Poetry

I put up links to some of my poetry there in the left-hand corner. I used to write pretty often, but Sisyphus that I put last week was the first in five years. Prior to that was cicada.

Most of these have been published some place or another - I have a few in two different volumes of In Our Own Words, collections of poetry that vary from really, really, really bad to quite good. I hope I'm in a positive end of the spectrum.

I have been featured in two online publications, Zero City, run previously by Michael McNeilley, who is, sadly, no longer of this world, and Agnieszka's Dowry, which appears to not be running full steam these days. My poems are here.

Other than that, mostly print. A publication no longer in practice named Block's Poetry Collection liked me - published me a few times. Columbia College's Baobab picked up some of my 2nd tier poems, etc.

If you're a poetry person, you might like some. Depends on your style, really. I have two sonnets, but they're not completely strict. One, restive, is a big, long, run-on sentence. The other, Sonnet 2 has a funny wild degrees of separation story attached to it that perhaps I'll post at some point when it's not about bedtime. The rest are free verse.

I even had a guy review me once. Trouble is, he wanted to post the review on alt.lesbian.feminist.poetry. And, well, I'm neither a lesbian or feminist so my reviewer, um, changed the gender of address in some of my poems. Here it is, though - I enjoyed the review. And the response I sent to him was most entertaining.

hln

Posted by: hln at 11:01 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 286 words, total size 2 kb.

Sisyphus
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On barren crest
a craggy crooked overhang
stands smashed against a hill.
Each morn it bleeds against the sun,
juts an angry ledge that leads beyond the view.

Closer now, a man defines
his task, the sound immense in motion.
Rolling.

Briefly it sits against a nook. Silence.
Cunning once, he is broken, fixed,
briefly stooped, torpid against his fare.
Sinews in his arms collapse as
blisters dance, stretching for relief
against the sweat-washed strain.

There is no rest, really. Illusion, a blink.
The climb commences, into the
shiny blood afar we stand,
passersby who watch the
scene bemused.

A thousand years, though, this
persists in cycle. The stride, angled still -
the sullen cries. The mountain path
forgives its friend.

Who never thought to throw
the boulder down, transcend, and
behold a man born within a man.

Instead, he arches into the scripted path
whispering pleas too soft and weak
to pull the power down
and empty his hand.

hln
9/7/03

Posted by: hln at 08:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 166 words, total size 1 kb.