~ Were you born in the wrong century? ~
Would you have fit in at King Arthur’s table
been a blood-stained Crusader if able
In Rome, been a patrician or plebe
or like Cassius, have a plot up your sleeve
Would you have pondered with Galileo the night sky
or been a ‘flat-earther’ who never asked why
Would you, like Washington, have forded the Delaware
even if you had but moth-eaten rags to wear
Would you have bad-mouthed cars for the sake of your horse
sabotaged phone lines to preserve Samuel Morse…
Well, let me tell you, as for me,
I would have joined Fred and Barney Flintstone
for a ride on a pterodactyl built for three
Piano gently plays
Eyelids like shades drawn
Ease back in La-Z-Boy chair
The present slips away
Eternity is present
Piano gently plays
Fingering time and space
Reaching for relationship
With the most, high God
Piano Gently plays
I never leave haphazardly
The patrician Rock keeps me
He blesses me with peace
I trace His words in my spirit
Piano gently plays
A man, more patrician than not,
Of folly, he had quite a lot.
Stentorian voice,
But words of poor choice,
A sot, not a yacht, had he bought.
I know an ambitious politician
His nose in the sky like a patrician
Looks down on all others
As voters, not brothers
Appointed ‘Chief of Dog-doo Emissions’
I can breathe when I go to your parlor
Through your smile, verbose speech,
Snow white teeth, fleshy skin, sweating
I can breathe thoroughly, coz love sheer
I can breathe when I go to the fresh nature
Hearing birds chirping, walking under the
Cloudy shadow, hearing river’s rhythm
With fountain falling norm I breathe fair
But I can’t breathe when I go through myself
Where I find varied customs of discrimination
Where I make an abode of hatred, vengeance
Barring love where I care so-called patrician pelf
I’m breathless in the reign of apartheid humanity
Breathless I’m dead alive to take taste my destiny
© Mahtab Bangalee
Chattogram
30/01/2023
Someone gave Jeff Kyser a subscription
Writer’s Digest seized his imagination,
It was almost like an editor’s prescription
For developing Jeff’s fine poetry articulation
He quickly discovered the poetry pages
Latching on to new forms…not on P.S.,
Strange syllabications from some sages
And navigation of the complex, I guess.
Probably more than any poet I know
Jeff wrestles with rhymes and patterns,
Ranging from serious to silly, although,
He lays it on thick when rhythm matters
Certainly, one of the better poets here
He deserves this moment of recognition
So, to Jeff, I want to raise a stein of beer
And say “Hear! Hear!" to a poetry patrician!
Written October 15, 2022
He is almost perfect, just a chip on his nose,
a neatly bearded patrician.
His spouse is seriously damaged,
her face mangled by time.
In the museum two Roman busts
placed a little apart from each other.
I sense her mood; insight gives her words.
“I never loved him.” the marble woman says,
her one crushed eye tilts toward her consort.
“He was ever the highhanded martinet.
His original bust was hacked off,
it lay face down in the dust for hundreds of years
covered in goat . This one is a fake him.
I like him better.”
All hail the village mortician
his bearing, proper patrician
Sterling the gent's reputation
throughout his chosen vocation
A man of dignity and reserve
whose stare can a ghost unnerve
Frankly, he makes me quite nervous
though one day I'll be needing his service
MY TREE - IT SHALL SURVIVE
Beside the Kinta River still it stands
Colossus of the primal forest panoply
Residing native of the fecund land
It’s limbs supporting graceful arcing canopy
A wondrous teeming aerial village live
It shall survive
A plume of smoke in still cool morning air
Warned of a threat to life of our dear friend
I dragged back fire and damped consuming flames
From perilled home of copious verdant life
Reprieved to face more challenges, and strive
It shall survive
Bearing scars, endured with grace of old patrician
Looking on unchanged, while all around contrive
‘til once more needing care of a passing physician
It shall survive
Each time I pass that way, I muse as I see
With warm complacent notion : ‘That’s my tree!’
13 September 2019
Writing Challenge 2, September 2019 - The Photograph
Sponsor, Dear Heart - Wiishkobi Ode
Dino walks on the lino with a cat for a hat
A collar for colour and leash for pastiche
With a tale in his tail as he jiggles and wiggles
The flag half white with delight and bright as the light
Green shadows for meadows and jolly as jelly
The grand creature roars extra on demand as a feature
‘I am the Lord in the fort and mojo of play dough
Patrician magician and seal your appeal
Applause from my paws will guard in the land of the bard’
Dino looks like a rhino or bear in despair
A clown with a crown or ovoid on steroids
Mussel with tussles or dragon that fell of the waggon
‘When I’m older and bolder my fire won’t tire
Blow fumes in my plumes and breathe off at ease
Enlarge small into tall protect Daddy from baddies’
‘The rhyme is past bedtime one last lullaby sweetie pie
Happy dreams no monster screams rest snug little slug’
‘Love you Daddy Paddy let’s have dinosaur scales for breakfast in Wales’
16th June 2019
(The Welsh Flag is a red dragon on a half green and half white background)
THE BABY GRAND
The black baby grand,
Caressed by a slender finger,
By a young, red-haired’s fair, small hand,
(With her russet curlicues in a bow)
Emits cadences that languishing, linger
From the royal nook of the lady’s parlor,
Where she gazes through the stained-glass window
Upon the florid, turquoise harbor;
(A wave ascends, then reels,
Circling down to the watercress.)
Her patrician dress
(One might confess)
While modest, reveals
Her soft, lavish knees,
Where lilac-scented harmonies
Ring from that medieval chamber,
Out into the garden below,
Through the half-open, bluish panes,
Where the dahlias, slumbering, waver
Now to and fro, now high, now low,
Kissed by those amber, ghostly strains.
JOHN LARS ZWERENZ
FEAR NOT THE CLAUSE
There is no cause to fear the clause
It has no teeth, has no sharp claws
Though analysis may give you pause
Dissect it, then you’ll be the one to dictate
It has a subject, and predicate
But a usual function subordinate
It does neither state nor interrogate
It's a delegate with aid to dispense
It may have a pronoun and a verb with tense
And might be inclined to make a pretence
But while it may have a where or when sense
It’s not a true sentence; although a key stone
Lest it's the MAIN clause self determined, alone
A patrician of syntax up high on a throne
As a sentence support like a vertebra bone
Put in its right place could give words a revivali
So direct the clause, noun, adverb, adjectival
Do not be concerned, it won’t risk your survival
And make it act as your aide, genitival
There is no cause to fear the clause
B52s above the Aleutians?
It never was a Red Dread global mission.
Fidel was just Galician patrician,
and Ho and Mao were scholarly Confucians.
They wore those uniforms like horsehair vests,
to carve from abject nothingness an entity,
a national and regional identity,
ingredients which only coalesced
when nascent nations donned that soviet skin,
abhorrent to the blinkered Baywatch mind:
unowned, untethered, boundless, non-aligned –
but with Kalashnikovs airlifted in.
As Mary Jane moved in on moonshine stills,
the five-year-olds rehearsed their fallout drills.
Tourist in Bruges
I was in Bruges, in Flanders, once
Saw beautiful old buildings where the patrician class
The merchants and charlatans lived
Where the poor lived in the past has been erased
The poor now live in high rise flats.
We rented a carriage with a bored horse that did its round
On streets too clean to be true; animals peed on canvas.
We walked around took the pictures as did others.
We had lunch at a café too expensive for its food, but the beer
Was good and that is worth remembering.
Beyond imposing gates there lies the place
Where charming children of the leisure class
Live out their carefree days at tranquil pace
And play patrician games on greener grass.
Across the street stands shyly a small boy
In beggarly attire all wet by rain:
He watches bound by grief and craves the joy
Which he is never destined to attain.
The view before him puzzles and defies
His dream of justice on this cheerless day.
He shakes his head, draws closer still and sighs,
But then he bites his lip, turns back and walks away.
Find my poems and published poetry volumes at www.eton-langford.com
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