From the Dreamscape

Two figures lurch across an open field. These brothers come to stand mere feet apart, eyes locked as their hands steady above their belts. There are guns, somewhere, and knives eneath these, but the hands do not betray the moments–they know their duty to the instant, and so they wait. Morose reflections in a quaking [...]

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Poetic Spotlight: I Am Not Yours

This week, the spotlight falls on one Sara Teasdale, a lyrical poet of the early 20th century. Sara Teasdale is a fine example of a tribulation many poets, writers, and other creative sorts have faced throughout history: depression. Many that pursue the arts seem to fall into it, as they fall into all emotions–heavily, for [...]

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Poetic Spotlight: Emily Dickinson

This week’s addition to the poetic bookshelf is one I’m pretty every American knows (or at least they should), in spite of her legendary nature as something of a hermit. Emily Dickinson was something of an anomaly, in all senses of the term. Though she wrote nearly 1800 – yes, 1800 – poems over the [...]

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Beside the Tracks

By the Tracks life is the silent terminal ache, gentle reverberations in the wind the iron earth calling to the unknown hope of time. – Somewhere steel belches, the smoke, flaming flies between the beauty and decay. – Heart throbs to the notion— old men questioning burial rites too soon too soon for the ache, [...]

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Beside the Trenches

Gallant cried the horseman saddled with his cloth and care, rattling his salivating saber to a bugle’s tune of God and Country. There were no spurs so swift beyond the field where trenches lay. The drums and alarums still rattled banners as man and beast gave rise to dusted glory, untouchable, their raucous shadow lines [...]

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Restless Nightmares

For the final One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry, and the grand opening of the dVerse Poets Pub, I would like to bring back a classic – the poem with which I introduced myself at the first One Shot Wednesday, in July last year, when One Stop was still just a glitter and a [...]

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Stone by Stone

Stone by Stone Vines inhale the flesh The world atone Stone by Stone Memories of the haunted-hallowed moan Of all we’ve wrought, kingly mess Stone by Stone Humanity stripped, to rise afresh. * Hello, all. This, obviously, is my submission to One Shoot Sunday over at One Stop Poetry. It’s more than that, though. I [...]

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Birds in Flight

Feathered summer bright In taloned march sing madness Death—one season’s end. A piece for this week’s edition of One Shoot Sunday. There’s no interview by me (had a couple weeks off, you know?), but several lovely prompt choices to select from a generous old friend of One Stop: Fee Easton. You may remember my earlier [...]

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Just a Man & a timely Senryu

No martyr, in death A shadow on a cave wall— A symbol stretching. Just a Man Lights erupt on paved hearts and bloodbound screams, the sound, the roar breathless lines in broken exposition— no words to mark the dust in the wind, the starlit flag where planes and concrete fell, bodies gathered in the mass [...]

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World Poetry, Part Deux

For day two’s favorite poetry selection, I give you English poet John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud:”   Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so; For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest [...]

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