Category: Waxing Poetic

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (day 27)

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

A Poem a Day

The wordsmith’s challenge: to produce a fully grown garden

in less than 24 hours. Plow down deep, furrough’d in sweat

and the searing summer sun baking whatever it touches.

Cast out fistfulls of seed into the shifting wind and coarse ground

where time and chance and powers above and below

cast out their wills or ills upon your tiresome toil.

–

An ankle turned, the back of the neck red, raw, pealing.

Old machines not meant for new work

retain their eccentricities despite your mechanical interloping.

Tender, anxious words spoken upon docile dirt,

your antediluvian blessing

meant to caress or careen a spark to light a fire all

too easily snuffed.

You trade your peace for her pregnancy.

–

Let loose your prayers for weather and time and the

vagaries of hope, if only to see once more

the perfection in a tiny handful of wheat.

–

Now, do it again tomorrow.

November – A Poem a Day (day 24)

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Okay, so this is perhaps cheating. The purpose of #novemberpoemadaychallenge is to use the initiative as a means of producing original poetry. Granted. But, this is just so good, especially on American Thanksgiving weekend. I find this poem by Joy Harjo utterly transfixing and transformative. Much more happens at our tables than we care to admit or even recognize. Joy calls these things to mind in this remarkable piece. Enjoy.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (Day 22)

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

At this point, the title of this challenge is, for me, a misnomer. I haven’t even come close to posting a poem a day. However, in an act of profound self-abasement and self-care, I humbly submit to you that we’ve moved into a new flat. Phew, monum explicandum out of the way, let’s just get on with it, shall we?

Day 22 –

Moving

The fragrance of a flower remains,

regardless of the address of her rootedness;

beauty intact, bees to groom her, admirers to

love her still attract. Her voluptuous shape

and symphonious aperture, from the mouths

of old and young alike, still yield a

satisfying, “aaaahhh.”

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (6, Day 11)

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 11 –

My simple, but genuine, thank you to our life in Edinburgh…

A protrusion of gratitude

Cloaked in landscapes of light, remunerations

of remembrance brought clear in the rehearsing.

That literature of land partnered with time

makes for fragrant mornings in settings

of coal-kissed stone, unsullied

by lesser things.

No more exile here –

just a protrusion of gratitude.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (Day 10)

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

One more

One more day to figure it out.

One more day to turn over the wrong tables

for the right reasons;

correct the wrongs spray-painted on crumbling walls,

the signposts of injustice.

One more day to find the right god,

tattooed on the arms wrapped around our latent lusts.

One more day to cry the tears meant for another,

for ourselves, for our children’s children, still gasping for

breath under the rubble of a thousand bad decisions.

One more attempt to set the bones,

broken, dislocated from too much heavy lifting

of things not our own.

One more song to sing, croaked out

to friend and foe, neighbour and fiend,

with words yet to come.

One more choice, to free, to find, to follow, to forget

what else might surely come.

One more day for one more day,

for one more.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (4, Day 9)

On By robertalanrifeIn Prayers & Liturgy, Theology / Spirituality, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 9 –

Lament – A Psalm About Faces

O Lord, God of faces, where now is your face?

And why have you hidden from us your gaze?

Where once we walked together,

now we thrash and reel and hack.

Darkness has become our only ally;

and hopelessness our truest friend.

For those of insolence and hatred rule over us;

the ruthless and ragged become our destroyer.

Therefore, falsehood and lies bind us;

and the absence of truth shackles us.

We have become party with wolves and savages,

those without conscience or care for the poor.

They lash out from behind empty eyes

to oppress the widow and orphan,

the immigrant and the voiceless.

All that is good, pleasing, and right is set aside;

truth and love are traded for lies and hate,

victim to the victimizers.

And through their shame have we become a byword,

a cause for mockery among the nations.

We hear them cry out in the streets,

and moan among the people of injustice against them.

But it is they who are unjust,

with lies have they clothed themselves.

How long, O Lord? How long must we watch our children caged,

and our future torn apart?

How much more treachery must we endure at their hands?

Save us, O God, from their filth;

release us from their grotesque machinations.

Turn your eyes toward us for we are weary and broken;

tearful and confused.

Find a place again among us where all that was good

can again be good; where the darkness again is dark.

Rise up, once more, gracious Lord, and be our protector;

the light behind our eyes,

the light behind our faces;

the face behind all faces.

For we are your people,

and you are our God.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (3)

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 7 –

What if?

What if we just stuck to whatever came first?

Right before us in time and space-

the faces, friends, fiends life gave us?

What if we didn’t wait to run, feel, fight, forget-

took our days and hours, minutes and decades

like a summer drink from the garden hose?

What if roses really were red, violets violently blue-

and we noticed?

What if the wax from our candles had time

to run down, scattering itself in fluid memory,

cast out on wooden tables?

What if I finished this poem

and there weren’t any more to follow?

What if that was okay?

What if what ifs weren’t so frightening?

Then, could we laugh and turn the page?

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (2)

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

In the many conflagrations which rage around the globe, in some sense we are all complicit in the death of another, somewhere. We can never see ourselves in the oversimplification of projected sainthood, political correctness, assumed innocence, or erroneous belief that “God is on our side.” We truly are our brother’s keeper and must all weep for the other at the level ground of Christ’s cross.

“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Day 2-

Why do you smile at gunfire?

Why do you smile at gunfire,

when spilt blood smells like

a bullet from your own gun?

Where poets learn to see

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic1 Comment

Grey ash, dead-branch-dim

d

e

s

c

e

n

d

s

into corpses, exhumed-verse to still worse fate –

apathy.

Words, once ample-ripe, now winter-sparse,

hunt, cock-ear’d, lungs-flatten’d, for somewhere

to land, to inhale.

Dust-grey soundings lay coiled, like the end of a painter’s day,

wrestling out colours, lines, faces –

not bothered anymore with looking beyond what is seen.

Just the clamouring fool’s last-call for the quick and easy.

These

lazy

letters, unfinished sen

Like changing tires on rusted farm trucks mired in tired dirt,

we muck about in quicksand of distraction, disappointment, deadlock,

the oppressive weight of art.

As needful distraction, we gather up the prosaic, pretentious, polemical,

in fits of laughing stems knit to notes, clinging tight to daylight’s end.

Throats worn from croaking long-forgotten songs of drunken men and laughing children.

Why not dare, instead, to probe the unentered caves where live

the furies, the forbidden, the fortuitous?

That prodigious, crowing dark –

where poets learn to see.