Tag Archives: death

A Simple Rule: tercet

There is for life a very simple rule:
stand up when you must stand, and then lay down;
the grave awaits the king, wise man, and fool.

06 JUN 2017

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Let’s Toast: stave

It makes no sense to soldier on;
the dusk looks so much like the dawn
that even should the sun eclipse
there is no cause to do backflips
or celebrate the coming day.
But come, let’s toast life, anyway!

Each day begins and ends the same;
with no specific cause to blame
except that living tends to drone
and carry on. You’re born alone,
and by exception find your way.
But come, let’s toast life, anyway!

You buy and sell each moment’s art;
it can’t survive, if split apart
from what creates it, the bruised whole
that struggles to maintain control
and tolerate each passing day.
But come, let’s toast life, anyway!

In vain, we seek to understand;
inventing myths, and gods, and man,
as if we had creative strength
except to measure, width and length,
the box we’ll fill, returned to clay.
But come, let’s toast life, anyway!

What is the point of this charade?
Just prancing horses, on parade,
whose blinders lead just straight ahead
and walk until they fall down dead.
We know this, but walk night and day.
But come, let’s toast life, anyway!

05 JUN 2017

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I Cannot Speak: rondeau

I cannot speak of what I’ve seen:
the smell of bleach is on those scenes,
and faintly, on each memory’s breath,
a subtle scent of loss and death,
with hints of joy and hope between.

I hear the dripping fat, I dream
of crackles in the kerosene
that sizzle ’til there’s nothing left;
I cannot speak.

I stand aside, and watch, and lean
a while. I wait as the new green
begins to sprout amidst this death;
a garden is a grave, reset,
that in each’s season prayer and sweat
writes of the sacred and obscene
I cannot speak.

04 MAY 2017

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Blank Canvas: kyrielle

Believe it: in a moment’s time,
what plans you’ve made can all unwind
and with a splash of turpentine
your canvas is again a blank.

No matter the expense and time
in pigment, brushes, sweat and wine,
no other act is as sublime:
your canvas is again a blank.

Perhaps it’s opportunity:
to start again, to disagree
with first intent, to be set free.
Your canvas is again a blank.

Or maybe just a timely prick;
ego’s balloon deflates so quick.
True art employs such dastard tricks:
your canvas is again a blank.

The simple blinking of an eye,
and one’s whole lifetime flashes by
before an ounce of paint is dry,
your canvas is again a blank.

The painting is your legacy,
but won’t reflect the means, you see,
only the end is guaranteed:
your canvas is again a blank.

31 MAR 2017

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Walk Out: englyn proest gadwynog

I’m so tired of all this:
the endless sense of hopeless;
the evil creeping like mist;
the feeling ever helpless.

Walk out into the sunshine!
Find anything that’s divine:
some thing we share, yours and mine.
Look past its flaws in design,

find a world worth redeeming!
Seek what is, not the seeming:
beneath the gray – the gleaming.
Wake up! Stop death’s slow scheming.

14 MAR 2017

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Useless Feet: englyn lleddfbroest

Our life and death for a while leave
some tiny mark on the earth,
a minute’s trace of spent breath
before we repose in death.

In that lifetime, so fleeting,
what we think we truly need
escapes from us at such speed
we cry out at useless feet.

08 MAR 2017

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The New Idea: cywydd llosgyrnoch

A new idea finds the mind
and digs itself a home behind
what it finds still living there,
rewiring lights and such to suit,
requiring sometimes a reboot.
Then it takes root, without care

for walls and beams it wrests aside,
for contents lost when seams collide.
It takes great pride in breaking
the models of forgotten thought,
old lesson plans no longer taught,
like recipes not worth making.

And in that space it will expand,
imagining the world it plans
not build on sand, but on stone;
its buttresses unshakeable,
its hold on us, unbreakable,
its taproot makes a great throne.

But that illusion cannot last;
in birth, idea’s death is cast.
How fast new seeds demand light
and will destroy without regret
the noble root, and will upset
tradition’s sense of what is right.

And so the tragic, fragile mind
consists of what is left behind
and what is blind and just made.
There, in that pause between the sigh
of death and birth’s great squall and cry,
none deny they are afraid.

22 FEB 2017

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