Stiffly Poems | Examples

She spoke to me yesterday

She spoke to me yesterday
Rippling in the brisk spring breeze
Humming her song of freedom
Etched with the pain of passion
Humbled by the sacrifices endured
Snapped sharply as a gust stirred images
Of a county’s growing pains
The trauma of generational gestation

Then she whispered to me
As I shed a tear
Each must become its own
Sharpen its own sword
Stand tall in the fickle winds
Knowing that an idle flag
Will stiffen in defense
Of its right to snap stiffly
In the rising winds of change

I smiled
As I watched her shadow
Dancing with the children
In the park’s playground

salvation army

salvation army

she wore purple because she liked it.
hanging stiffly on the store rack,
yellow goodwill tag with smudged blue ink,
was it a three or five?
she argued for three, willing to pay five, she did.

her breasts had followed the alphabet
from a to b to c to d
and settled back on c
after some of the air had escaped her life
and left her haggling over purple dresses.

somehow salvation was unreachable
and the army refused to go home,
but she had purple swatches to mend the holes
and fingertips that blended too well
with gunnysack purple and bruised memories.

she remembered life in yellows and orange
bright colors that worshipped the sun.
but that was when she dreamed while still awake
and wished without a penny.
purple happens to life.  

and it did.

tolbert

True Story

I had a vision,a waking dream.I drove someone,a female to a beautiful secluded spot in nature.It may have been the trail of tears state park.We sat in the car and talked for a while till I asked her would she like for me to take a stroll allowing her some privacy for the storm that was brewing.She said no ,she wanted my presence .Almost inaudibly a sound began as if from the soles of her feet building in volume and intensity .As each resistant cell released what it had long held the volume continued to escalate as it sought a point of egress.Arriving at her wild eyed contorted face she looked at me questiongly.I responded with a look of calm reassurance that she would endure this . it ripped its way up her throat  pulling her head back with the force of the long contained explosion of pain releasing a scream that both frightened and awed . A ferral non human wale of a banshee that made the hair stand stiffly at the nape of my neck .
Then she collapsed into an outpouring ,no flood gate
Could have contained removing the last vestiges of the unbearable weight she had exhaustively carried.And then she was well.

frost

crust on water's edge 
stiffly standing cattails 
resting ground for geese

can you please get me out of here

mermaid wrested her breasts on the edge of the dish
Her powerful tail gave one tremendous swish
Be open to new people, her inner voice said.
Who are you? Mermaid asked, fluffing her hair of red.
Little girl carrying calico kitten stiffly walked by.
Can you please get me out of here? Mermaid asked, her head held high.
The little girl snickered and the cat gave a sniff.
They rolled their eyes as if to say “as if”….

Ode To Ambedkar

Part II

What would have happened to million’s fate, 
If Subedar Ramji had failed, thee to set.
In 1891’s simmering heat of April
Born true nationalist Phule’s pupil.

Being motherless boy, thee set sails,
Thee had to bear brunt of devilish veils.
Under the curse of being an outcaste,
Hiding behind were satanic verses vast.

Fighting stiffly with ethnic bigotry,
Thee maintained disciplined gallantry.
Thee was not allowed a sip to drink life source,
from glossy vessels tainted by ritualistic force. 

Passing exams with flying colours, 
Thee received scholarship armours.
Baroda Maharaja fuelled thy intellectual leap,
Thus, begun stripping naked waists cheap.

Almost Xanadu

Winged mannequins dot the forest trail,
forest fairies in the dale -
so lifelike in their chalkware skin,
unexpected in the vale.

Stumbling under their glossy gaze,
lost inside a leafy maze -
I back up slowly, turn and run,
clawing through the morning haze.

"Join us", they plead now - reaching, falling,
all of them so sweetly calling
"You need some flowers in your hair",
as I am gasping, crawling. 

"You could be one of us", they sigh,
"abandoned here we know not why,
creating almost Xanadu -
we never have to live or die."

At wood's green edge I glimpse the street
and glance back, oddly incomplete:
I see just pallid mannequins 
posed stiffly in the summer heat.

Learning From Loss

The hardest losses
are those too late to repair
what has been win/win time lost
to despair

Just as love
cannot co-arise
where fear grows 
fully uprisen
a prison
predicting anger's nearby
impetuously apprised
surprise.

So too,
Freedom cannot thrive
where addiction has hard helped
us feel we are not  softly worthy
to survive

"Loser" labelled struggles
with addiction
cannot feel free of affliction
nor can giving in
to addiction's short-term affections,
powers to feel escape
from personal
and communal,
economic
and political,
monocultural
and monotheistic
OverPowers

Social judgment,
blame
and shame,
co-detachment
non-communication
developing hard
stiffly cold silent screaming
excommunication

Depressing loneliness
isolation
self-ostracization issues
win/lose closeted
fear-based shame defenses
against Old School GoldenRule
loss of co-invested love
offenses

Against spirited natural
nondualistic redemptions
restorations
of win/win historical
Sun nurturing light 
and Earth nutritioning power
regenerating 
EarthTribe 
indigenously sacred regenerations.

Snowstorm

A white out
A snow bomb
Homes snow blanketed
Whited sepulchres
Cars abandoned
Stuck in snowdrifts
An arm sticking stiffly out
Above its embedded body
Deep in  its shroud of snow
The wind howling and keening
The banshee's delight in its kill
With the thaw 
will come the count

Night Walking

It creaks,
drifts have rubbed the air raw
it crunches
as if some large beast were walking
over the packed snow.

All night listening        had to
it could have been a robber
an ice-cold housebreaker
I can't sleep
when the night walks like this.

They say
there are lots of frozen people
dying somewhere,
I imagine the wind carrying their last words
across the empty fields,
they are going somewhere
and I don't think it's anywhere good.

Get up
stare out into the black,
outback
the bare-boned trees
rattle leafless twigs like dentures
all buried now
            in the heaped and falling.

Morning slides in stiffly
                        dragging light
over the dark stained ice.

Then a late sun opens wide a white sky
pretty now.....yes it’s all lovely
of a sudden.

I look for foot or paw prints
listen for the creaking's
there are none
the recently dead
            also 
            are soundless.

A Sullen Silken Star

Stiffly staring
from a faded
frightened far
is a sullen
silken star.
Scornfully
scattered behind
it’s skittish
skin of scolded
scowling scars.
Youthfully
yearning
for a life
contentedly
cleansed in
candlelight.

Disobeying Military Order

A stiffly worded instruction 
That should commence with a ruction,
Opening fire; next action,
Lifeless Bodies sole attraction...

But then what of Reconstruction?
Easier to crush than to rebuild
Either as one man or a guild;
Often tough to achieve a Peace Talk
When you've had a real long bad walk
From my lips A loud "Correct Sir!"
But I was shaken down to my fur…

From there straight to Repented's Church
I'll be there waiting for their search!
They'll me pick up plus my letter:
A Resignation's not later...

Disobeying military order:
Pure risk but could be in order.

The Social Stage

There on society’s 
stage of
social standards
stiffly stands 
a man timid
and tense.
With his mind lying  
in a world
that had never 
made sense .
Bounding him under 
the brittle 
bones of a 
broken system.

Translating Rumi

not through the tongue and its wind-spray
or the booming chest

but a soul moved by broken wings,
the whispers of ruined things
crushed by a cosmic tongue

here is a sparrow corpse
this is his poetry
catacombs of grubs
a wing bent stiffly up
the other
pounded into utterance

Rumi's spirit is riddled by flesh
it is blown through
the blare of broken lungs
not salted
on the suds of pious speech

but in the ruined breath
of sky shattering prayers

A Girl With Poor Handwriting

As The Note-Taking Girl scribbles
And absentmindedly quibbles 
Her fingers are animated wriggles
Churning out eccentric squiggles:
Letters of Ever Clumsy Angles,
One like a creeper that tangles,
As many like threads in singles, 
Wherefore her teacher openly wrangles 
And after explosion stiffly dangles
Before her the option of A Street Hawker
Bearing a case with or without a locker
And around patrolling with jingles
Or she be whipped and a nearby ear tingles!

But that wasn’t The Rescue from a writing 
That keeps a teacher’s eyes biting!

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