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Posted on 10/05/2006 8:13:09 PM PDT by Soaring Feather
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Beautiful, thank you very much.
Another:
The Drum
The drum is sounding in the night,
O listen to it beating,
a dark foreboding heart it throbs
Without a moment's ceasing.
When Eve chose dark instead of light
The first stroke hit the skin,
When Adam joined his choice with her,
The rhythm then began.
The choice was made, the beat began
To echo to the ending
The world was torn with sin of man
The dark beat never ceasing.
Abel's blood cries in the night,
Listen to it moaning,
Violence at another's hands
Without a word of warning.
Lust and pride and greed march on,
like some perverted treasure,.
And anger hurls them all along
Its army without measure.
But a whispered hope came with the fall
Of someone who would come
And heal the breach and make things whole
And still the beating drum.
He came as to us as babe in arms
crying in the night,
The answer to our spirit's woe
the one to make things right.
With his own heart's blood he made
The salve to heal each soul,
To bind up all the wounds of sin
That terrify the soul.
The time of healing nears each day
that passes through our hand,
The drumbeat grows more frenzied now
As the clock runs out of sand.
And when the last grain passes through,
with maddening cacophony,
Abel's blood will moan no more,
And the drumbeat cease to be.
And when the last beat of that drum
echos in the night,
He will bring the morning sun
Renewed, and clear and bright.
Very well written. Much depth.
Ah, lovely Lady, such a lovely feather. Thank You.
Ping to current thread.
Welcome to Free Republic!
Thank you: I appreciate it. I'm a little new to all this.
PIP(Poem in Progress)
The Translation
Two translators and an archeologist
Went traveling beneath the rising sun,
Behind the broken pyramids of Egypt,
Searching for a treasure in the dirt
Laboriously covering the sands of time.
They wandered for a while, halfhearted
Talking about Israel and Mecca
As if there was nothing here worthy
Of making a pilgrimage to:
Historians are often peculiar.
And then, to awake:
The scrolls were there, shining and golden,
Dripping in value like butterflies
Drenched in precious, diamond dew
The ink a faded purple, like the shades
Of leaning shadows cast across the plains,
An ancient cursive hand, archaic tongue
The translators alone could understand.
Inside those microscopic drops of ink
A thousand light bulbs, every one a glow
With fingers luminous, extending out
To shake the hands of their descendant children,
Little ladybugs, buzzing with age
And wit and work and wonder—
Dripping still. The photons in their day unnamed, unknown,
Like tiny sparrows in their migrant flight
Those incandescent bulbs not yet invented,
Spilling light across the songs of men,
The voices of the dead remain alive,
Whispering into the ears of death:
Enchanting her, persuading her to dance
And flaunt her mystery between the eyes
Of living generations, staring straight
Across a vacuum to the spirits dead—
The written word can cut across the sky,
That endless barrier, celestial wall,
And speak as if the earth were born to hear
And listen to these light bulbs of the past,
And time shall spill its mercy and its tears
For young Narcissus, dead before his age,
And left with but a flower as his tale—
“Tell my story,” shout the haunting dead
Through what is left of them. The genocide
And persecution suffered at their cause
Will wreak its havoc well, but once or twice
Will pause in face of glory and rethink
The tread of fate, a looming thing of darkness
Barely present, yet the vital force
Behind these thousand flowers on their tombs,
These carcasses in turmoil without breath,
These living forces sanctifying nature
With their fragile light bulbs. Fate controls
All that is ours and will be; fate records
Our secrets in her stolen tapestries.
Hung as an offering to heathen gods,
The well of history is scant and dry—
The bucket weighs more than the water does,
Yet every handful of its lighted store
Will echo for eternity, will shine
Even in days when none are there to hear.
The translators sat there a while,
They thought in tender choirs and Hallelujahs,
Pondering the meaning of it all,
Each sat to work, produced a different scroll,
In his own native tongue, so all could read.
But then they found that each
Had translated the text a different way,
And rose in argument: they fought alone,
With unembellished words, and spoke alone,
The ancient scrolls untouched, upon the sand.
Hmm...Where to start?
I started writing actively when I was in third and fourth grade, and obsessively in fifth. This is probably due to the fact that my Dad, the loving intellectual that he is, was reading Frost, Keats, Eliot, et cetera aloud to me since I can remember. After a while, I decided that the written word was so magical to me, I just had to experiemnt with it on my own. Thus a few poems and short stories were produced, which evolved into the hundreds of pages I have today (not all noteworthy, but some are reasonable.)
Typically, I write long-ish, rhythmic/often rhyming poetry (i.e. the field of William Carlos Williams is something beyond me). I enjoy reading everything in print and out of it, and I like volunteering for things. Hobbies include music (piano and voice), rock climbing, debate, politics, philiosophy, literature, swimming, psychology, and religion.
I'm looking forward to geeting to know everyone. :)
Ah, thanks for the info. We are a small group of poets, we drift like the sand. Some of us hang around when the muse takes our hand and deliver up a poem or two. ;)
We are happy to have you join the ranks of an Lairites.
Correction, sheesh.
We are happy to have you join the ranks of the Lairites.
Compulsive
Poets, those slaves to words
and the subtle textures of a phrase
the shifting colors hinting at a thought
and never wanting anything less then all of them
Let not yourself set limits that creatively do hem
or hold you back, let not that be your lot
rather find the hidden revealing rays
in poems like free-flying birds
I like this (The Drum)immensely. My only critique would be a couple minor repeating words, but then again I wouldn't be sure what to put instead of them.
Yam: You Amaze Me
(Several Yams here...)
Good morning,
Ms Feather!
I did realize I used the same word to rhyme twice in the same stanza, and changed it...Got interrupted in the middle of writing it and didn't catch it until later.
Good Monday to all.
Oh my, it's gorgeous, I love it!! Thank You.
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