How that florid scent
Wafts through your two vents
Making all your senses yield
To wilderness in a field.
How the petals soft
Carry you aloft
To the clouds above us all,
Lightly float and never fall.
How the colors beam
In a matching scheme,
Fine art in a museum
Painting over tedium.
Yet how flowers fail!
Before you they’re pale,
My Lady across the earth,
Rarest blossom the world hath.
-Evan Mantyk
Brian, your poem is a superb and stark meditation on civilizational decay. It is powerful, morally crucial, and executed with…
There were many reasons for regret over this particular fly, Margaret. It had been buzzing around me in my office…
Coincidentally, I recently wrote a 1200-word story from the POV of planet Earth, warning us that the 6th Great Extinction…
A workmanlike journey home poem, whether literal or metaphorical, or a mix of both, with imagery that made me shiver…
Thanks, Paul, glad you liked my aromatic but smokeless poems. I've heard that Arab men like the very expensive oudh…
PEONIES, SHELL, AND COILED CANDLE: AFTER STONE ROBERTS
Upon the pale and shiny stonework ledge
sits shell, white vase, and beeswax candle coil.
Here is a neoclassical-clear edge,
a spare, fine atmosphere betrayed in oil.
Peony petals drooping, perky too,
in yellow, white, red violet, and pink,
against the wall, a dark gray, background hue;
one wonders how they smell, sweet, light, or stink.
The smoothness is disturbed by sharp-shaped conch,
the long-line grooves and patterns of the vase,
the copper-finished plate and clip ensconced
about the sixty-hour candle’s base.
A New Dutch Realist has been let loose
where once New Amsterdam was in the News.