November

A ten-year-old attempt at a poem, recently re-worked and re-titled.

Draft of a sonnet

Cool air, the fragrance of dead leaves, the plume
From a live cigarette, the winds that blow
In late October, the glory and the gloom
Of seven thousand yesterdays ago --

The chronicle of transitory bliss,
The sudden gratifying memory
Of a passionate twenty-year-old kiss
From a girl who smoked and loved immoderately --

Now distant in geography and time,
But very near in thought, immediate
And intimate as trouble with the heart --

The brief joy cherished as a happy crime,
An injury both fierce and delicate
Healed not by length of days or surgeon's art.

After Reading Robert Lowell

Once more October, season of "hope and change":
my forty-second year.  These autumn leaves
are crisp bits of eye-fire, foliate explosions
of mortal color, whose loss one always grieves.

I gather books, huge stacks. Some say that's odd.
Scores of used volumes -- poetry, religion.

I wonder if all these dusty tomes estrange

my heavy soul from the ever-living God.

I am stockpiling sins -- lust, wrath, and pride:
inveterate private peccancies, the old
fall-bys that make one sink into dire disgrace.

O Distant One, have mercy on me, weak-willed
addict of leisure and rhyme and cyberspace,
who crave the peace of Thy kingdom. Come, abide.

*


first draft October 2010
latest version May 2011

Cummings

(on this, the 116th anniversary of his birth)


i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
--i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are the prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
--i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)


[from 95 poems]