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Best Poems Written by Carl Nel

Below are the all-time best Carl Nel poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Carl Nel Poem

The Call - To Lady Europe In These Troubled Times

This
This is
This is a
This is a call.
This is a call to
This is a call to prayer.
God
God is
God is one
God is one God.

And a song goes out
And a song goes out
And a song goes out in the morning.
And the crier’s cry
and the crier’s cry
and the crier’s cry’s from the towers.

At the lunch hour
you spill and throng and swarm.
Hot heads
touch
cold stones 
in stoic reverence
where cobbled streets become mosques.

And you look, lady dressed in twenty-seven stars,
at burning cities governed by the dispossessed.
Your eyes are framed in sickles and potent crescents.
Your head is crowned with ice.
Your heart lies embedded in memories of strife.
Your feet blister, treading lands glowing angry like coals.
At once, one hand grasps unruly youths
The other blocks the east that reaches for the west.

Do not leave me mute, grasping angry stones.
Do not leave me mute, pelted with rubber vengeance.
Do not leave me mute
because
my silence
is not compliance
merely
incipient defiance.

Details | Carl Nel Poem

Invigilation

These furrows, littered with bags,
Separate stalks
Bent over and inclined to suns of ambition – 
And escape.

These shoots grow relentlessly –
In spite of me.
These saplings break the ground 
And Send down roots
That anchor them in soils that are too
alkaline.

These ones, potted and clumped, shrubbed,
Must one day stand alone?
And sway in the wind
as the old trees do outside
Just beyond
This grid-like field
In an old decaying greenhouse?

Details | Carl Nel Poem

Journey Man

The wind stretches taut
across his ears, 
playing them.

His feet shuffle,
Send clouds of dust
in shapeless forms 
to either side
and nowhere.

And in the distance somewhere
- he is sure -
lies his home.

Details | Carl Nel Poem

Double-Track Journeys

You stood with crossed arms
Pathways
up automatically
like greenhouse gas
rising
up and up
and disembodied voices
marking your progress.

Flashing signs mark the time 
that no-one else seems to feel
Subterranean thoughts
Sepulchral dreams spilled out
long masses of people march expectant
to the mouth of the mall
and herds feed at colourful stalls

Details | Carl Nel Poem

You'Ve Got the Look, Ladies

You’ve got the look, ladies.
You’ve got it all.

Like fat hens
Plump and pompous
You peck and strut.
You roost, safely,
Away from foxes.

Your eggs are safe, 
All tucked under.
The hatched ones are all a-growing.

Little chicks that soon will prove
The very foxes stalking perches.

Details | Carl Nel Poem

The Church

Wooden guardians part reluctantly,
Their threats feeble against my entry.
The gloom adjusts itself in the warm light from outside.

Cold steam billows
Where incense rose and inspired.
Wooden benches,
Unseated,
Apprehend the emptiness.

Old blessings echo off the walls and fall on to cracked tiles.
All around the cracked altar swirl spirits
Invoked in need.
The long empty table,
Unconsecrated,
Uncelebrated,
Unblessed,
Stands mostly
Unused.

Details | Carl Nel Poem

Current Events

Between
headland and
headland currents, strong, 
circle, swirl, 
swivel
and catapult
themselves around around.

Between 
headland and
headland the distance
never lessens
but
grows year 
by year leaving 
between them
cold 
steel
sea.

Details | Carl Nel Poem

Past Glory

You live today,
Still,
On 
Past glory.

Like an old man, in a cafe,
Wrapped, capped, wizened
– and lonely,
You pay for your bill
By telling old stories
Again
And 
Again,
Tipping by doffing.

Details | Carl Nel Poem

It Begins Inside

It begins inside
with the refusal to be
a machine.

It begins inside
with the refusal to recognize
the beat you play.

It begins with a frown. And a shrug.

And a turning away
To a voice
kinder and sweeter
than the
rasping rattling, redolent 
of your empty threats.

Details | Carl Nel Poem

Flaming Sword

I would draw my flaming sword
and battle your angelic guards
to force my way
into
your 
Paradise.

I would slice and slash
the downy feathers
just to see the prize within.

But once inside
I shudder and sigh.
For blood and violence
Can never draw
the flowing waters.

The prize without
the prize it was:
the hope of paradise within.