She, cold as stone, was once warm

and with soft, scented skin flushed pink

from a beating heart. And she moved.

She spoke, laughed, walked under sky acres.

Then immortalized inadequately in stone or words.

Crafted but cold, stationary, here and gone.

 

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Missed Connection

You were sitting just two rows ahead

at the poetry reading, listening so intently

that you didn’t notice your sweater slipped

off your shoulder. I noticed. Soft skin

perfumed by a sonnet made of air.

 

Poetic License

More than just dramatic license – the liberty

to deviate from conventional form or fact

to achieve that desired effect, factual distortion,

altering grammar and language with lovely impunity,

and all in the name of art.

Form

“Form ever follows function,” said the architect.

The shape from intended function or purpose.

Long-necked giraffes reaching the tallest of leaves.

The poem beating with its 5-7 heartbeat.

Our life evolving into an unimagined design.

 

 

(“Form ever follows function” is credited to American architect Louis Henry Sullivan.)

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church

but you spend this Sunday with me,

on the October garden bench reading poems

from your small hand-sewn fascicles, never published,

but for here and now, where God

preaches and the sermon is never long.

 

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This poem recalls – and borrows lines – from Emily Dickinson, whose poems I was reading this morning.

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, poems,written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a drawer,  died without fame, only a few poems were published in her lifetime, then published with words altered by editors or publishers according to the fashion of the day.

The volume I’m reading, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, has 1,789 poems with Dickinson’s spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact.