BLANK VERSE
I Think Therefore Iambic©
NEVER SELF -POSSESSED OR PRUDENT,
LOVE IS ALL ABANDONMENT
William Shakespeare (1564 -- 1616)
English Poet and Dramatist
TRUE LOVE AND OTHER LIES
True love does not exist, save the poet,
and therein, only in his gentlest dreams
where it settles, centering the heartbeat,
and rendering his life a misery.
Knowing One True Love is not a joy,
but an unfulfilled desire, a dream
unrequited and quickly gone to vapor
in the face of parents, husbands, wives,
would-be friends and other miscreants.,
all of whom are certain in their bones
what's good for them is good for everyone
and must be obeyed, amen, amen.
And so we come to question life itself,
for if there is no love but per instruction
what good is all the rest? Just this, we find:
To eat and breathe, beget and teach our children.
that there is more to life than food and breath,
then pray we die before the joie de vivre
departs them and they slump beneath the weight
of knowing that true love does not exist.
Harvey Stanbrough
Pittsboro, IN
"Sad is his lot, who once at least in his
life, has not been a poet."
Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869)
French Poet
CHRISTMAS EVE ON THE SIDEWALK
Two Santas pass, one jolly, staggering,
the other far too thin and glassy eyed,
and distant sirens wail and hawkers curse,
try everything to lure the passersby;
"I need to sit awhile, y'know" C'mon!"
and beauties who no longer look in mirrors
frequent the corners, hawking wares themselves,
their faux mink barely covering their hips,
A lonely, older gentlman, his eyes
quick-misting, tips his trembling hat and smiles,
and one flips him the finger; his sad gaze
belies his pain at having lived so long.
The rumble of the train growls through the ground,
reminding him that someone's going somewhere
he'll never go again -- they're going home.
He shuffles on into the fading night
Two blocks down, a pair of fine old ladies
dodder from the sidewalk to a shop
looking for the perfect cards and trinkets
with which they might display grandmotherhood.
They will not venture here, fearing Christmas
fades where lights are dim as unwashed children
and wishing not to blight their happy mood
with people God himself has written off.
Harvey Stanbrough
Pittsboro, IN
COFFEE BREAK
Its fawn face swirls, an eddy from my spoon.
And unsophisticated as I am,
I've added cream for lighter outlook in
my china cup, a java god. It yields
my languid smile, well-being from a bean's
obliteration - nearly ground away
to waken senses striving to keep on.
Momentum's mocha taste invigorates
the dullest moments of the afternoon.
Carol W. LaForet
Bucks County, PA
The biggest temptation is to settle for too little.
Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)
American Writer / Poet and Trappist Monk
ON THE REMARKABILITY OF POETS
These lives are ordinary, these few dreams
we are given time to dream remarkable
only to us, who---in our silent fervor
to mark our way so others (say, our children
or other fellow unremarkables) might follow---
find, after our demise, nobody did.
The post demise perception is a theory,
of course, and open to interpretation
according to the several other theories
to which we variously ascribe: the god
or gods or goddess(es) to whom we pray;
the maleness or femaleness of our selves;
belief or not in congregational
athletics, a spiritual limbering-up of self;
our interim destinations, Right and Wrong;
and how we felt upon each sad arrival,
having left something, someone behind;
reflexions on those gods and on our selves;
and whether anyone will read our lines
and wish that they had written them and wish
that they had had the opportunity
to meet us in the world that went before
we dreamed the final dream we were allowed
and passed away or kicked the can or died,
whereupon, I think, we all will find
ourselves as unremarkable as those
we left behind, the ones we hoped would follow
the trail we marked---unremarkable
as those we chose to follow while we lived---
and that we neither did nor were, but dreamed.
Harvey Stanbrough
Pittsboro, IN
"There is a limit at which forbearance
ceases to be a virtue."
Edmund Burke (1729-97)
English Orator and Statesman
THE SEA
The past sings an unsettling current note;
José Ortega y Gasset once wrote,
embellishing the German Goethe's pen:
that man will move his arms to keep afloat.
As he fights the waves and his destruction,
man quickly spurns his sense of a wrecked ship,
confusing his swim stroke with life, itself.
By reach, he reasons, he will stay afloat.
A few of the swimmers have springs for eyes;
laser beams aim their light at what could be.
Their blind brothers kick the incoming tides,
gyrate their dreams and seek guaranteed shores.
Springs-for-eyes question the swimming and ask,
"Why do arms-control talks produce more arms?
This ice-sculpture carved for a party?
Long dresses or cocktail? Black tie or white?"
Mary Gribble
Los Angeles, CA
"Only two things are infinite --
the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
American Physicist
CHASING HEMINGWAY
Each night he dons a broad-brimmed Panama---
a child would don a helmet for The Game
on Sunday morning, wouldn't he? ---then lights
a hand-rolled Cuban from the humidor,
strips to his shorts and stands before his desk,
pencil in hand, to dream of Hemingway.
The whisky burns into his throat and chest,
and overhead a barely moving fan
beats air and smoke into a moody haze
to set the stage; the writer has arrived---
But all the same, the words seem lame at first;
they limp across the page in ordered lines
and wait until he deigns to rearrange
them from their perfect form (grammatically)
into a greater and more vibrant line,
before the dawn.
And so he scribbles on
revising his and rearranging that
(for this will do some good and that no harm)
enticing words into a private dance
that he alone may view and understand
albeit through the haze of whiskied smoke.
He dreamt of Hemingway, who never showed,
and Whitman and the others he would ape
if only there were time. And for a time
he felt and knew the wonder of the desk,
the pencil scratching 'cross the pulpy pad,
the whiskied smoke, the whirring fan, and last,
the ultimate grandeur
of being found passed out upon the floor---
then, all things done (but nothing done too well),
he pressed a pistol snug against his head,
and mimicked his dear Hemingway at last.
Harvey Stanbrough
Pittsboro, IN
Fair-handed spring embosses every grace.
James Thomson - (1700-1748)
Scottish Poet
MUD SHOES
Spring creeps on mud shoes past my backyard
gate
without regard for sodden garden beds,
turgid soil, where southerly warm breath
dispatches wispy tatters of the snow.
Two bluebirds lease a house hung fifteen years
ago, without a tenant until now.
Their flight is better than my muck mired walk,
a soggy promise April always keeps.
Mud is a seasoned harbinger of time's
escape from winter fangs. Spring leaves a line
of prints behind, then pauses to absorb
warm continuity upon its face.
Carol W. LaForet
Bucks County, PA
"Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself."
Plato (429-347 B. C.) Greek Philosopher
THIS LIVIN' AIN'T NO EASY THING TO DO
This livin' ain't no easy thing to do
just gettin' by from day to day. I'd 'low
there's folks that's got it harder maybe'n me
but not too many folks, an' that's for sure.
Why just t'other day, that Rev'rend Jim
come swinging' by the house in that new car,
an' Molly, while the kids was still in school
an' I was still at work down at the mill,
just hopped right in an' drove away with him.
They took off in a big ol' cloud o'dust,
them two, an' them big ol' Caddy tires
throwed dirt an' rocks clear up on my porch
like they was in a rush. O'course I wasn't
here to see 'em leave; the neighbor lady
told me ever'thing; she saw it all.
Don't get me wrong; I mean, I ain't so much
that Molly couldn't leave me---an' the kids
an' me, we'll do all right, I guess---Ibut man,
this livin' ain't no easy thing to do.
Harvey Stanbrough
Pittsboro, IN
Self-trust is the essence of heroism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
American Poet and Essayist
DEAD HEROES
No room at Arlington for these who failed
to do their fathers' bidding -- these who lived --
and failed, in that, to make their fathers proud.
These go unburied, unentombed, unclaimed,
unclassified by shrinks as post-traumatic;
unheralded, unnoticed, and unkempt,
as dead as those they left behind, as dead
as those whose fathers place the tiny flags
on stones that mark remainders of their sons.
How can we call these heroes? These who clawed
their way through steaming jungles, grasping mud,
the shameful tears of men, and grazing fire,
but lived. No room for these at Arlington
who failed the bold Arthurian Ideal:
a Hero, everybody knows, must die.
King Arthur died, fulfilling expectations,
and everybody wailed as they must do,
then set his ship aflame and him adrift.
And so we aggrandize our heroes -- those
who had the common courtesy to die --
but these we set adrift, we set adrift.
Harvey Stanbrough
Pittsboro, IN
