Friday, May 4, 2012

Poems - Part 2

Second batch of poems to get myself up-to-date.

The Ground Is Rising Up
Certainly the ground is rising up
around the old men
while the sky remains
as still as it has always been.
The rodents hurry to dig down  
in fear the clouds will touch the ground.
You don’t know when you’ll be there,
but you can smell the changing air.


Perhaps tomorrow you’ll start
doing nothing more for yourself.
It doesn’t mean that you care more
or you need less or anything else.
Soon you’ll find that you need more
than you ever thought you would before.
The best-laid plans don’t often stand
when ignorance can play its hand.
Who can you trust when
the kindest have the cruelest intents,
when the healthy are diseased
and no gods will not let you repent?
Experts clamor to fill you in,
but nothing ever seems to begin.
You can hear things in your ears
but don’t know whether to interfere.


Who can say for sure whether you are
a cause or merely an effect?
Will finding out the answer
make you happy or upset?
There is so little we can control,
so we bury ourselves inside our holes.
If you ever go, give it your all.
Get as far as you can before the sky falls.



He Wrote No Letters
He lived out his last days alone   
at the end of a dirt road in Tennessee.       
His nearest neighbors were miles away
and his children never came to visit.
He had no phone
(but then he was half deaf)
and he wrote no letters.
He always kept silk sheets on his bed
because he wanted to die on silk.
He had a bomb shelter in his basement
because he thought the world was not safe.
He tried to grow his own food
and ate just enough to cover his bones.
His face was creased from always frowning,
and he wrote no letters.
His walls held no pictures or mirrors
because there was little he wished to remember.
He stopped keeping a calendar
or making plans for the future.
He could no longer hear the trains
that passed by up in the hills.
He had no one left to call friend or enemy.
He wrote no letters.


Picture A Wounded Child
Picture a wounded child
laying on the ground
crying out for its mother
and the mother walking away.


Copyright (C) 2012 by Eric Landuyt

3 comments:

  1. These poems are so dour! Don't let a cutter read them.

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  3. I really liked the rhyme scheme of the first one... seemed to represent people fashioning an order out of their lives after whatever came before. Nice job.

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