These are poetic snapshots, poems that employ imagery and metaphors related to glass, windows, mirrors, lenses, cameras, photographs, etc.
Snapshots
by Michael R. Burch
Here I scrawl extravagant rainbows.
And there you go, skipping your way to school.
And here we are, drifting apart
like untethered balloons.
Here I am, creating “art,”
chanting in shadows,
pale as the crinoline moon,
ignoring your face.
There you go,
in diaphanous lace,
making another man’s heart swoon.
Suddenly, unthinkably, here he is,
taking my place.
Published by Tucumcari Literary Review, Romantics Quarterly, Centrifugal Eye, Poezii (Romania), Poetry Life & Times, Poetry Webring and The Eclectic Muse (Canada)
"Snapshots" is a poem about how a camera lens and film can capture and preserve us, or at least an image of us, as we were at specific moments in time. But do we understand our former selves and are we the same people today?
***
Speechless at Auschwitz
by Ko Un
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
At Auschwitz
piles of glasses
mountains of shoes ...
returning, we stared out different windows.
Ko Un speaks for all of us, by not knowing what to say about the evidence of the Holocaust, and man's inhumanity to man.
Ko Un was speechless at Auschwitz.
Someday, when it’s too late,
will we be speechless at Gaza?
—Michael R. Burch
***
Mirror
by Kajal Ahmad, a Kurdish poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
My era’s obscuring mirror
shattered
because it magnified the small
and made the great seem insignificant.
Dictators and monsters filled its contours.
Now when I breathe
its jagged shards pierce my heart
and instead of sweat
I exude glass.
***
Bi Havre (“Together”)
possibly the oldest Kurdish poem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I want us to be together:
we would eat together,
climb the mountain together,
sing songs together, songs of love,
songs from the heart, sung from above.
I want us to have one heart, together.
Many words in this ancient poem are in doubt, so I have excerpted what I grok to be the central meaning.
***
Veiled
by Michael R. Burch
She has belief
without comprehension
and in her crutchwork shack
she is
much like us ...
tamping the bread
into edible forms,
regarding her children
at play
with something akin to relief ...
ignoring the towers ablaze
in the distance
because they are not revelations
but things of glass,
easily shattered ...
and if you were to ask her,
she might say—
sometimes God visits his wrath
upon an impious nation
for its leaders’ sins,
and we might agree:
seeing her mutilations.
Published by Poetry SuperHighway and Modern War Poems
***
What Immense Silence
by Michael R. Burch
What immense silence
comforts those who kneel here
beneath these vaulted ceilings
cavernous and vast?
What luminescence stained
by patchwork panels of bright glass
illuminates drained faces
as the crouching gargoyles leer?
What brings them here—
pale, tearful congregations,
knowing all Hope is past,
faithfully, year upon year?
Or could they be right? Perhaps
Love is, implausibly, near
and I alone have not seen It . . .
But if so, still I must ask:
why is it God that they fear?
Published in The Bible of Hell
***
Beast 666
by Michael R. Burch
“... what rough beast ... slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”—W. B. Yeats
Brutality is a cross
wooden, blood-stained,
gas hissing, sibilant,
lungs gilled, deveined,
red flecks on a streaked glass pane,
jeers jubilant,
mocking.
Brutality is shocking—
tiny orifices torn,
impaled with hard lust,
the fetus unborn
tossed in a dust-
bin. The scarred skull shorn,
nails bloodied, tortured,
an old wound sutured
over, never healed.
Brutality, all its faces revealed,
is legion:
Death March, Trail of Tears, Inquisition . . .
always the same.
The Beast of the godless and of man’s “religion”
slouching toward Jerusalem:
horned, crowned, gibbering, drooling, insane.
***
Only Flesh
by Michael R. Burch
Moonlight in a pale silver rain caresses her cheek.
What she feels is an emptiness more chilling than fear ...
Nothing is questioned, yet the answer seems clear.
Night, inevitably, only seems to end.
Flesh is the stuff that does not endure.
The sand begins its passage through narrowing glass
as Time sifts out each seed yet to come.
Only flesh does not last.
Eternally, the days rise and fall with the sun;
each bright grain, slipping past, will return.
Only flesh fades to ash though unable to burn.
Only flesh does not last.
Only flesh, in the end, makes its bed in brown grass.
Only flesh shivers, pale as the pale wintry light.
Only flesh seeps in oils that will not ignite.
Only flesh rues its past.
Only flesh.
Keywords/Tags: life, death, flesh, mortality, time, sand, hourglass, ash, loss, night, moonlight, stars, rain, grass, despair
***
Sweet Centerless Sixteen
by Michael R. Burch
Inconsolable as “love” had left your heart,
you woke this morning eager to pursue
warm lips again, or something “really cool”
on which to press your lips and leave their mark.
As breath upon a windowpane at dawn
soon glows, a spreading halo full of sun,
your thought of love blinks wildly—on and on ...
then fizzles at the center, and is gone.
Published by Shot Glass Journal
***
The Composition of Shadows
by Michael R. Burch
“I made it out of a mouthful of air.”—W. B. Yeats
We breathe and so we write; the night
hums softly its accompaniment.
Pale phosphors burn; the page we turn
leads onward, and we smile, content.
And what we mean we write to learn:
the vowels of love, the consonants’
strange golden weight, each plosive’s shape—
curved like the heart. Here, resonant, ...
sounds’ shadows mass beneath bright glass
like singing voles curled in a maze
of blank white space. We touch a face—
long-frozen words trapped in a glaze
that insulates our hearts. Nowhere
can love be found. Just shrieking air.
Published by The Lyric, Contemporary Rhyme, Candelabrum, Iambs & Trochees, Triplopia, Romantics Quarterly, Hidden Treasures (Selected Poem), ImageNation (UK), Yellow Bat Review, Poetry Life & Times, Vallance Review, Poetica Victorian
***
The Composition of Shadows (II)
by Michael R. Burch
We breathe and so we write;
the night
hums softly its accompaniment.
Pale phosphors burn;
the page we turn
leads onward, and we smile, content.
And what we mean
we write to learn:
the vowels of love, the consonants’
strange golden weight,
the blood’s debate
within the heart. Here, resonant,
sounds’ shadows mass
against bright glass,
within the white Labyrinthian maze.
Through simple grace,
I touch your face,
ah words! And I would gaze
the night’s dark length
in waning strength
to find the words to feel
such light again.
O, for a pen
to spell love so ethereal.
Published by Contemporary Rhyme and The Eclectic Muse
***
Wonderland
by Michael R. Burch
We stood, kids of the Lamb, to put to test
the beatific anthems of the blessed,
the sentence of the martyr, and the pen’s
sincere religion. Magnified, the lens
shot back absurd reflections of each face—
a carnival-like mirror. In the space
between the silver backing and the glass,
we caught a glimpse of Joan, a frumpy lass
who never brushed her hair or teeth, and failed
to pass on GO, and frequently was jailed
for awe’s beliefs. Like Alice, she grew wee
to fit the door, then couldn’t lift the key.
We failed the test, and so the jury’s hung.
In Oz, “The Witch is Dead” ranks number one.
Keywords/Tags: Alice, Wonderland, Joan, Arc, martyr, blessed, beatific, religion, witch, Oz, carnival, mirror, lens, jury, kids, lamb, beliefs, faith
***
Is the mirror unkind
by Michael R. Burch
for Beth
To your lovely brown eyes is the mirror unkind,
revealing far more than reflections defined
in superficial glass, so lacking in depth?
Is the mirror unkind, at times, darling Beth?
What you see, my dear, others see different by far,
as our sun from Centauri is just a “small” star,
while here it brings life as it warms each day’s start.
(Oh, and a mirror can never reveal a true heart.)
Published by Angel Poems for Her and The HyperTexts
***
Reflex
by Michael R. Burch
for Jeremy
Some intuition of her despair
for her lost brood,
as though a lost fragment of song
torn from her flat breast,
touched me there . . .
I felt, unable to hear
through the bright glass,
the being within her melt
as her unseemly tirade
left a feather or two
adrift on the wind-ruffled air.
Where she will go,
how we all err,
why we all fear
for the lives of our children,
I cannot pretend to know.
But, O!,
how the unappeased glare
of omnivorous sun
over crimson-flecked snow
makes me wish you were here.
Published by The HyperTexts and Poetry Garden (China)
***
If You Come to San Miguel
by Michael R. Burch
If you come to San Miguel
before the orchids fall,
we might stroll through lengthening shadows
those deserted streets
where love first bloomed ...
You might buy the same cheap musk
from that mud-spattered stall
where with furtive eyes the vendor
watched his fragrant wares
perfume your breasts ...
Where lean men mend tattered nets,
disgruntled sea gulls chide;
we might find that cafetucho
where through grimy panes
sunset implodes ...
Where tall cranes spin canvassed loads,
the strange anhingas glide.
Green brine laps splintered moorings,
rusted iron chains grind,
weighed and anchored in the past,
held fast by luminescent tides ...
Should you come to San Miguel?
Let love decide.
Published by Romantics Quarterly, Poetry Life & Times and Muddy River Poetry Review
***
Squall
by Michael R. Burch
There, in that sunny arbor,
in the aureate light
filtering through the waxy leaves
of a stunted banana tree,
I felt the sudden monsoon of your wrath,
the clattery implosions
and copper-bright bursts
of the bottoms of pots and pans.
I saw your swollen goddess’s belly
wobble and heave
in pregnant indignation,
turned tail, and ran.
Published by Chrysanthemum, Poetry Super Highway, Barbitos and Poetry Life & Times
***
Warming Her Pearls
by Michael R. Burch
for Beth, after her bath
Warming her pearls, her breasts
gleam like constellations.
Her belly is a bit rotund . . .
she might have stepped out of a Rubens.
***
Mending Glass
by Michael R. Burch
In the cobwebbed house—
lost in shadows
by the jagged mirror,
in the intricate silver face
cracked ten thousand times,
silently he watches,
and in the twisted light
sometimes he catches there
a familiar glimpse of revealing lace,
white stockings and garters,
a pale face pressed indiscreetly near
with a predatory leer,
the sheer flash of nylon,
an embrace, or a sharp slap,
. . . a sudden lurch of terror.
He finds bright slivers
—the hard sharp brittle shards,
the silver jags of memory
starkly impressed there—
and mends his error.
***
The Octopi Jars
by Michael R. Burch
Long-vacant eyes
now lodged in clear glass,
a-swim with pale arms
as delicate as angels’ . . .
you are beyond all hope
of salvage now . . .
and yet I would pause,
no, fear!,
to once touch
your arcane beaks . . .
I, more alien than you
to this imprismed world,
notice, most of all,
the scratches on the inside surfaces
of your hermetic cells . . .
and I remember documentaries of albino Houdinis
slipping like wraiths over walls of shipboard aquariums,
slipping down decks’ brine-lubricated planks,
spilling jubilantly into the dark sea,
parachuting down down down through clouds of pallid ammonia . . .
and I now know this: you were unlike me ...
your imprisonment was never voluntary.
Published by Triplopia and The Poetic Musings of Sam Hudson
***
Raindrops can also act as lenses and mirrors, magnifying ...
The Strangest Rain
by Michael R. Burch
“I ... am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves ...”—Emily Dickinson
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”—Emily Dickinson
The strangest rain, a few bright sluggish drops,
unsure if they should fall, run through with sun,
came tumbling down and touched me, one by one,
too few to animate the shriveled crops
of nearby farmers (though their daughters might
feel each cool splash, a-shiver with delight).
I thought again of Emily Dickinson,
who felt the tingle down her spine, inspired
to lifting hairs, to nerves’ electric song
of passion for a thing so deep-desired
the heart and gut agree, and so must tremble
as all the neurons of the brain assemble
to whisper: This is love, but what is love?
Wrens darting rainbows, laughter high above.
Published by Erosha, The Eclectic Muse, Muse Apprentice Guild, Nisqually Delta Review, Erbacce, Poetry Life & Times and Brief Poems
***
iffy coronavirus haiku #1
by michael r. burch
plagued by the Plague
i plague the goldfish
with my verse
yet another iffy coronavirus haiku #2
by michael r. burch
sunflowers
hang their heads
embarrassed by their coronas
I wrote this poem after having a sunflower arrangement delivered to my mother, who is in an assisted living center and can’t have visitors due to the coronavirus pandemic. I have been informed the poem breaks haiku rules about personification, etc.
homework: yet another iffy coronavirus haiku #3
by michael r. burch
dim bulb overhead,
my silent companion:
still imitating the noonday sun?
yet another iffy coronavirus haiku #4
by michael r. burch
Spring fling—
children string flowers
into their face masks
yet another iffy coronavirus haiku #5
by michael r. burch
the Thought counts:
our lips and fingers
insulated by plexiglass ...
yet another iffy coronavirus haiku #6
by michael r. burch
masks, masks
everywhere
and not a straw to drink ...
Dark Cloud, Silver Lining
by Michael R. Burch
Every corona has a silver lining:
I’m too far away to hear your whining,
and despite my stormy demeanor,
my hands have never been cleaner!
New World Order (last in a series and perhaps of a species)
by Michael R. Burch
The days of the dandelions dawn ...
soon man will be gone:
fertilizer.
Keywords/Tags: snapshots, imagery, images, metaphors, glass, windows, mirrors, lenses, cameras, photographs, photos, pictures
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