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Best Poems Written by Laraine Kentridge Lasdon

Below are the all-time best Laraine Kentridge Lasdon poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

Blue Hat Dream

Curled up on the floor. In the middle of the day. I dream.
Images of hats and pills come out of nowhere. 

“I visit my garden each morning 
searching the ground to see
if the unused pills I found 
in my mother’s pill boxes,
and planted, had produced
a rose or purple Phlox.
I buried her tablet boxes, 
buried them, like tiny coffins.
I lined the miniature graves
with crushed blue velvet,
(like the cases that stored 
her elegant forks used only 
on special occasions, 
at four o’clock tea-time, 
the cake served primly
on gold-rimmed plates).

Treading through the wet grass, 
rootling through the fertile soil,
I saw, without surprise,
blue hats growing wild, 
velvet and tulle, 
pills and sequins 
scattered and whimsical,
my mother decorating 
their botanical brims
with silver cake forks 
tied with ribbons”.

I wake up,
eyes blurred,
I can barely see.
I make a cup of tea,
cut a slice of currant cake, 
and eat it with a small, 
antique English fork.

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

A Hot July In the Texas Hill Country

Across the valley, salted with the distant sands of the Sahara, I hear the raucous song of summer’s cicadas. As a counterpoint, dry Texas mesquite trees offer a sullen crack like old men requiring their Club Soda with lemon to clear their throat, burning with age. The sun, so often serenaded for its pink bloom of morning, it’s golden orb at noon and fiery red at sunset, today, in mid-July, does not move. My shadow, so reliably robust by late afternoon, deeply engraved on the stones and grasses of the Hill country, is so pale in this terrible light, that I begin to doubt my existence. And what if that existence was in doubt?
   
   A wasp looping, dipping in a slim glaze of water
   Brown leaves hanging loosely from branches
   like the hot tongues of ranch dogs.
   Lone Star flags rustle on their poles. 
   Lemonade glasses perspire.
                         The wasp in the birdbath loops,
                         dips, sips and dies.

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

In the Company of Birds

In the company of birds     

My eyes are red,
the red of wings.
The simian stain
of my human graceless
sorrow and pain seeps
into the noble architecture 
of the nest, but no blemish
can dim its rosy stems.

Morning follows morning, 
seductive mist full chill.
I sit on a wet stone wall   
under flustered, verdant ferns.
 
Red birds fly
from oak to cable
without guile,
their tangible grace
nestling in me.

I feel the tremor
of wing and heart,
a choir of birdsong
in delicate harmony
with my timid voice.

Morning after morning
the red birds,
uncorrupted by futility, 
capture and teach me,
at last, to fly with audacity.

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

Guardian Spirit

The air was very still
but clear, you know, so
no problem, a nice day
but the air was very still
and dark shadows in deep caves
trembled, the sun’s halo shivered
and the guardians of man
lost their appetite for joy.

In the distance was a shocking
roiling black cloud, roiling black cloud
poised to rise as high as a galactic
wave unprecedented and unknown to the guardians of man who had lost their appetite for joy and who were just arranging a meeting to discuss the stillness of the air and the meaning of happiness while waiting for Plato
and Aristotle to show up. Bickering
because Zeus wanted to speak first,
bickering blocked out the black cloud
the roiling black cloud hissing and hushing, biding its time waiting for the guardians to lose their joy altogether because it had to be all their joy
before the dark power could be.

Plato and Aristotle wandered in and another couple of guys Moses and Jesus.   And a few women (God forbid) well not God perhaps but Esther, Mary and that crazy Joan of Arc were expected as they had a way with words but are often busy and they too, the darkness knew, were depressed about the new coldness that wrapped around men’s hearts when in times of plague and war usually the best emerged. The nice day waned or the moon waned. Whatever the case, the wise ones left, not revealing God’s Will.

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

Confection

CONFECTION    Laraine Kentridge Lasdon

Everything I am seems to belong to someone else
Everything I am seems to be someone else

Imagine a memory mirror
framed with pearlescent medallions
painted with miniature portraits of apples, 
ginger toffee, and glutinous gummies.
Day and night the mirror reflects
blue-green fields or star-filled skies,
ferris wheels and carousels, 
and a young girl
alone, insubstantial,
dressed in spun cotton candy,
sweet, hoping to be liked
in her fairy floss robe.

The glass shatters
my reflection, shifting light,
mirror image wounds,
blood flowing backwards.
I pull thin sharp shards
from the shattered glass
with my bare hands
rendering all semblance,
remembrance, unreliable.
I smile a satirical smile,
a baroque smile of a girl 
of a girl who accepts stories
of familial gatherings, embraces
that were never for her. 

Everything I am belongs to me
Everything I seem to be, I am
There is no mirror.

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

Dare To Dream At Midnight

Dare to dream at midnight  Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Villanelle style verse  March 2022



Dare to dream at midnight
Eyes close, head on downy pillow
Safe to fly to fantastic lands of light

A dream weave with moon rays bright
Will take you to a place of golden glow
If you dare to dream at midnight

Those who dream reach a marvelous height
To capture sweet essence before sunrise halo
Dare to remember your dream in the morning light

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

Coming To Term

COMING TO TERM IN THE USA  2022 Laraine Kentridge Lasdon

who are we to talk of women’s rights
or the travesties of cultures of bans
when our Supreme court becomes
a pawn of pandering politics
and we are no better than
them

how many two year olds
must be beaten
left in closets to die
with no Hail Mary’s 
to mark their death
 twenty year old mother
 nineteen year old boyfriend 
sit in jail for the rest of their lives
  foster children 
sleep in offices, under tables
unwanted
and 
and 

with wanton abandon
the powerful use
 
every tool they have
to silence sober practitioners 
of abortion and education
forcing birth and poverty
on young women pregnant 
rape, incest, or ignorant
about their own body

father-father, boyfriend-father
unaware, or not required to care

(as my father-father willfully
controlled me the injustice stings)

wrapped in judicial cloak of cynicism
the Court decamps
intoning platitudes
and buries Roe vs Wade

there is nowhere to turn
the baby is still born

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

THE AGE OF HUMANS



Waterways, red cliffs,
ancient underwater caves,
back to the Pangea age,
 continents fused as one.
I stand in the stardust
of a million-year-old memory,
a flutter of songbirds,
a bouquet of warblers,
the wild swoop of blue jays.
Hummingbirds check me out.
My breath hovers over crimson wildflowers.

       Long before the idea of a kiss,
when love was mystery,
the earth entered it’s quaternary period,
the age of humans.
A time of gestation, anticipation,
the Great Lakes birthing,
hawks soaring, the first migration.
All we see of that coded mapping
are faint skeletal imprints,
visible in glacial rock formations.

The stone I cradle, a mountain remnant,
honors the ancestral presence
and my encounter with raw existence

The lake shivers as falcons dive,
beaks and talons fisted and footed.
A drop of water touches my face.
Profound. As much as a human caress.

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

Wing of a Hawk

The signal to leave is called out urgently.
Blue jays spin, whistle, and gurgle.
Heralds of the gray days of winter.

We climb Hawk Ridge Observatory hill.
The rough benches, wooden table, a simple tabernacle.
It’s a late summer day,
tinged with the soft reds of Fall.
The lake swells, delicate white froth
hushes and bubbles caressing the shore.

Our guide lifts something curious
out of a dusty old box.
In her arms is a single great wing.
With gentle gesture she invites us in.
Birdsong relaying migration routes
form a choir as we silently approach.

This was a killing wing.
Ruthless in its resolute trajectory of the dive,
grasp of bloodied vole to nourish
his brood, squawking from their cliff-edge nest.
Each feather feels strong, indestructible,
yet, this hawk was found with wings outstretched,
a span of six feet end-to-end,
neck broken on the golden sand.

I stroke the black and grey feathers.
Thin-ribbed architecture smooth, cool,
the skeletal structure rustling, lifting,
lifting as if it might suddenly take off.

The corpse-wing caught the next gust of wind
carrying the hawk-spirit on thermal spirals.
High in the pale of blue sky a hawk wheels and cries,
casting a shadow onto the very spot her mate died.

Mourned by his love. Majestic in death.
I learned about life, that day at Hawk Ridge.

Details | Laraine Kentridge Lasdon Poem

The Ghosts of Lime Kiln Road

Summon your demons, devils, and wraiths,
visit moments of hurt and loss.
Replay what might have been, wrestle with regrets,
Do “if only” scenes haunt your past?

I follow the faint ribbon of sand on Mackinac Island,
lined with sugar maple tree, aspen and lilac.
Wild lilly of the valley, its fragrant musk, from dusk to dawn,
clings to lichen and headstone, 
in the old cemetery at the end of Lime Kiln Road.

I am as ghostly as the local specters.
The fine young military boy, 
eyes wild and strange,
wandering across the old rifle range, 
striving to collect his remit.
Payment for the murder he did not commit.

Or darling Miss Biddle, only eight years old.
They handed her Mama her green Christmas coat.
Drowned when the ice cracked, no-one saw.
Lost in a snowstorm on the island of Mackinac.

Ghosts are so practical. They wander, they howl, 
always in the same place, always the same sound.
Patient in time eternal, that their fate will dissolve or resolve.

My earthly body moves through life,
restless in my quest to change the past.
Spirits moan, I am not lost.
I close my eyes and dance with my ghosts.