I’m honored to share here today that my poem “Confession” was featured by The Piker Press! You can find it at the link below:
“Confession,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Thank you, Editor Sand Pilarski, for allowing me to share my voice among so many talented contributors. I am grateful for the opportunity.
“The Fifth of November,” popular English folk poem
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot!
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes and his companions
Did the scheme contrive,
To blow the King and Parliament
All up alive.
Threescore barrels, laid below,
To prove old England’s overthrow.
But, by God’s providence, him they catch,
With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
A stick and a stake
For King James’s sake!
If you won’t give me one,
I’ll take two,
The better for me,
And the worse for you.
A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
A penn’orth of cheese to choke him,
A pint of beer to wash it down,
And a jolly good fire to burn him.
Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!
The poem that M recites during 2012’s “Skyfall” is a section of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Its full text is below.
“Ulysses,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
Sean Spicer cannot find the teleprompter;
Things fall apart; the White House cannot hold;
Pure incompetence is loosed upon the world,
The bungling tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of sanity is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the amateurs
Are full of Trumpian intensity.”
— William Butler Jørgen (Jørgen Laursen)
I got some more nice news today — Haikuniverse featured my micro-poem, “Our Drive Home.” Haikuniverse is a project of the Poetry Super Highway, and daily publishes either a haiku or a micro-poem. (Readers can sign up for an e-mail from Haikuniverse each day.)
Thanks so much to Editor Rick Lupert for allowing me to share my very brief poem.
You can find it below:
Blue Wolves Move In An Indigo Wood
“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”
— Carl Gustav Jung
All the colors are off —
Blue wolves move in an indigo wood
Their cobalt backs arrive, arising
Like coarse dorsal fins over
low-lying orange flora,
their beryl heads hung low — every
aquiline cerulean nose is angled down —
tracing the escape of a flaming hare —
their racing red rabbit has evaded them again.
Dreams leave all our long nights’ inner canvases
in singular tints and incongruous
strange iridescence.
Reason, here, is pariah.
Senses are its surrogates.
Vision its impostor
in the illogic’s ether:
Slow stars arc in scarlet.
Racing sable comets
make black wakes against
blinding white night.
A full moon rises in violet —
the fat and full and low-lying fruit of a
dark and overripe plum.
Yellow bucks bounce
high and away in the wolves’ wake —
sun-colored stags beat bright retreat
a running herd of burning gold —
all sunlit sinewed limbs and flashing hooves.
Flurries of green quail flutter,
flushed from fushia grasses —
alate bladed emeralds, blazing away.
The verdant birds burnish silhouettes —
angles on lunar lavender.
But ever all the blue wolves ignore the moon.
Each arrows forth in formation
ardently advancing —
oblivious to bucks and disregarding birds.
It’s the hare that they’re after —
its crimson prints
lure azure noses
and bait the ordered forward pace
of the great broad and blue padded paws.
In a surprising eloquence,
one predator’s head
rises and sonorously
sounds its disinterest.
“See, then, dreamer, see,
“what evades the lucid wit at dawn.
“The obvious moon is the obvious girl;
“your love is a glaring suggestion —
“as bare-faced and as common
“as a hundred thousand loves that came before — her face
“turning and facing away is as plain
“as a routine moonrise, but we,
“we are the Jungian Shadow.
“And our red hare is your red hare
“And hare for one and all.”
The predator’s head is an arrow —
its broad blue ears angle back
as its blue nose rises and scents.
And its voice is song.
“See then, dreamer, see
“what confounds the heart at noon.
“The stags to which we’re indifferent
“Are the heroes of your childhood.
“The flight of every bird is your every
“moment of loss, but we,
“we are the Jungian Shadow.
“And our red hare is your red hare
“and hare for one and all.”
Then the blue nose dips
to sniff the ground again
in the predator’s diligence. If
this wolf’s tones were physical,
they would be blue tears.
“See then, dreamer, see
“what escapes the brain at day, see,
“Arriving at your reservoir,
“that its pedestrian waters
“though shallow, still may drown
“in existential death, so rather
“hunt at its circumference
“the red of a Collective hope.
“We are the Jungian Shadow.
“And our red hare is your red hare
“and hare for one and all.”
Finally its eyes soften,
running from burning blue cobalt
to the warm sky-blue of hopeful new boyhood summers, and yet,
its sad irises reflect
a distant dancing red:
a spinning flame –a prancing hare.
“See, then, dreamer, see
“what renders your pain as prosaic —
“the racing red flame of the hare.
“It might have tempted Ovid once
“or pained the painters of caves,
“baiting them as their discovered fire
“first turned stone to a nocturnal
“canvas — the clay
“reddened their hands but they
“could only glimpse an inner quarry,
“as you glimpse it, now,
“turning away
“from your minutiae.”
“See, then, dreamer, see.
“See a universal grief
“and a shared catharsis
“rendered in red in your sleep:
“blood red, the color of prey,
“sunset red at end of day,
“flame, the color of pain
“and, yet, created light.
“See, then, dreamer, see.
“Hunt with us and hear our call.
“Our red hare is your red hare
“and hare for one and all.”
— (c) Eric Robert Nolan 2016
Photo credit: By Dennis Cowals, 1945-, Photographer (NARA record: 2196327) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m honored today to see “Confession,” easily my most popular poem to date, featured in Issue 10 of Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine. As in the past, I am grateful to Editor Samantha Rose for allowing me to share my work alongside that of so many talented writers.
Issue 10 can be purchased in paperback format for just $3.41 right here:
Issue 10 can also be downloaded in PDF format for free! Just click here:
Issue 10 for free in PDF format
“Mother’s Love” (author unknown)
Her love is like
an island in life’s ocean,
vast and wide.
A peaceful, quiet shelter
From the wind, the rain, the tide.
‘Tis bound on the north by Hope,
By Patience on the West,
By tender Counsel on the South
And on the East by Rest.
Above it like a beacon light
Shine Faith, and Truth, and Prayer;
And thro’ the changing scenes of life
I find a haven there.
Photo credit: “Peasant Mother,” 1894″ by Fritz von Uhde
Pete Harrison has long been a valued contributor to this blog. Tonight I’m fortunate enough to feature a poem he’s authored himself — one which I happen to like a lot.
Thanks, Pete!
*****
We had just made love
There was enough light to see her
So I looked at her
Under the soft light
She smiled and asked what I was looking at
I said I was looking at her
Every part
Every mark
Every mole
She said she wished I would not do that
She said she had parts of her that she did not like
She said she had been told that they were imperfections
And when I told her it was all these parts I loved
Because they were all parts of her
And to me she was perfection
She laughed quietly
And looked away from my eyes
I will never be with her again
And I still don’t know
If she believed it was true
For me about her
Or about her for herself
And I still don’t know
Why she would believe anyone or anything else
“As Silver as the Stars You Tried to Rival”
The
world grows
darker in increments,
earlier every evening,
as Autumn’s arcing swallow bends to curve
at long last, rounding down, to the hardening ground, where only brown
leaves outlast November’s burning rug of reds and flaming footprints,
cast-off scarlets,
now giving way
to the gunmetal gray
of winter’s coarse eagle, its ash-gray and annual, slow,
feathered rule of sky ascends hemispheres, its lead belly
groaning for hare or softer birds, its slate eyes searching, yet ridden with hints of silver —
— thin silver threads in the breast of the lead predator,
ascending
screaming “December,”
slow, as slow as frost, as cold as loss,
frigid, frigid like a still photo and its forever frozen face there,
black and white, its timeless smile a lie, exposed by common calendars and your indifference.
If those blacks and whites were shaken up in a glass bottle, the jumbled shades under glass might make
silver:
— thin silver threads out of memory:
— as silver as the slimming minnows that you kicked
out of shallow water onto sand at 9
with the other boys
birthing, then returning swimming platinum
to the warm-womb mine of that black lake, you knew
that summer would never end —
— as silver as your father’s hair, when you were 13, the last time that you thought
your father would never end —
— as silver as the cross you gave to your first love,
kissing you at 16, there in the stairwell at school.
She laughed at your
accidental piety.
You thought it was a curving swallow;
it was a tiny crucifix.
And you told her
love would never end —
–as silver as the stars you tried to rival, drunk at 21, drunk at Cape Hatteras during the storm, drunk at the face of the Universe.
At “Kill Devil Hills” you balked at God.
The stars shouted with light, the violet-sable sky reeled and vaulted purple-black, interminable, drunk in its excess of self, the rhythmic, clutching sea its unforgiving son.
Your friends
warned you away from the sea.
The curving waves would swallow you.
They warned you, “You get dark when you are drunk.”
“And, besides, you’ll die.”
You laughed and stormed the waves against their wishes.
And you were dark. Your violet-sable heart
reeled and vaulted purple-black. You laughed
and shouted back at the stars,
young-mad and piss-drunk,
the freezing forward ramparts stung you but
you stormed in headfirst, headstrong, and interminable:
this night would never end,
and if it never ended, how could you?
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
Photo credit: bigwavephoto / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 