Poetry Samples

HOPE

Maybe your hope is the thing

with feathers,

But mine is the thing with fire.

My Hope burns with

force and passion,

a flaming carnelian heart in the dark.

It knows it must burn,

must light,

must show me the way into the darkness,

as I tread with confidence into

emerald halls of “yeses”,

gilded with pearls of wisdom

and golden rewards for my effort.

But only by the light of a flaming Hope,

burning endlessly and fiercely as I onward go,

will I find this thing I seek:

this possible dream of a life

happy and sustained.

My Hope cannot afford to be fragile,

with feathers and tiny bones.

My hope is made of

bright red,

firey,

Earth-crumpled stone.

MOURNER

In a past life,

I may have been a mourner at

high-profile Ancient Egyptian

funerals.

Screaming laments and welling

with crocodile tears for some

dead rich man who beat

My cousins.

And for my fraudulent but

convincing efforts, would be

paid in meager currency by his

Surviving kin.

A wife who had only known

Perfume and honey.

A son who would grow up to beat

My cousins’ children.

But I take the work as a

Great pretender, because

my melancholy wails are,

though perceived by the eye of

an onlooker to be mournful,

a mockery of the lives of these

Terrible people. People who have

no real ardent mourners,

and so must pay to show that

they are missed.

Pathetic.