Half the course, half the course,
Half the course finished
Each one all in, to the end
Run the relentless
Forward the runners bold!
Charge the vic’try arch—their goal
Each one all in, to the end
Run the relentless
Challenges to the right of them,
Challenges to the left of them,
Challenges in front of them
Still they are fearless
No need to ask them why
They’ll give you no reply
Spirit you can’t deny
Each one all in, to the end
Run the relentless
Torn skirt billowing behind you
like a parachute,
you fell,
fell,
for the telescoped eternity
of two seconds.
The pond turned its blind eye
to the sky,
and the shuddering gate
swung shut.
No one was talking.
Next day, the sun stirred
the larkspur into bloom again.
A rambler saw the flattened weeds,
suspected a fox,
and poked around for feathers.
They found your body later:
drowned in the darkness of the wood.
And raped,
or so the papers said.
‘A rendezvous with death’
was how one writer put it.
The police are looking for a man in black.
First published in Landfall, New Zealand
Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson
with tetrameter(ABBA) had much fun
Gifted with wordplay he was blest
'In Memorium' at his best
A poet is a musician
The instrument he/she plays are words
The heart of a musician is the essence of song
So when Lord Alfred Tennyson defined
Poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty”
He felt, he heard, he composed the internal song
Presenting sound and content
In a style of it’s own
Creating mood inspiring a view
Painting a phrase a cliche or two
It is music in the mind’s ear
Best poems are timeless text is clear
Be they transformed by languages years
Great poems live on
External life’s future peers
Clairibel
Mariana
Timbuktu
Lord Alfred Tennyson
poet loved by my favorite poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
charge of the light brigade
my husband’s favorite poem
“theirs is not to reason why”
Alfred Tennyson was created a Lord
but his poetry ever strikes a chord
He suffered an emotional blow
when fellow poet-rebel.Hallam was laid low
Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
When all was certainly said and done,
Wrote “Better to have loved and lost…,”
Perhaps that was the bar he crossed.
written October 12, 2021
It’s just like an intellectuallist
to tear creation from its little nest of stone,
thinking only if it rests in his hand,
if he can see all its white veins
will he grasp its mysteries.
Maybe this is why he knows
Death
so well,
and God so little.
Who, wanting a lover, seizes it out of life,
and lays its corpse in a tender repose,
trying to fathom the truth of what it means to smile?
The smile the autopsy leaves is no mystery.
A flower in a crannied wall
is a mystery
no more for the taking
than laughter.
Posted March 4, 2020
For Craig’s Flower in the Crannied Wall contest
Deep as first love,
and wild as all regret -
Alfred Lord Tennyson
There is an aching in the heart
slipping into tears that burn and tear apart
every fiber of your being
so that the eyes are no longer seeing.
Each look was just pretend
knowing well how love would end
and there deep in the hallowed halls of time
well I knew, you wouldn't always be mine.
A somber memory paints
the heartthrob emotions making youth faint
delirious with love and sensual feelings
enough to send two bodies reeling.
Shadows lurk easing back and forth
assured each struggle for their own worth
there in that selfish centered need
one would follow and the other lead.
Just a moment held
as lovers succumb to love's spell
that quickly fades and disappears
with hearts held back by fear.
There in the shadows, each one alone will walk
their first love slipped away without talk
and futures die in the dream's regret
but it is a memory none ever forget.
Joseph May contest
Lines to awake the muse
3/1/20
The rain. Unrelenting.
Cats and dogs.
The dreary architecture of the souless
grey-brown urban landscape
worthy of the matchstick man fella
But. Hopeful.
The smokers hunched by the bookies,
beside the battlecruiser. Handy.
A cosy camaraderie with a common denominator
No judgement; but wonder or at least inquisitiveness
I envy them; I'm not of their clan
They are the self determined grassroots,
as politicians like to say
A certain folksy wisdom prevails
Later; the grim realities unveil
But. Enough!
Have the craic, lads
Have the craic!
Wonders of the world abound
on our earthly stomping ground,
in the seven seas profound,
midst the heavens round us wound.
Images from reaches vast
by astronomers amassed
show in varicolored cast,
cosmic glories unsurpassed,
stories of the great immense,
begging questions why and whence,
scenes stelliferously dense,
bringing past to present tense.
Oh how tantalizing to
lose oneself in starry view
of galactic vision new
where a poet’s words ring true!
Tennyson’s ‘Far--Far—Away’,
penned for Music’s haunting play
with the sounds the words convey
as they whisper, swing and sway,
tells of ‘far’ from past long gone,
murmur from ‘his own life’s dawn’?
breath where ‘doors of death’ go on
through an open curtain drawn?
Whether time or space be meant,
or spacetime together bent,
still, whatever sense is lent,
far’s remote in its intent.
After sunset’s crimson blaze
we may raise a dreamy gaze
in escape from troubled days
to celestial splendors praise.
Will our search of cosmic sphere
teach us to esteem what’s here?
Oft stargazers too I fear
must look far to see the near.
~ Harley White
The Charge of Boris's Parliamentary Cohort of three hundred lawmakers
I
Forward the light brigade!
Was there a dude dismayed?
Though most should have known
Cameron had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply!
Theirs not to reason why!
Theirs but to do or die!
Spurning the fear of Death
rode the three hundred.
II
Farage to the right of them,
Corbyn to the left of them.
Bannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered.
Stormed at by the press,
Onward they rode in stress
Into the wilderness,
Oh, what an awful mess!
Rode the three hundred.
IV
Can ever their great deed fade?
How high that price they paid!
All the world wondered.
Praise to the charge they made?
Praise to the Light Brigade?
Intrepid three hundred!
MY PLEA - a Tennyson Phrasis
By this still hearth I will drink
life to the lees.Much I have
known and seen..myself not least.
I am part of all that I have met,
yet how dull it is to pause to make
an end without this plea to thee.
From the eternal silence,something more..
a bringer of new things beyond the
utmost bound of human thought.
Come my friends,strive and find,'tis not
too late o seek a newer world.
A Christian Evangelical Phrasis inspired by some words in Ulyses by Tennyson
A Phrasis is a structured prose verse collaboration where the poet uses selected phrases of another writer’s (out of copyright) words to compile unique poetry therefrom as a tribute thereto,(the word phrasis is Greek for phrase). x
You may hear me recite this phrasis and much of my PS poetry on youtube under my pen name ichthyschiro
From Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem In Memoriam:27, 1850:
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
From Eileen M Ghali's Monoku in Poetry Soup: August 6, 2014
It's better NOT to have loved and lost than always to remember a paradise gone.
Ring Out, Wild Bells, to the Wild Sky
(Ode to Alfred Lord Tennyson)
Fair son of England whom I write
of saw not well; thus short of sight,
formed lines that in his head would lie.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild Sky.
Those lines (deep thoughts) - once written down -
rang out like church bells through a town
or birds, which to the heavens fly.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.
Yes, lofty verse and lyric sound
could touch those rooted to the ground
and make a nation’s royalty sigh!
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.
Victorian inside his soul,
he also played a modern role -
He saw man’s plight and questioned why.
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.
Poet Laureate too was he
who penned a famous elegy
for his young friend so young to die:
“Ring Out, Wild Bells” (to the wild sky)
By old age, he had crushed his fears,
outlasting many poet peers.
To honor him, I can but try. . .
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky.
For Dr. Ram Mehta's Contest on
"Ring out wild bells to the wild sky"
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