I haven't finished the illustration for DRAGON OF REALITY yet; I estimate another ten days. Meanwhile, here is something I just jotted down the other day:
Roberta SchulbergGoro
2-4-11
I LIKE THIS DEVELOPMENT
I like the way she struts in as if to say
"You don't know how much you'd have to look up to me if you knew."
I like the way she doesn't know I know.
Gone is sadness at her hostility caused by her "deprivation."
Gone is feeling need to protect her vulnerability,
And best, no longer must I be concerned to consider the inconsiderate in future plans.
I like it because a scornful laugh evolved while facing her scorning midlife maturity‑‑-
Because she doesn't want me to know and doesn't want to tell me
'Though all her friends are in the know (with she not knowing all my friends are in the know)
Because her generation does not rest on our shoulders nor follow in our train nor reach into our pocketbooks
But wants to bump us off
(our perch)
In the ignorant assumption that such little monkeys as she will be around longer and be in longer need
(Having been born without the sin of Eden though firmly set in sins of territory)
And therefore sieze a twig at the pinnacle (woops too high to swing a foot at our heads)
Instead of a sturdy long limb of effort.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Here is the finished LAMENT FOR LOST SONGS.
November 2, 2010
This is a poem that tells, means. Archibald Mac Leish wrote "A poem should not mean but be." But I wanted to tell about something on my mind which I myself have witnessed. It "bees," but "be"? I have settled some things in my mind while writing it, including questions of what, in poetry, I want to continue to do, to drop, to change, or to newly attempt.
Paul Valery wrote: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." But I don't at this time intend to abandon it. It might reappear some time in the future looking a lot different except for the "good parts."
~~~~Roberta
LAMENT FOR LOST SONGS
By Roberta Schulberg Goro
They shift through wavering shadows along the worlds' plicated folds,
Separate groups outside of government.
Falsified fact, half-truths, misrepresented views of rivals
Cause loathing disregard of slandered, act as censor of those libeled.
Sub-rosa activists jolt retraction from opposing-conscienced resistants,
Who cower to silence by intimidating insistence.
Autocratic domineering,
Impeding speech, barring hearing,
Organized societal estrangements,
Wily monopolistic arrangements,
Unscrupulous games played cruelly
For personal gain and supremacy,
Decadence despite idealistic legality,
Cursèd shortcuts to unearned mastery.
~ And new times invent new tactics.
But law redresses outrage after the outraged sue.
Assuming that discovery's timely,
Will maligned have resources to carry through?
Have shunned the social connections needed for rebuttle of
Misrepresentations, guileful, subtle?
~Not everything is government control~
Or should new times invent new tactics?
Ought authority forestall distortion, hate-creating practics
By placing prying guards in ubiquitous patrol?
Should it create a fearing silence as avoids controversial mention
And with such fears nullify its own free speech protection?
If what we forfend becomes our favor we ourselves transmute to other
And give accord to overmastering subjection.
Fear-- But their world begins in fear - is fear.
And it's fear that makes them tyrant
Should their brittle cosmos of preconceptions be disturbed and
They press back if,
In abrupt encounter with the bustling gyrant,
By miscalculated strategy,
Shifts of time,
Or turns in the road,
They are startled to meet exuberance of
Clacking tongues,
Uplifted arms,
Clapping hands
And tambourines,
Rhythmic stomps of varied step,
Syncopate songsters,
Recounters of tales,
Weavers of intricate bands of color,
Clamorers of what they know
And in the telling, telling clear
A dissonant contrapuntal melody
Of doctrines diverse and actions contradictory.
Uneasy in consideration of the anarchic array of differences,
They edge through the narrow containing furrows,
Around assemblies of colorful bustling boroughs,
Disdaining the pageant on display, perturbed at guileless candid references.
But they do not go away.
They skitter in a safety which is clandestine to
Observe in anonym the drubbings, meetings, trades and orations,
Scurrying close to the rim of the dividing ruts of corrugations,
The partitioning clefts between the congregations,
Hating whatever is not somber,
Searching for reasons to censure.
Or quivering at their own daredevil malevolence,
Dart into folds pretending adherence
To defame outside ethos or stance.
Eyeing folds of endeavor, enthusiasm or exertion,
They circuit,
Silent,
Unless with short inward breath,
They halt,
Shocked at ecstatic song's or fevered story's protrusion from its origin,
It's unaccustomed sort of light past boundaries of it's own division
Of broad cosmology or utilitarian pragmatism.
They goad each other gnashing at the whooping young they come upon
Whose sharp elbows and supple-ankled feet protrude from jumbles of ruckus and jump-rope song,
And silence with brief barbed words the cackles of the scathing, droll, multiplexic old found sauntering on byroads the winnowers tread along
Abashing constructs articulated beyond the firm division each belongs to,
Outraged umbrage brushing those wayside or crossing over
Into convenient folds which confirm one-or-another preconception of the hour,
Self-appointed sanctimony putting "in their place" everyone who they run into.
It's not the government's authority but private impulse to weaken that seeks cordoned narrowing to witless.
A paternal authority who extends broad witness
Diminishes enfeebling ignorance,
Encourages sagaciousness.
It's not the majority, but the tyrants of conformity
Who anger at conceptual disturbance.
Tyrants hate the free play
Of minds they can't manipulate,
Prefer lives forged through fright, docile to obey,
Though irrelevant to law's decree, anyone's demand
Adults, their spirits folded neat like laundry on a sidestand.
Obedience itself is the new tyrants' veneration,
Regardless of particular tradition,
Funneling mavericks into convenient railed-off pens of custom
Roughly fitting a salient trait marked as temperament's token
Or as a partial ethnic configuration of the formerly unbranded, now to be newly broken.
Throughout a childhood longer than other earthly creatures,
Human's with difficulty imbibe ready concepts of society and nature.
But tyrants limit compass of that unfathomed world in which we all are insecure,
Stifling mental receptivity among those no longer immature.
Although alike physically,
We are immensely different ethnically,
Never hardened to a species specific way.
Time's cogencies leads us aware through transformation,
Yielding insight beyond our custom's earlier conformation.
And concealments will not prevent alterations.
And distortions will warp contemporary custom's re-configurations.
Now ~ since acrobatic reckonings disport unceasingly within the mind,
Eager hearsay's glossing gossips of a barriered actuality
Arouse unnerving chimeras of vivid irreality,
Narrowed insular intellect accepting as tuition
Unwitnessable tales of personage or tradition.
And folds which, among their own kind,
Repress the transparent, incandescent eidolons
That skim in tandem with our alert quotidian minds,
Which delimit the intricate formation of conjectures wrought
By meticulously measured, abstract, formalizing thought,
Shrivel among their own the innate, mentally agile, specifically human delight of such venture,
Molding out of a plenary human being a sullen, anguished, lower creature,
Subjugating such limited beings of the fold to the fold's limiting intimidator.
But this is not about lapse in enforcing the constitution.
It's about unregenerate private passion
The will to dominate and control without argument or limitation,
A competitive sport, played only for the winning.
A match of rise, gloat, and score.
It's a psychology lesson.
Now, inside the martinets maneuver distrust of outside innocence,
Their shakey allegations swaying swelling ranks of ignorance.
~ Or they pose a strategy of detachment,
Marshalling unguided trust in viciousness
With a dangerous tokenism of permissiveness as examplar of restrained tolerance,
Withholding information to that same walled-around ignorance.
To be in their good graces requires ready assent to implication
That giving ear outside the group exhibits traitorous collaboration.
Nods are flashed toward scholar or casual reader as addenda to insinuation.
Then shunned are those of questionable convictions,
Avoided now are unfavored commitments.
Done casually, coolly, in unofficial manner, unsubjected to court's rigor and without interrogator, they proceed without ruth.
Can a persuasive minority obscure truth?
Will a groveling majority evade integrity's truth?
In groupings of enthusiasms like art, history or philosophy,
Contrivers, stalwart in beneficence to their protégés,
Diminish difficulties of age-old thorny complexities
By devoted doctoring of ancient works according to current sophistries.
They simplify, re-interpret, conceal, enhance and restructure,
Recasting work, artist, and antecedent culture,
Peremptorily filling (as they see it) the needs of present circumstance.
Disaffected members of the group, noting the general lack of substance
(Hardly enough for the little grip of infants),
Lose interest, or feign enrapture in obeisance.
And then again, associates of small but effective power in key positions,
For example, small township librarians,
Principals of religions,
College historians,
Others not under Library of Congress restrictions,
Can eradicate or disarrange new and ancient compositions,
Zealous villagers spread irate "stamp out" proscriptions
From town to town like a virulent disease link,
Insiders self-segregating from what more distant towns think.
We are a wonder to ourselves.
Grasp of our unique sapience
Rounds through astonished cognizance
Of our own culture's countenance
In contrast with epoch or locale gaped at from a distance.
Insight ignites when our imagination
Envisions long past or distant invention
In intertwined apposition with paradigms of our own,
Initial reflective formulations warning or inspiring of a potentiality
Portending turpitude or a transcendent turn in history.
A weighty portion of self-knowledge is lost with loss of any ethnology.
But self-segregaters stop, shun, and slander singers of another song.
Contradiction holds to silence keeping place among the throng.
Peripheral opinion lowers eyelids, shrugs, backs off from surrounding audit,
Repeats "They said it's not good," represses further thought.
Inside only silence, fearing and insensate.
Outside, only cynosures for hate.
Underpinnings between the folds disintegrate.
The overall purpose? Gamesmanship in the sport of DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
Assisted by those reared to acquiesce, manipulators have set the gaggle into positions of controllable order.
And the strong minded are, in the silence, made ready for insurgent uncontrollable disaster.
It happened many times in history,
Lovers of homogeneity,
Condescenders and iconclasts
Destroy a civilization and its recorded past.
I don't. We already have the legislation.
What's needed is extension of societal education
Raising everyone to a condition of sophistication.
In adversarial record don't destroy even comma or apostrophe,
Yet, in your own name, stand forth to disagree.
Group or person, be known by honest friends of forthright discipline
So if ever you suffer need for defense, you among the just will win.
That speaker sounds to me like one of experience.
November 2, 2010
This is a poem that tells, means. Archibald Mac Leish wrote "A poem should not mean but be." But I wanted to tell about something on my mind which I myself have witnessed. It "bees," but "be"? I have settled some things in my mind while writing it, including questions of what, in poetry, I want to continue to do, to drop, to change, or to newly attempt.
Paul Valery wrote: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." But I don't at this time intend to abandon it. It might reappear some time in the future looking a lot different except for the "good parts."
~~~~Roberta
LAMENT FOR LOST SONGS
By Roberta Schulberg Goro
They shift through wavering shadows along the worlds' plicated folds,Gruff between the pleats of human passage,
Enshrouders of old sung tales, silencing the not yet told.
Sidling in withdrawal, abhorrent of oppositions, scowling where multiplicity of voice is permitted,
They skulk,
Withdrawn,
Fearing to sound their own names
And enamored of restricting domination,
Carry dreams so newly pernicious, they thrill at daring to commit them.
First of all, such silencing is not new.
It was done by dynasties of Egyptians,
By ancient Greeks. In Europe by Christians.
Second. We have already won freedom of speech and religion.
You want credit now for the glory of old battles.
No valor this, just a repetition.
But silencing others remains subsistent.
Suppressive schemes to clasp control continue persistent inSeparate groups outside of government.
Falsified fact, half-truths, misrepresented views of rivals
Cause loathing disregard of slandered, act as censor of those libeled.
Sub-rosa activists jolt retraction from opposing-conscienced resistants,
Who cower to silence by intimidating insistence.
Autocratic domineering,
Impeding speech, barring hearing,
Organized societal estrangements,
Wily monopolistic arrangements,
Unscrupulous games played cruelly
For personal gain and supremacy,
Decadence despite idealistic legality,
Cursèd shortcuts to unearned mastery.
~ And new times invent new tactics.
Law's procedures prevent hindrance to retort.
Government is the surest resort.
Assuming that discovery's timely,
Will maligned have resources to carry through?
Have shunned the social connections needed for rebuttle of
Misrepresentations, guileful, subtle?
~Not everything is government control~
Or should new times invent new tactics?
Ought authority forestall distortion, hate-creating practics
By placing prying guards in ubiquitous patrol?
Should it create a fearing silence as avoids controversial mention
And with such fears nullify its own free speech protection?
If what we forfend becomes our favor we ourselves transmute to other
And give accord to overmastering subjection.
Your anxiety is feckless.
Schemers, rare, not likely to be reckless.
Fear of disclosure is tort restrained!
Avoiding disgrace, serenity's maintained!
And it's fear that makes them tyrant
Should their brittle cosmos of preconceptions be disturbed and
They press back if,
In abrupt encounter with the bustling gyrant,
By miscalculated strategy,
Shifts of time,
Or turns in the road,
They are startled to meet exuberance of
Clacking tongues,
Uplifted arms,
Clapping hands
And tambourines,
Rhythmic stomps of varied step,
Syncopate songsters,
Recounters of tales,
Weavers of intricate bands of color,
Clamorers of what they know
And in the telling, telling clear
A dissonant contrapuntal melody
Of doctrines diverse and actions contradictory.
Uneasy in consideration of the anarchic array of differences,
They edge through the narrow containing furrows,
Around assemblies of colorful bustling boroughs,
Disdaining the pageant on display, perturbed at guileless candid references.
But they do not go away.
They skitter in a safety which is clandestine to
Observe in anonym the drubbings, meetings, trades and orations,
Scurrying close to the rim of the dividing ruts of corrugations,
The partitioning clefts between the congregations,
Hating whatever is not somber,
Searching for reasons to censure.
Or quivering at their own daredevil malevolence,
Dart into folds pretending adherence
To defame outside ethos or stance.
Eyeing folds of endeavor, enthusiasm or exertion,
They circuit,
Silent,
Unless with short inward breath,
They halt,
Shocked at ecstatic song's or fevered story's protrusion from its origin,
It's unaccustomed sort of light past boundaries of it's own division
Of broad cosmology or utilitarian pragmatism.
They goad each other gnashing at the whooping young they come upon
Whose sharp elbows and supple-ankled feet protrude from jumbles of ruckus and jump-rope song,
And silence with brief barbed words the cackles of the scathing, droll, multiplexic old found sauntering on byroads the winnowers tread along
Abashing constructs articulated beyond the firm division each belongs to,
Outraged umbrage brushing those wayside or crossing over
Into convenient folds which confirm one-or-another preconception of the hour,
Self-appointed sanctimony putting "in their place" everyone who they run into.
Your simplistic, over-heated flouting of authority merely
Describes those acting paternally
To block disruption of that clement conformity which
Secures every disparate disciplined boundary.
Understand this
Conflict in ethos' can cause panic
Confusion confronting the anarchic.
I doubt false reports goad to reject.
It's that the majority,
Naive and uncircumspect,
Give to none but familiar concepts respect.
It's not the government's authority but private impulse to weaken that seeks cordoned narrowing to witless.
A paternal authority who extends broad witness
Diminishes enfeebling ignorance,
Encourages sagaciousness.
It's not the majority, but the tyrants of conformity
Who anger at conceptual disturbance.
Tyrants hate the free play
Of minds they can't manipulate,
Prefer lives forged through fright, docile to obey,
Though irrelevant to law's decree, anyone's demand
Adults, their spirits folded neat like laundry on a sidestand.
Obedience itself is the new tyrants' veneration,
Regardless of particular tradition,
Funneling mavericks into convenient railed-off pens of custom
Roughly fitting a salient trait marked as temperament's token
Or as a partial ethnic configuration of the formerly unbranded, now to be newly broken.
Throughout a childhood longer than other earthly creatures,
Human's with difficulty imbibe ready concepts of society and nature.
But tyrants limit compass of that unfathomed world in which we all are insecure,
Stifling mental receptivity among those no longer immature.
Although alike physically,
We are immensely different ethnically,
Never hardened to a species specific way.
Time's cogencies leads us aware through transformation,
Yielding insight beyond our custom's earlier conformation.
And concealments will not prevent alterations.
And distortions will warp contemporary custom's re-configurations.
Now ~ since acrobatic reckonings disport unceasingly within the mind,
Eager hearsay's glossing gossips of a barriered actuality
Arouse unnerving chimeras of vivid irreality,
Narrowed insular intellect accepting as tuition
Unwitnessable tales of personage or tradition.
And folds which, among their own kind,
Repress the transparent, incandescent eidolons
That skim in tandem with our alert quotidian minds,
Which delimit the intricate formation of conjectures wrought
By meticulously measured, abstract, formalizing thought,
Shrivel among their own the innate, mentally agile, specifically human delight of such venture,
Molding out of a plenary human being a sullen, anguished, lower creature,
Subjugating such limited beings of the fold to the fold's limiting intimidator.
Again you're caught up in glorious old history
This time the battle against slavery.
Adults in unsatisfactory happenstance
Have the right to leave and take their chance
On finding some unknown, some superior circumstance.
It's about unregenerate private passion
The will to dominate and control without argument or limitation,
A competitive sport, played only for the winning.
A match of rise, gloat, and score.
It's a psychology lesson.
Now, inside the martinets maneuver distrust of outside innocence,
Their shakey allegations swaying swelling ranks of ignorance.
~ Or they pose a strategy of detachment,
Marshalling unguided trust in viciousness
With a dangerous tokenism of permissiveness as examplar of restrained tolerance,
Withholding information to that same walled-around ignorance.
To be in their good graces requires ready assent to implication
That giving ear outside the group exhibits traitorous collaboration.
Nods are flashed toward scholar or casual reader as addenda to insinuation.
Then shunned are those of questionable convictions,
Avoided now are unfavored commitments.
Done casually, coolly, in unofficial manner, unsubjected to court's rigor and without interrogator, they proceed without ruth.
Can a persuasive minority obscure truth?
Will a groveling majority evade integrity's truth?
In groupings of enthusiasms like art, history or philosophy,
Contrivers, stalwart in beneficence to their protégés,
Diminish difficulties of age-old thorny complexities
By devoted doctoring of ancient works according to current sophistries.
They simplify, re-interpret, conceal, enhance and restructure,
Recasting work, artist, and antecedent culture,
Peremptorily filling (as they see it) the needs of present circumstance.
Disaffected members of the group, noting the general lack of substance
(Hardly enough for the little grip of infants),
Lose interest, or feign enrapture in obeisance.
And then again, associates of small but effective power in key positions,
For example, small township librarians,
Principals of religions,
College historians,
Others not under Library of Congress restrictions,
Can eradicate or disarrange new and ancient compositions,
Zealous villagers spread irate "stamp out" proscriptions
From town to town like a virulent disease link,
Insiders self-segregating from what more distant towns think.
We are a wonder to ourselves.
Grasp of our unique sapience
Rounds through astonished cognizance
Of our own culture's countenance
In contrast with epoch or locale gaped at from a distance.
Insight ignites when our imagination
Envisions long past or distant invention
In intertwined apposition with paradigms of our own,
Initial reflective formulations warning or inspiring of a potentiality
Portending turpitude or a transcendent turn in history.
A weighty portion of self-knowledge is lost with loss of any ethnology.
But self-segregaters stop, shun, and slander singers of another song.
Contradiction holds to silence keeping place among the throng.
Peripheral opinion lowers eyelids, shrugs, backs off from surrounding audit,
Repeats "They said it's not good," represses further thought.
Inside only silence, fearing and insensate.
Outside, only cynosures for hate.
Underpinnings between the folds disintegrate.
The overall purpose? Gamesmanship in the sport of DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
Assisted by those reared to acquiesce, manipulators have set the gaggle into positions of controllable order.
And the strong minded are, in the silence, made ready for insurgent uncontrollable disaster.
It happened many times in history,
Lovers of homogeneity,
Condescenders and iconclasts
Destroy a civilization and its recorded past.
And just how do you expect to legislate
Against a frenzy which initiates
In sectors that are private?
I don't. We already have the legislation.
What's needed is extension of societal education
Raising everyone to a condition of sophistication.
In adversarial record don't destroy even comma or apostrophe,
Yet, in your own name, stand forth to disagree.
Group or person, be known by honest friends of forthright discipline
So if ever you suffer need for defense, you among the just will win.
I've been listening and I prefer whatever is the safer decision
Those not choosing sides in refutation,
Or clamoring in disputation,
Not interposing, countering, making or taking the trouble,
Won't find themselves calling and clambering in some aftermath of rubble.
That speaker sounds to me like one of experience.
No hazards for minding one's own business.
Ride your bike, sow your garden,
Not get lost in altercating diz zi n ~
Friday, July 30, 2010
Argument Between Pompous and Facetia
Here is one of mine which was printed in "Hello Poetry" online magazine. Since writers maintain all rights when published there, I decided to use it for this month's New Potpourri.
--Roberta
Roberta SchulbergGoro
Written March 6, 2008
Pompous:
"Oh God, no, not another shallow rhymer,
fitting each word to its neat little place.
Oh God, no, not another painterly composition
with planal directions going round and around or leading that way and this.
They did that in the past; get to the new.
Make sure the reader or viewer knows that the masterful
knows more than than the masterful letsthrough out.
Disdain extenuating weakenings caused by straining for clarity
or unnecessary exertions in expressions of cohesion.
Words, though plain, arouse astonished wonder by nonchalant impenetrable shufflings.
Be clued-in, be bold, be tough and show it when you sculpt the clay.
When shaped, use your trowel to scratch the surface conjuring even more obscurity.
Toss it off in broad strokes of masterful negligence.
Be above the miniscule.
By these means show in shadowy hints the profundity that winks beyond merely ordinary restrictions.
Break the barriers, fly the constructive. Those old shackles lie about the world.
Show you ain't no conforming sissy.
Display in impatient referenceless strokes
Your forceful awareness of the world as known."
Facetia:
"Oh?
--Roberta
Roberta SchulbergGoro
Written March 6, 2008
Argument between Pompous and Facetia
Pompous:
"Oh God, no, not another shallow rhymer,
fitting each word to its neat little place.
Oh God, no, not another painterly composition
with planal directions going round and around or leading that way and this.
They did that in the past; get to the new.
Make sure the reader or viewer knows that the masterful
knows more than than the masterful lets
Disdain extenuating weakenings caused by straining for clarity
or unnecessary exertions in expressions of cohesion.
Words, though plain, arouse astonished wonder by nonchalant impenetrable shufflings.
Be clued-in, be bold, be tough and show it when you sculpt the clay.
When shaped, use your trowel to scratch the surface conjuring even more obscurity.
Toss it off in broad strokes of masterful negligence.
Be above the miniscule.
By these means show in shadowy hints the profundity that winks beyond merely ordinary restrictions.
Break the barriers, fly the constructive. Those old shackles lie about the world.
Show you ain't no conforming sissy.
Display in impatient referenceless strokes
Your forceful awareness of the world as known."
Facetia:
"Oh?
Such a world as shows no evidence of form and structure in living creatures;
no effortful eons of evolution.
Forests have no ecology and laws of nature are not binding.
Mind never happened, spirit's a farce,
unions only expedient plottings.
Lessons of history describe the disruptive;
it's what you grab and who you club;
others are only take or be taken.
Show 'em who's boss,
stash it away,
it's dog eat dog until there's nothing.
Shake it all up; break it all up.
It's only entropy."
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Here are two larks of mine.
---Roberta
This one I placed in the "comments" section of the online Journal "Tinywords."
June 22, 2010
door's soprano hinges swing
pitpat scramble, altos yumm
Here's one I placed in a personal Blog, unfortunately now disappeared, in answer to the problem "Write a story in one sentence."
July 24, 2009
ONE LINE STORY
While staring at a melody and hearing a blaring tattoo of light, alarmed technicians threatened communications shutdown as the computer, in defending itself against desynthesizers, reconnoitered non-surrender and locked entry into T.P. Alley.
---Roberta
This one I placed in the "comments" section of the online Journal "Tinywords."
June 22, 2010
Title: WEEKEND HYMNAL AT GROUP HOUSE
Cook riffles pages
Cook riffles pages
chantarelles roll into bowl
scents ascend, risers stirdoor's soprano hinges swing
pitpat scramble, altos yumm
Here's one I placed in a personal Blog, unfortunately now disappeared, in answer to the problem "Write a story in one sentence."
July 24, 2009
ONE LINE STORY
While staring at a melody and hearing a blaring tattoo of light, alarmed technicians threatened communications shutdown as the computer, in defending itself against desynthesizers, reconnoitered non-surrender and locked entry into T.P. Alley.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Written 5-25-07
By Roberta SchulbergGoro
Ode to Vinegar
(How the modern world won the war against the plague of scurvy)
The doctor said the surest cure brings more pain than the disease.
Cramp in pith and sting in pelt by wine and sours lengthily ease,
But stiffening ranks of stench still feast on obese flesh,
As counter-attacking mites within avenge the withering of their mesh.
The spotted skin erupts in curvilinear bloody splits
Where electric flashing flesh its stony-ball diseases spits.
While protein, carrots, careful nurture, lift intruders to the fleece
To spew on all the situation 'round dead muck of microbes in release.
By Roberta SchulbergGoro
Ode to Vinegar
(How the modern world won the war against the plague of scurvy)
The doctor said the surest cure brings more pain than the disease.
Cramp in pith and sting in pelt by wine and sours lengthily ease,
But stiffening ranks of stench still feast on obese flesh,
As counter-attacking mites within avenge the withering of their mesh.
The spotted skin erupts in curvilinear bloody splits
Where electric flashing flesh its stony-ball diseases spits.
While protein, carrots, careful nurture, lift intruders to the fleece
To spew on all the situation 'round dead muck of microbes in release.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Dualism is a Never Ending Battle
By Roberta SchulbergGoro
In the semi-sunlight, I squinted at a black-striped stone I never before noticed,
rooted and still,
close to a clump of grasses near the bank,
as the slow, drifting, artificial canal gently rippled around it.
But it must have moved,
like a clock invisibly,
for soon I saw it was free of the grasses,
moving with the drift southward and into the center of the basin.
As it passed by me,
I saw the mustard-colored stone was a yellow-backed sea turtle,
the stripe a fresh-water baby alligator eight inches long, its tail into the water.
The snappy party, alien to this technological water, moved passively with the stream,
floating slowly toward the exposed ledge of dangling toes at the far end of the sculpted cove, and
toward the pumping machinery of the now scarce-used swimming pool
which had recently undergone a renovation,
its sunning deck now protected from a sun shower with
a thickly thatched, gabled roof of reeds placed, they said,
in honor of the new Hawaiian president.
In the semi-sunlight, I squinted at a black-striped stone I never before noticed,
rooted and still,
close to a clump of grasses near the bank,
as the slow, drifting, artificial canal gently rippled around it.
But it must have moved,
like a clock invisibly,
for soon I saw it was free of the grasses,
moving with the drift southward and into the center of the basin.
As it passed by me,
I saw the mustard-colored stone was a yellow-backed sea turtle,
the stripe a fresh-water baby alligator eight inches long, its tail into the water.
The snappy party, alien to this technological water, moved passively with the stream,
floating slowly toward the exposed ledge of dangling toes at the far end of the sculpted cove, and
toward the pumping machinery of the now scarce-used swimming pool
which had recently undergone a renovation,
its sunning deck now protected from a sun shower with
a thickly thatched, gabled roof of reeds placed, they said,
in honor of the new Hawaiian president.
Pandora's Box,
(The Electronic Poetry Magazine)
By Roberta SchulbergGoro
Unbound,
Sprung from the box,
Upward fluttering
Hazy penumbra hovering
In flight transforming to aureole,
Delineations at center sharpening,
Definition to edge widening.
Zooming view into revelations:
The segmented spaces of a stranger's thought.
A new one every lifting of the lid
As promised by the technology magician, the salesman saying,
"This one's not much. The box itself plain and unadorned.
"But you're not paying much;
You can buy it for a song."
I wanted it.
A pandora's box,
Skills an angry Zeus hid from the presumption of Prometheus,
Revealed only one-by-one
When Patriarchal anger relents to forgiveness of prematurely stolen fire:
Brainstorm,
Lustrous flairing enlightenment
By Roberta SchulbergGoro
Unbound,
Sprung from the box,
Upward fluttering
Hazy penumbra hovering
In flight transforming to aureole,
Delineations at center sharpening,
Definition to edge widening.
Zooming view into revelations:
The segmented spaces of a stranger's thought.
A new one every lifting of the lid
As promised by the technology magician, the salesman saying,
"This one's not much. The box itself plain and unadorned.
"But you're not paying much;
You can buy it for a song."
I wanted it.
A pandora's box,
Skills an angry Zeus hid from the presumption of Prometheus,
Revealed only one-by-one
When Patriarchal anger relents to forgiveness of prematurely stolen fire:
Brainstorm,
Lustrous flairing enlightenment
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
