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Best Poems Written by Judyth Vary Baker

Below are the all-time best Judyth Vary Baker poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Written When Most Are Proud Cyborgs

In pleasantries, orchestrated on our screens,
We live the lives of many men and women,
As if sex could be! We grow, composed of well-cooked pablum
Eaten between long work hours, digested pleasantly.
In a fetal coil, I rest, my optic eye
Doesn’t blink at the silver reticules of my mind:
My body well knit by well-knit engineers,
This me-model makes real tears, running from my eyes.
Of course I’m human – hammered out in school,
Wearing what Designers Club tells me to;
You and I, we can adjust ourselves with tools,
Look down upon the Primitives -- those old fools.
Insulated from all microbial bio-terrors,
Safe from the brute, the thorn, the flawed flower
Blooming wild; we -- kept safe – know no variant weather,
Pity the Primitive, exposed to flood and laser-tower.
Did you see those messages, scrawled upon a wall,
Comparing us with vipers at Adam’s Fall?
There’s not an original thought in what he thinks:
That purist Primitive! His raw flesh stinks!
Computers say it best, and yet, I see
Something –compelling--- in his graffiti:
“O song, sing forth unto the endless skies--
O hear, created stars! You long have looked
Upon all who weep, who ever made outcry,
And wrote it down, in God’s forgotten book.”


written for those in the future--a protest against genetic engineering

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The Pearl

There's beauty in the smallest pearl--
the darkest grain of sand--
the cry of eagle and of lark--
the curve of sea and land--
I have seen it in the human heart --
within it, folded down:
beauty --deep as could be hid--
the Pearl Diver found.

        JVB                    2006 
Pine Hill Navajo Indian Reservation, New Mexico

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To Lee Harvey Oswald, My Lover

Fire
Flames – destroying everything –
Flames – I felt their heat –
The whirling world – it cannot stand—
In fevered circuit melts.

Those flames traverse
Throughout my bones,
Rage, hot, across my nerves,
Consuming all the stars I see
In heaven’s stretched-out canopy.

Fire – burning in my soul –
Fire – I felt its heat—
The dervish lust was scarce concealed
When he kissed my feet.

My firm and frail virginity--
My bosom -- plucked by him,
No apples bit in Paradise
More ample with our sin.

Flames – destroying everything –
When true love caught me up
From that false vintage that I quaffed
From a false Loving Cup.

O, you burnt brighter than the lust
That, fiery, op’d my doors;
And in your passion, warm with love,
A galaxy was born.

Jan. 11, 2009 Istanbul
Background for this poem: Lee Harvey Oswald was falsely accused of killing President
Kennedy. I was in contact with Lee only 37 1/2 hours before the assassination. Don't believe
what propaganda-writing paid flunkies have written about me or about LHO. The cover-up is
real, and thinking people now have the evidence on YouTube and elsewhere. See my website
at http://www.judythvarybaker.com for more information. I'm writing this note of
explanation because other poems here also refer to Lee Oswald, such as "The Magazine
Bus," and "Lord of the Galaxies." My book, Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose
Lee Harvey Oswald, will be published this spring by Trine Day Publications. This is the latest
of dozens of poems written about LHO, some of which are published here at Poetr Soup.

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To Robert, Former Husband, On His 69th Birthday

Robert:
"We walk a journey--where, we do not know,
nor do we wish to know how hard the way --
The dark, the light, the nigh,
The dawn of day
Equally a mystery,
and so
We walk a journey --
where--
we do not know."

Judyth:
"But though with smiles or tears
we pass this way,
how few do rise against the flow,
defy the day, and dare the night,
with wings widespread, in breathless flight
above the void, though but to die --
I laugh, and scorn the bitter night--
I go where few have dared to go--
became
what you 
could never know."

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Poem Written At the Sussex Hotel, London,04/04/04 After Death Threats

Because I have so little time,
I only hope, for what is mine--
in my blood so dark and hot
is a bright and fevered spot--
O let me be, to sing again
without the penalty of pain,
lest I, before my time, be torn
from life, and to the grave be borne--
my nostrils full of soil, my ears
stopp'd by grave and ritual tears--
O let me be, lest they will tread
--my children-- on their mother's head
before my song for them is done,
before my course on earth is run,
before they learn the song I sing:
that love can conquer
everything.


this poem is written in the shape of a funereal urn

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The Magazine Bus -- New Orleans August 1963

I stood and cried in The Magazine Bus,
Deep in New Orleans, in the city rush, 
as it plowed and choked along
like a curved-back dinosaur
wheezing through the swampy ways, 
rattling electric wires in a maze
of strangling city vines,
stamping the earth with oil and pugmarks,
straddling, shifting, sliding up and down
shifting, blinking, yawling, yelping, 
pawing, I rode the dinosaur,
Nawlin's crowded Magazine Bus.

Nothing like its roar, its shaking great sides,
the sudden shifts and hang-on-dear;
I gaze outside at tangerine skies
and hang on to my slippery seat,
gripping the slick and sticky chrome,
as the bus comes rumbling home.
 
Motley passengers come and go:
there's a guy with a silver saxophone, 
kicks at a dog with its nose hung upside down,
all broken bones.

Now I sit in the rear on the Magazine Bus, 
with him my love,
my feet braced, heart racing, 
supported by his strong, sure arm, 
How is it, now, that Nawleens charms?
How, with its lights, its songs, its trash and mud,
coughing up its sputum, 
its body and its blood?

I’m a flower, bloomed out, already picked, and strung --
drying out around the neck of my young
lover, there I’m hung.
He snatched me from a midnight-siren hell,
when my husband left me, after he had his will.
Then came this patient sweetness:
for him, I let loose my hair
and he, my new love,
caught each tender thread,
held me steady here.

Busfumes, guns, and truckhowls
twist hours through afternoons:
then come night's bright glowing lights,
fighting off the gloom.

Our Magazine Bus, it lumbers on,
and the driver holds tight with his two long arms,
telling his jokes as he blinks in the sun.
(Butcher-shop New Orleans, 
your bright masks hide the night...
Magazine Bus, you dinosaur---!
---Hush, baby---it's all right!]

His kiss made all the difference:
His touch revived my soul:
And New Orleans made it Easy
to let the Big things go.

Tomorrow, we will fly away, 
but today in the Bus we stand,
And my lover promises roses,
as he holds my trembling hand---
don't judge us, you 
who drive your cars,
who live in air conditioned halls,
with no graffiti on your walls:
you cannot have come as far as we,
in all your evolution's days,
nor can you know the rings we wear
are not the symbols that they seem:
just the same as New Orleans,
you'll never be sure
just what
you see.
                JVB    August, 1963, New Orleans, LA

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Perfect Tomorrow, Recycled

Will one day be against the law
To grow your body five feet tall,
To have a paunch/To eat too much:
And those too different [or who Pray]
Will be (Most Kindly) put away.

And will watch you/checking if
You have eaten what they wish,
That you wash, and that you wipe,
Doing Everything That’s Right:
Resistance, futile, as the Borg,
Inefficiency – abhorred—
Then as the drone, when you are old,
[Most Gently] thrown out in the cold.
But after desiccation, then
O Soylent Green, you’ll live again.

          JVB September 27, 2007    Viksmanshyttan, Sweden

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My Once and Former King

O once and former king of all me thee surveyed,
I submitted, with my small embodied self,
to your regency over me:  I kept your ring,
instead of another offered me, 
O once, and former king.
The day has come when I stand here, alone
on a high tower, and, below me, staunch
and sorrowful you stand, your blue eyes
empty as the gray and windy skies,
your heart, too, as cold as the blue blood
it pushes through.
You thrust me away, for I prayed to a God not yours: 
But spurned, I opened my long-unfolded wings,
And soared up --- when about to strike the stones!  ---
For I remembered how once I was well-beloved
By another man --and, lest you would ever know,
I was silent—for he died, and I alone
had to survive the winter storms of snow.
I regret that you will know before you die, my rigid king,
sequestered up within your own small, nested world,
that secret part of me, that ever did yearn to fly,
when I gleamed there, a vision in your eye—
ah! You never knew-- the eagle whom you cast down
--that before she’d strike the stones and die--- she would fly.                
                                                        
            JVB   ==to my former husband==1997 LA, USA

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Getting My Breath

We are in the age of raging time,
rhyme and reason down the drain
 with our coffee grinds,
quick views and videos, terror on the tubes,
smart-mouths cursing
between commercials
repeating Breaking News.
Find somehow a parking place,
stand in line, glazed over,
gulp a drink, make smiling face,
chew on a Something Burger,
Spray underarm deodorant
so your sweat smells sweet—
sit at the computer,
tap away,
sinking in your seat--
gaze at the little icons,
brand them in your brain;
wash the car to guarantee
a bath in Acid Rain;
set alarm and throw it down,
put body in a shower,
Stop a minute! Cries the churchman—
time to smell a flower!
Time to look in someone’s eyes,
Past the flickering nod,
to run through open fields again,
to contemplate a God—.
Cook your dinner,
stub your toe,
write bills --small change keep—
moments touching tender skin
through packages of sleep---
stand aloof and shy because
you said the wrong damn thing:
watch a Sitcom, sponsored by
all your  plastic things—
O what to tell the child inside
that still believes in dreams?
(O young girl, and O young boy, 
deafened by the screams?)
As for Romance--
not a chance
though still a wavering ray
of Light I see: I’d like a Knight
to carry me away.
But if I were innocent Maiden Fair,
with bosom bound in silk,
the men on my street
would rape me down
for Heroin and Coke.
I’ve no time
to quaff the wine,
can barely wash my hair,
and the clocks tick on as my life winds down
 running down the stair—
(and in the store, a pregnant clerk
is not allowed a chair…)
So all of us are forced to stand
And Never Can Sit Down:
the ants in ant-mounds ---better off---
hurrying around.
I’m out of breath
I’m out of time  --
there was so much to say
I always thought
I’d get the chance
But life just breathed away.

                JVB   U of Louisiana @ Lafayette 1998

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Dog

God, you gave
A dog to me,
And when she died—
(My best of friends)
Who, all Selfless, cared for me—
Who Lov-ed
Unconditionally,
I screamed.

O God!  You gave
A dog to me.
I deserved no such good thing!
And when she died
I howled, I wept
inconsolably.

For Suzi Q  Oct 19, 2009
She had a soul.  Where she is,
I hope to be accounted good enough to go.