Long Songbook Poems
Long Songbook Poems. Below are the most popular long Songbook by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Songbook poems by poem length and keyword.
It is called the American Bar in the Savoy Hotel, in the Covenant Garden area of central London just off the Strand. Tonight, it was awash with indifferent lovers searching for another dramatic romantic interlude or perhaps just some empty sex on a Saturday night in mid-August.
The man stroked high on the thigh of his date or escort; one can never be certain when it comes to these types of complicated arrangements, as she continued to push her skirt down. I took this as not a good sign of things to come later in the deep edge of night.
She swallowed champagne by the glass, as he plowed into his third or fourth bottle of over-priced foreign beer. It was at this moment I realized everything at the American Bar in the Savoy comes with a high price, even when you are
more than willing to pay it.
Fascinated, I watched the scene play out as he leaned further in to her, almost eclipsing her profile. Youth was not going to be his constant companion on this evening or any in the future; his best days were adrift, lost in another moment in the conscious stream of time.
At the next table, the young suit pursued the lithe blonde seated across the table. Drinks ordered, then swapped, he didn’t like his. An early exchange of bartered goods since he had a wedding band and she was still looking. The night was early and exciting without paying the check.
A large rainbow gathering anointed another birthday for one of them; the ebb and flow of celebrating with best wishes and pictures to be passed around Monday morning. No doubt the tab was going to be high but it was a Saturday night and another year to be tacked on.
There was no shortage of lookers versus takers spread out unevenly in the crowded room, as the piano player stylishly swooned out Cole Porter songs from the great American songbook. The players and the played filled up the bar, wondering how to make this night different.
The quick sideways glance, hoping to make eye contact with an unknown partner, held for a moment or perhaps just not long enough. When I asked, no one could tell me why it is called the American Bar located in a London Hotel on the Strand but I was free to guess.
Between conjecture and classification there is
observation, experiment, data (collection and analysis),
statistics, calculus, and a good guess
about God's intentions - probabilities, fractals, chaos and complexity.
This is the thunderous city.
The form of the poem, the rhyme.
Form cannot be first if you want to reach high artistic levels, since
you are then bound by form, and that form is very often a
betrayal of reality.
Yet I find I am attracted all the time
to philosophies in short skirts, jewels and eyes lined with kohl.
I love where her legs lead, to her very soul.
Three women hike by under an umbrella in a winter rain. Two men side
by side run in rhythm.
An oil truck takes the hill in low steady gear.
My old Marine, 89, died last night without anxiety or fear.
May I overcome my pain enough to reach the place where the deer lay
down their bones
and, like them, die alone.
When making an axe handle, the pattern is not far off.
The purpose of school is to introduce us to the world's innumerable
wonders.
The periodic table, World Wars I and II, Huckleberry Finn and Jim.
But soft,
what light through yonder window breaks?
It is a billion trillion nuclear detonations per second without which
nothing can be done or faked.
The temple bell stops, but the sound still comes out of the flowers.
Forests and the composite species will be nameless. Genetic prowess,
receiving the sacrament, performing Lohengrin from the Great American
Songbook,
the look of love in all the wrong places, facebook,
fakebooks, folios of old family photos on or in pianos.
How can I be both still and skilled?
When we took Pop-Pop off the ventilator, we put him in a refrigerator.
He stopped eating, he stopped breathing. Circle with a dot.
He had his dream, he'd rowed his boat.
No single line can completely explain - or rhyme - or untie this knot.
In his songbook,
are raving songs of beauty,
which thrushes around the phrases of my mind
and embroiders my soul on an errand
into a white night of a white Christmas,
in a white dreamland,
and having sleepless dreams,
and numerous pictures,
which I can’t clearly depict
but I could reminder an auction,
where flood, was sold at a discount
and breath, to the tallest bidder
Therein in,
my late hero brother,
cheerfully sang from his hero’s songbook
and I astonishingly sang along
with a bright smile and cry,
craving for a new hug,
but we could not hug nor shake hands
And he palely said to me,
I am back to stay,
never to leave
But I woke up, to notice it was a white lie,
Why so, my hero brother?
I try to anger in white lightning,
but I notice that my anger is colourless
and my sweat is adourless
I also try to use white magical feelings to give him a hug or bring him back,
but I could not,
because I am not a professional white witch,
My emotions has been white washed,
and I feel like white trash,
because my hero brother has been trash away from me,
by death
I feel like giving up my white ghost,
like a prostituted white slave,
by drinking up a full tank of white spirit liquid,
so I could be on his ream
But my hero brother begged me not to
He consoled me by saying;
that no matter how transparently apart we where,
his soul will never stop blowing the whistle of joy
or flash a white flag in surrender to death
Because his music will never end, nor will his whistle blend,
because the only thing he has freely given to death is a white feather of shame
This filled me will plenty white hope,
I will sob no more!
Because I now know that my hero late brother is a white knight
I will wait for him, in this unlabeled white land
till we meet and share hugs again
How can there be despair when the entire
natural world unfolds with new life?
When the anhinga alights from the Nowhere
he was into the Somewhere you are, negotiating
his spectacular landing, spreading out his
Gulliver wingspan to warmth and healing on
the grassy knoll that rolls down to the lake--
manmade it may be, but the green-gold ducks
don't know that. They swim, they scan,
they disappear into its mysterious depths
for what nurturance is there.
How can there be sorrow when the male cardinal
darts across your line of vision with his red reality
twice in the same day into the Crape Myrtle
as it readies to burst its rooted heart? And, when
he comes again at dusk to rest on a budding
branch to sing a song you never heard before--
allows you to tell him how beautiful he is.
But when you ask him to stay, he darts away
because you are not the regulator.
How is there is no blessing when the stone
gray Buddha in his prayerful place on your porch
with his folded hands and bare feet reminds you
that the gods we respect do not always look like us.
When the Northern mockingbird who fell in love
with the South offers his limitless songbook
in the Laurel Oak, that wise grandfather, whose
leafy language writing the Braille of the senses
says Hold On, Hold on, and So, you do.
This songbook that I'm thumbing through,
uplifts my soul, I sing anew.
""Amazing grace how sweet the sound,
that saved a wretch like me."
(John Newton, thank you for this song,
you changed your life, you righted a wrong)
"At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light,
and the burden on my heart rolled away"
(With Jesus, your sins, too, will roll away,
and the joy in your heart will grow stronger and stay.)
"Love lifted me! Love lifted me!
When nothing else could help, love lifted me."
(Jesus is a lifter of souls.
When sins are forgiven, heaviness goes.)
"This little light of mine, Yes! I'm gonna let it shine;
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine."
(Everyone of us in our own unique way,
can shine their light for Jesus today.)
"Take my hand, precious Lord. Hear my cry, hear my call,
hold my hand lest I fall. Take my hand, precious lord, lead me home."
(When you need a hand to hold,
know His touch is more precious than silver or gold.)
"When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be!
When we all see Jesus, we'll sing and shout the victory."
(This world is not our home.
Someday we'll see Jesus sitting on His throne.)
History is the mirror through which we see tomorrow.
She is the apartheid portrait and silhouette of liberty in Port Elizabeth.
In Cairo, the pyramids would show you her hidden hollows.
Through the Niger River, she led Frederik Lugard to Lagos.
She is the archeologist's land-mark of Blood Diamonds.
You could ask the Congo’s, Angolans, Liberians, and the Ivorians,
They would tell you that Free Town was never a free town.
Yes! Freedom is never free at all.
We were rivers of blood and forests of bones.
We were snapping twigs and broken glasses.
We were these and more, in search of a big Tomorrow.
Hurray now, the Tomorrow is here
Maybe not so ‘big’ (correct me if I’m wrong).
'Children are the leaders of tomorrow',
a songbook we were forced to buy at school many years ago,
My father had no money, ergo, I was forced to borrow.
It was the only way I could learn and sing along with my peers, damning my ego.
Alas, the leaders of today are still yesterday-leaders’ alter-ego
Are people not born because others should be gone?
How then would the beautiful ones come
when the ugly ones are still very much in form?
When exactly shall we see this big Tomorrow?
She reaches far into my chest
And pulls out a handful of emptiness
Our embrace, enough to drive a master lockpick to madness
Both our hearts, pounding rock hard
Hard enough to shake leaves from the tallest, wisest tree
She has hair like wild lava
Eyelids of a butterfly's wing
Petals of rose dance in her cheek
Lips lush as fresh blood born of the finest sabre
Her lobes are the very first droplets of morning dew
And her voice, one hundred children running through a hilly field
Laughing and falling and falling and laughing
I am a harrowing tradgedy
I have lost her
Now I must wake everyday, until I meet the end of time
The sunset took her hand held high
She slipped from my arms, while the lockpick laughed menacingly
My eyes conquered by a salty ocean
Burning like a lick of the sun
All colour left everything my vision falls upon
All I see now are black rainbows and grey sunsets
With her, she took spring and summer
A bird's songbook and scents of eucalyptus woven on warm breezes
I live every hour at the beginning of fall
In the middle of long graveyard-cold winters
And ending only when fall wakes again
He leads me through East London,
docks, pubs, among the stray dogs, the
River Thames lapping at low clouds.
We find the second-hand player in a street
where the shops are dusty holes under the arches
of viaducts and railway bridges,
Me carrying the portable Dancette record player
in its hard Bakelite box,
lifting it by its leatherette handle, and I,
small for my age
but wanting so much to lug it all the way home.
The plastic cuts my fingers,
sharp corners bark my shins.
Father talks of his life here, the blackouts
and bombs, rationing,
and the bloody Saturday night street fights.
He whistles tunes
from a songbook of dead crooners.
That evening sitting together, with Sinatra -
watching the dark blue Capitol label
spiral and blur,
hearing the unseen belt under the bobbing needle
as it chewed vinyl -
reliving the clunk-clunk of our boots
as we pushed back fog-muted miles.
Years later, finding that player again
in mother's attic, lifting the machine
feeling how light, it is,
willing to take another walk with him
yet not knowing how to catch up.
“birds care not for whom they sing” - Silent One
You have your place in nature's choir,
Singing creation's songbook.
You're divine when you sing what you desire,
Like water in a brook,
Or leaves when a quaking aspen shook.
When you worry about the listening crowd,
You're no longer in tune.
If you feel sunshine, forget the cloud.
Forget about the moon.
The throng doesn't know, but it needs sun this June.
A bird sings not to lilt a melodious song,
But, because he's a bird.
To be who you are is never wrong -
When a wolf's mournful howl is heard,
He is what he is, and someone's soul is stirred.
Why please the milky orb on the sky's black roof
Unmoved by the wolf's plaintive song?
Her job is to be mysterious and aloof
To him, as he cries out so long,
But he feels content to bay his feelings, strong.
So, Painter, poet, singer, actor -
Whoever you may be,
Disregard every detractor.
Because they cannot see
Your beauty, and your place in God's tapestry.
If you look at Stephen Foster,
who wrote songs for the minstrel shows,
you wouldn’t expect a genius
that all of the world would know.
He was another bookkeeper
for a steamship company,
until he started writing tunes
that to this day sound masterly.
Today those same minstrel shows
seem quite insulting to good minds,
they weren’t exactly ‘High Culture’
way back in Foster’s time,
but the man wrote Old Susanna,
and My Old Kentucky Home,
the Swanee River, Camptown Races,
and Hard Times Come Again No More.
Even Beautiful Dreamer,
and Genie With The Light Brown Hair,
the amount of hits this man wrote
can drive musicians to despair.
From throw-away entertainment
that never got a second look,
this man alone wrote the core of
The Great American Songbook.
That he still remains relevant,
even known at this late date,
show that we never can predict
who exactly will be great.