That Wise, Wise River

That Wise, Wise River 7/26/2010
The river flows
Forever full,
Ever emptying,
Never empty.
Restless water
Filling the banks
Like an over-watered potted plant,
The channel air too laden down
With one eternal load,

Yet comfortably consistent and calm,
Fluidly flowing forever
From vastness to eternity,
The mountains to the sea.
Facing boulders as it ever has,
Meeting force with force,
And treasuring the honeyed valleys,
Forever found anew.

Indeed,
Every droplet sees each rock and
Every arching bridge and aspen tree
With wonder from the first,
Though every ripple passes by
The land as ever it did,
The same farmyards
The same cottonwoods
The same wide river
Forever fresh and clear and new,
With swimming eyes of tears
Astonished at the shining splendor
Of many passing years.

May I that wise, wise river be,
Sprung from the river of life,
That ever as I gaze upon
That same old battered cross
My eyes are new and see afresh
What I have ever known.

Digging a Dog's Grave

Digging a Dog's Grave 7/15/10
Grave dirt should be hard.
Cold and frozen.
Full of rocks that grind and grate
On some solitary shovel blade.

But this spring dirt is moist
From another day's rain.
A mess of grassy roots hold it together,
Keeping a firm grip on the well-packed earth.
We laugh about the paradox
As our shovels drop in time
With the ditties on our tongues.

The bell that sadly tolls for thee
Could never toll for me.
The barks of that so distant dog
Have never reached my yard.
No cold can chill Ophelia's grave,
Nor jesters digging there.
Ophelia never sighed for me,
Nor will on doomsday meet.
Was it her tears that damped
the dirt around our dirty feet?
No.
Our feet are clean,
Our eyes are dry,
Our hearts still bear a hope.
At three feet down,
With corners square,
We rise from out the grave.
Our shovels quit,
And car doors slam,
And music plays once more.

Grave dirt should be hard.

What would silent fireworks be like?

Lately, I've been focusing on using style as well as words to convey the ideas of a poem. This poem has two distinct parts, the first has a broken style to indicate noise and action.The second part uses a more consistent structure with slant rhyme and assonance to hopefully portray a sense of mystery. Let me know if you have other ideas for styles that would fit here, or if you have any other feedback, feel free to comment.

The Fourth of July 7/12/10
Crack!
Flashing fire flies
like lightning leaping
from the ground
to strike the stars,
sending showers shooting
down.
Upside down,
the light goes launching
up, not down,
and leaves explosions lingering,
bursting bomb-like in the air
before descending
down.

But if you plug your open ears,
And throw an ocean on the echoes in your mind,
Something else entirely appears.

Mystic starlight bursts like wraiths
From emptiness in space.
Upstarting quickly, drifting slowly
As some magician's cloak,
Hastened up with smoke and light
To all astonished eyes
Then gently dropping to the floor
To cloak the silent ground.
And all astrologists are dazed
At stars upsprung arrayed
In shining red of crimson wine
Or as the purple night
Or green like springtime leaves that sprout
Up silent from the boughs.
And mysteries that once were known
Are mysteries once more.

Summary of "The Dream of the Rood": a remix

In 2008, my literature class read an excellent Anglo-Saxon poem called "The Dream of the Rood." Soon afterwards, I wrote a poem on it which I liked because of its themes and imagery, but it didn't sound very good, and what good is a poem that sounds bad? So I reworked it recently and this is the result. It still has a somewhat choppy feel between lines, but I fixed some of the rhythm and added rhyme. I also expanded the images and added new ones, making it one of my denser poems as far as layers of meaning go, but in the process it has diverged somewhat from the themes of the Old English original. Anyway, here it is.

Summary of "The Dream of the Rood" 6/10
Behold the tree which brightly stands above the ones around
While casting down its shining leaves and garlands on the ground.
Its branching limbs reach far and wide to spread the joy it's found.
And every day it seeks to grow, it seeks to praise the Lord.

Behold the tree, now chopped and stripped of all its purple bark,
For men have rudely hewn it down by capture in the dark.
Far greater than its murderers, a contrast strange and stark,
For safety was not garden-grown; how can it praise the Lord?

Behold the tree, a man is raised upon its aching back.
Though sliced and bruised, it holds him up and gives the all it lacks.
The tree cries out! It can't refrain from murder cruel and black.
The angels weep to see the deaths, no more to praise the Lord.

Behold the tree, now glorified, a victor after death,
No ghost of hell could hold it down or keep it in the depth,
Its glory shown, not in the spring, but Jesus' final breath,
A symbol-tree for all to see, it now can praise the Lord.

A Football Poem

I haven't posted anything in a while because my family and I just got back from an excellent trip to Ghana. As you are probably aware, the World Cup, which is held every four years, is underway, and football (soccer) fever was at its peak while we were in Africa. The devotion to the sport, and the connection much of the world feels toward their country's football team is unlike anything I have seen in the U.S. any sport.

In case you haven't been following the games, Ghana played Uruguay on July 2. They were the last African team in the tournament and would have been the first African team to reach the semifinals if they won. In addition, this is the first time the World Cup has been held in Africa. Ghana was "the hope of Africa" to quote a commentator. At the end of the game it was tied 1-1 which sent them into 30 minutes of overtime. In the last minute of play (still 1-1), a Ghanaian took a point-blank shot which was blocked by the hands of a Uruguayan defender. This meant that the Ghanaian player was granted a penalty kick (a gimme shot in pro soccer) which bounced off the crossbar and missed. This sent the two teams into a penalty kick shoot-out which Ghana lost. Basically, they came as close to winning as a team possibly can without winning. This is a poem about the game.

Also, this is essentially a first attempt at a new style, a style which I frowned on for a long time. It is a very free, almost expressionistic style that I often see written poorly. Because of its minimal amount of rules, the poet must have excellent, insightful content to make it worth reading (which I hope I have here), otherwise it can sound like childish prose. That's one reason I generally use a more nursery rhyme style, it provides a firm structure to fall back on when content is lacking, even though it can be limiting and sometimes sing-song sounding.

Ghana Loses to Uruguay 7/3/10

Who made this man in yellow and white

the puppeteer of nations?

Unelected,

Yet all have chosen that their

hopes and fears should

rise and fall with his

success and loss.

And yet, against their will,

and even his,

This man must move a country,

a continent,

To glory or despair.

Nations rise to their feet

At the rise of his foot.

The strings and sinews beneath his skin

Are strings that swing the limbs

And bob the painted head.

A billion strong are bound

In one man,

In one moment,

In the simple kick of a ball, performed

A billion times before.

But now...

The hopes of all are born by

An air-stuffed sphere in Johannesburg,

No wings to guide its flight,

And sure to crash

to crash

crash

Three muscles rebels were,

Two neurons duty failed,

One billion faces fell.

Fickle Celebration, Ghana-weary,

Scattered elsewhere on the globe,

Finding finer friends in Uruguay

(Though no better earned)

At the mistake of one man kicking a ball.