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The Fossil Record, Catalogued by a Child
-for Matthew
From tellurian memory, I split Sandstone, in the presence of a
prescient child, to trace our organic past.
Questions sprout green shafts, buds, blossoms, leaves beneath a
symphonic, May Sun.
I call to ghosts in stones once hidden by hides of ice, lakes of
sentient water, bog-buried until the child, barely two years old,
collects the cool rock from the creek side, and fractures fossils,
revealing verses trapped in ancient stone.
The face of a thalassic scribe who’d wandered ocean beds,
swept into mudmix when ice demons scraped landscapes,
collecting shells, bones, skins, and voices for their own.
They rise again and speak to my tiny mentor. He stands—in awe of
eternal human history, bending time by breaking rocks.
Reading chthonic clocks of stone; of soil, of dust speculation.
His face is warmed by Sun brush, and his destiny is warned by canvases
of wind.
His studies are interrupted, as he flings the fossil shards into the
late Spring yard, and bounds past me, following a butterfly, to a ripe
Lilac bough.
-Robert Milby
November 16, 2011
Floodplain
Roil, growl, groan, rain swollen creek—
Winter refuses to leave.
In summer drought a gasping trickle; a
mosquito
Nursery.
Yet now in April, a Nor’Easters’ rage at
geriatric
Winter’s slow retreat, hikes through
cloud meadows by deep anguish,
Whose masterpiece snow flowers, melted
petals and wilted ice leaves,
Descend as mad rain, in a grey tumult of
flood and fear.
Crows walk the perimeter. Robins wait in
damp boughs,
Raindrops dripping from their pale,
yellow beaks.
They sing through this storm, aware that
warm days will emerge from A floodplain of Springtide passion.
Tunnels and warrens will be lost forever.
Mysterious graves will be uncovered.
The creek uses mud and silt paints on a
canvas of glazed winter grasses,
before such delicate blossoms and moist
buds suggest a vernal dominion
of hue fragrance and green children.
The meadow haberdasher will fit fern
flowers in moss vests.
Late Spring will seek her bold consort
and floodplain will sleep under July blaze,
Until Autumn’s forlorn storms sing Oak
leaf dirges and cold water.
-Robert Milby
May 2, 2007
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Spring Light
Daffodils and Tulips caught bolts of Sun,
To weave late April silks of light.
Gossamer, grey wind kissed their young
lips with raindrops.
Robins recited love poems, and told of
listening parties
on lawns, greening in grass brushes and
quills—
an impressionist canvas of milkmaid’s
violets.
Yearning Maples, proffered buds from thin
fingers,
Sculpting clouds on wheels of wind.
Rain tincture;
rivulets on consternation’s flood plain—
Soil monarchs tomb exhumed by cloud jewel
professors—
amidst new blossoms and meadow clover,
Transforming hillscape,
Under a cover crop of fog.
-Robert Milby
April 25, 2007
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At the Coffeehouse
Impassioned, her back to the busy street;
she recites.
Washingtonville does not care about
culture.
Thus, poets have claimed their pungent
café,
once a carriage house, for a new omnibus.
Her story is original, and powerful.
There is youthful mania in her pen,
ancestral wisdom in her green, magick eyes.
Her lithe body is smooth; alabaster
naiad.
She is olde Europe and mad America.
Poet!
Open the vein of Night.
Let grey wind pour into nascent Spring,
to write prayers in a pagan grove.
Her breath rustles a trembling page in
her radical hand.
Her paper wings defy the circus and the
sand.
Irish beer breeds golems from lust and
apathy’s servants,
in the pub—west of her recitation.
My undulant mistress of enigma,
I raise my pen and coffee to her
in vain solidarity
as sirens cry (of) fire
in a late Winter night.
-Robert Milby
March 28, 2006
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Camp Casey:
Ode To Cindy
Sheehan
In Europe, during
the age of monarchies, peasants camped in huts and squatter hovels
outside castles, and monasteries. Mothers had no
voice when sons were shipped home dead from the Crusades, if they
were not fed to sovereign sands, or sharks, or condemned with the
undead, to a forgotten abyss.
In America, during
the age of monarchy, a mother is camped outside Castle Crawford. She and the King
have August off. The king is off
and rides expensive high horses— in his odious Stetson crown, and
image pickup, drives property lines of Castle Crawford, espousing
the madness of his estate.
The mother is off
for the rest of her life, since her son’s death in 2004. A Monarch lies to
his suggested subjects. The mother from
California, mourns her son and her nation, critically wounded by
courtiers to the crude King.
Veterans of the
jungle crusade in Southeast Asia, gathered with the
mother to subvert the crude King’s prepared and stammered lies. The King’s black
caravan, sped past protestors in a screen of Texas dust as the bold
mother from California asked her question; sung her insurrection to
a robber baron’s skull and bones.
She dared! Dared
as many of her fellow taxpayers across the country, remained
entranced by an administration’s justification for war. Justification for
destruction. Occupation by imperial soldiers, as Jerusalem was by
foreign fighters—searching for a grail.
Her son’s death
was…noble. Roadside bombs,
bunker busters, block-by-block, house-by-house firefights leaving
tattered bodies of mothers and children are… Noble. Her son’s life
was…expendable.
The King and
Queen’s princesses are noble. In the mists of
drunken frat parties, debutante balls, ivy league affiliations,
the king’s
daughters have not signed up for the honor of depleted uranium, Abu Graib or a
massacre in Fallujah.
Prayer vigils held
throughout the kingdom, by candlelight, may not redress grievances, or influence oil shareholders and defense contractors, yet Cindy Sheehan was
at first a single candle, who did not need to curse the darkness,
but defy it!
-Robert Milby
August 19, 2005
Purification By Time
“I measure time by how a body sways.”
-Roethke
Poetry is lost to madness.
Madness is the cost of poetry.
Madness devours poetry.
Writing…is a useless
attempt at abrogating guilt.
Time will bruise the
feeling flesh of the writer.
Age will carry the condemned by Inquisitor’s cart—
hay, and twigs of history dropping along the brambled, muddy coachway
to eternity. The weather of
lunacy, smothers verses in asphyxiating romantic winds,
Frigid, mistral, misted trials of love, recollected fondly throughout
one’s verse,
until Death’s gift, but for most—
arrival at warm corridors of assisted living or a geriatric Bastille
where reeks their own visceral prose of last breath, medication, last
breath, wheelchair sores,
and hours of memory torture under the despicable eye of spiteful
nursing assistants,
whose breasts—tight and yearning, proudly defy the withered dugs of
time.
Poetry becomes lost
to Madness when the preoccupied scribe
is distracted by swaying Woman,
by caverns of lost thought—
yet who is responsible for imposition of harsh sanctions against
inspiration?
How can the
afflicted claim literary kinship to spiritual grandparents—
who laboured by day to escape escapades of madness,
but struggled in the bleak night to capture it?
Lost in throes of candlelight desperation,
the poet journeys away from the rational prisons of modern men.
Poetry is lost to
madness.
The poet is Time’s carpetbagger.
What use is there but to recount?
Recollection is the highest toll on the swaying bridge over gray
Lethe.
The cart…has weak spokes.
Torches planted on distant riverbanks
Were lit by society’s highwaymen.
-Robert Milby
November 18, 2005
All Poems © 2011 - Robert Milby |
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