The Dice Changer

T
Raven steals your name for an autumn joke:
buries it along with you under the broadest hemlock
known to squirrel or chipmunk.
He croaks it’s too bad you were awake for the event.
He accuses you of boring him
with the same old questions over and over.
You attempt revolt to prove his rattle
is cracked and as brittle as his song.

Raven clacks his beak like a trap and hollers
your face is a mask splitting down the middle
and madness has found a home.
All stink and fur dung, the black master
quips you had a chance to flee
but forgot where and what direction.
Now he blurts your pain must jump in the river,
the river thrash like the wind,
the mountain awaken you to the currents of the sea.
Raven hops away and chuckles as the dark chatters,
flips you over to your earth shadow.




Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

The Tower by William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
I

What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
Read Poem
0
195
Rating:

Faustine by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant. Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.
Read Poem
0
196
Rating:

Hotel François 1er by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
It was a very little while and they had gone in front of it. It was that they had liked it would it bear. It was a very much adjoined a follower. Flower of an adding where a follower.
Have I come in. Will in suggestion.
They may like hours in catching.
It is always a pleasure to remember.
Have a habit.
Any name will very well wear better.
All who live round about there.
Have a manner.
The hotel François Ier.
Just winter so.
It is indubitably often that she is as denied to soften help to when it is in all in midst of which in vehemence to taken given in a bestowal show than left help in double.
Having noticed often that it is newly noticed which makes older often.
The world has become smaller and more beautiful.
The world is grown smaller and more beautiful. That is it.
Yes that is it.
Read Poem
0
201
Rating:

Plurality by Louis MacNeice
Louis MacNeice
It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun
The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one;
World is other and other, world is here and there,
Parmenides would smother life for lack of air
Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks—
No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes,
Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights,
All your foes are friends and all your days are nights
Read Poem
0
140
Rating:

The Four Ages of Man by Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet
[Introduction]
Lo now! four other acts upon the stage,
Childhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age.
The first: son unto Phlegm, grand-child to water,
Unstable, supple, moist, and cold’s his Nature.
The second: frolic claims his pedigree;
From blood and air, for hot and moist is he.
The third of fire and choler is compos’d,
Vindicative, and quarrelsome dispos’d.
The last, of earth and heavy melancholy,
Solid, hating all lightness, and all folly.
Childhood was cloth’d in white, and given to show,
His spring was intermixed with some snow.
Upon his head a Garland Nature set:
Of Daisy, Primrose, and the Violet.
Read Poem
0
199
Rating:

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Argument

How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country. PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Read Poem
0
191
Rating:

Desert by Adonis
Adonis
The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust
Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space.

No road to this house, a siege,
and his house is graveyard.
Read Poem
0
524
Rating:

Town Eclogues: Tuesday; St. James's Coffee-House by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
SILLIANDER and PATCH. THOU so many favours hast receiv'd,
Wondrous to tell, and hard to be believ'd,
Oh ! H—— D, to my lays attention lend,
Hear how two lovers boastingly contend ;
Like thee successful, such their bloomy youth,
Renown'd alike for gallantry and truth.

St. JAMES's bell had toll'd some wretches in,
Read Poem
0
154
Rating:

War by Kahlil Gibran
Kahlil Gibran
One night a feast was held in the palace, and there came a man and
prostrated himself before the prince, and all the feasters looked
upon him; and they saw that one of his eyes was out and that
the empty socket bled. And the prince inquired of him, “What has
befallen you?” And the man replied, “O prince, I am by profession
a thief, and this night, because there was no moon, I went to rob
the money-changer’s shop, and as I climbed in through the window
I made a mistake and entered the weaver’s shop, and in the dark I
ran into the weaver’s loom and my eye was plucked out. And now,
O prince, I ask for justice upon the weaver.”

Then the prince sent for the weaver and he came, and it was decreed
that one of his eyes should be plucked out.

“O prince,” said the weaver, “the decree is just. It is right that
one of my eyes be taken. And yet, alas! both are necessary to me
in order that I may see the two sides of the cloth that I weave.
But I have a neighbour, a cobbler, who has also two eyes, and in
his trade both eyes are not necessary.”

Then the prince sent for the cobbler. And he came. And they took
out one of the cobbler’s two eyes.

And justice was satisfied.
Read Poem
0
133
Rating:

Town Eclogues: Thursday; the Bassette-Table by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
CARDELIA. THE bassette-table spread, the tallier come,
Why stays SMILINDA in the dressing-room ?
Rise, pensive nymph ! the tallier stays for you.

SMILINDA. Ah ! Madam, since my SHARPER is untrue,
I joyless make my once ador'd alpieu.
I saw him stand behind OMBRELIA's Chair,
And whisper with that soft deluding air,
Read Poem
0
154
Rating:

Lines Written among the Euganean Hills by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of Misery,
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on
Day and night, and night and day,
Drifting on his dreary way,
With the solid darkness black
Closing round his vessel's track;
Whilst above, the sunless sky,
Big with clouds, hangs heavily,
And behind, the tempest fleet
Hurries on with lightning feet,
Riving sail, and cord, and plank,
Till the ship has almost drank
Death from the o'er-brimming deep;
Read Poem
0
188
Rating:

Celebration for June 24 by Thomas McGrath
Thomas McGrath
For Marian Before you, I was living on an island
And all around the seas of that lonely coast
Read Poem
0
111
Rating:

The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
I
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
Read Poem
0
179
Rating:

from Odes: 36 "See! Their verses are laid" by Basil Bunting
Basil Bunting
See! Their verses are laid
as mosaic gold to gold
gold to lapis lazuli
white marble to porphyry
stone shouldering stone, the dice
polished alike, there is
no cement seen and no gap
between stones as the frieze strides
Read Poem
0
131
Rating:

Mythistorema by George Seferis
George Seferis
1

The angel —
three years we waited for him, attention riveted,
closely scanning
the pines the shore the stars.
One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel
we were searching to find once more the first seed
so that the age-old drama could begin again.
Read Poem
0
190
Rating:

The Frog Footman and the Fish Footman by William H. Dickey
William H. Dickey
Aiee! It is the ceremony of the first blades of winter.
Horticulture, horticulture, the little steam train says puffing up the mountainside.
As if he had never known a home of his own, only ditches.
Three stomps with a stone stump and the colloquium started.
Beggars under the drainpipe, another hand’s cast of the bone dice.
Whatever name the event has, it can be understood as an invitation.
Epilepsy, epilepsy, the little steam train said, descending at evening.
They bowed so low that their wigs tangled and I had to laugh.
Read Poem
0
141
Rating:

Fixed Ideas by Kenneth Slessor
Kenneth Slessor
Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters,
Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble,
Death’s candy-bed. Stone caked on stone,
Dry pyramids and racks of iron balls.
Life is observed, a precipitate of pellets,
Or grammarians freeze it into spar,
Their rhomboids, as for instance, the finest crystal
Fixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid out
Read Poem
0
152
Rating:

I Live Up Here by W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin
I live up here
And a little bit to the left
And I go down only

For the accidents and then
Read Poem
0
168
Rating:

A Perfect Market by Clive James
Clive James
ou plutôt les chanter
Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised,
Or, even better, sing them. Common speech
Held all the rhythmic measures that he prized
In poetry. He had much more to teach,
Read Poem
0
151
Rating:

Hanukkah by Hilda Morley
Hilda Morley
This season for us, the Jews—
a season of candles,
one more
on the seven-branched candlestick for
the seven days of the week,
but let it be seven
in the sense of luck in dice,
seven of the stars in
Read Poem
0
88
Rating: