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Category: Poetry

Caves of the Thousand Buddhas

Caves of the Thousand Buddhas

Inspiration from Cao Jun’s  Hymns to Nature Exhibit   Volcanoes are ancient teachers Rising up from the magma Core of planet earth The effluent bringing forth  All the swirling elements of life Choking out gaseous  Fiery energy and chaos Creating oceans and rivulets Mountains and savannas  Landscapes for the tiger  Spewing lava and ash For the delicate lotus To break through  Reaching to heaven Painters and poets  Are modern interpreters  Of universal truths Written in calligraphy  Hidden deep within the …

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New Poems by Clyde Kessler: The Young Child’s Breakfast

New Poems by Clyde Kessler: The Young Child’s Breakfast

  AT THE PRIMITIVE CAMPGROUND IN THE GORGE A ghost cannot gather itself inside a tree, or a peregrine, or a creek, or heaven. It cannot draw stars through the window of a building in Beijing, or on a cabin near Woolwine with spring peepers chorusing music to fit the sky. It cannot revive its mind in a trout lily, as much as I wish. I can’t tell it my name. I can’t share one flapjack, smoke, or a sip…

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This is Not a Poem

This is Not a Poem

The Monkey Climbs a Tree I. With words come the square, the block Of sound, time and space With words, you fill the square And we bounce you hither and yon The block of time and space, ex nihilo Becomes something you see, touch, hear Smell if you’re advanced Taste if you leap beyond the possible II. An image does more, because it is The thing in a sense A copy of the thing at least But words can never…

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New Poetry by Natalie Crick

New Poetry by Natalie Crick

Sundown   That deluge of haze Just before sundown. Spring shakes Winter’s hand Goodbye. Now the day has truly gone. Street lamps glow A sodium pink When blue milk pacifies, The copper moon sliding up a sleeve of glass, Her luminous lake Drowning the city, A black felt hat against Heaven’s empty dome. An indigo deer slips back Through the shadow of night-green cedar, Loving, Teasing with promise. I could not look away. ___   At the End of Autumn…

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Rick Garni: New Poems

Rick Garni: New Poems

  THE DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE ORCHESTRA, PT. 1   The bassoon is almost as red as it is brown. It is a complicated color that was invented by the orchestra way back when. It lives life richly. It can be a dying bear when it sings, a smiling hippo when it is at rest. It is not the same. It is different. Anything that is different, is easy to make fun of. Go on, make fun of it. It’s…

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The Decision

The Decision

And he thought about building Crafting Making things Merging the useful with the useless To some For there are beings in this world Who care nothing for beauty There are beings in this world Who care nothing for art So he would build the functional And make it sing for the tone deaf For the colorless he’d make Things bloom in usefulness But then he thought Why work so hard For them? For the beings who pass it all by…

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Thrown into Being

Thrown into Being

The clearing She thought she heard The last clearing It was Heidegger’s not hers And after his keyre His turn So many turned on him But not for that For other things like his falling out of Being With the world With the world as it ought to be So she passed through that last clearing On her way to something nonfictional Non-mythical . . . beyond epic legend and folk-tale Existence comes before essence she thought Or we have…

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Being With Time

Being With Time

Angles of Being I push away Like winter visions in summer Or summer sweat in the fall I fall for it all the time The angles of Being as if They existed like that Just like that in realities We can’t fathom and never Will see Because our senses are puerile In the grand scheme of things In the swelter of summer In the mists of winterish Storms and  howls And legendery wooshing Like some pack of grey wolves Glowing…

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