by phillipw | Dec 30, 2023 | SO, SP
Parament Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem The spirit world is not as spectral in It colors, in its mauves and oranges, pinks And greens as veils, so halo-like and thin Spread...
by phillipw | Aug 28, 2023 | AK, AN, SO
A Glowing Untruth Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem The Christians and the Jews and Muslims, not To mention Hindus, Buddhists and the . . . rest, Have failed to tell us in exactly what Sweet...
by phillipw | Aug 6, 2023 | BL, PE, PH, SO, WI
Bliss’s Obsidian Wand Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem “Maleness is magic, the potent principle of universal creativity.” ~ Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, 40 A warlock holds his...
by phillipw | Jan 11, 2023 | AR, KY, OL, SA, SO
Some Things Don’t Need Recollection An old man takes his time to wrap around His sag of flesh the armor. This care’s not Because he fears the fight or battle ground. It’s just because his joints are are stiff and fraught With aches. One younger...
by phillipw | Feb 21, 2022 | CH, JU, RE, RI, SO
Inner, not Outer Rightness 12 Also the Levites which were the singers, all of them … , with their sons and their brethren, being arrayed in white linen, having cymbals and psalteries and harps, stood at the east end of the altar, and with them an hundred and...
by phillipw | Feb 11, 2022 | AL, SO
Imagine Ignorance Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem Imagine being ignorant enough To fail to know the difference between The Fates and Furies, or between the buff Abderos and his...
by phillipw | Oct 4, 2021 | FO, PO, SO
Half a Thousand Years from Now Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem “The harp that once through Tara’s halls” Messi and Neymar HUG Each Other After Argentina’s Win | Copa America...
by phillipw | Sep 19, 2021 | SO
Saints and Aztecs and David Koresh David Koresh Priests don’t try to prove the soul’s existence. The faiths just preach it and presume that weak Minds everywhere will bow. The insistence Of all religions is that they can sneak This lie as truth the...
by phillipw | Jul 26, 2021 | BI, BL, SO
Throbbing Out Music in March Japanese Bush Warbler song ウグイス 鳴き声 信越の高原 7月上旬 野鳥4K 空屋根FILMS#1078 – Bing video Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem In winter in the bushes near the ground The uguisu...
by phillipw | May 24, 2021 | SO
Facebook, Twitter, TikTok … When great Gods go, sly half-gods come. They take The holy landscapes over for their needs. Christ disappears and in His stead a snake Comes dangling, offering shining huckster beads On tv screen or deep from cyberspace. They...
by phillipw | May 4, 2021 | AR, DA, FA, FE, GE, GR, MA, SE, SO, SP, UN
Armpit and Genital Hair on the Masculine Anima Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem The armpit hair of spirits is too dark For women. Females do not like to think Of it or get a glance of it as stark As...
by phillipw | Apr 19, 2021 | LO, ME, RO, SO
Recovered? Recovered? Covered once with scars, before That with the Mylar we call love, my heart Deals gingerly with this collection. More Reflective sonnet talents in the art Of poetry and love have run ahead Of my discovery of little gifts Forgotten in...
by phillipw | Apr 15, 2021 | LO, ME, MO, SO
Lunar Loneliness Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome? ~ Sonny Rollins The moon has been too visited by rocks, Celestial bodies and all sorts of bits And pieces from deep space. Yet frequent shocks Of such communication are just hits Of loneliness, again,...
by phillipw | Mar 29, 2021 | CO, MU, SO, SY
The Music for Saints’ Ears The snow is like two perfect music realms. It came in perfect purest notes as flakes All night and now the vision overwhelms. In dark it manifested white as lakes Turned first to ice, then covered with true white. High symphonies first...
by phillipw | Mar 27, 2021 | AE, AL, AR, CA, DE, ES, SO
Libation Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem Solutrean bison – By Museo de Altamira y D. Rodríguez, CC BY-SA 3.0 I sprinkled my best wine with dust from tombs, Presuming that...
by phillipw | Mar 18, 2021 | CO, DR, FR, HI, PO, SO
Distant Hits The writing of vague truths in sonnets to Those readers you will never know takes on An almost holy redolence. You brew Up draughts of hormones and of nights long gone, And other steams of psychedelic drugs, And somewhere far away,...
by phillipw | Mar 18, 2021 | AR, SO, UN
Sonnets, Unruly and Ruly Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem Perhaps he ought to be ashamed that, if You smell the bodies of his sonnets, you Will often get at least the slightest whiff Of rudeness,...
by phillipw | Mar 14, 2021 | AE, BE, BU, CO, ES, MO, SO, TR
The Sonnet in Its Little Room The sonnet, much too like a tight cocoon, Encased inside its silk-like threads is far Too tiny and too strict but not immune To mystic grandeur. It is not a czar Upon a dais seat raised up and vast Of gold, but more a derringer...
by phillipw | Jan 29, 2021 | LO, PE, SO
One Peony One peony has blossomed late. To hold Her globe of fragrance up in bravery Is what she wants. Those petals would enfold The smiles of other pinks and there would be The others’ laughter, if she had her way. Alone she meets the sunshine,...
by phillipw | Dec 9, 2020 | CO, DE, DI, GH, MA, OR, PE, RE, SO, SP
Reincarnation The spirit wishes it could look back to Its body, not the rotted one, and see The firm young form with hair and holy blue Of Mary’s robe in clear young eyes still free Of intimations of their death. The hair, The blond head...
by phillipw | Oct 16, 2020 | HE, MU, PE, PO, SE, SI, SO, VA
The Point of Poetry and Song Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem A poem or a song can be as fierce As knife points. They are neutral, though, about The hole they make. They care not whom they pierce...
by phillipw | Oct 5, 2020 | CA, FA, SO
The Point of Greens Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem The scents are green in golf. They are the green Of grass, and hope, and promise, and of rest. Perhaps they are the green of youth as seen...
by phillipw | Oct 4, 2020 | CH, LO, SA, SO, TR
Na + Cl A purity, a silver white, desires To bond with yellow-greenish chlorine; salt Appears in crystals. Far away from fires, The point of this affair adorns a vault In darkness in a cavern. Blackness blanks It out. A wish becomes a zeal that...
by phillipw | Aug 10, 2020 | DE, DI, GH, GO, HA, JE, SO, TR, YE
Knowing Men Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. ~ Ezekiel 16:49 Both Sodom and Gomorrah, salt-lick...
by phillipw | Aug 4, 2020 | BE, EA, LI, MU, OR, PH, PO, SO, Uncategorized
Initiations “Every word was once a poem” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, “The Poet” “A single letter was a matter of life and death.” ~ Anne Michaels The alphabets came late, like virgins to A wedding feast. The clauses, words, and grunts Of love were...
by phillipw | Aug 2, 2020 | GR, MO, SO
Radioactive Requiems Grief, long and slow as radiation from The ancient rocks beneath us, does not fade. Instead it sends out pulses in a thrum Of rays reduced to an angstrom glissade Inside all protons dancing on the stage Expected to exist as long as stars. If...
by phillipw | Jul 20, 2020 | PH, PL, PO, SO, WI
What We Drink Who wants thick wisdom first in poems? It Is ours for chewing in the pleasures of The scrolls of Plato, thinkers who permit The thought that pleasure proves the point of love, And stern philosophers with guts to kill All weakness, straight. The...
by phillipw | Jul 20, 2020 | ES, GI, MA, MI, PL, SO, VE
Watered Down Wine and Esthetics “Gretchen Reydams-Shils (“Myth and Poetry in the Timaeus“) deals with Socrates’ puzzling remark that his description of an ideal state was like a painting.” ~ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/ Socrates’...
by phillipw | Jul 20, 2020 | CH, DI, JO, KE, PL, PR, SO
True Love For Charles Randall Stanfield Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem “I can never feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty.” ~ John Keats...
by phillipw | Jul 19, 2020 | AT, BU, CO, EL, LA, LO, NI, OL, SA, SO, SP, TH, VI
They Loved Sovereignty and Liberty Most “And the Lacedæmonians offer sacrifices to Love before they go to battle, thinking that safety and victory depend on the friendship and those who stand side by side in the battle array. And the Cretans, in their line of battle,...
by phillipw | Jul 19, 2020 | GA, LE, PO, SO
The Triune Potency According to Penelope Murray, “Socrates . . . . says, ‘any story or poem . . . narrates things past, present or future’ ”. ~ Plato on Poetry, 4 We want a poem that is full of now, And past, and future, full. We want intense Severity of...
by phillipw | Jul 17, 2020 | LI, PL, SO, XA
The Ion, the Phaedrus, the Republic When someone else is all mixed up, we tend To sneer at what they have to say, so why Not Plato? Must we allow him to bend And contradict his arguments? Is high Philosophy supposed to work like that? He has the voices in two...
by phillipw | Jul 16, 2020 | CO, GO, JA, ME, OD, PE, SA, SO, WI
The Big Exceptions The women move in caged in places both In life and plays. In poetry they are Curtailed to Sappho and Corinna. Troth Constricts Penelope. It hems. No spar To take her seas away, she sits at loom, Is trapped at night unpicking her trapped work,...
by phillipw | Jul 16, 2020 | PL, SO
Stabbing in the Cave-like Dark before There Were Laboratories or Electron Microscopes, Plato Presumed that There Are Souls and that They Grow. How Very Poetic. “Halliwell claims that Socrates’ remarks about poetry early and late in the Republic differ because the...
by phillipw | Jul 16, 2020 | PH, PO, SA, SO
Socrates versus Sappho One wonders if poor Socrates might just Have been much happier if he had made Up poems, not philosophy. A gust Of inspiration from Apollo swayed The poets into rhapsody of thrill. While lost in love for some young person’s hair, The writers...
by phillipw | Jul 16, 2020 | DI, IN, PH, PL, PO, SO, TI
Spells and the Thoughts of Tiresias “Halliwell’s basic argument is that Socrates admits the Book X arguments to be insecure and open to defeat. He calls them ‘spells’ rather than philosophical knowledge, and he asserts that he must use them [those arguments]...
by phillipw | Jun 4, 2020 | AG, DI, GR, SA, SO
The Central Singularity The blood of sadness is reality. The real stands far away from bloodless veins And not in shadows. No duality As Zarathustra saw it swells or strains Inside the marrow of the universe. Inside its bones where quantum physics seethes The...
by phillipw | May 18, 2020 | ME, SO
Melodies for Sonnets I searched the Web for melodies to sing A sonnet to, and YouTube offered four. Four measley tunes for sonnets! Here’s the thing: I reckon at the very least that more Than 40,000,000 sonnets will have been Composed since Petrarch tidied up...
by phillipw | May 3, 2020 | HE, PH, PL, PO, SO
What We Drink Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem Who wants thick wisdom first in poems? It Is ours for chewing in the pleasures of The scrolls of Plato, thinkers who permit The thought that pleasure...
by phillipw | Apr 30, 2020 | PH, PL, SO
Wisdom or Wonder “…if Homer and the poets…had knowledge of the truth when they wrote, and could defend their words in conversation, they would deserve to be called lovers of wisdom.” ~ Penelope Murray, Plato on Poetry, 11 Put up your hand if you...
by phillipw | Apr 28, 2020 | IN, PL, PO, SO
Mixed Race Divinity and Humanity Go to the link: https://images.app.goo.gl/afEGMDrkc96exuSm7 Socrates “builds up a picture of the poet as ‘a light, winged, holy creature’, who cannot compose until he is out of his mind and possessed . . . . The god takes away the...
by phillipw | Apr 26, 2020 | ED, PL, SO
Pigs Would Fly if Their Sties Were Noble Poor Socrates. He thought that if the young Were wrapped in images of beauty, they Would take good in and then could climb each rung Of rightness. Lovelinesses would convey Them up and straight to healthiness of soul. Their...
by phillipw | Apr 15, 2020 | PL, SO
Stabbing in the Cave-like Dark before There Were Laboratories or Electron Microscopes, Plato Presumed that There Are Souls and that They Grow. How Very Poetic. “Halliwell claims that Socrates’ remarks about poetry early and late in the Republic differ because the...
by phillipw | Mar 18, 2020 | AN, GR, SO, TR
He Won More Victories, With Hammering More Hard . . . and Better The greatest playwright of them all loved boys. https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/collection/13481 Competitors loved prostitutes. Their whores Were high-class (mostly). Still their slippery joys...
by phillipw | Mar 8, 2020 | HE, SO
Facebook, SnapChat, and the Death of the Gods Despite his lovely ankles with their wings And all his manliness of shape in youth, Immortal youth, a terrible fact sings Across the myth of Hermes. Here is truth: He’s dead now. Pan was killed at Jesus’s birth...
by phillipw | Jan 26, 2020 | LO, SO
Heavenly Messengers Come Down to the Cities of the Plain The possibility of knowing them Intrigued the men of Sodom. (Angels came To Sodom seldom.) Why did God condemn These citizens to rained-from-heaven flame And brimstone? Wouldn’t you have wanted to Acquaint...
by phillipw | Jan 3, 2020 | SO, SP
The Address of the Soul Inside the skull is spirit’s home. Soul Inhabits brain. Protected by thick bone, The insubstantial essence floats. A scroll Of hardened jellylike gray is its lone Account, its empire. Spirit is a monk, The head its hermitage. Soul has...
by phillipw | Nov 20, 2019 | SO
Patriarchs and Pussies The wife of Lot did not look back to yearn For Sodom. No. She turned her back on Lot. The kind of man he was deserved to burn Along with all the others. He had caught Himself out just the night before. He chose To give his daughters...
by phillipw | Nov 15, 2019 | SO
Alpha If glass contains a sound, we cannot hear It. We can cause a sound from it by force But torture chambers manage only queer Sounds, agonies, from humans, so of course The sounds we cause by breaking glass or with A wetted finger on a rim...
by phillipw | Nov 4, 2019 | SO
Epitaph on Epicurus’s Epiphenomenon: Wishful Non-Thinking The soul, if it exists at all, consists Of stuff we cannot register with tools Or natural senses. If the mind resists The logic of thin physics, then new rules Must be developed, like a child who...
by phillipw | Nov 1, 2019 | SO
Calm Down, Gautama: the Escape is Eternal I fabricate myself a Soul. It needs Much less than what religions would impose. This Soul of mine is limited. It heeds My own creation, not the rows and rows Of rules that random deities require. Instead it recognizes...
by phillipw | Sep 17, 2019 | GO, HE, SO
Everlasting Godfire I wish that God had killed the angels whom He sent to Sodom and Gomorrah, not The men–the husbands, fathers, sons in bloom Of youthful beauty, bachelors with hot Prospects–and not the women, children, mules, And donkeys, braying in the...
by phillipw | Sep 12, 2019 | SO
Preserved Passionate Regret in Zoar: Eve Purified How beautiful the angels are is shown By Lot’s wife. She had reached the safety of The town of Zoar. Angels then had flown Away to angel places, realms of love, When God rained down the brimstone, fire, and death...
by phillipw | Sep 11, 2019 | SO
Anticipation of the Angels Anticipation of the angels in Our lives is like transparent gold. We seek The glow of beauty and the flame of sin With them, a flame as powerful and weak As that from candles. We desire yellow Heat beaming from angelic shapes, but blue...
by phillipw | Sep 9, 2019 | SO
Consoling Thought Forget the soul. Inhabitants of you And me are actually our blood and bones, The bones that make our blood and strength, the true Red blood that bathes our brains and carries moans From it to lung and throat. Our hidden parts Are our essential...
by phillipw | Aug 21, 2019 | SO
It’s Good We Have No Soul Inside Us It’s good we have no soul inside us. What A crowd there’d be if it were otherwise. Each capillary has a megawatt Of passion in its tiny tunnel. Cries Of pumping silence pulse along our veins– And arteries...
by phillipw | Jul 30, 2019 | LO, SO
A Failure by Two Men Sharing the Writing, Back and Forth, of a Sonnet Sequence A sonnet sequence is by nature one- Sided, so far as history is concerned. So maybe it will be extremely un- Expected if I say why this one’s turned Out boringly to fit that mold. ...
by phillipw | Jul 8, 2019 | SO
Heavenly Messengers Come Down to the Cities of the Plain The possibility of knowing them Intrigued the men of Sodom. (Angels came To Sodom seldom.) Why did God condemn These citizens to rained-from-heaven flame And brimstone? Wouldn’t you have wanted...
by phillipw | May 31, 2019 | SO
Melodies for Sonnets I searched the Web for melodies to singA sonnet to, and YouTube offered four.Four measley tunes for sonnets! Here’s the thing:I reckon at the very least that moreThan 40,000,000 sonnets will have beenComposed since Petrarch tidied up the formAnd...
by phillipw | May 12, 2019 | SO
A Plea from Sodom and Gomorrah Please return to pain and bruising, not scars With numbness in the tissue. Trauma gives A certainty at least. Those dense armoires Of pale cicatrice commemoratives Might be, you think, better than current harms That sting, then ache,...