charlotte Corday;
1st Philosopher;
2nd Philosopher;
The Commentator’s Voice.

Act 1. A tavern. Two philosopher sit at the table; 
Marat sits at the other, some distance away.

1st Philosopher 

…or even worse:...

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PRELUDE.
When the sky and world are dark no sounds are heard in the woods. Perhaps the scrabbling of night creatures on the hunt fo food. But no sound of woodpeckers ra ta tatting, bird song...

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#1
"It is a sin to kill a Mockingbird.
While playing games with rocks or guns, defray,
them, please, ...shoot old tin cans.  Each whispered song 
from Mockingbirds, can heal the wounds  of the day"

Virtues are...

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Age defiant was this spruce and spirited citizen slinking blithely past the burgundy red doors of her enigmatic country dwelling.
As her olive skin neatly curved fingers 
slid over an intermittently scratched carbon black handrail she...

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POTW 28 January 2018

Prologue:
A beautiful extra-terrestrial female researcher is sent down to a remote island to observe earth and beam her findings back to her planet. She’s strictly forbidden to make any human contact. She...

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The ride to the country is uneventful
Except that I feel a little like
A man riding inside a cannon ball.
Yuliya's father Igor drives
I'm also up front (the honored guest)       ...

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Integrity of Healthy Wealth

You have heard it said
Turn your swords into plowshares.

We, both Left and Right, echo that to add
Turn from planting bombs and bullets and barbs
to planting trees, and shrubs and carbon-infested fibers.

If our...

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Treading Down the Journey of Life

                            I have...

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A dawning twilight's me. Oh, joy. Oh, what a joy. This day. Oh, what a day. A breath bestills my eyes and I, e'er slight, a deeper breath that reopened them and myself to a...

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Blood spilling in the east running all the way to the west
Forming rivers of doubt in the north and South
An army of men converge along the river bank
With long guns strapped to their sides
And big...

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Men, do not give up your dreams for these girls, keep sleeping. 


My cousin had read this phrase to me in August, when my wife left me for a harvard graduate that moved in our...

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...and the Demon spoke,
its voice deep and mellow like smooth satiny chocolate,
"There is more, much more than good and evil,"
the words thunderously whispered.
The verdant emerald green of the forest quivering at the sound,
drawing in upon...

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Deep in a silva of the Emerald Isle there hides a peculiar coppice,
Shaped in a spiral labyrinth which is seen only on the summer solstice. 

As the sun rises to its highest of tides and...

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My hair has always 
had a mind of its own
Stays doing whatever
it wants whenever 
it pleases
Just never bothers to do 
any of it, at my convenience
Will take its sweet time 
to grow 
When I'm most...

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Written 4 June 2023
Placed 1st in :
A Brian StrandPremiere No. 2022

                        ...

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Parents
exercising totalitarian rights
to abuse and neglect WinWin family governance resolutions
for restoring peace with EarthJustice climates,
develop unfortunate children
perpetually longing
for their revengeful turn
at decompositional bat.

Families pulling through well-anchored weeds
of life's,
love's,
collected and too quickly grown redundant detritus,
hoping to...

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When I was just a  little girl, we lived by railroad tracks;
we loved the steamy, smoky stacks, the wheels clickety clack.
On many days we would find, knocking at our door,
a hobo who had jumped...

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Lost in the solitude of time they journey through the forest in their mind, searching for a path that would lead them out of the dark; the woods were so thick that they had to...

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I had always loved being near deep-sea water, and I was never too far away,
As the beauty of fresher tomorrow, is but mystic hours from prevalent today.

I enjoyed swimming and boating and surfing, and even...

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"In restoring the land, I restore myself."
       Franz Dolp

We long ago started bilateral tree balancing information
for mind and land restoration structures.

We noticed trees in an old secular commodified above...

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