Weekly Poetry from Poems for Free: An Epiphany Poem and More
Posted: Wednesday, January 05, 2011
by Nicholas Gordon
http://www.poemsforfree.com
EACH YEAR AGAIN THE GIFTS ARE GIVEN GLADLY
Each year again the gifts are given gladly,
Perhaps because one wants to be a gift.
In goods there can be good, yet sometimes, sadly,
People get the thing but not the drift.
How could the wise men come without some token,
A gift to give the child, new born a king?
Nor could their words speak as their gifts had spoken,
Yielding love incarnate in a thing.
To say goodbye's impossible forever,
And yet we must too soon exchange goodbyes.
No magnitude of love when someone dies
Can manage the immensity of never.
Yet even death cannot our friendship sever
Though you may rest somewhere beyond our sighs
And all the talk of afterlife be lies.
Eternity is our brief glimpse of ever.
Even as each breeze must alter time
And each unruly rock reshape the sea,
So love lasts beyond our consciousness.
Each pulse of life's a piece of the sublime,
A breath so full of grace it cannot be,
A wave that ripples endlessly through darkness.
YOUR HEART BROKE WHEN I SAID I HAD TO LEAVE YOU
Your heart broke when I said I had to leave you
To serve our country somewhere far away.
But every day tells me how much I love you,
And how I'll mend it once I'm home to stay.
For life is but a dream, and we the dreamers,
Making what we will of what we are.
When gates clang shut, we are our own redeemers,
As love leaves for us a door ajar.
So dream with me these empty months of sorrow
As we find ways to be together still.
No longing can be brighter than tomorrow,
Nor dream less certain than our strength of will.
CYNICISM COMES FROM SELF-DISGUST
Cynicism comes from self-disgust,
Yearning for a world one has surrendered.
No vision is complete but in repose,
Implicit in the steady gaze within.
Come, then, to know that good and evil must
In everyone with due respect be rendered,
So delicate their dance, as much in those
Not cynical as in those steeped in sin.
ON YOUR ENGAGEMENT LET THE ANGELS SING
On your engagement let the angels sing!
Now let them fill the air with voices strong!
Yield, ye gates that shelter Heaven's throng!
Open up, that they might glory bring!
Unleash the mighty organ tones that ring
Right through the rock beneath your joyous song!
Even to this world of right and wrong
Now come angels past all reckoning!
Granted, after celebration due,
Angels tend to slowly disappear,
Going back behind the golden door
Even as you long for their return.
Music, though, remains behind with you.
Each moment that you listen you will hear
Not them, but from your own unwritten score,
The songs of love no innocent could learn.
HERE WE HAVE A LITTLE BIT OF EDEN
Here we have a little bit of Eden,
An innocence deliberately detained.
Praised be love, that holds the heel of heaven,
Preserving what would else escape from pain,
Yet now renews the heart again, again.
For love depends upon a tended garden
Older than the myth of Adam's fall,
Underneath the usual confusion
Resisting the implacable illusion
That makes of love a dream beyond recall:
Here it lives within the garden wall.
BEFORE I KNEW YOU, I HAD ALWAYS LOVED YOU
Before I knew you, I had always loved you,
Even as I dreamed of whom I'd love.
My inner picture was a portrait of you
Years before your heart my heart would move.
Vistas of enchantment are but rarely
As we find them in reality.
Love with you is what I dreamed, but really,
Eden as no dream could ever be.
Nor is this the magic of the moment,
The proper costume for the holiday.
In words like these one finds the winnowed ferment,
Not of the desire, but of the way,
Else lost amid the longings of the day.
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