by phillipw | Jan 22, 2020 | LO
Sonnet for the Morning of St. Valentine’s Day If I were dying, I would say to you, “My heart will soon be dead but what you need To know is that — no matter what — all through The cosmos one recurring, mystic creed Is whispered. It is far too mute to be Picked up by...
by phillipw | Jan 22, 2020 | BR, CO, RO
The Last Rose of Winter … November presses on in coldness, wind And cruel light exposing death around The garden. Life and beauty have been skinned, The greens and pinks and whitest petals browned To desolation, but one bush holds out. It holds up high its...
by phillipw | Jan 22, 2020 | LI, RI, VE
Rimbaud, Magyars, and the Perfect Number Seven Research reveals that when the Magyars Invaded Hungary, they counted up Not quite to seven. And in Verlaine’s stars Barely anything mattered but the cup Arthur offered him to drink. Verlaine should Undoubtedly have...
by phillipw | Jan 22, 2020 | RI, VE
Arthur Rimbaud, Lucien Létinois, Frédéric-Auguste Cazals The decades wane away and Verlaine hears The man in Africa expressing in His silence what he said to Paul those years Ago when he in melancholic sin Repented in a Belgian prison. “You, Little poet of straw,...
by phillipw | Jan 22, 2020 | RI, VE
“Il faut, voyez-vous, nous pardonner les choses” ~ Paul Verlaine in Romances Sans Paroles [ “I need you to pardon some things.”] “Let’s be two children,” Paul suggests, leave The cabbage life behind, and live on love Outside the world’s stubborn facts. Let’s cleave...
by phillipw | Jan 22, 2020 | RI
Autre Refusing brings on passion. Saying No Ignites the twilight, higher truths. He chose To cancel Oui and launched us to the snow On top of cruel mountains to impose A fire of thought and coldly sharpened heat Where others would have settled for...
by phillipw | Jan 22, 2020 | CH, LO, ST
Print Before Reading I want your hands to hold my written words, Your hovering fingers to caress them, your Fingertips to touch these lines like a bird’s— A hummingbird’s—wing wafts the air, the pure And cool breeze fanned above the nectar. I Want your...
by phillipw | Jan 22, 2020 | MO
Love and Sorrow We love and then they leave. They leave us here Alone, abandoned like a husk that hogs Won’t eat, or as a freckled, red-haired, clear- Eyed girl ignores (or shudders at) the bogs That are the eyes of that blind student who Desired her since...
