Wind, water, music, Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath…
J Edward Neill and H.R. Reiter choose a wide variety of themes, styles, and famous poets, and splash several poems in each theme throughout this elegant poetry book.
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Giveaway ends January 16, 2020.
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Extinction
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Crowning smoke
cloaks the heads of fallen kings.
And there I walk, on silent streets
over broken bridges
through the dark capillaries
of yesteryear’s fall.
With ashes, the towers weep
carpeting black the castle floors.
Their sacrificial fires, a century extinguished
but still they smoke
ever fuming
from glass eyes and stone-toothed mouths.
No one is here, save me.
Were they ever?
Ten grains of burning sand
on the fathomless shore of infinity
was the kingdom of man.
Three ticks of eternity’s clock
did we reign.
All that remains is me
straggling through grey fields
beneath crumbling battlements
crunching forgotten bones
under the last boots I will ever wear.
It was never my place
to ask why
or how.
Nor have I the desire, nor means
to dig answers from the dust
from the sunless sky
from the dwelling crypts of billions
whose laughter has gone.
No one is here, save me.
Were they ever?
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J Edward Neill
More words here
It began the moment I left.
The clouds, black and burgeoned with dark water,
caught me, contained me.
Drums in the sky pounded the only message
my body needed to know.
For all their thunder, my bones shook.
For all their streaming rivers
falling down my fractured panes,
I should have turned back.
Brief, I expected them,
and easily swatted aside.
But the sky told no mistruth,
and the serpentine road, swallowed by the rain,
scrawled into my tired eyes
the lie of leaving.
A wager, I made with the advancing night.
‘You’ll break with the sun when I return.’
‘And go black again with every retreat.’
And impatient, I threatened.
And railed.
And made war against everything.
Even knowing the deed was mine.
But the rain only laughed.
And the night shrugged at the hidden moon.
Daring that I should do it again.
That I should return, and stride the storm
a thousand times over.
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For more words, go here.
Am I dead, I asked her?
In a box, I did molder,
rotting, shapeless, my nightly sleep.
Dead, but dreaming, of what waited
beyond my comfortable dirt, beyond
my opulent world of worms and disquiet.
But when they asked, wake me none I said
until the day my box is broken.
And then the first of dreams
drained through the holes where nails once lay.
I listened. I woke. And pushed away the cold dirt.
My insides, new, pumped with raw life,
and I recalled the days I’d never lived.
The moon, she burned my face. My eyes, she scalded
with such light my box never allowed.
Still hushed, she bade me walk beside her,
and her smile drank away my grave-dust.
For hours, we tread lightly
On the shadowed fields, unseen.
Of the world below, of worms, of coffins, she asked,
and for the moon, we floated high,
in the wind, the light, and nothing.
But to the silver jewel, we never did come,
for at last, she saw the dusk within,
and feared, with me, the sun
would not rise.
Quickly, we climbed back down.
The dirt waited, starved of me.
Where now will you go? the dream asked me in lament.
To sleep, I said. My home, it is,
in my tomb, dead but dreaming always.
Down, she lay me, shining no more, but gloaming
as I slid into bed, shivering.
Again, I’ll see you? she asked.
Long from now.
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