Narrative Poems
Baby's Pantoum
by Anne Waldman
for Reed Bye
I lie in my crib midday this is
unusual I don't sleep really
Mamma's sweeping or else boiling water for tea
Other sounds are creak of chair & floor, water
dripping on heater from laundry, cat licking itself
Unusual I don't sleep really
unless it's dark night everyone in bed
Other sounds are creak of chair & floor, water
......
100. Raindrops file like veins down the driver's side window
by Kea Campbell
Raindrops file like veins down the driver’s side window. Thunder booms like a bass drum that rattles lightning from the gloomy clouds. Sirens echo around my head like a song stuck in the back of your mind.
The pavement in front of me is as visible as knowing what tomorrow holds. Hazard lights in every direction, like a Christmas tree set to a rhythmic strobe. A pair of beating reds in front and behind, and I can almost make out the double yellow and white lines. Where am I even going?
Mirrors ripple, leveling the dips in the road, and suddenly, I'm hydroplaning. 65 miles an hour and I'm hydroplaning. The back wheels get tired of being caboose, the front agrees and my car has turned into a hand of a clock, counterclockwise.
Thoughts flood my head, a brainstorm. I wish they taught us this in driver's school. Stupid drivers school. I surf my files of memories as if they hadn’t just sit us in a classroom, daydreaming of their next paycheck.
I blink, and nothing has changed. The air like a maze of droplets, like a skewed version of Dots and Boxes. My car in the same place, sitting sideways. I reach for the door and it's locked. I panic and unlock the car. Silly me. The raindrops hitting my body from all sides except up. Trailing, a me-size hole in the rainfall. I can see everything clearly, like peering through the protective mesh behind your bedroom window.
I blink, and my car glides away, 65 miles an hour, sideways. I glance down at my body, hands open like a landing pad for the downpour; palm-up like and fingers sprawled out like I had just received a pair of my own. I hear a car horn barreling toward me until it becomes one with me.
I blink once more, and I see pitch black. I'm dry. The rain continues and thunder booms a half-second worth of daytime into the sky, into my room. And I'm staring at the ceiling above my bed, in my room.
......
To The Republic
by James Galvin
Past
fences the first sheepmen cast across the land, processions
of cringing pitch or cedar posts pulling into the vanishing
point like fretboards carrying barbed melodies, windharp
narratives, songs of place, I'm thinking of the long cowboy
ballads Ray taught me the beginnings of and would have taught
me the ends if he could have remembered them.
But remembering
was years ago when Ray swamped for ranches at a dollar a day
and found, and played guitar in a Saturday night band, and now
......
Arnold Von Winkelried
by James Montgomery
'Make way for liberty!' he cried,
Make way for liberty, and died.
In arms the Austrian phalanx stood,
A living wall, a human wood,—
A wall, where every conscious stone
Seemed to its kindred thousands grown.
A rampart all assaults to bear,
Till time to dust their frames should wear;
So still, so dense the Austrians stood,
A living wall, a human wood.
......
The Cavern By The Sea
by Martha Lavinia Hoffman
The tropical islands of Tonga
In the Southern Pacific sea lie
Like fragments of cool rainbow color
Dropped down from the melting blue sky.
They are gardens of clustering palm trees
Of creepers and tall waving fronds,
Flowers, colored by sunshine and sea-breeze,
Fruits, painted by tropical dawns.
......
100. Raindrops file like veins down the driver's side window
by Kea Campbell
Raindrops file like veins down the driver’s side window. Thunder booms like a bass drum that rattles lightning from the gloomy clouds. Sirens echo around my head like a song stuck in the back of your mind.
The pavement in front of me is as visible as knowing what tomorrow holds. Hazard lights in every direction, like a Christmas tree set to a rhythmic strobe. A pair of beating reds in front and behind, and I can almost make out the double yellow and white lines. Where am I even going?
Mirrors ripple, leveling the dips in the road, and suddenly, I'm hydroplaning. 65 miles an hour and I'm hydroplaning. The back wheels get tired of being caboose, the front agrees and my car has turned into a hand of a clock, counterclockwise.
Thoughts flood my head, a brainstorm. I wish they taught us this in driver's school. Stupid drivers school. I surf my files of memories as if they hadn’t just sit us in a classroom, daydreaming of their next paycheck.
I blink, and nothing has changed. The air like a maze of droplets, like a skewed version of Dots and Boxes. My car in the same place, sitting sideways. I reach for the door and it's locked. I panic and unlock the car. Silly me. The raindrops hitting my body from all sides except up. Trailing, a me-size hole in the rainfall. I can see everything clearly, like peering through the protective mesh behind your bedroom window.
I blink, and my car glides away, 65 miles an hour, sideways. I glance down at my body, hands open like a landing pad for the downpour; palm-up like and fingers sprawled out like I had just received a pair of my own. I hear a car horn barreling toward me until it becomes one with me.
I blink once more, and I see pitch black. I'm dry. The rain continues and thunder booms a half-second worth of daytime into the sky, into my room. And I'm staring at the ceiling above my bed, in my room.
......
So Passe
by Evelyn Judy Buehler
Witness if you will, the occupants of Deep Space Flight 6952,
on a mission to the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
A short time ago, the spaceship experienced turbulence,
and soon they'll experience fear, and even doubt reality.
They've just entered The Twilight Zone.
'What a rough patch of turbulence!' said Thomas. Nicole
responded, 'I believe it's the worst we've encountered yet.'
Then Nicole suddenly tasted coffee, that had not even
begun to be brewed, to her regret!
......
The phantom of the asteroid
by Marc B. F.
How long it's been
since the airship reached
this distant space rock?
Years, decades,
or maybe more.
Stranded on this lonely asteroid,
I lost my thirst, my sense
and my body to the void.
The dust of my bones
made an atmosphere
......
Narrative And Dramatic The Wanderings Of Oisin
by William Butler Yeats
BOOK I
S. Patrick. You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,
Have known three centuries, poets sing,
Of dalliance with a demon thing.
Oisin. Sad to remember, sick with years,
The swift innumerable spears,
The horsemen with their floating hair,
......
Kora In Hell: Improvisations I
by William Carlos Williams
1
Fools have big wombs. For the rest?—here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy- ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.
2
For what it's worth: Jacob Louslinger, white haired, stinking, dirty bearded, cross eyed, stammer tongued, broken voiced, bent backed, ball kneed, cave bellied, mucous faced—deathling,—found lying in the weeds "up there by the cemetery." "Looks to me as if he d been bumming around the meadows for a couple of weeks." Shoes twisted into incredible lilies: out at the toes, heels, tops, sides, soles. Meadow flower! ha, mallow! at last I have you. (Rot dead marigolds—an acre at a time! Gold, are you?) Ha, clouds will touch world's edge and the great pink mallow stand singly in the wet, topping reeds and a closet full of clothes and good shoes and my-thirty-year's-master's-daughter's two cows for me to care for and a winter room with a fire in it—. I would rather feed pigs in Moonachie and chew calamus root and break crab's claws at an open fire: age's lust loose!
3
Talk as you will, say: "No woman wants to bother with children in this country";—speak of your Amsterdam and the whitest aprons and brightest doorknobs in Christendom. And I'll answer you: "Gleaming doorknobs and scrubbed entries have heard the songs of the housemaids at sun-up and—housemaids are wishes. Whose? Ha! the dark canals are whistling, whistling for who will cross to the other side. If I remain with hands in pocket leaning upon my lamppost—why—I bring curses to a hag's lips and her daughter on her arm knows better than I can tell you—best to blush and out with it than back beaten after.
——————
......
