Calling @anon84763962 and @ArchStanton and everybody interested in posting poetry for the humanities. Drop a poem or discuss one. Paste a famous one, or one not-so-famous. Our mission is to build Babel Tower to be on a par with the most high!
I will start off with one of mine. Here goes.
Escape to a purple moon
equipped with a provision of green tofu
tucked away in a durable flight case
as you glide in a winged capsule to far from home,
your ears wide open and keen to celestial harmonies.
This lunar destination is a dustbowl you’ve never visited,
perhaps never observed by telescope in the heavens;
your gleaming craft brings you closer,
the portholes in the hull looming big
with the cratered sphere’s purple approach.
But your ship’s radar registers nothing,
no substance to occupy the physical space ahead,
while your eyes swear to a solid satellite
in orbit about the gaseous planet you passed
on your way to this haven of lavender landscapes;
and your brain on the edge of panic thinks:
Do I believe my eyes or my ship’s computer?
Can I make a landing here or not?
And beneath the wrinkled folds of your silver spacesuit
the cold and clammy perspiration starts,
unnoticed until it drips from your brow into your eyes
and stings like battery acid.
You decide to attempt a landing,
for if you heed the radar and fly through the illusion
you may discover the hard way that your eyes were right.
Seasons stoutly shower flame
and pass like games from day to day;
watch us playing in the flaming rain,
a lake of fire accruing at our knees.
Particles of apathy
jingle tinny harness bells;
the bulls aflame are read in sacred scrolls
and nature’s sympathy is in our heads.
We judge with tongue of taste and talk
seasoned in our conscious flesh;
world and math agree miraculously,
dreams and words are severed from the world.
With words is how we choose to speak
to each other, build society;
humanity a bladder sealed off,
a womb, cocoon that someday yields a moth!
Toward bright light the moth will fly,
from natal moon to solar eye;
born in verbal ignorance and fear,
apotheosized in new knowledge clear.
Well, I committed the sin of pride. Pride always leads to a fall. I was too ambitious, even grandiose and flippant. I apologize for these and for blasphemy. Partly, I blame Vraylar.
Ipso facto positing stone blocks
together slopped with off-white mortaring,
one slab upon another on another,
is the might of poem after poem
in a haughty enterprise to reach the sky.
Delightful duty’s being the most high,
neither past nor future, day nor night;
eternity’s our grand and glorious goal,
to touch the hand of God as Adam would
in Michelangelo’s mural we all know.
A pawn promotion greatly we desire,
and while we can, endeavor with our labor
to unmask the beautiful that is the truth.
Notice open-sea wrinkles
and the fairy city beneath,
highlighted by tangerine sunbeams;
purple cloud-puffs at the surface
are one explosion with the waves;
immortal water mother, the sea,
emanates thought balloons
propagating water-consciousness to the earth
in pensive showers on students’ umbrellas
in any “soul mother,”
manifested from one hidden well
on the other side of time,
where Odin left his eyeball sinking
and sucked the water like a nursling,
prizing mental vision above physical–
this, of all his wanderings,
proved the most fruitful event,
but an acquisition that cost a sacrifice.
What does the plucked right eyeball of Odin
left behind in Mimir’s Well perceive,
bereft of its socket in the head
where it had enjoyed a symbiotic relationship
with the All-Father’s brain?
No perception lives in the eye alone,
though the mind minus the eye
can imagine that it sees,
and sees even more with the magic water
from Mimir’s exacting wisdom well.
See it coming, see it coming, The Great and Terrible day of the Lord, See it coming, see it coming, The judgement of Babylon the whore. Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen, Babylon the Great is fallen, Who sits on many waters and made the nations drunk, Drunken wrath of whoredoms with the kingdoms of this Earth. Imagine Xtina wrapped in the flag, Revelation 17:4, She thinks she’s a queen and she’ll never see, Sadness or sorrow or famine or fire, Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen, Babylon the Great is fallen, Who sits on many waters and made the nations drunk, Drunken wrath of whoredoms with the kingdoms of this Earth, Who is this woman, and where is this city that rules over the kings of this Earth? Washington? Hollywood? United States? Take it for whatever it’s worth.
*********Still I Rise
BY MAYA ANGELOU
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes
Ten years in waiting, The time has arrived, A corridor that leads to a cold room, Machine of death, No one survives, The Priest says one final prayer, As they blindfold my eyes, Can’t swallow this lump in my throat, There’s no way out, I’m going to die on death row, All alone again, Death row, This the end I guess, Death row, Tell my mom I want to go home… In a flash I see my whole life, And the things that I’ve done, How we laughed when we robbed that old man, And made him dance at the point of a gun, And there was that whole trippy thing with the constables wife, I swear to God I’d have not left her breathing, If I had known I would pay with my life, Death row, All alone again, This is the end I guess, Death row, Tell my mom I want to go home, Nooo! Motherf–But i’m not f-----’ sorry! Bereaved? …F— the bereaved! I’m the one----AAAGGH! AAAGGH! AAAAAAGGGGGH! (Guttural exhale)