Nylon Mesh Mnemosyne, Mehrangarh Fort and the Parthenon

 

A Few Feathers Trembling in a Dark Breeze

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

Love builds a fence with armed guards all around

To hold the dead and hold the others out.

That dead one, though, is sneaking to confound

The careful caging.  Dead ones do not pout

And settle in.  They seek to disappear,

A smidgin at a time.  The sound of laugh

Has slowly gone and deadly losses year

By year, though tiny, blown away like chaff,

Erase yet more and more, how shoulder looked

In shade and whiskers set inside the skin.

Reaction to your love was undercooked

And women, one by one, prevailed in sin.

  Just how the swollen voice box spoke of love

    Is now a feathered trace of long-dead dove.

©  Phillip Whidden  

 

 

He Disappears into Something Like a Troubled Dream

 

A prison cell of memory cannot hold

Him.  Memories, different from steel bars, don’t stay.

Your love, attenuated, cannot scold

Away the desperate losses and their gray

Attenuates to something thinner than

The vapor from thin spit from that one kissed,

From that one kiss, unholdable that man,

The heat like lead turned, sublimated, mist.

There never was a lock to hold that door.

Houdini like the dead one will escape

Accompliced by a pole dance druggy whore,

That thing called time erasing loved one’s shape.

  A drowsiness replaces thrill.  A sleep

    Reduces life in disappearance deep.

©  Phillip Whidden

 

Pitiful Parthenon

The lover built a temple, marble walls

With priests provided to contain the sights

Of memory held inside pure pillared halls.

The memories, though, are like incense’s flights.

Both waft away beyond the sacred white

Space.  Altars do not have the powers to grip

The drifting.  Hairless details float away in flight

Because the holy details turn to smoke and slip

Away to lost eternity between

The lover and his breath.  Mere he inhales

Because the loved one has been turned to sheen.

The memories cannot even leave veiled trails.

  The sacerdotal ploys are weak.  The fan

    Of death leaves only black hair of that man.

    Wraith Reverberations

These buildings are constructed to contain

The echoes.  They are what are left of him,

These echoes only.  They are built from pain

And other less important stuff.  The hymn

That they would sing is less than echoes, though,

And architecture built from echoes strains

To grasp them.  They have one desire, to go

Away beyond you.  Anguished gasp constrains

Them briefly, maybe, but that gasp is brief.

Its relatives come sometimes but their times

Are separated.  They are each a leaf

That molds like blood of long-forgotten crimes.

  When you were living then, when he was here,

     Your soul was what those echoes, each, could hear.

September 26, 2026