Wk kortas: Favorites

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

CATACLYSM

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Lori Jones McCaffery

Like a giant crystal chandelier
Suddenly dropped from altitude
The flimsy walls of distant Turkey
Now lie shattered on the ground.

All the promise of tomorrow
Was cruelly ended yesterday
When forty thousand lights went out
And hope was buried in the rubble.

The miracles have come and gone.
No one survives beneath those piles.
New holes are filled with lives cut short
With sorrow shoveled over them.

There is no point in cursing God
What’s broken down must be rebuilt.
The Bible warns of things to come
And Turkey is a diverse place.
ljm

Turkey, Ukraine, Both sides of the world are in rubble. Where does it strike next.

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Dreams Blown Apart at 60,000 Feet

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Lawrence Hall

Dreams Blown Apart at 60,000 Feet

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com

Dreams Blown Apart at 60,000 Feet

Spiraling down from the empyrean blue
Like a gutter-flung cigarette stub
Or a vapor trail over winter fields
Dreams blown apart at 60,000 feet

A spy balloon cannot compete with love
In its ascent to impossible heights
An unexpected launch
a sudden death
A fallen mystery lost among the ice

That brief encounter in the turn of a dance
Shot down with only her disapproving glance

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

The Sting in Gabriella's Song

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Marshal Gebbie

The Sting in Gabriella's Song

Vermillion streaks in stratus, dark
Against the very heart of night,
Bands of deep red in the shroud
Portend approaching cyclone's might.
Morning shards of fractured cloud
Stream across a shattered sky,
Smothered sun in shadowed orb
Against where apprehension's lie.

South East winds arising now
Tussock billowing in dale
Trees commence a windward thrash
In lieu of kiss of coming gale.
Greyness of a leaden sea
In the lee of storm's approach,
Beneath the streaming sand dunes
The seagulls shelter, in reproach.

Mounting gusts of boisterous wind
Cascade along the lamp lit way
Schoolgirls shriek as skirts fly high
And ominously, skies turn grey.
Supermarkets, in the city
Teem with queues in panic buy,
Grab bags now the urgent item
Just in case the flooding's high.

Traffic blocks the bridge and byways
Wan in headlights falling rain,
Anxiously, the need to be home
Frought anticipation's pain.
All the birds have disappeared
Vanished, in the sudden still,
Eery in the misting rainfall
Frightening, in a mystic chill.

Havoc as she sets upon us
Howling wind and teeming rain,
Horizontal onslaught blasting
Gabriella's Song by name!
Bridges under siege with flooding
Trees down over roads,
Monstrous waves in tidal surging
Causing coastal overloads.

Imprisonment by sandbags
As flooded rivers overflow
In blinding rain of maelstrom teeming
Anywhere and everywhere you go.
Inundated cars on freeway
Flashing hazards submerged deep,
Rescued souls lost, bewildered
In sudden-ness disaster reaps.

Massive trees are torn asunder
Blasted foliage thrashing wild
Torrents rage through streambed gullies
Gabrielle, destruction's child!
..............
Aftermath of horror's silence
Hollow eyed and gaping jaw
A nightmare for your sanity?
Nay, Gabriella's Song.... is flawed.

M@Foxglove,Taranaki NZ

A direct hit by Cyclone Gabrielle on a vulnerable New Zealand, adrift in the vast South Pacific Ocean

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Night-Blooming Cereus

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Evan Stephens

Night-Blooming Cereus

Flowers that blossom at night:
those who open in the dark,
those who open to the dark.

I sit in my ***-bottomed boat,
thinking about the turns
& branches of my life.

No: my boat is dry-docked.
Let's be honest:
it's just a lonely bed, no oars.

But I am open, at last:
I am ready for someone
to come and turn their key

in this reddened lock.
Behind this door are rewards.
Behind this door I am waiting.

But let's be still more honest:
no one is racing down the hall
with a key in hand to try their luck.

I am a night-blooming cereus:
open in the dark, scented,
waiting for something in the black

to land and spread pollen.
I will breathe it - I will inhale
the sweetness, the gesture...

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Assisted Living

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Lawrence Hall

Assisted Living

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com

                              “Remarkably Like Any Other Place”

                                                     For Tod

                                        Who is in assisted living
                                        Assisting others in living

Rich: This is an awful place.

More: Except it’s keeping me from you, my dears, it’s not so bad. Remarkably like any other place.

Alice: It drips!

More: Yes. Too near the river.

                         -Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

Life is a pilgrimage from cell to cell:
The bedroom of one’s childhood, the college dorm
The noisy barracks, merry in spite of all
Eighty conscript soldiers bunked out in rows

The marriage home set forth among trees and grass
A comfortable chair with a lamp and books
The office with its official desks and files
And Sunday liturgies in an accustomed pew

All these are now condensed into a cell
Where God has chosen to live and wait with you

(I suppose I'd better clarify that my friend Tod sees his room as a monastic cell, not a prison cell.)

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

When I was young

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

rose hopkins

When I was young

When I was young and time was infinite
I was spontaneous,impulsive, impatient.
Now I am older
and life is precious
and timeless becomes time
with an end in sight.
Love becomes more visible.
I am adventurous,
pensive and patient,
riding the next dream
into a timeless future.

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

To JP's "Same Old Song"

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Marshal Gebbie

To JP's "Same Old Song"

Virtue lies in simple lines
Unencumbered by the times,
Same old song's familiar tune
Breeds contentiousness's classic rune....

"That worrisome and trouble lurks
So deep in thoughts, where trouble works."

Shed ye the dark within, old friend,
Then whisper, soft, thy song again.

M@Foxglove,Taranaki NZ
5th February 2023

That Same Old Song

Why carry this weight?
Does reward await
some years ahead
but...before I'm dead?
Is there virtue in the same pain
felt again and again,
that same old song
I've been singin' for so long?

JP Midwest USA

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Billy Collins' MUSICAL TABLES, a brief review

Feb 2023 Wk kortas

Lawrence Hall

Billy Collins' MUSICAL TABLES, a brief review

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]

A White-Space Ripoff

If you purchase this volume as a notebook with a few piquant aphorisms already scribbled here and there on its pages you will have some value for your $26 (now under $20 via amazon). If you buy it as a volume of poetry you will delight in many of those brief witticisms but as a whole might be disappointed that Mr. Collins and Random House have your money and you have lots of wasted wood pulp.