Long Threadbare Poems

Currents
by Michael R. Burch

How can I write and not be true
to the rhythm that wells within?
How can the ocean not be blue,
not buck with the clapboard slap of tide,
the clockwork shock of wave on rock,
the...

Read More

I heard you calling my name in an echoing whisper 
I saw a bird take wing in the whirling wind of disaster 
I put my weary head on your broad shoulders
The moment we touched, I...

Read More

(In a Lush Garden Somewhere Out There)

The student stands where shifting sands of thought
Once firm with reason 
now elusive truths are sought.
Its splendor wanes 
a threadbare fading strand,
A quest for wisdom 
in this digital land.

Sage:...

Read More

Beckoning
by Michael R. Burch 
 
Yesterday the wind whispered my name
while the blazing locks
of her rampant mane
lay heavy on mine.
And yesterday
I saw the way
the wind caressed tall pines
in forests laced by glinting streams
and thick with...

Read More

For All That I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought:
I feel the burnished weight...

Read More

Sonnets XVII-XXIV

Discrimination
by Michael R. Burch

The meter I had sought to find, perplexed,
was ripped from books of "verse" that read like prose.
I found it in sheet music, in long rows
of hologramic CDs, in sad wrecks
of long-forgotten...

Read More

Sonnets LII-LX

The Endeavors of Lips
by Michael R. Burch

How sweet the endeavors of lips: to speak
of the heights of those pleasures which left us weak
in love’s strangely lit beds, where the cold springs creak:
for there is...

Read More

World War II Poems and Holocaust Poems - IV - Primo Levi

Shema
by Primo Levi
translation by Michael R. Burch

You who live secure
in your comfortable houses, 
who return each evening to find
warm food, 
welcoming faces...

consider whether this...

Read More

I shall resolve to leave this
Place now...
And steadfastly search out,
Nestling between ridge and bluff
Amidst the folds of a foreign 
Land,
Several acres of unkempt ground
Fallow and rough;
Upon which stands...
Crumbled stone walls
With an exposed slate roof in
Some...

Read More

Was this a bold  endeavour or worst-case high risk plot?
 In one sense I was caught between two poles apart  concerns.
One must never underestimate indeed trivialise a devilish 
difficult decision.
A decision that may...

Read More

LOVE POEMS I by Michael R. Burch

These are love poems by Michael R. Burch: original poems and translations about passion, desire, lust, sex, a first date and dating, a first crush, a first girlfriend and...

Read More

His words stung me, as the cries from the maelstrom seem to retort
Their scattered, foreign words and wails retching their say
I listened, almost mesmerized,
Pulverized

“Come,” Said he,
With threatening authority

Upwards, higher than the balcony from which we...

Read More

I'm in the back burner once again
Once again
Wild and free in the fields of fleedom 
Mild with glee, ahhhh awaiting his Kingdom 
Yes baby, you make me happy as a clown getting all of the...

Read More

But we of the Three Tribes live undiscovered 
   In the reverberating stillness of the 
 Three Gorges...
And are therefore unknown to the warring mongol;
    His impassioned lusts -- his...

Read More

Exclusive Birth Rights

I am German and guilty as charged by history and evil parental culpability
privileged by life and proxy thus I refuse to forget ancestral perpetration
though I propose without any diminution that systematic genocide is...

Read More

They have been playing a dirty game for years because they have nothing  of depth to share, they have been playing a dirty game for year, without conscience,  love or fear. They make...

Read More

Another day in dreamland

Wake up.  Watch the sun ease in the light
like the day before, goin back, and on some more.
Cuddle with the reasons why while I collect
my unconscious back from the sky.
Okay, get...

Read More

I had a historic dream
that Einstein led polypathic Elders
pursuing roots of time
emerging light's speeding race
through repowering histories,
revolving thought experiments 
resolving re-ligioned mysteries.

I dreamed energy conjoined sacred places
as vibration reiterates pattern
rhythmic times of changing space
bifurcating sight's...

Read More

The afternoon dances before and night sky
Threadbare shoes dangling on their tired feet
Torn up clothes bulging underneath the deep
Dirty clothes sticking to their slender backs
And a strange odor circulates around them
Five boys and one girl...

Read More

Coronavirus microbe (COVID-19) begat...
heebie jeebies couple months before March 15th, 2020

More'n three hundred and sixty six days ago,
a pandemic did devastatingly blow
across the webbed wide world
dark shadows spelled glow
bull horror seeds of hell show
did terrify...

Read More

After the doomsday clock struck midnight...

a blizzard of blinding demoniacal
highly radioactive fueled banshees
(analogous to a bajillion barenaked ladies
raging against the machine)
barreled across the brutalized landscape
affixing fiendish scorched earth signature
whereby survivors felt like foreigners,
or strangers in...

Read More

Phoenix and Phoenicia

They had both been victims of their own sad minds stories lost told and untold
narratives to be re-authored livid experience lived in silence meaning smeared in
crusted mud slung in terminal slots shots executed...

Read More

The mystical maid of the seasonal change, in summer darns a
Gown of evergreen, with rose petal blossoms of bows, and leaves
Ribbons woven intertwine through thorns and beauty.
In the rush the colder winds blow at natures...

Read More

Asifa's Blood Pens 
(The Courageous Princess)

No! No! Wipe out the name of Asifa! 
No more Asifa's on this earth to be born!
O Lord, my creator, my benefactor, my protector!
My parents chose my name in your...

Read More

Three hundred and eighty-eight acres of it runs across the desert land and a thousand peasants kneel in the ground gathering moisture in their hand to solidify the land. Hundreds of them partitioned in rows...

Read More