Poetry

Love's Enigma by Jon Mayo

Love's Enigma

By Jon Mayo

Love's comforts came to encircle the grief.

Lent warmth to the shrapnel-torn soul-

Who never knew to trust love for relief.

Bore embattlements, solid and cold-

When cried forth in the space of a stanza once read.

The reader yet still met its prospect with dread.

When stagehands prompted the player aplomb-

The thespian then questioned what might become.

Is the love only describable in deliciousness of text?

In dramatic flair, in the critical hour, preoccupied with what lies betwixt?

Is love as a player's strut across the stage of life?

So vocal, so intense, so full of betrayal and strife?

Or is love as the gifts of birds of spring-

Who offer glory, expecting nothing?

Does it sustain as do the tides?

Unrelenting like waves at jetty-side?

When we dash ships of love upon shoals-

So scriveners can chart the rolls of loveless souls-

When we go forth with only taste for distrust-

Love upstaged by its distant cousin lust.

The words will need to burn across the sky.

The day we cast the cynicism aside.

The day we take pause to trust love.

Is the day we just might rise above-

~

Copyright 2010 Jonathan Mayo
The Poet's Perspective-capecodtoday.com

A Christmas poem by Lawrence Ferlanghetti

Christ climber down

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Christ climbed down
from his bare tree
this year
and ran away to where there we no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candy canes and breakable stars.

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powder blue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives.

Christ climbed won
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck crèches complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post, the babe by special delivery...

Christ climbed down
from his bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary's womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody's anonymous soul
He awaits again
and unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest of Second Comings.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti. from A Coney Island of the Mind. New Directions, 1958.

Local Color

Local Color

by John Prophet

There is a place with wondrous views galore
Where untold beauty sweeps the land;
Where Nature wields a firm, persistent hand
To leave its mark for evermore.
A glistening stream basks in the sun,
Divides a teeming salt marsh wide,
And ebbs and flows with every tide;
‘Twill only cease when Nature’s done.
The human hand has left its mark,
For in the mix of malls and highways long,
Amidst the clamorous gathering throng
The ghosts of old reside in ancient buildings stark.
In graves preserved for all eternity,
Where noble souls are laid to rest,
Their stones with sacred affirmations blest
With love beyond infinity.
The place where luscious cranberries grow,
Where sailing ships have come and gone,
Where unrelenting herring spawn,
Is old Cape Cod we love and know.

Above photo: Hardings Beach in Chatham by John Fitts.

John Prophet is an award-winning author and poet. He maintains the blog Historic Harwich here on CapeCodToday.com.

The blind gardener

Let me be... like the blind gardener

   who lives at he end of the road

   where only one will go.

   The only desire to create a

   beautiful, bountiful garden

   for the eyes of the one.

   Blessed be.

RP

My country, tears for thee

(Re-published on the occasion of the United States sending more troops to Afghanistan. See POLL.)

Despite the success of the military venture, by March 1880 the British were aware that defeating the Afghan tribes did not mean controlling them. Although British policymakers had briefly thought simply to dismember Afghanistan a few months earlier, they now feared they were heading for the same disasters that befell their predecessors at the time of the First Anglo-Afghan War.

Anthem

My country

tears for thee

land of mediocrity

to thee I cling

land where where my brothers died

on every side

from every atom-fried

mediocrity

Rafio, 1959