These are some poems I would hope people might remember. A few from me, that I think I did a good job on, and one much better from Sidney Keyes, about the ongoing and endless horror of war.
Now that we live in a country whose economy has been trashed, that is run by people who thought that was funny; it is hard to know what to do other than try to grow vegetables, write poetry, try to be kind, and try to use whatever venues are available to get our and other people's words out there.
I hope the electrical grid does not crash. But then, if it does, there will still be books, and talking, and singing. We WILL prevail.
Miep
Remember Your Lovers by Sidney Keyes, 1922-1942.
Young men walking the open streets
Of death’s republic, remember your lovers.
When you saw with vision prescient
The planet pain rising across your sky
We fused your sight in our soft burning beauty:
We laid you down in meadows drunk with cowslips
And led you in the ways of our bright city.
Young men who wander death’s vague meadows,
Remember your lovers who gave you more than flowers.
When truth came prying like a surgeon’s knife
Among the delicate movements of your brain
We called your spirit from its narrow den
And kissed your courage back to meet the blade –
Our anaesthetic beauty saved you then.
Young men whose sickness death has cured at last,
Remember your lovers and covet their disease.
When you woke grave-chilled at midnight
To pace the pavement of your bitter dream
We brought you back to bed and brought you home
From the dark antechamber of desire
Into our lust as warm as candle-flame.
Young men who lie in the carven beds of death,
Remember your lovers who gave you more than dreams.
From the sun sheltering your careless head
Or from the painted devil your quick eye,
We led you out of terror tenderly
And fooled you into peace with our soft words
And gave you all we had and let you die.
Young men drunk with death’s unquenchable wisdom
Remember your lovers who gave you more than love.
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Next two poems by me, Miep Rowan O'Brien
Dwarf Tale
I think of you, tonight
Up there in your rafters
Spinning the fleece into gold
And speaking the secret names.
I was told once
I had an abnormal grasp
Of Rumplestiltskin, another spinner.
He did not get the child, either.
But at least he got the last word,
before falling through the trap-door
poor punished weaver
guilty only of loving children
and secrecy.
What a lightweight.
And what of that tearing in two?
That is sort of trap-door-like,
such piecing of one's self into parts.
And never pretty. The afterimages are really pretty gross.
No one wants to watch, and yet they do
And yet they do.
And what of the child?
That is always the question, isn't it?
There he is, all squalling and prescient.
That trap door stuff is pretty rough
It's kind of hard to keep secret
There will be repercussions.
The princess who faked her way in will have a lot of stories to tell,
She will be kept quite busy with all this.
The kid will grow up wondering just what all that was about
The bit about the dwarf and the gold
that he hears about from servants, rarely
just before they grow old.
It will never be clear, he'll never quite get the straight story
dig under floorboards though he may.
That dwarf must be down here somewhere,
he’ll think.
He’ll know he didn’t just make this all up.
Sooner or later, he’ll get around to it
He’ll look for a revelation of names
Layered in strata,
All the way to China.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The cheese stands alone
One thing about being the cheese,
Is that there is a lot of room.
And also, you get to be in the middle,
It has been said
That when your ass is on the line
You are well situated.
It has also been said, that he who hesitates is lunch.
But, what else is the cheese to do?
All there alone in the middle
Dodging relentlessly.
It is a sort of structured hesitation, all of this getting out of the way.
Backed off; everybody else is in the picture.
The cheese is the camera.
The cheese is lunch.
mro