Long Throngs Poems

Heat Lightening
by Michael R. Burch

Each night beneath the elms, we never knew
which lights beyond dark hills might stall, advance,
then lurch into strange headbeams tilted up
like searchlights seeking contact in the distance . . .

Quiescent unions...

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     by how many badbyes can you measure the length of your day

                 first comes...

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Each year as Christmas rolls around, as I buckle under the pressure and stress of shopping for gifts for people that already  have everything, I find myself remembering that Christmas of 1954.

Dad had joined...

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Poem One: Inspired by my reading of -Lady Labyrinth's---magnificent

poem ,  "Courting the Sublime Significance of Nothingness"

 (1.)  Poem One

Seeking The Boundaries Of Love's Depths And Her Hand

The air, its surging breath sings

into the...

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The three enigmas of Turandot

The well of souls run deep in fabled lands of old.
Of China's ancient dynasty and the lost Great Tartary, 
a ballad of love and loss that must be told.

The Emperor's daughter,...

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From my lowly bachelor’s house
Proudly christened ‘Embassy Fair’
I woke up to the chirping of birds
On the trees above and across the vale
And the riverine bushes in-between
I woke up to the crowing of cocks
And the mooing...

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The First Gathering, The Wrath, The Return Of Zeus
( "Wherein Fate and Destiny Reign Over Blind Worship )


Else the throngs of mortals find the truth,
 
teeming in the angry hordes they may,
 
forget to pay...

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The Tale of the Unexpected Prince
	I sat in my lonely castle room looking out of the window. The village below was a flurry of activity with peasants going about their busy day. I sighed. I...

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He/I/they/all/we/none knowing sit/sats he/she thoughts he/she witnessed he/she held a behold as to what the hell a corporeal ring of things once unbeknowinest to him/her was about,: thought provoking, yet undeterminate in any reason with...

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I loved sailing upon the blue sea, and I was never too far from it,
As one who knows sweet cravings, is seldom far from chocolates.

In my previous much loved vessel, I had sailed a thousand...

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“Never forget 
everything Hitler did 
in Germany was legal.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

drop by drop lady liberty bleeds
red on white and blue
common sense vexatious 
verboten spins askew 

“We can and we must 
write in the...

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the Universe, a self-defining everything
  but then, what of the Cosmos wherein we all dwell?
  that big bang blast, forever on a far-flung fling
  from beyond and within which, lurks heaven and...

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I was an avid, lifelong book lover, and I could read forever and a day,
Like the pleasing, scented lilacs, always and forever blooming in May.

Though my house was very disorganized, I would read where I...

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At Peace And In Sweet Awe Of Bronze Shaving Of New Rising Moon

Night, its darkened whispers had come, its silence had fallen
there in the midst of Nature with its deep woods a'callin'
campfire burning and crackling,...

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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...

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Humpty Dumpty lived in make-believe land, like dreamy shadows get long;
And he dwelt in a house near a wall, among merry, crimson, oriole throngs.

He had a figure equally rotund and jolly, and was therefore loved...

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Gratitude for running water on tap... 
and heat flowing with a snap

After shaving and showering,
yours truly feels winsome
though morose seeing
unwanted adipose "love handles"
inflating mine abdomen and tum
unanimously decided courtesy quorum
losing washboard stomach
finds me uncomfortably numb,
which...

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I was a vibrant, portrait painter, bringing cherished profiles to eternal life,
Like undying life of balmy springtime, recurring in shades of green so rife.

I had long been fascinated with new faces, for it is seldom,...

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Three points of ionic invisibility, drawn off the charted map
Of realism or reality, the calibrated compass spins out of 
Control, then suddenly freezing at polar northern degree!
Within the gravitational shift, a rippling vibrational influxes 
Occurs,...

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Enktantas sat bolt upright,
in his hut near the temple walls,
he lived just below Olympus,
worked there beneath the mountain tall.

He worked to serve the oracles
who would augur the will of gods,
Enktantas was no holy man,
but paid...

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In the Apocalypse of Hell, a warning strong, 
Of destruction and judgment, where dark throngs, 
Where eyes that sin, must cut to save, 
To seek the path, the righteous pave.

Hell's inferno starts on Earth's domain,...

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THE STARGAZER'S RIDE
                                ...

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Sappho Translations IX


Sappho, fragment 17
translation by Michael R. Burch

Hear me, Queen Hera, as your delightful festival nears,
you to whom the sons of Atreus performed vows,
those dazzling kings who did such amazing things,
first at Troy, then...

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GILDAS TRANSLATIONS

These are modern English translations of Latin poems by the English monk  Gildas Sapiens (“Gildas the Wise”).

“Alas! The nature of my complaint is the widespread destruction of all that was good, followed by...

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I feel the wind passing through my hair blowing a sweet aroma in the atmosphere; the birds in the trees are flying around with glee and the scent of the fish blowing from the sea...

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