3 Poems

Note and Photon

At last I, too, will leap through that black hole—
or maybe limp or crawl
or be carried
or led by some unseen hand,
but finally will fall
through that pinhole
where even light is bent
and twisted into coils
that wind around night.
There deep darkness
nestles a gleaming universe
with all the brightness of a mind,
a single Life, endlessly
weaving its awe inspired tapestry
of light and music, warp and weft.
And I?
A single note of music,
or the last photon of light
that winks where I once was.

 

Contra-Dogmarel

Neither fish nor fowl, it’s dished out
in doctrines and trite truisms
without music or rhythm,
or else it’s straight-up dogma
in doggerel wrapped in rap,
rant or raving, but called “poetry.”

You’ll hear it at every venue
where chic revolutionaries hold services
without having seen a revolution
except on two-week tours through Cuba
where their minders served as blinders
as they viewed the circles of hell
they’ve come to call “heaven.”
When they return, their verses
serve as hymns to the victory
of socialism, battle cries for wars
they’ll never witness.

Cheap words like ads
for last year’s fashions,
doctrines drawn from the leader’s
speeches, interviews and texts,
then barked and growled
in North Beach readings,
waterfalls of rhetoric
oceans without waves,
storms without rain,
sermons without salvation,
but at least inspiring enough
to make me write some
of my own.

 

Once It’s All Lost

Once it’s all lost, everything,
down to the last button and crumb
all tumbling back to earth,
remember the earth.
We were never the gods we thought ourselves to be,
one step beneath the winged angels,
we, always just another creature
recently risen from the wild sea
or the muck or dust.
May that wisdom lost in all our knowledge
then be recalled when all is lost;
may we save the wisdom
that saves us as we fall:
this earth hungrily embraces
even its wayward children,
we who had forgotten
and thought we were lost.


Clifton Ross


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One Response to 3 Poems

    1. Really nice work. Will look forward to seeing more.

      Comment by Gary Garten on 14 March, 2018 at 4:19 pm

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