I cannot ease your pain
Include suffering in your expectations
Conscious existence in full contains
Elated joys and sorrowful lamentations
Gene G. McLaughlin 2017
Tag: Poetry
A Poem That Makes Me Think of the 20th Century
Sirens and Bird Calls
The sirens and bird calls
Merge in the distance
Becoming one to my ears
Both are alerts of an oncoming storm
I can see the shadow of what approaches
It’s outline partitioned by the bright sun
No storm ever comes as one
It comes in parts
What you choose to brace for
Wind
or
Water
or
Lightning
or
Mud
Depends on where you’re standing
Gene G. McLaughlin 2017
MLK Day 2017
Beyond the tight binary loops
That bind and divide simultaneously
Beyond the preselected groups
Driving us toward homogeneity
Beyond the demarcation which dilutes
The resilient strengths of humanity
Lie the path to love’s roots
The beginnings of equanimity
Out of which shoots
New growths of solidarity
Gene G. McLaughlin 2017
First Line To A Poem-
Everything I Love Is True . . .
Feel free to complete the poem in comments, I would love to hear what people have to say.
The Other Guy’s Version of Empathy
The subject was pain
Not related to you
Only what me
And mine
Have been through
Empathy is
My needs met
With little
Or no
To do
From you
Gene G. McLaughlin 2016
A Day in Autumn
A poem that feels like fall to me.
A Day in Autumn-
After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.
As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.
Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city’s avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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
BeardedRiffRaff.Blog 