The Ohio wipes its face every few miles.
A bend in the river
forgets the wharfs, the gravel silos
and power plants,
only occasional coal barges
push an industrial past before them.
Here cattails gather herons
into measured dominions.
The river gallops under placid waves,
fish-eyed currents dip and toggle
in the ripple.
It is possible to watch yourself
in this new bend in the stream,
possible to wash your face
anew also -
there to see your own rivering.
Categories:
wharfs, poetry,
Form: Free verse
I was born to a city. Once was that city,
grout and soot were my bloodline
I was in it that city, and it was in me,
my eyes were hundreds of windows,
thousands of street lamps.
I was hoodwinked and bounded
by the hoops of an encircling blight.
My child-body an extension of docks,
cranes and wharfs,
of grey schools on the drizzling corners
of grayer days, small narrow shops
on dreary cramped streets, roads strewn
with the detritus of poverty, all an adjunct
of my urban milieu.
I never imagined that another city existed,
one unknown to the drab and mean byways.
I felt I was the scaffolding of that place
and that which I did not belong to
was beyond my view.
I was the glue of my own stark world.
It was then a shock
when they said I was to be moved
to the country.
I wanted to ask - What country,
what manner of place
could my cityscape fit into?
Little by little, brick by brick
I shed the cement filled hollows
while a newer me
shorn of the pasts teaming crush
sought higher acres.
Green pastures taught me to fly
far from of that self
I was leaving behind.
Categories:
wharfs, poetry,
Form: Free verse
The Ohio wipes its face every few miles.
This bend in the river
forgets the wharfs, the gravel silos
and power plants,
only occasional coal barges
push an industrial flatus before them.
Here cattails gather herons
into measured dominions.
The river gallops under placid waves
Fish-eyed currents dip and toggle
in the ripple.
It is possible to watch yourself
being rinsed and laundered
in this newly whisked stream,
possible to wash your face anew.
A person can stand on this reedy shore
and forget, nor see the daily grime,
but observe a lathering,
as a fishing sunlight
pulls out a new image,
the spread of fathoming nets
flung far to catch this fresh
momentary wonder.
Categories:
wharfs, poetry,
Form: Free verse
Gray are the lives that matter,
departed poems in a gray post-dated heaven;
‘silvery-gray,’ as the dead are said to say.
Paris was built gray; in summer,
the trees and the umbrellas upload color.
Yet only a few poems surfaced
they were too young to survive for long.
Edinburgh is gray, gray are the plastic rainhats.
Damp kilts gamely fly a little color
beneath a waterlogged pewter.
Words once penned
had to be tied together
so they would not sink.
Shanghai flakes its red and gold,
rises into cloud-scraping silver
that gilts the gray Huangpu river.
The girls are silk flowers
in designer Nike’s.
Gray are the wharfs and waterfronts.
Young silvery laughter turns poems
into porcelain teacups.
It is good to write
for the dead
(the dying have their own poets).
The deceased travel no more
but reside in a living-space
in God’s backlot, where all those
who do not fit into extant poetry
spin a grey alchemy
into a colorful language
which they then send
to places
no one ever writes about.
Categories:
wharfs, poetry,
Form: Free verse
5/19/17
Lost in space
Little to no faith
Can't find my place
Or always keep up the pace
Among animals and the human race
Don't recognize the face
I see in the mirror, not even a fragment or trace
What exactly is it that I seek and chase?
Something unexplainable
Purely unbreakable
And untraceable
Yet irreplaceable
Meaning it will not always be available
Not doing well at setting a course
The problems come from the source
Despite all the friction and force
It 's mostly erratic, like certain waves at wharfs
All over the motherland
Difficult to understand
Despite what is on the other hand
Something still missing
Continually drifting
Am I really existing?
Or is their a catch, like there always is in fine printing
By: Dalton Ogletree
Categories:
wharfs, creation, dark, emotions, fun,
Form: Rhyme
Elizabeth: squat river with cranes, tugs, wharfs abristle,
Its broad, deep-dredged breadth plied by warship and merchant mammoth,
Ships with haughty grandeur gliding along buoyed channel—
Lofty titans sneering down on collier, barge, sloop at sail
And, on fog-bound nights, soothing sleepers with moans baritone.
November 21, 2016
Form-River Line-Poetry Contest
Rick Parise, Sponsor
Categories:
wharfs, river,
Form: Verse
Pale sleep awakens.
Another light scorns the earth
as crooked fingers lash down,
their jagged streaks slashed by
nagging pall puffs, shattered
by lofty white swirls.
Breath drawn in- then out,
burying itself in rusted, fallowed
dreams and nettled streams of
daylight bleeding through
slatted blinds.
Humming drones of life
whine along bustling streets.
Sphinxian machinery grinds
stone to dust, settling somewhere,
lost in a terra incognita- finding homes
in pink blushed skies, and seaports where
the smell of fish and oil hover over wharfs.
Market flowers wag brilliant heads,
seeking homes. Songbirds scold,
haggling over baptism in shallow basins.
Dead leaves rattle on pavement,
scratching destinies, left to southern winds.
The sun tips its hat to the moon,
and slides to an end...to begin again.
Categories:
wharfs, change, creation, day, destiny,
Form: Free verse
Waters rise, engulf the land and other ruses
we devise to block their flow, to stem the tides.
Anxious, we are left to ride the waves
on fragile barques bereft of sails.
Such flimsy arks (mere barrel staves
and baling wire) float up the sides
of great sea-risers like defiant snails
awash in slime. In time, seabrine looses
collective holds on congealed excuses
and in salt solution we dissolve.
To silver fishes we soon devolve
while worlds and stars, giants and dwarfs,
fade from mind like boats from wharfs.
And when to darker depths we dive,
will fishes miss us? Shall we survive
apart from sky, from air, from dry?
If at last we gasp and die
will crabs cavort? Can fishes cry?
Categories:
wharfs, allegory, angst, death, depression,
Form: Rhyme