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Best Poems Written by Lesley Kaplan

Below are the all-time best Lesley Kaplan poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Lesley Kaplan Poem

Let

Let me run my tongue along the lines of your history
Around the curves of your past
Winding up to today, here 
Digesting through Braille the pricks and pathways
That have helped to form you

Let my breath communicate what my voice cannot form

Let me smooth your worn roads for a time
With outstretched arms

Let us seek out the children of our woods
Hiding behind the large oak
Shivering in the nights mist with crescent eyes

Let us decorate their faces with the paint of fireflies

Let me hold in my hands
The glass marbles of memories
The relics of my heart
The workings of my mind
There are bubbles so fragile here filled with the image
Of all that hope contains

Let them float
With starlit blues swirling on their surfaces

Let me whisper through your museums
Eyeing your artifacts
Warming the glass that contains them with my fingers
Until the bolts fall loose and I can feel their textures

Let us leave the shutter open until we are overexposed
Allowing the negative space to evaporate
Then hide with me in the dark room as we develop

For the times when we walk separately
We can carry these photographs to remind us

Details | Lesley Kaplan Poem

Gardner of Your Soul

I was thrown  into a conflicted family
my boat tossing and turning until
my sails ripped rendering me immobile
and unprepared for life
and fearful of the instability of existence
 Iike a plant adapting to toxic ground 
I grew to have some toxic attributes
my experiences of myself and others always added 
up to less then the ideals of my mind 
while my heart cried blood
pumping into my veins
 
there was a breach between my head and my heart 
when my identity was beginning to build
and I mistook this for the final product
but people are not things
they are ever evolving works in progress
it was simply a prototype I am now dismantling 
piece by piece
to create a better me
 
The wisps of whispers of truths
echo in the patterns we create
while trying to make the same story good, better, different
we are caught in a spiral
but it is our choice as to whether we ascend or descend.
Souls should wing upwards
We are not fallen angels that should end in flame
 
The enigma of growth is beginning to unravel as we change
the juxtaposition of our way of seeing , being , and learning
This  tapestry in translation always has an impact
like a historian piecing together the puzzle of a time
 
we can not only learn from our past in a mental way 
but implement it in a way to change the future into
an unknowing shoreline waiting to be explored
 
We don't have to wait for divine intervention, the right lover,
or anything else to enter our lives
 
the waiting time has passed
 
retrace the routes you have traveled then 
go for the unmarked trails new only to you.
See life as an adventure instead of a conquest
go on a treasure hunt for yourself
and harvest the sacred of you.
 
Life is full of windows and mirrors
some you look out of and others into
but once you can meet eyes with the very depth of your being with acceptance
true growth sprouts
 
you are your own history in the making
 
you are the gardner of your soul.

Details | Lesley Kaplan Poem

Narcissus

Narcissus


Once upon a timelessness 
after a re-occurring dream 
awoke wired and restless 
with a relentless curiosity. 

An unlikely poster child 
creature of terrible beauty 
freed from its muted haze 
fiery in spirit 
its kaleidoscopic variations 
protected with a cloak 
of sea urchin spines.
 
shipwrecked and rejected 
The shadow bleeds into the sea 
old and uncharted. 

Dreamlike oddities haunt 
the un healed fractures 
the barnacled ghosts. 

Hidden in the wing
the mythical siren sings  
evolving in splendid isolation. 

A pause in the rhythm 
agony frozen in a time.

When time doesn't matter 
it's like being suspended in space 
orbited by electric blue .

A mirror in the sky for reflection 
but these eyes are blind 

the dark and the light are joining hands
without destroying the larger balance.

Once mute mouths trying to speak the truth 
of the unsettling similarities between 
the saviors and the martyrs.
 
Trying to connect criminal to crime scene is an impossibility
 
within the city of an urban purgatory 
like a museum stripped of its artifacts.

A soul transforms a falling star into a polished stone
written on it:

"man is condemned to be free" 
within the tapestry of the
 labyrinthine dream of a reality 
of prisms and polarized light"
 
looking closer we see only our own reflection because
in the faces of our Gods 

the sun only bows 

to Narcissus.

Details | Lesley Kaplan Poem

Laugh-Lines

Pieces of me
 swollen and sullen 
come to peek through my eyes
From when I was raw and young

I have stayed so long in my skin
That sometimes I forget what it feels like
The sensuality 
Of when you feel every movement
And every moment
Now my moments ferment
I taste them like a good merlot
Juices exploding like a blackberry in my mouth
Sweet and sour

I have changed in such ways
My mind is now stronger then my body
My heart steadier
I don’t jump at any loud sound
And don’t ache as much when a loved one isn’t around
Every other moment is not a crisis
I have known peace

Perhaps I am less complicated
Maybe I’ve just calmed down

I may not be looking to solve every mystery
But smiles are no longer strangers

Someday I will have earned laugh-lines

Details | Lesley Kaplan Poem

Beyond the Quiet Face

Images of ghosts fly behind my eyes
I shudder
sometimes it's cold here 
below the belly of warm eyes.

If you could would you transcend?
Slip in between the day to day
and stop time in your mind 
to look at me?

Beyond the quiet face
into the underlay
meshwork of elements
paradox, uncertainty, childlike hope
entangled with a personal universe.

Would you look closer?
Intrigued? Interested?
Or brush your fingertips
across the weblike strands
to see which hum against your energy?

There's an internal waterfall
pulling everything down.
It slows me. 
Would you taste from it?
Or walk away hurriedly
afraid of getting wet,
afraid to drown?

I wish I could open up my palms like a book
the pages would be tissue paper thin.
It would be called layers
and it would tell the story
of the way we paper mache our souls 
and put overlays around our intentions.
I would rip at it one page at a time
and read every word to you
before throwing them into the fire.

Sometimes statements are really questions
they barely whisper their meaning 
in a look in the eye 
or the tremor of a voice.
How can we we know somebody else 
when we barely know ourselves.

Details | Lesley Kaplan Poem

Renaissance Woman

A renaissance woman
Bathed in dust and light
Of many moods
Sometimes wild, often stormy
But never less then majestic
Her domestication
A mark of shame
Had almost erased her instincts
But sometimes nets are superfluous
She slipped through the holes
Putting up the great façade of a camouflage artist
But apart from the smoke and mirrors
Everything comes in multiples with a million variations
Like the glorious chaos of freak accidents
The overloading of the senses leaves her edges exposed
In this vulnerable seascape the sharks are circling
Entwining into the self indulgence of dreams
Like grey ghost awaiting resurrection
She is a moral fable storytellers invented
But to the others she is an oracle of falsehood
She leaves their engines stalled 
Because they speak different dialects
To translate her body language would offend the spirits
But I am fluent to the truth within her fiction
I will walk down her cobbled street in eye popping darkness
Down the spiral staircase of her mind
And breathe her in like a yoga master
Having the sublime vision of catching the sun
While eternally beholding the stars.

Details | Lesley Kaplan Poem

Mold Me

I have seen you in the eyes of strangers
I have heard you in the symphonies of dream time
I have wished for you on the dark edge of hope
And hoped for you in the moments of still awakening
I have mistaken you for others
The chattering ego and the carousel of mind thought have 
Captured my attention but have not fulfilled me
I have despaired in believing I had been abandoned
Turned my back on things soft
Chiseled out identities for myself
And tried to carve a niche in this universe without you
Still satisfaction eludes me
This oak cries out for its’ roots
The shell aches for wholeness
I sit like cut flowers
Essence drifting
Time sands shifting

All is naught if not for love

Bring back the pulse of the fervor
The passion that sung like a madman
Let me weep in the pain of apartness
Then fill me with all the is you
Let us eat of my heart in a lovers feast
And feed the fires of need
Let them warm me until at last they consume
And sear away the rust and tarnish 
On this once faithful soul

Whisper in my ear the words of the great nothingness
Show me what the stars look like beyond the veil of illusion
Purify me back into wonderment
Mold me back into myself