I inquired of a cardinal,
What’s with the red?
Wouldn’t camouflage brown
Be safer instead?
He pondered it briefly
And breezily said:
My breed’s really not
The cowering kind.
We like to stand out,
Easy to find,
Ready to fight
If you’ve trouble in mind,
And let me just add
That the females I know
Are very selective
In choosing a beaux,
But seem rather fond
Of a feathery show.
You might think that by now the Sphinx
Would have sunk into the sand,
But it sits and never slinks,
Never scratches, never blinks,
Looking out across the land,
As some ancient sculptor planned.
They build churches
To hold holiness,
But then we worship
Things measureless,
And uncontainable.
Still… sometimes attainable.
The song of a bird at sunset,
As the evening star pokes through the blue,
It will not stay, and yet,
It plucks a string in you,
No words, all feel,
Just real.
When we were kids, my father thought it was funny
To claim that he would catch the Easter Bunny,
And make a rabbit stew - a tasty way
To celebrate a happy holiday.
When Sunday came, he’d say the news was grim -
The bunny had again outsmarted him,
First stopping by our house with candy and eggs,
Then hopping over the trap with nimble legs!
Love is a feeling,
A force of the will,
Perhaps revealing
A sort of skill
At truly discerning
Beneath the skin
The fire burning
The heart within.
Dostoyevsky was an addicted gambler,
Whose best characters are loquacious ramblers
Who frequently verge into the absurd.
But since he was getting paid by the word
And was on a personal moral mission,
He brought great novels to fruition.
Boethius called the Muses of Poetry names:
“Whorish stage girls”. In this way he defames
An art that he himself had long pursued
In terms offensive and incredibly rude.
On the other hand, if we want to be perfectly fair,
He was being held in some kind of confinement where
He awaited a sentence of torture and brutal death.
His book “Consolation” is sort of his final breath,
In which he tried to set his learned mind
On cosmic truths, hoping there to find
Relief from anguish. And oddly enough this book
Is studded with poems. It’s certainly worth a look.
It bridges the ancient world and medieval times,
Profoundly affecting both Dante’s and Chaucer’s rhymes.
Some say that existence exists,
And I’m not here to tell you they lie.
The universe surely persists -
Without sign of soon saying goodbye.
Parmenides said Being Is,
Albeit, he said it in Greek.
All agree he was a whiz,
But did he provide what we seek?
It is what it is, we now say,
When urging recognition
Of facts in the present day
Which present in a sorry condition.
Existence Exists, I admit
Has a tautological sound,
But still we keep using it
As an evidentiary ground.
As a philosopher, Seneca promoted
Maintaining tranquility in the face of trauma,
However as a playwright he emoted
All over the stage with tragic bloody drama.
Scholars question which is the truer side,
But I imagine equal parts of a whole:
The stoic Jekyll and the dramatic Hyde
Springing together from one tormented soul.
