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Best Poems Written by Romella Kitchens

Below are the all-time best Romella Kitchens poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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What Rusts In the Rain

What Rusts In The Rain
(For The Memory Of William S. Burroughs 
& Typewriters)  

It is Lawrence, Kansas and the sky opens
up as if a doppelganger of all mothers and 
wombs
Leaving out rain as milk from its breasts 
onto
all things fertile
     Rangas of storm
A writer adores their typewriter.
They name it and ache in its lack of health 
and death.
Brother, the decades faded and the Beats 
and the Hippies
their dawns edges burning off in the 
sunlight of time
took flight on dusky dirges and are gone.
Generations come and go and that none 
of us can turn in protest against, too busy 
in our living and then our leaving.
Opiate, apt fruition.

There is no lover like a typewriter.
Stroke its keys.
Know its response.

Kansas, Dorothy's head all turned around 
and paisley.
You died and they left your typewriter in 
the backyard
of your last home, grass growing up into 
its spine.
No more pawning for what the soul was 
too terrified to
go without.
Maybe it is better here.
Waiting for the return of some living, freed 
dignity.
An ability to grow creative legs, talk again.
The scent of English Ovals on its skin

Details | Romella Kitchens Poem

Interior Landscapes: the Border Collie

Interior Landscapes: The Border Collie

It is the country of fallow fields in
my dream, our car pulls off the road 
beside a fenced in area...

The grass is tall and merciful there.

In this field, a border collie runs at top
speed back and forth.

My soul knows the dog as my dog who
died years before.

My heart bounds, I alight from the car 
through the evening's heat, climb through 
the fence love pouring like painful nectar 
from me.

God tells me, in this dream, the dog has 
gone through many lifetimes, soul traveled 
just to have this moment with me.

I stand in the middle of the field, gray night 
sky to both sides of us, but dark clarity 
above and I call to the dog, my arms 
opened wide, "Come to me, my beautiful 
dog. How long I have waited just to
hold you."

The dog knows me and leaps from a full 
run into my arms. The dog is as warm as 
love and reality.

Then, the moment passes and the dog 
scurries joyously away into an enourmous 
white church at the far end of the field, its 
orange warm light resounding through the 
fallow and the full fields then...  The gray 
and the vibrant purple.

I know the white church to be heaven and 
God assures me the dog is happy and safe 
there.

I turn, go back to the car through the 
Summer night's heat and am rested in my 
soul, rested in my dreams.

Details | Romella Kitchens Poem

For Ravi Shankar: This Is What It Was

Raga. Sun shifts as fingers on
sitar.
Ravi Shankar is dead.
Old women in dark clothes 
make it down the road through
a tabla of sounding rain

We know not sometimes
what effects us until it
has done so.

Play music in the cell phone
and breath while awaiting the
bus.

Pour honey onto bread at home
and think, this is what it was.

Details | Romella Kitchens Poem

Citizenry of the Soul

Written  Upon A Visit To Shanksville After 9/11



                                               Citizenry Of The Soul

If I did not believe there was bad in us,
I would have told you so.

If I did not believe there was also good, there
I would have uttered the words.

The instant of man is suspended upon this. It
pivots upon it as if some jewel on a chain, as
if “the belonged.”

We travel down the gravel road together past
The cornfields, and there a peacock stands bewildered,
by a barn, with eyes like a human being.

Up further are three golden feathered roosters with
blood red combs and, a ram with majestic horns.
Still, further is a reindeer, who hides his oddness in
the shadows.

On the ridge above are the horsemen. The horses are
Pale and beautiful and the sky above is “laid
open” and wondrous.

We travel further and, we reach the field of ghosts,
one single flag in the middle of the green grass.

We sit and wonder at mankind, at the struggle that
ensued there above that field to preserve humanity.
We imagine the plummet of the metal hull to the soil.

The purer of soul come everyday and sit and look out
upon the single flag, look upon the single truth.
The mud clings to their feet.

There is no wind above here or below. But, the currents
of air have odd faces and hands, they make unfinished 
turns and curves. They ring bells on plaques.

And, caress chimes, flutter ribbons.
We see the brighter souls.
We know they are this wind we feel brushing our 
arms strong – even in their going.

Details | Romella Kitchens Poem

For Ravi Shankar: This Is What It Was

Raga. Sun shifts as fingers on
sitar.
Ravi Shankar is dead.
Old women in dark clothes 
make it down the road through
a tabla of sounding rain

We know not sometimes
what effects us until it
has done so.

Play music in the cell phone
and breath while awaiting the
bus.

Pour honey onto bread at home
and think, this is what it was.

Details | Romella Kitchens Poem

The Elementary Spirit of Poetry

I am teaching poetry in an elementary 
classroom -- a tiny girl with a large soul,
gigantic brown framed eye glasses and
a silky brown bang writes a poem Dorothy
Parker would have been proud of 

and Alice Walker would have adorned her 
walls with, I tell her,"Dear student, you are 
wise beyond your years.This is really 
better than tremendous."

A gigantic girl with shoulders like Heinz 
Ward sails across the classroom and 
snatches the poem from the tiny girl's 
hands. She and her fellow condors scuffle
to read it, their savage beaks bashing 
together.

The teacher and I make the bully give the 
verse back.
The tiny student sighs, looks up at us our  
regretful, apologetic expressions and 
states, "I am used to this."

I retort, " Ah, I see. Then, you are used to 
being the kinder person and the better 
writer. Your assets will help you...And, 
them..."

Bell ring. End of class. Books gathered.
Dismissal.


Note: The poet loved teaching and loved 
students and these situations amused her 
and made her love all of them even more. 
The next session they were far more 
collegial.

Details | Romella Kitchens Poem

Bukowski Contest

Bukowski Contest

Its a video -- Bukowski has a
mistress, she is younger than

he and beautiful.

They fight before the camera
and, she flees like words on 
pale paper across the transom,
out the door...

He sits for a while unaware of
the camera, the poems quiet for
a while, his brow naked except 
for regret and sorrow.

Then, he calls out to her in dipthongs
of need, his boastful alcohol wearing
off -- the frail, lonely intellectual
peering moist eyed around fleshen 
corners.

Genius

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La Tombre Sin Nombre

The mother of plantains and holy thoughts
She shifted in the underbrush to avoid the 
guerilla
soldier's gunfire.

Still, now she is bones and a cross 
necklace.

"One day the evil will not rule and she will 
rise."
Un dia el mal no va a globema y que se 
elevara.
Elevara.
Elevara.
From the dust.
From the dirt..
No singing songs of mourning.
The song then a song fit for Lazarus and 
for life
healed and returned.
The pure throat.
The innocent throat.
Oh, her beautiful black feet dancing once 
again.

Details | Romella Kitchens Poem

Come To Me As a Poem

Come To Me As A Poem

The days of thunder in the cane fields 
gone...
lightning strikes on the flat, brown flesh of 
earth  rushing through the green breaks 
and out,
leaving the earth chattering.

Come to me as a mandrake searching 
wildly/
through the night air for its mate.
Come to me as human lava and living sea 
swells,
desirous swords clashing.

Day and night merge in the twilight 
tailings of /
the two and may not come exactly the 
same way
again so defy waiting with its still, cold 
hands and...
Come to me as a poem...
Come to me as a poem with wild, moist 
eyes and --
open, frenzied palms filled with wild 
flowers and self
liberated dahlias, a poem brave in the face 
of its own
worth and passion.
Come to me like the taste of the cassava 
of poems/
the plaintain of poems, the flowing red 
embers of poems.

Many are the words of a poem that have 
no one looking for
them.
But, look, here I am poemas after poemas 
of you in my
palms, a canter of every vowel and 
constants you have spoken
to me, every word you have written.

Come to me as a body of poems, fold into 
my arms as what/ 
one needs to say to others.

Purple honey in your going, purple honey 
in the poem
of your wise arriving yet again.

Details | Romella Kitchens Poem

Shore

I dream of a house sometimes, Segovia plays
And there are finches in a cage
I meditate  into the evening to the sound of 
cicadas

You found my fine bones and made love
to them

There in halls that knew   no ghostly coolness
There was sound
There were the echoes of our laughter
from within our sensuality, then
down the corridors

And it wasn’t just touch, it was inward
back from wandering waters of discontent

towards a emotionally sensual shore

Then silence, the cicadas and the less
nocturnal all having gone into their rest