FIRST POT OF COFFEE

Morning has dawned

when I make the day's first pot of coffee

as the cats meow beside their

trays still holding

last evening's food;

morning has dawned,

and I am listening to yesterday's news

of craft to Mars and Earthly turmoil,

waiting for the coffee to drip

as light dances on the wall,

late messages from a Summer

that has passed me by,

inside these walls where I wait

for days as dark as the

black coffee I now drink.

31.07.2020

THE WICKED PRIME PRIME MINISTER OF OZ

God tells me to do

terrible things,

and who am I -

a devout

family man,

to say no?

So, your Will be done,

on Earth as it is in Heaven,

For the kingdom and the power

and the glory are yours forever,

Rupert. Amen.

25.07.2020

WE CAN'T AVOID IT

We want the

cherished dead to live on

in the young,

emerging in their features,

gestures

and words,

not just continuing

a family,

and a memory 

of a life,

but the life itself

that was interrupted,

frozen in time

at a moment

we call death.

20.07.2020

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

SURFACING

The day passed

in sleep, dreamless

abyss

releasing its grip,

allowing to surface

once more

into tired, exhausted

consciousness on

the dead calm

surface of reality,

trapped like a fly

between two window-panes.

18.-19.07.2020

THE PRISON OF THE MIND

How bitter

this prison

built from

life with

our own

hands is

to inhabit.

Caged denizen

of our own

edifice, condemned

by our own

deeds and

the sentence

we gave:

Life,

to be wasted

as a jail

for its builder,

who still

cherishes as

the greatest treasure

the key

to the unlocked door.

18.-19.07.2020

AMY LOWELL(1874-1925)

If only you would have been a man,

an obese, rather ugly man,

loving women, 

then it would have been all-right;

your status as a major poet

would not have suffered -

but, alas! You were a

woman, and a middle-aged,

overweight one,

and all the obese,

rather ugly men

could not forgive you

that you were a lesbian

of the kind

their friends wouldn't paint

cavorting nude and pink

beside some

Arcadian stream.

19.07.2020

THE NIGHT WIND

The night wind

awakes memories

of autumns from
long gone years,

but the birds that
chatter in the gloom

only speak of the summer

that has come.

I choose the

memories, let them come

like high tide

over sorrows.

24.05.2013-18.07.2013

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

HOW EASILY

How easily we harm

people, the loved

people who

are all we are, 

even when trying

to help.

Ignore

their plight,

and they die

through your selfishness;

try to help

and your clumsy,

misguided attempt

dooms them.

Either way,

you send them

away into the sunless

death, in the airless

void, the oblivion

of thought and being.

You, to all you

loved and cared about,

deadly.

17.07.2020

coming to us all

it could end

just now

suddenly

and not

have time

to realize

is as terrifying

as to know

and awake

to weeks

of remembering

that death

is coming

and of course

it is

to us all

17.07.2020

THE WORDS THAT ENDURE

Letters on tablets of clay,

scribbled on shards of pottery

in cuneiform and hieroglyphs,

will endure with their sentiments

past the ephemeral existence

of all our emails and text messages,

and with them, some echo

of their writers will reach

past us to generations in far

future to whom we shall be silent.

17.07.2020

ALCIBIADES

When the house is on fire,

and the way to the Persians

is blocked by the

armed men waiting outside,

listen to the roar of the flames,

draw your dagger and seek

your death in swift shafts.

16.07.2020

A PHILOSOPHER CAN NEVER ADMIT BEING IN WRONG

When the Athenians had sentenced him to death,

the astronomer Anaxagoras escaped to Lampsacus;

the nature of the Sun and the Moon

were not reason enough to die for.

Better to live, teach

and see them sail the great void.

The material things of the cosmos

have reality beyond the human arguments

and need no human sacrifices

to confirm their existence,

unlike what exists solely

in the thoughts of human beings.

When the Athenians turned their condemning

gaze on Socrates a generation later,

he stayed to drink hemlock and die;

preferring martyrdom for debating

on some foreign agora and

allowing the Athenians think they had won.

16.07.2020

TO THE END OF EVERYTHING

At the beginning

is the birth

of the end,

and at the end

is just

the end

of everything

that came

between

the first cry

and the last

breath.

16.07.2020

THE HANDS THAT HOLD THE OIL LAMP

When archaeologists opened

the tomb of an Etruscan princess

in ancient Tarquinia's necropolis,

her skeleton lay among princely goods

and remains of a funeral feast,

but they soon looked past all the glories of the lost

and were amazed by a little oil lamp

that had been hanging on the tomb wall

for two thousand six hundred years...

When the kings of Rome ruled, it hang there,

when Rome fell to the Celts it hang there,

when Rome burned Carthage it hang there,

when Caesar laid in a pool of blood it hang there,

when Nero watched Rome to burn it hang there,

when Constantine won on Milvian Bridge it hang there,

when Alaric sacked Rome it hang there,

all through the dark ages and the renaissance

it hang there as the popes came, schemed,

went to their graves and got their sainthoods,

through the conquests of Napoleon

and Garibaldi it hang there,

the petty Savoy kings

and the pompous fascists

and the corrupt politicians came,

schemed with the Mafia,

molested underage girls,

and got killed, dethroned,

or slapped on the wrist,

and still it hang there

until the tomb door was opened

and a human hand took it,

just like a human hand

had put it there

and all those twenty-six centuries

were like one evening and one morning

whose light now danced

on the little oil lamp

and no one could see a difference

between those two hands...

24.09.2013-15.07.2020

Jii

above the town

and the frozen lake

the bright

fearless young eyes

of my niece

look far with curiosity

28.02.2014

THE PEERS OF THE GODS

The gods have always

been on the side

of the rich and the powerful,

and why not?

How many poor and weak

gods

have you

worshipped?

13.07.2020

BEYOND OZYMANDIAS

Grim irony is weaved through human history,

pulling down the mighty dead

to sinkholes among the living poor:

The hieroglyphs in the memorial chapel of Mentuhotep II

(2008-1957 BCE) in Abydos,

praising the pharaoh

who united the Two Lands

after two centuries of strife,

and brought forth three centuries of prosperity,

being eroded by waste

from a leaking sewage tank

built in 1935.

12.07.2020

SHEPSESKARE

Even the least of those

ruling over the suffering masses

has a name echoing through millennia,

a name without a face or activities

to boast about, just

a name on damaged lists of kings

and

the meagre remains of a pyramid

barely begun; yet

great minds struggle to give

reality to the name -

an usurping uncle

or

an orphaned infant dying

on his mother's breast?

Thus a few months on the throne

indeed grant immortality

as the great masses

with their toil-filled days

are but dust and sand.

08.07.2020

PAIN IS THE ONLY PLACE TO LIVE NOW

In the last moment

we will yearn for the pain

that life is

now, has been through cascading

years of grief and regret.

We dress in sorrow

and hastily leave

for the exit,

only to realize

that life reduced

and weaved through with agony

is still existence

outside the erasing gates

of oblivion. Beyond

the pain lies nothing.

05.07.2020

EVEN WHEN WE WRITE POEMS ABOUT IT

Life is a denial of death

in action, in every breath

taken, in each heartbeat felt,

in each hopeful thought cast

towards future time

we deny the inevitability ´

and the reality of our own end,

as long as possible

postponing mortality

beyond the horizon of thought.

Life is about holding

into existence so tightly

that nothing else

seems possible

than us going on,

going on forever.

Until death.

14.05.2013-04.07.2020

OF BEAUTY

The most beautiful women

never lived -

look in vain for the grave

of Ireland's Mary Hynes,

sung by the blind -

or were wreathed in beauty

by power and charm,

like the last Cleopatra,

bitten by

the snakes of Rome.

04.07.2020