Still

By Alysaria

Within the cold shadows of the deep
A creaking corpse. A skeletal husk
Sightless socket staring,
An empty gaze.
Wounded and broken by unforgiving seas,
Now at peace beneath the churning waves,
At rest in the dark and vast.

Men no longer toil on this vessel.
Suffering, celebration, have ceased
Silent, haunters lurk,
Weaving through the worn planks.
This boat no longer sails
It’s voyages are a memory, a whisper in the pages of a story:

Sirens of the deep, black hair flowing
Sing, but not the songs of David
The bare, scarred, half-forgotten echo of the past,
A reminder of mortality, a tribute to all that is lasting.

Children of the Eastern Garden!
Speak with words made sweet by bitter fruit.
A golden tongue sweeps away the world in fantasy
Weaving fact and fancy into one.
Seek not truth.
Mystery is the life of imagination,
Brutal fact a fatal blow
The force to crack a mighty hull,
The grasp of greedy waves, dragging ever down.

Water soaked logs bear no tales.
Cling to the crinkled pages of ages past.
Within the deep stillness, there are no answers
Fathomless questions, unanswerable, stare up from the gaping hole.

But if you must,
Seek me.
Gaze upon the nameless
Faceless.
Blood red sky - an indifferent warning
Grim shade flashing blade bright across the waves.

 

very nice! I wanted to make a poetry section/thread for the forum, but felt like it would be cheating, since I don't write poetry and couldn't post anything myself.

That was very pretty, though.  Thank you

Okay then...

Blue Man

I got the biscuit dropped
in my cup of tea blues.

I got the slight tear in the armpit
of my favourite jumper blues.

I got the loose connection
in my headphone earpiece blues.

I got the loud bathroom fan
that wakes people up

when I go for a late night piss blues.
I got the went to the corner shop

for a paper today and they didn’t have
the Saturday Guardian blues.

In the pines, in the pines.
I got the intermittent

broadband connection blues.
I got dem ol’ fresh parsley

doesn’t last very long blues.
I got a letter this morning;

what do you reckon it read?
It said: “O% until June 2010

on balance transfers.”
Boom boom boom boom

A-haw haw haw haw
Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm

Really great poems, you guys! I enjoyed reading them.

xD You inspired me to go digging through my poetry folder and I found this old one. Starting to rework it.

perhaps you still dream of civil war

the south:
a burnished gold,
cotton tinged with slight
smears of yellow (honey-light),
lazy humidity and dusty roads.
magnolia blossoms break
along the lines of your skin,
hanging on to the past, each reminder
a fresh bruise, a fresh crack—
translucent and fragile.

your dreams change to sepia.
you wake up, heart pounding,
remembering only smoke, bitter burning.
the tendons on your neck
stretch as you rebuild yourself:
crossed beams and skyscrapers
replace your fragile bones.
your eyes change, baby blue to gray.
your back aches and your ears ring
from humming shuttles and iron.
you forget how to breathe easily,
oaks rattling as you cough smog.

your skin is patchy with memory.
parts of you that want to forget,
[outer edges, manicured nails]
and parts that still remember:
[your stomach, the scar that runs across your legs]
your tan lines show as you
run your fingers across your wounds.
[burn marks and the crack of a whip]

you stretch your syllables
languorously, like a cat
but you are not, you are instead
a ghost that solidifies erratically.
you are tainted fog that blows away
to reveal steel, structured so
you’ll never fall down again.

A simple Goodbye

I've really enjoyed reading all your poetry!

I promised Nadette I'd put up the poem I wrote that won a poetry contest. So here it is. xD Enjoy!

Ashkae Remembers Her Youth

I was his lover, chosen by mothers’ hands
as surely as they folded garments.
They said Mila’s smile was too much like summer,
had too much gold to complement his darkness.
They said Dura was too dark, like wine-ridden winter,
that she would stain him with gloom.

They said I was perfect, that my muted sepia
accented his smile and brought harmony
to his temporary storms. I would be steady
when the red earth buckled under his feet
and I would revive him, remind him
what else there was: cool monsoon rains
and small warm buds against wet palms,
the coarse hair of bamboo plants
and his voice calling me through the waves of the wind
Ashkae, Ashkae

I taught him to dance in the rain,
to smile without strings tugging the corners
of his mouth, to kiss me with the night
seeping into his lips. We loved
like goose-down pillows shaken out
on sweet straw grass. The whisper
of my name drifted around us
like feathers, wrapped into sleep—
Ashkae, Ashkae

I slept in his voice like I slept in a hammock.
As we grew older, the doctors who monitored
his labored coughs told me he did not have long,
that his muscles would atrophy and his heart
would burst—not with love, they said,
but with labor, the exhaustion he ignored
when he came back to me from the fields.
They did not see that the dark blue mornings
could be folded into sheets that would never wear out,
that we stored our love in the wind’s whispers,
that we would end together.
He said he would call my name forever,
Ashkae, Ashkae

His last words were spoken in the hot fields,
air spiraling from his lips as the life spun away
from his ruptured heart, and his words
have fallen into the tilled ground and nestled
between moist soil and hardy roots and nourished
a bed of grass that I cannot find and
Ashkae, Ashkae,
never again have I felt so loved.

My Dilemma

Lauren