art music poetry

A Not so Social Poem

by

Don’t let it
put its big thumb
on you and
crush you like a bug.
Beware of likes and
no likes.
Don’t pour your soul
down a page of approval.

If you look,
there are to many paintings,
If you look,
there are too many poems,
If you look,
there are too many songs to sing, or
not sing.

If I look,
I am insignificant.

If I weigh me
I weigh nothing.

It is better to be
famous among the barns. **

Knowing where you stand
ain’t so grand.
Delusions are grander
and produce better work.

**- from Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

Rebuttal to Burroughs

by

Thank you Spaniards
for your small pox
and lust for gold.
Thank you for not caring as
European
greed created genocide with your manifest destiny
Thank you Europe for your slave trade.
Thanks for getting us off
to such a good start.
Thank you for becoming us
and then acting like
we ain’t you

‘Just Haiku’ and other Haiku by Joe Brennand

by

‘Just Haiku’

Basho’s deep north
a hermit crab walks
from side to side

on the shore
where the tsunami hit
a hermit crab

spring horizon
ripples of sunlight
on the shore

frost in the air
you see both sides
of the argument

departing summer
one pebble
skims the lake

mobile library
a ladybird eats fallen raindrops
from the leaf

a fox searches
upturn bins
stars twinkling again

Mocking bird
I am diagnosed
with dyslexia

Afternoon thunder
twins
in your ultrasound

Joe Brennand

Joe Brennand Haiku

Haiku by Joe Brennand can be found on the Camel Saloon, Dead Snakes and Writer’s Haven

After Dylan on the Ninth Wave. A Poem by Robin Ouzman Hislop

by

 
 
 
After Dylan on the Ninth Wave.*
 
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age – Dylan Thomas (1914-53)
 
Worm’s Head on Rhossili beach’s
Rocky peninsula
Crags that jut in the eye’s squint.
A bellying belly capped by a pixie cone
In a turn around bay, on a turn around tide.
 
Long levelled backwater mud banks
Bogged to the edge of another shore
Down dusk grey fallen sky
Misted on slow dark billowy waters
Slip to the rippling sand’s brink
Break with a sigh from the far horizon’s
Foggy veil’s sheeting light
That winks in the blink of a squint
As clouds rush down, head on.
 
Whilst the man on the hill
Beach up from the dune in heather, fern
Cliff path & bleats of rolling flocked wool
Wanders side on against Gods & Goddesses.
The might on high of ancient deities at play
In their buffoonery with the day
As they rollicked & frolicked
Harangued & battled for naught
Other than gainsay for the man on hill.
To push him & pull him, hither & thither
As his shadow swelled & swathed him
Down under into the rock below
Whilst they in their lightning & terrible frightening
Also would fall from their lofty citadel
Although immune from his suffering
To rage, rage against the dying of the light
To like him in their burial.
 

 
Worm’s Head on the Gower Peninsular was a well known haunt of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, also known for his prodigious drinking bouts from which he sadly died at the age of 39 in a New York bar. It is recorded he was once stranded on the Worm’s Head when cut off by the incoming tide from the mainland. Origins of the name Dylan in pagan mythology can be found in the Mabinogion, where he is described as the Son of the Wave, a Sea God born of the Goddess Arianrhod. Robert Graves in the White Goddess describes the mythological source of Dylan, as the Divine Child born on the Ninth Wave and sometimes ancient graphics depict a naked man caught by fishermen in a net are held to refer to Dylan. Its etymology variously ascribes the root as ‘The wave that floods’, ‘The flood that recedes’ and ‘The tide that returns’.
 
Lines in italics from Dylan Thomas’s Birthday Poem at Laugharne Bay & Do not go gentle into that good night.’

 
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