Ripped Messiah

Ripped Messiah

Easter reminds us we will stand again

Anastasia - dance card of the young

We wrinkled can’t relate or recall when

with brawn we pulled up from the bottom rung

Enough we don’t fall down. Now take your pills.

Live it all again? No fond desire.

What if the crucified on Calvary’s Hill

An old dude, carpenter ‘fore gospel fire

Made him shake his cane at those righteous swells

they killed him, leaving grandma, sad grandkids

weeping at his cross. Would sedate church bells

salute codger-messiah on the skids?

The Savior of the World he best be ripped

with tats, tall mohawk, ring in those big lips.

Copyright 2014 / Richard Baldwin Cook

Source:

DAD WAS TAKEN TO WATCH A LYNCHING

Occasional Poems

by

Richard Baldwin Cook

(Nativa, LLC, 2014)

Available at lulu.com

and elsewhere

An Easter poem by the Master

Sunday Morning

by 

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

1

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

[ . . . ]

The day is like wide water, without sound,

Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet

Over the seas, to silent Palestine,

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2

[ . . . ]

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

[ . . . ]

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measure destined for her soul.

[ . . . ]

6

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find, the same receding shores

That never touch with inarticulate pang?

[ . . . ]

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

The  complete poem:

http://m.poemhunter.com/poem/sunday-morning/

Poetry - "a bridge between separated souls"

April 17 - birthday of Irish poet Brendan Kennelly (1936) who said:

"Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one's person's solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others. That is why, to me, poetry is one of the most vital treasures that humanity possesses; it is a bridge between separated souls."

SOURCE:

Writer's Almanac, April 17, 2013