Poem Hunter: Poems - Poets - Poetry

Sister saying—‘Soon you'll be back in the ward,'
sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,'
the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine';
small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,
though, soon, he would blink again and again
because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,
rash as a blind man's, inside his soft brain.

If items of horror can make a man laugh
then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth
still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time;
more brain mashed because of the probe's braille path;
Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still;
his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list,
a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.'

Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,
a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,
leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,'—
the patient's dummy lips moving to that refrain,
the patient's eyes too wide. And, shocked,
Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe
with nurses, students, sister, petrified.

‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,'
that voice so arctic and that cry so odd
had nowhere else to go—till the antique
gramophone wound down and the words began
to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … '
to cease at last when something other died.

...

Everything’s looted, betrayed and traded,
black death’s wing’s overhead.
Everything’s eaten by hunger, unsated,
so why does a light shine ahead?

By day, a mysterious wood, near the town,
breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume.
By night, on July’s sky, deep, and transparent,
new constellations are thrown.


...

She is the light in my darkest days
the calm to my chaos, the warmth in my haze.
Like a gentle whisper of love in the softest of air,
She found me, held me, showed me she care.

Her touch is a vow, persistent and true,
Her love is a fire, burning right through
through the monsters, through the fears, through all I've ever known
and in her care, I have finally grown


...

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.


...