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John Tansey Poem
With the boy’s room, draped in white sheets
This whole year, like a cocoon, preserved in amber,
She closes another album: The fossil record of their marriage,
Steeped, in the earthen layers of clay.
Then turning to face him, two huge land masses:
He, the old world, she is of the new,
And with thirty years of continental drift
Having poured an ocean in between them,
They live, now, in different time zones,
Sleep, eat and speak in different tongues…
11.15.7 John Tansey
Copyright ©2008 John Thomas Tansey
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2013
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John Tansey Poem
Life was holier then when younger,
opened gifts at Christmas, I toyed
beside the shelter of my father.
Faith in the world was stronger
when what little I knew, relied
upon the lies he told me when younger,
For as the hand of God, come under
a cloud to part the sea for a boy,
I walked proudly through the crowds with my father.
But now, his iconic loom no longer
fends, like prometheus, the plight
of man from one no longer younger.
For I see in the winter of his growing older,
this frail mortal of him, that destroys
the hope I would hold his hand forever.
Empty by fact of having grown colder,
Christmas goes quietly without the joy
so omnipresent when I was younger-
and still knew God by the shape of my father.
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2013
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John Tansey Poem
Magnanimity
Brandon, the world
depends on the
existence of fireflies.
A simple kindness
toward lesser things.
The magnanimity, the compassion
of not taking life
simply because you can
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2015
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John Tansey Poem
I
Eyes aglaze in the morning rush,
suspended in thought, I stare
through the window of the car,
Adrift in this diffused glare
of the green traffic light,
I am too absorbed to go through.
I have scaled life's stair to this rung
where my mother stopped, doubting
she could continue on,
Collapsing right there in a slump,
bent half-over from the fear
of seeing their before her
In the shape of her father on the stairs---
his grim infirm slouch, praying
she would not follow after
To where the ghost of him stood,
starless and fearful even at that height
that he still could not see God.
II
How old was she then when she descended
back down, stumbling
over words she would choke on,
As she spoke of her life, regressing
to the gestures of a child,
spiraling through the years
To where it all started, a girl lost
at the bottom landing, turning
with a face flushed in tears,
"My father", she said, "would sit in a chair
drunken fits of silence
so steep he did not notice me there",
"Standing in that immense air of depression,
where only mother would speak, breaking
the silence like a bird of premonition"
"He thought his life a loss", she said
"alone, and given up, he abandoned
every hope I was the love of".
III
Was it then she bit her tongue
and folding back her limbs, buried
every white flower in her mouth,
Extinguishing actions like words
she withdrew by lantern, alone
to the cavernous echoes of her soul.
Is this is my inheritence, this brooding trait,
this inherent sadness that states
I am sole heir
To my family's flawed heirloom
of depression, passed down
in an ambry of gene.
This shell of a man, host
to its genetic strand,
its rogue chromosome
That looks back from the mirror---
like these hands once thought mine
seeming now to have always been yours.
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2013
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John Tansey Poem
Muscle Memory
Looking in the mirror,
I am getting older;
the loss of muscle mass
Sink-holing the skin
with pockmarks and the sagging
of my triceps and hamstrings
shows me so.
Ten pounds for every ten years, they say.
With such drastic loss of muscle memory
I soon forget how to crawl.
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2015
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John Tansey Poem
Evening sets with self-delusion
stirring the synapses
with a steaming
cup of coffee.
A dimly lit oil lamp
shrouded in Saffron
casts the room in an amber hue
where words meld like gold
onto the page
in an alchemic blaze.
Morning rises, dispelling dreams
out of every fold of darkness
to a sterile whiteness
that turning back
such ingots
into leaden blocks of stone
I wake, both bleary eyed
and blood shot, into this failed,
pale bleak
truth of morning
John Tansey
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2013
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John Tansey Poem
It is in the subtlety
And not the blunt insult,
The threat and not the onslaught;
The implied and not the explicit.
It is in the first gleaning,
remembered scents of Spring
And not the direct,
Overhead heat of Summer.
The autumnal dread
And not the dead of Winter;
The sweet dream of sleep
And not the bleak morning after.
When somewhere between the gift,
And it’s crumpled paper wrapping,
Lie an infinity
Of finite things to be chosen:
But of a thousand choices
if I must choose one,
I would settle, instead,
For the choice and forego the choosing…
John Tansey 11.25 07
Copyright ©2008 John Thomas Tansey
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2013
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John Tansey Poem
All truth is quicksilver
Slipping through fingers.
The moment I speak
Is the same that I lie.
It is only when my tongue
Seeps deep down my throat,
Knowing though not telling,
That truth remains alive.
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2014
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John Tansey Poem
THE MORTAL DILEMMA OF FAIRY TALES AND FIRE FLIES
(Brandon, the world
depends on the existence of fairy tales and fire flies,
the simple kindness towards lesser things,
the magnanimity, the compassion
of not taking life simply because you can.)
Out playing with my son
in the day-dwindled dark
among the autumn leaves,
an enshrined firefly
cupped in the apse of my palm,
I stoop closer to show him
its brief luminosity like an halo,
a prayer candle in the breeze
its flame, flickering
in the grotto of my hands.
Suddenly, a swipe of the hand,
and the fall begins
with a child's first cruelty
and here we stand, guilty
by the depth of your stroke
that felled a star and made the sky dark
but for the full moons of your eyes
What shall I say to you now,
that you are only two
and your years thus far
have been but the calculation
of constants
like your parents, fixed planets,
fingering the flora of your golden hair
as they revolved about you.
This is the father’s dilemma,
whether to dispel as rumour
the faith in fairy tales and fire flies
to head off the terror
of learning on your own
that the world has no morals,
nature no ethics
steel you for a life of brutality
make you a bully,
Or nurture that spark of gentlenesss
as your jaw drops
at the that last spot of phosphor on your shoe,
and the glow of a firefly
dissapearing beneath the blades
like the sun going down on us both.
It is the end of the day, summer,
and the innocence of your ways.
John Tansey
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2019
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John Tansey Poem
I Fear the Day
I fear the day
the sheer length of it.
It's call to actions
and not words.
Fearing it while it is
and loving it when it is gone,
right or wrong.
Evening beckons...
It's soft, amber hues of lamplight.
As I peruse a book,
another day passes
into fables of mythic storytelling.
Swaddled in the womb of light
in an eternity of night;
Until sunrise and the dread of morning,
I wake, trembling, at the start of the new day
John Tansey
Copyright © John Tansey | Year Posted 2019
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