Poem Hunter: Poems - Poets - Poetry

Tasted, smelled, rising from hot asphalt, sweet rain
in the street where a man works on his camper in the rain.

Like desire, felt less often now we are old, the joint pain
and fatigue competing with that other. Sweet rain

rising, lifting the dampened piano that hides its teeth
beneath a lid. Sweet rain, bird song, all the rain-wet

exigencies a house brings to bear. Valence, curtain,
scrubbed porcelain. Perhaps a mouse-brown rain,

pummeling the decking. Or a violet sky shines behind
cloud cover, dense with time. Where shall I go, rain,

how can I recall my only name? The man's sweat
pays for no one's poverty. Often I feel jealous, sweet rain,

of brother and sister — gone to Sweden, or France.
That's the end of the story that began with a father's rain-sweet

face, poor past, Holocaust. Let the locusts swarm, sweet rain
brings them down out of the dogwood, they die by sweet rain.
...

These autumn gardens, russet, gray and brown,
The sward with shrivelled foliage strown,
The shrubs and trees
By weary wings of sunshine overflown
And timid silences,--

Since first you, darling, called my spirit yours,
Seem happy, and the gladness pours
From day to day,
And yester-year across this year endures

...

At midnight, I lie awake,
Not chasing dreams, but chasing you.
My pillow knows the truth I hide—
That I still ache for something through.

I hope for a message, a call, a sign,
A whisper that says, I miss you too.
But all I get is silence back—
The cruelest thing you ever do.


...

Someone inside says, "Get busy."
But I've got appointments to keep,
I have an abstemious love of equations calculated quickly
While the tepid day melts into design.

And the high cheekbones of the beautiful life
Bear the loose look of a calendar by lamplight.
I search for patterns in everything.
I am tied in knots of comprehension.

I think, how useful it might be
To pierce all the hands of the earth
With an oath of pins encircling snarling planets
But talent and shallowness sewn together

Is nothing but a kerchief tied around a survivalist's head,
And it helps to know the feet wriggling through a hole
In the universe will land for an instant
Upon the cushions of the dark,

And that after marching one doozy of a kilometer after another,
We each come upon the same poem scribbled in invisible ink
Taped to the door of a room
In which an austere justice is burning for us.
...

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me

...

A tiny seed, so small and round,
Grows roots deep beneath the ground.
Up it reaches, tall and bright,
Drinking sun and catching light.

Its branches dance, the birds all sing,
A home for every living thing.
A shady spot, a place to rest,
A gift of nature at its best.


...

A crow beats on the updraft over a scragged hawthorn,
rocked but plunging on. A stick of Paras, bristling with nerves,
coughs and boots forward along the sheugh.
Long after the soldiers have gone, the crows will settle home.

Since Newry, choppers have been battling back and forth
across the track. These trains are overheated, sweat
stings in my underslept eyes; I'd rather the crows' lift and pluck
than to be here, rocked to the quick, driving on Derry.

I often wish, my love, that we were birds, the wide domains
of Ireland at our turn and fall, the world's wind
our natural element - rain, ice, hail or sun our gods,
the tall pines our greenwhip lightning rods.

Tonight there's a horned moon and Venus trailing
low over the Waterside. Tonight let me fold you in my wings,
pray nobody's killed in dark of country or town. We'll settle
the long night in another of our beds, watch what the morning brings.
...

She plucked a blossom fair to see;
Upon my coat I let her pin it;
And thus we stood beneath the tree
A minute.

She turned her smiling face to me;
I saw a roguish sweetness in it;
I kissed her once;—it took, maybe,
A minute.


...

ELANA

I found you—
alone and afraid
in a distant, cold world
so different from mine.

Your heart became my obsession,
even before I truly knew you.
Still, somehow,

...