Hello friends,
Four poems this week. Enjoy! (And if you do, please consider supporting my work by purchasing my new book The Robots of Babylon.)
THE DESERT (Palindrome)
Moody, burned dust….
Oh, still aerify!
My ravine defoliated,
dim, its mirage bit.
Sure no bliss of pools to order,
still its red roots loop fossil bone.
Rust, I beg
a rim’s timid detail of Eden.
I vary my fire:
All its hot, sudden, ruby doom.ATLANTIS WISHED (Shakespearean Anagram-Sonnet, Iambic Dimeter)
Within sad slate,
wind halts a site.
The island waits,
sans tidal white.
Awe hits its land—
At dawn, this isle
tilts wise a hand.
It stands awhile.
In wash, last tide,
the sand it wails.
Wan salt, it hides
its wit and shale.
Its death in laws,
it lies and thaws.SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (Anagrammed Lines)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
A warning said, the Green Knight
waits there — darkening, hanging.
The reigning king draws a thane.
Gawain, rearing, ends the Knight.
(It knew! — gathers a grinning head....)BEDROOM (A Petrarchan Sonnet Ghost Story)
Her portrait seemed contorted by the night:
Her gentle smile had straightened to a frown.
Her locks — by daylight, braids of blonde and brown —
had famished in the frame and fallen white.
To banish the illusion, kill the blight —
to remedy the lady in the gown
and see her form restored to its renown —
I dove beneath the sheets, to wait for light.
Alas, I couldn’t help but glance again —
and saw, once more, a visage not the same:
one sunken, grey with foul decay and dread....
I closed my eyes, but not for long: In vain,
they opened, to behold an empty frame —
and something’s shadow, passing by my bed.