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Chromapoetica

Category: Mythology

Endure O Heart

Filed under: Art, Epic, Love, Mythology, Personal, Philosophy — 5 Comments

June 15, 2022

Doubt creeps into his heart
writhing like the snakes of
Medusa’s stone gaze
caging him in no man’s land
far from hearth and home
a prison of his prescient
choice to be parted
from his beloved bride
endure, o heart

Bound to the mast
a cut above the company
he surrenders to sirens’ call
his heart howls from within
to hear paeans of his heroic deeds
falling in love with distorted
reflections of his weary visage
a soul-song lashing
willing there be meaning
glory traded for trauma

Driven aground by foul winds
his heart snarls within him
in the land of the lotus eaters
false prophets of bliss
lost in the breach of time
mouths gushing specious
promises of luxury and ease
far from the mourning
and vagaries of wars
in an endless silent peace

Lost in nightmare
indoctrinated in the tunnel
vision of cyclop’s bounty
hiding his true self, a
false abundance leading only
to a dark grave of pride
he upbraids his heart,
reflecting that he must
find passage home
a fiery hearth and
way to his beloved
endure, o heart

He wades through 
tall grass prairie 
dreaming of her silken hair
chestnut mane like 
the wild horses chasing 
the transcendent horizon
glimpsing her reclining figure
in mountainous skyline
she lights the sage smoke
swirling from the red dirt
to blue heavens she sings
songs sirens’ covet
endure, o heart

As her bride’s heart
a fidelity unmatched
dancing to the unwavering
music of devotion and beauty
that first bound them
in an unbreakable bond
eschewing the doubts
mending the wounds
weaving their future
a rich tapestry
tale of resilience,
redemption, and love
that endures forever

Posted for d’Verse Poets Pub‘s Meeting the Bar: Fall seven times, stand up eight where we explore aphorisms, myth, and fables by writing our own gnomic poetry. Please join us!

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Ilha de Fera (Island of Wild Creatures)

Filed under: Love, Mythology, Philosophy — 7 Comments

November 12, 2020

He was born in the salt-sting tempest
demigod son of a Celtici priestess
ravaged by a trickster god of the sea
oblivious to his origins and form
only known survivor of Carcharodon
ancient predator of the deep

Shipwrecked in the hinterlands
arriving at the end of the wilds
Portuguese, sea-faring mystic
hunting melancholic forests of kelp
prowling the labyrinth with the hunger
of an addict, driven to destroy

Grey sky pierced by the padrõe
inscribed with King’s coat of arms,
divine mark of ownership,
over Africa and her heretical heart
he mistook her saudade,
whale song of longing, for a sacrament
a carnal invitation in a strange tongue

His treacherous bite severed her soul
bleeding into the seafoam
he circles, awaiting her final heartbeat

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Virtue in Eternal Nature

Filed under: Allegory, History, Love, Metamodern, Mythology, Personal, Philosophy — 5 Comments

June 23, 2020

Arkansas River Near Leadville, CO. Credit: USFWS

I am the keeper
of limbic cryptoglyphs
of all immensely fragile
and beautiful things
surreptitious traumas
salt-stained sorrows

Locks and mementos
burdened by history
epitaphs written in
blood of my ancestors
incorporeal touchstones
to a fateful past

Singing bowl moans,
bones refracture,
and ashen losses unveil
all these men ever want to
holdfast are fantasies,
embroidered abstractions,
questlines in unfeeling,
lifeless worlds of murder

Strategies deployed
in a game of abuse
lost in an oubliette
of broken promises
each door and
window a deception,
opening to apathy,
with illusory joy
always out of reach

He alters the earth under me
reduces me to a thing, an idea –
angel trapped in a cycle of forgetting
cyborg glitched by programming
a seeker forever searching for a path –
mirror to his vanity that cannot
reflect enough glory to be cherished

Until the day I awoke
petrichor leading me
to the hallowed river –
it was conquered,
torn asunder in war
dam near stole
its roaring fury

My peripatetic soul
nurtures its wilderness,
its forward motion
flowing into a future
heartbeats riverside
snow-packed source
from the Rockies
to its wide-mouth
confluence and,
eventually, to the sea

Linked to dVerse Poet’s Pub.

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Lyra: Orpheus’ Lament

Filed under: Love, Metamodern, Mythology — 12 Comments

April 16, 2020

NASA, ESA, and C. Robert O’Dell (Vanderbilt University) used by permission under CC 4.0

Vows echo hollow in the night sky
my lyre cast into the heavens
paeon twisted lachrymose
music unraveled in star trail fragments
a leitmotif of grief

Was it the uplift of hope
or my fallen eagle of faith
that lost you, my beloved?
our reunion assured
until I could not look away

From my bright star,
my soul’s hearth
doomed to an eternity apart
colliding underworld horrors
in interstellar space

The ring upon your finger
now a beacon and an effigy
shattered nebula of my love’s promise
tainted by the poison of another
constellations of sorrow dismember me

Envelop my sight
cleave my joyous heart
rob my arms of succor
my feet of the path back to you
muses bury my bones

and silence our song

Linked to dVerse Poet’s Pub.

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Lexical Shangri-La: Soul-vale of star-trail dreamscapes

Filed under: Art, Mythology, Writing — 15 Comments

June 3, 2019

Painting of Shangri-La (somewhere near Gangkhar Puensum) by Anna Montgomery

Orchids imbued with angelic authority
shiver a quantum flux thunder-clap
manifesting the Himalayan goddess

she unfurls, an unbounded poetry,
untamable dragon eyes spark
spiral galaxies of linguistic delight

She sighs her secrets
dancing melodies along a liminal threshold
azure moon-glow midnights of another dimension

This is a Quadrille for a wonderful prompt at dVerse that requires the word dragon and only 44 words total. This poem is a melded and greatly truncated version of two previous poems: Lexical Shangri-La: Here be dragons and Lexical Shangri-La: Prosody of Blue Poppies.

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• Denise Levertov

  When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.

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• Postmodernism

  Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.

• Robert Anton Wilson

  Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

• Witold Gombrowicz

  Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke

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  I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.

• Gustav Flaubert

  Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

• Dušan “Charles” Simić

  Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

• Monique Wittig

  Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.

• W.S. Merwin

  All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible

• Thomas Aquinas

  Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.