Category Archives: Reposted from elsewhere
Past Time
The best tribute I can pay to this piece, Betty, is to repost it so that others can stumble upon it – and you. The best poems are timeless.
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She whittles
on a block
of solitude
until it’s gone
and pieces lie
about her feet
and slivers
bleed her hands
carving
out another poem
that only he
will understand.
.
.
(c) 1995, 2017 Betty Hayes Albright
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sky become sea
OLD NOTEBOOKS: East Anglia, England (originally dated October 8, 2012): 06.00hrs: I’m upstairs in the cottage, sitting at the desk placed in front of the small window looking out at the world. What a strange sight, everything is chocolate brown. The field was ploughed yesterday, I remember now, a man in a red tractor ploughing the earth into neat chocolate furrows, moving by small increments across the field and back, followed by a flock of pale grey seagulls making a tremendous mewing sound. It took him the whole day.
Furrowed chocolate fields, forever, like lines drawn in the earth, as you would draw with a pencil on a piece of paper, but on a huge scale; a measurement made across the field. Furrows as neat as a comb passes through hair and it leaves the strands precisely separated from each other, for a time. The strange thing is, though, it’s…
View original post 479 more words
Remembering Of A Something
REMEMBERING OF A SOMETHING
I shall not remember this,
Nor shall be remembered for this.
And yet for a moment I am here,
Settled between grey hills in slow rain.
My love, still sleeping, her dreaming breath
A slow mist down by the river.
Where did it begin?
Moving on, just so,
As a shifting sunset.
Stone stretched thin until i admits hollowed light.
Dark cliffs wane, and here we are:
Saints as numberless as sheep,
Sheep as numerous as clouds.
Clouds piling to heaven then whispering to nothing,
Pushed by hills older than themselves.
The river runs thick and dark, naming each stone.
It is as easy to forget, sometimes, as to remember.
(Bitter ashes, black soot, husks huddled that once had faces).
How fast the grass covers it all, takes away cause and reason.
Here we are:
A silted green valley down to the sea at Llantwit,
Where…
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St Ives
How unexpected to find a second poem containing the word pilchard in such close (relative) proximity. And a fine poem too.
Where is the tang of salt,
the reek of the sea’s harvest?
No more the seafarer’s roll
caresses my pier side stones;
no more the women’s red hands
bear fish stained air to cellars,
to chapel, to marriage beds.
I am left to the idle,
the fanciful escapees
that smother my golden sands,
and the sea only knows rage
or seduction – picturesque
to the exclusion of life.
Pilchards were my life – “pilchards”!
Even the word lacks beauty –
‘a devious shining worm
of a man’ this oily fish
has become in a packaged age.
Eyes have turned to the shining
light, springing into the air,
to the translucent turquoise,
to shapes of leisured gesture,
and the abstraction of form.
But beneath, I lie silent,
founded in oil and offal,
grieving for the days of fish,
the certainty of produce,
of sea, land and working hands –
plain, factual…
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criticism
you’re a bull in my shop
believing yourself to be
companionately brutal
and each time
bone china flies
and each time
i am left
to sweep up my aisles
littered with shards of pellucid and greige
Tick Tock
Tick tock clock click
Clunk click every trip*
Locked in up tight
Count down to zero~~~~~~~
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clunk_Click_Every_Trip
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Time is no straight line,
it is a serpent
crossing the room sideways
like a glance.
It burns rubber
careening
around every corner
tossing irony,
like bits of confetti
into our pockets.
Time dances a circle
around the fire of desire
then churns out to sea
on a wave of kelp,
unraveling one dream
weaving another.
It flip flops
in crazy eights,
bounces like a rubber ball
on a hot sidewalk
reflecting all angles
oblique and acute
but always right.
At its best
time is a spiral
lifting our vision
until the end
when it shrinks into a dot
in the palm of our hand,
and with one breath
blows us away
into the heart of forever.
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© 2014, 2017 Betty Hayes Albright
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(a re-post)
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Smokescreen…
Yes
yet let’s
not get draw
into the bipolar set-up
that simply fuels
the dysfunction
~
Each day they’re saying something…
Never aiming to catch your attention…
Hoping you are distracted enough…
Not to seek out any intervention…
Uttering words without meaning…
And telling little white untruths…
Preaching to the ignorant masses…
From the elderly to the numbed youth…
But do you really hear them…
Do you understand their words…
Read in-between the constructed lines…
Or care what motivates their world…
A world where everybody cheats…
A world where everybody lies…
They wrap up all of the dysfunction…
Hide secrets deep behind their eyes…
Always standing in the shadows…
Sending messages to your ears…
Projecting from a cold dark place…
And preying on all your worst fears…
Telling you what they want you to hear…
Always force feeding you their version…
As you swallow with a pinch of salt…
They’re looking for the next diversion…
But they’ve failed to communicate…
To each and every single…
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Literary ‘dead’
Pen; a shamefully legalized sword and
a paper of forced reflections, I am just
a rented massacre frantically walking on a narrow lane,
burdened with ostracized thoughts and glimpses of reality;
denied, I was once told that my words have the power
to change the stagnant and uplift the meek voices,
but I am a fiction; dead, poetry; marginalized,
a novel unheard
for all they wear is white and all I know is to stain.
Sunday Quote : Where to focus
Hold tight to what is most yourself, Don’t squander it
Don’t let your life be governed by what disturbs you.
Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri , c. 973-1058, Arab philosopher, poet, and writer.
Spritely
Truly enviable, Bella. And what a shame “masterful” remains so tainted with outdated and unwelcome sexism. 😦
That strong wiry body she wore
like a curse, smiling all the while,
nature diffusing her with passion
for dun and verdant, fruit and flowers
astounding nimble fingers, eyes darting
and dancing with delight not reciprocated
in a world of humans she tried to forgive
as we communed in silence, renegotiated
until endings inserted themselves
as they will, all gardens being temporary;
And refusing to take further insult
from a species short on integrity tried
to end it, booze and pills, vomit clumped
in a long tangle of hula hair, cradled
skeleton rocking back and forth, back
and forth, rejoin the living, meet us
again on terms of this earth, let us touch
the sparkle, share wisdom and laughter
while sifting over mounds of harvest
heaped onto old unblemished porcelain
as we pass time reflecting on budding
cloves and sliding doors to worlds
beyond the veil.
