I Have News for You
after Tony Hoagland
There are people who see promise in denuded branches and black buds
and others who
see only the stranglehold of Winter
There are people who look at a stone wall and don’t think
of poverty and the stoniness
of the West and of the hands that built it and where
they are now
There are others who look out at the sea and think of
childhood revelry
and yet others who see only a cavernous graveyard
There are persons who look at a gnarled old tree and
don’t think of who planted it
and how many have sheltered and found shade beneath it
through the years
There are those who see the world in monochrome at the
expense of today’s joy
and tomorrow’s epiphany
And there are acquisitive human beings who like ticks
with suctorial apparatus
imbibe every ounce possible from their subjects
And others who see growing old as something that
happens to everybody else
but not themselves
I have news for you –
There are people who have come to an early realisation
That life is no test flight for me or you and there is
no recall on time
And every morning they embrace life with gusto
and are thankful for every moment of being
Sonnet Without End
after Francois Villon
I stand in shock
at the sound of silence
As warm as toast
and head to toe I freeze
While at home I’m
in a foreign land
Near burning
bright, I shiver
Bare as windswept
rock, clothed like a sheep
I smile in tears
and hope without promise
Consolation I take
from sorrowful symphonies
Gladdened, and yet
of contentment I have none
I am able but
lacking in sinew and vigour
For me there’s
nothing definite but what’s unsure
Nothing hidden but
what’s crystal clear
I have no doubt
now except the surety
of no love without
pain, no beginning without end
The Long Now
The slow coach of
youth speed merchant of age
In a tangled web
like tofu eighty-six billion fire
Big energy
consumers in the domed upper room
Subjective mind
time perceived differently
One second: the
number of a Caesium atom’s vibrations
over nine billion,
only one lost in a hundred million years
Four hundred
atomic clocks around the world
Marking time of a
future civilisation for ten thousand years
The Clock of the
Long Now
The past didn’t
happen and the future will never come
Will tick once a
year, bong once a century and the cuckoo
will come out once
every millennium
Staring Po-faced at Us
A body of atoms
seven thousand septillion maybe
Hydrogen oxygen
carbon nitrogen calcium
mostly
Cell death a
genetically regulated process
At the atomic
level we are all hitched
One atom in
everyone’s lungs
at any moment was
in Caesar’s
as he exhaled his
final breath
Why do we always
turn our attention to everything else?
About the same as our birth weight our ashes
Delightful!
ReplyDeleteFabulous poems, Teresa. Congratulations 🎊
ReplyDeletewonderful poems Teresa
ReplyDelete