Linda's Literary Home

Tag: original poetry

  • If My Words Could Rise & Other Poems

    Image: If My Words Could Rise & Other Poems

    Dedicated with my love and gratitude 
    to my sweet Ron

    The following poems appear in my collection titled If My Words Could Rise, available on Amazon as paperback or Kindle.

    1 If My Words Could Rise

    Dedicated to my sweet Ron

    If my words could rise
    Like smoke
    They would form your face
    In the clouds
    They would hang
    In the tops of the trees
    Looking for a nest
    Where a mother bird sits
    On eggs
    The color of your eyes

    2 In the Tops of the Trees

    “As soon as you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the trees, then attack, for God has attacked in front of you to defeat the Philistine army.” —2 Samuel 5:25 Common English Bible

    –for the moldman, who screeched, “That’s my line!”

    No, dude, that is not your line!
    No matter how many times
    Or with how much spit
    You spew it.

    Trees and their tops
    And the words they live in
    Belong to all of us.  Go!
    Dig your hole–grovel in your slime.

    3 Dreams and Days

    “His tongue cuts / Slices of meat / From the hearts / And livers / Of those / Who would love him” – “Between Slices of Bread” —from Linda Sue Grimes’ At the End of the Road

    I quote myself, well then,
    I quote myself —
    I include multitudes —
    Uncle Walt taught me that much.

    The man in the poem
    Cannot bring himself to say
    Or to pray about his own lividness
    He shuts out spaces and commas
    Lives in his own relevance.

    He murders his own children
    With his viper attitude
    And nibbles the ankles
    Of prostitutes
    Who erase his will to power on.

    You have seen him
    Perhaps did not recognize him —
    He has sat in your parlor
    Sipping your coffee
    Dusting off his duplicitous moves —

    He fears death but not yours
    He imagines you at the bottom
    Of a cold, black ocean
    Your tongue bait for the fishes
    His Bolshevik brain conjures.

    Your freedom is a fantasy 
    If you remain too close to his heat
    Get your life back – get your love back
    Where God made you in his image
    And you are close to seeing it.

    4 Flesh and Desire

    “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  —T. S. Eliot

    Into the fire of wisdom, thoughts go to perish.
    “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Christ commands.
    But we still wobble behind the Devil
    Hoping to be snatched from the arms of death
    In time for supper and for the many tomorrows
    We image we still possess.
    In the valley of dreck and poison, I have lived
    Even as I knew better or thought I did.
    No, I am not here to testify.
    Although a word or two of testimony
    May slip out every line or so!
    I can pound sand with the best of them.
    But I can also bitch and moan.
    Where is the beginning of joy and rectitude?
    One might ask.  Where is the promise?
    O, come on!  You know where the promise is . . .
    Yes, just testing the waters and they are warm.
    Every time I delay, I am warned.  Just pray
    And wait and listen close and tight to the hum
    In the brain.  I will follow.  I will follow close.
    Yes, I will.  And flesh with its crude desire
    Will no longer taint the years
    With their distractions.
    The mercy of Spirit will wipe my tears. 

  • At the End of the Road & Other Poems

    Image:  At the End of the Road & Other Poems

    At the End of the Road & Other Poems

    Dedicated to the memory of my father and mother:
    Bert Richardson, January 12, 1913–August 5, 2000
    & Helen Richardson, June 27, 1923–September 5, 1981

    The following poems appear in my collection titled At the End of the Road & Other Poems available on Amazon.

    1 Earned Pain

    —owed to Emily Dickinson’s “Joy to have merited the Pain“

    Earned pain fades into joy,
    Gains a vivid, long liberation.
    Each phase dissolving into joy –
    Then paradise on the horizon.

    Absolved, my eyes grow strong,
    Peering into the ancient eye,
    Improved and brooking no wrong
    Approaching paradise, I realize.

    That these eyes glimpse Thine eye
    And that Thou glimpst mine atone
    And attest that my brown eyes
    And Thy sacred sight are one.

    Thou consumest all time, remaining
    Infinitely present, never astray –
    An eastern spirit explaining
    Morning to the day.

    Evoking Thy highest peak
    And the valley far below,
    My voice can speak
    Inside the darkest shadow,

    Spiritualizing all space and time
    As years drop eternally
    Ghost day by ghost night
    Journeying through eternity. 

    2 A Summer Dream Phantasm

    sweet dreams for the monster

    At the edge of the water
    We sit together
    Talking about heaven & earth
    Poems & love.

    You ask if I still think of you
    While you are away.
    I throw a stone into the water.
    The answer is the ripples.

    3 In Dreams We Happen to Meet

    for Mr. Sedam, my poetry benefactor

    “I protest your protest its hairy irrelevancy” —”Malcolm M. Sedam’s ‘Desafinado’“

    In dreams we happen to meet
    On some mystic, planetary hill —
    Poetry eludes us yet we commence
    Talking about the sham progress
    Bleeding hearts have inflicted.

    The professor in you wants to align
    Wokeward but you cannot bring yourself
    To spring into the claptrap that clamped
    Shut on Ginsbergian filth, deviance
    And that mayhem of hairy irrelevance.

    You think of your children
    Wading into the waters of vipers
    Nipping their ankles
    Snapping their necks
    Erasing their freedom and will.

    You would have those you love
    Experience their own close calls —
    You crashed into your own
    As you flew those planes
    Over the Pacific, fighting that war —

    Facing death, watching death
    Take soldier after soldier
    Leaving you with the intuition
    Outcomes cannot be guaranteed
    By bureaucratic Bolsheviks.

    Only freedom of opportunity
    Guarantees free will remains free
    And life continues to beget life
    In the magnolious scheme that God
    Made man after His Own image.

    4 Bone Couplets

    “Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone…”  —Anne Bradstreet

    They outshine the flesh in the reign of desire
    Where pink like a blush goes on shining like fire.
    Fat necked imbeciles, brain-numbed and wrong
    On every backboned thought that ever ran along
    The confines of the apple of Adam sweetened
    In the birdless cage rump-driven and weakened.
    Greed and swagger click the gangling matter
    Knuckles cling and circle each limb to tatter.
    Hipbones narrow in the faulty weather.
    The bare truth flies out on filth-tinged feather.
    Bring me back to the place where life can stand!
    Let me feel the smooth relief of pounding sand!
    This belly swore it would unburden the green.
    Within the sulking skull it makes its way to preen.
    In the sweet toned laughter where children move
    And every old fart says he will not prove
    Until the night breaks over those who pray
    And every chime kinks the ear heaven to delay.
    Relevant as an old donkey on an extended beach
    The moon sinks into ripe flesh as if to teach
    Those angry cells to leave off all that hunger.
    No years will ease—no one will grow younger
    Than the moth whose flame has singed his wings
    Clacking bare truth to the mercy of things.

    5 A Terrible Fish

    “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
      Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.  —Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror”

    The nightmare repeats itself:
    A daughter clamped tight to each foot
    Pulling her down under
    The brute waters of the dark, deep lake —
    She gasps — imagines she’s drowning
    While her husband watching from the levy
    Wrings his hands, faints in the heavy fog.
    A terrible fish looms under her nose;
    She smells blood dripping
    From a dozen hooks dangling
    From his mouth.
    His eyeballs slide out easy
    As the drawer of a cash register.
    Each eye-socket a window
    To her own soul — $ bills
    With little jackpots on them
    Jump up and dance like clowns
    Poking out their tongues,
    Flapping signs of slogans
    With hammers, sickles, swastikas —
    She believes – ¡Sí, se puede!
    Morning shivers her awake again,
    Stumbling to the bathroom
    Where the mirror flashes
    In her face that same terrible fish
    That has been catching her dreams
    And throwing them back
    As she chases each $,
    Never quite able to grasp enough.