Tag: Poem
I Come To Take Your Hate
This I write
To make true
Decency is not lost
Love is not diminished
Grace is not absent
I come to take your hate
I will turn the hot stone
Into a cool wind
Fire only consumes
Remakes the world
In its own image
Of ash and ember
This I do
So that you may know your own sound
Breathe
Hear your heart
The beating
Of the engine
Hear the blood
How it flows
With quiet force
The sound
Of your fingers
As you gently
Rub their tips
Together
This is the sound of time
Without the weight of years
This I give to you
Gene G. McLaughlin 2016
When I Was A Ghost
When I was a ghost
Songs sounded like sorrow
The aural recognition
Of time fading away
But
When love shaped my form
I knew the song was melody
The joyous exclamation
That then is always now
Gene G. McLaughlin 2016
I Didn’t Get it Henry and Wish I Didn’t Get It Now
The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.
– Henry James – 1914 – on the day England entered WWI
The world always gets turned upside down
I see that and know it
It’s the way everything works
Always has worked
It’s a cycle
I studied history
The facts are clear
Cause and effect
Random occurrences
A trampoline of ups and downs
Forever
Intellectually Henry I knew it
I thought you wrote real pretty
But then I moved on
A footnote, an addendum, something that happened
To someone else
but I didn’t get it Henry
and
Wish I didn’t get it now.
Gene G. McLaughlin 2016
The Subtext
I wish I could show you what
I see
But
It lacks impact
Without context
But
As a hint
Love and light
Are the subtext
Gene G. McLaughlin 2016
The Terroir of a Thought
When I am struck
By a feeling or emotion
That is not consistent
With what it once was
I recall
The terroir of a thought
Includes time
An instigator of change
Gene G. McLaughlin 2016
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride
Red Raw Orlando Sun
Red raw Orlando sun
Lays our failures plain
Kneeling all as one
Souls burdened with pain
Filtering words of sense
From the anger soaked insane
Gene G. McLaughlin 2016
Undiminished
Time is not a zero sum transaction
Somewhere
You exist young and undiminshed
Everything echoes
All at once
All the time
I choose to hear your laughter
Gene G. McLaughlin 2016
Anatta
You like sand
Not like stone
Self like blood
Not like bone
Wind moves water
Wind wakes waves
I am the foam
Crashing upon
Cold crags
Gene G. McLaughlin 2016