Poems about Things that BreakA Poem by Michael R. Burch Poems about things that break, shatter, fall apart, dissolve, burst, etc. Poems about Things that Break These are poems about things that break and/or shatter: a bubble, glass, a mirror, a twig or tree limb, a thunderstorm, cities and towers in times of war, old habits, our hearts, and sometimes Love itself. Shattered by Vera Pavlova loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch I shattered your heart; now I limp through the shards barefoot. Dark-bosomed clouds pregnant with heavy thunder ... the water breaks ―Michael R. Burch As grief reaches its breaking point someone snaps a nearby branch. ―Yamaguchi Seishi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch Lightning shatters the darkness― the night heron's shriek ―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch Eros, the limb-shatterer, rattles me, an irresistible constrictor. ―Sappho, fragment 130, loose translation by Michael R. Burch My heart is unsteady as a rocking boat; besieged by such longing I weaken with age and come close to breaking. ―Otomo no Sakanoue no Iratsume, loose translation by Michael R. Burch Mirror by Kajal Ahmad, a Kurdish poet loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch My era’s obscuring mirror shattered because it magnified the small and made the great seem insignificant. Dictators and monsters filled its contours. Now when I breathe its jagged shards pierce my heart and instead of sweat I exude glass. Mirror Images by Michael R. Burch She has belief without comprehension and in her crutchwork shack she is much like us ... tamping the bread into edible forms, regarding her children at play with something akin to relief ... ignoring the towers ablaze in the distance because they are not revelations but things of glass, easily shattered ... and if you were to ask her, she might say― sometimes God visits his wrath upon an impious nation for its leaders’ sins, and we might agree: seeing her mutilations. Published by Poetry SuperHighway and Modern War Poems Franta Bass: The Little Boy With His Hands Up Frantisek “Franta” Bass was a Jewish boy born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1930. When he was just eleven years old, his family was deported by the Nazis to Terezin, where the SS had created a hybrid Ghetto/Concentration Camp just north of Prague (it was also known as Theresienstadt). Franta was one of many little boys and girls who lived there under terrible conditions for three years. He was then sent to Auschwitz, where on October 28th, 1944, he was murdered at age fourteen. The Garden A small garden, A small boy, a sweet boy, Jewish Forever I am a Jew and always will be, forever! But I will always fight for my people, And I will never be ashamed of them; How dignified they are, in their grief! Cleansings by Michael R. Burch Walk here among the walking specters. Learn inhuman patience. Flesh can only cleave to bone this tightly if their hearts believe that G-d is good, and never mind the Urn. A lentil and a bean might plump their skin with mothers’ bounteous, soft-dimpled fat (and call it “health”), might quickly build again the muscles of dead menfolk. Dream, like that, and call it courage. Cry, and be deceived, and so endure. Or burn, made wholly pure. One’s prayer is answered, “god” thus unbelieved. No holy pyre this: death’s hissing chamber. Two thousand years ago, a starlit manger, weird Herod’s cries for vengeance on the meek, the children slaughtered. Fear, when angels speak, the prophesies of man. Do what you can, not what you must, or should. They call you “good,” dead eyes devoid of tears; how shall they speak except in blankness? Fear, then, how they weep. Escape the gentle clutching stickfolk. Creep away in shame to retch and flush away your vomit from their ashes. Learn to pray. Second Sight by Michael R. Burch I never touched you― that was my mistake. Deep within, I still feel the ache. Can an unformed thing eternally break? Now, from a great distance, I see you again not as you are now, but as you were then― eternally present and Sovereign. chrysalis by Michael R. Burch these are the days of doom u seldom leave ur room u live in perpetual gloom yet also the days of hope how to cope? u pray and u grope toward self illumination ... becoming an angel (pure love) and yet You must love Your Self If you know someone who is very caring and loving, but struggles with self worth, this may be a poem to consider. Ghazal by Mirza Ghalib loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch Not the blossomings of song nor the adornments of music: I am the voice of my own heart breaking. You toy with your long, dark curls while I remain captive to my black, pensive thoughts. We congratulate ourselves that we two are different but this weakness has burdened us both with inchoate grief. Now you are here, and I find myself bowing: as if sadness is a blessing, and longing a sacrament. I am a fragment of sound rebounding; you are the walls impounding my echoes. Bubble by Michael R. Burch .................Love ..........fragile elusive .......if held too closely ....cannot.........withstand ..the inter..................ruption of its.............................. bright ..unmalleable.............tension ....and breaks disintegrates ......at the............touch of .........an undiscerning ..................hand. I believe this is my only shape/shaped/concrete poem. Because Her Heart Is Tender by Michael R. Burch for Beth, on the first anniversary of 9-11 She scrawled soft words in soap: “Never Forget,” Dove-white on her car’s window, and the wren, because her heart is tender, might regret it called the sun to wake her. As I slept, she heard lost names recounted, one by one. She wrote in sidewalk chalk: “Never Forget,” and kept her heart’s own counsel. No rain swept away those words, no tear leaves them undone. Because her heart is tender with regret, bruised by razed towers’ glass and steel and stone that shatter on and on and on and on ... she stitches in damp linen: “NEVER FORGET,” and listens to her heart’s emphatic song. The wren might tilt its head and sing along because its heart once understood regret when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on. She writes in adamant: “NEVER FORGET” because her heart is tender with regret. Published by Neovictorian/Cochlea, The Villanelle, The Eclectic Muse (Canada), Nietzsche Twilight, Nutty Stories (South Africa), Poetry Renewal Magazine and Other Voices International Break Time by Michael R. Burch for those who lost loved ones on 9-11 Intrude upon my grief; sit; take a spot of milk to cloud the blackness that you feel; add artificial sweeteners to conceal the bitter aftertaste of loss. You’ll heal if I do not. The coffee’s hot. You speak: of bundt cakes, polls, the price of eggs. You glance twice at your watch, cough, look at me askance. The TV drones oeuvres of high romance in syncopated lip-synch. Should I feel the underbelly of Love’s warm Ideal, its fuzzy-wuzzy tummy, and not reel toward some dark conclusion? Disappear to pale, dissolving atoms. Were you here? I brush you off: like saccharine, like a tear. Breakings by Michael R. Burch I did it out of pity. I did it out of love. I did it not to break the heart of a tender, wounded dove. But gods without compassion ordained: "Frail things must break!" Now what can I do for her shattered psyche’s sake? I did it not to push. I did it not to shove. I did it to assist the flight of indiscriminate Love. But gods, all mad as hatters, who legislate in all such matters, ordained that everything irreplaceable shatters. Mate Check by Michael R. Burch Love is an ache hearts willingly secure then break the bank to cure. Water and Gold by Michael R. Burch You came to me as rain breaks on the desert when every flower springs to life at once, but joy’s a wan illusion to the expert: the Bedouin has learned how not to want. You came to me as riches to a miser when all is gold, or so his heart believes, until he dies much thinner and much wiser, his gleaming bones hauled off by chortling thieves. You gave your heart too soon, too dear, too vastly; I could not take it in; it was too much. I pledged to meet your price, but promised rashly. I died of thirst, of your bright Midas touch. I dreamed you gave me water of your lips, then sealed my tomb with golden hieroglyphs. Published by The Lyric, Black Medina, The Eclectic Muse, Kritya (India), Shabestaneh (Iran), Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Captivating Poetry (Anthology), Strange Road, Freshet, Shot Glass Journal, Better Than Starbucks, The Chained Muse, Famous Poets and Poems, Sonnetto Poesia, Poetry Life & Times Resemblance by Michael R. Burch Take this geode with its rough exterior― crude-skinned, brilliant-hearted ... a diode of amethyst―wild, electric; its sequined cavity―parted, revealing. Find in its fire all brittle passion, each jagged shard relentlessly aching. Each spire inward―a fission startled; in its shattered entrails―fractured light, the heart ice breaking. Published by Poet Lore, Poetry Magazine and the Net Poetry and Art Competition In the Whispering Night by Michael R. Burch for George King In the whispering night, when the stars bend low till the hills ignite to a shining flame, when a shower of meteors streaks the sky as the lilies sigh in their beds, for shame, we must steal our souls, as they once were stolen, and gather our vigor, and all our intent. We must heave our husks into some raging ocean and laugh as they shatter, and never repent. We must dance in the darkness as stars dance before us, soar, Soar! through the night on a butterfly's breeze: blown high, upward-yearning, twin spirits returning to the heights of awareness from which we were seized. Published by Songs of Innocence, Romantics Quarterly, Poetry Life & Times and The Chained Muse Distances by Michael R. Burch There is a small cleanness about her, as if she has always just been washed, and there is a dull obedience to convention in her accommodating slenderness as she feints at her salad. She has never heard of Faust, or Frost, and she is unlikely to have been seen rummaging through bookstores for mementos of others more difficult to name. She might imagine “poetry” to be something in common between us, as we write, bridging the expanse between convention and something . . . something the world calls “art” for want of a better word. At night I scream at the conventions of both our worlds, at the distances between words and their objects: distances come lately between us, like a clean break. Published by Verse Libre, Triplopia and Lone Stars The Ruins of Balaclava by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch Oh, barren Crimean land, these dreary shades of castles―once your indisputable pride― are now where ghostly owls and lizards hide as blackguards arm themselves for nightly raids. Carved into marble, regal boasts were made! Brave words on burnished armor, gilt-applied! Now shattered splendors long since cast aside beside the dead here also brokenly laid. The Greeks erected shimmering marble here. The Romans drove wild Mongol hordes to flight. The Mussulman prayed eastward, day and night. Now owls and dark-winged vultures watch and leer as strange black banners, flapping overhead, mark where the past piles high its nameless dead. Once Upon a Frozen Star by Michael R. Burch Oh, was it in this dark-Decembered world we walked among the moonbeam-shadowed fields and did not know ourselves for weight of snow upon our laden parkas? White as sheets, as spectral-white as ghosts, with clawlike hands thrust deep into our pockets, holding what we thought were tickets home: what did we know of anything that night? Were we deceived by moonlight making shadows of gaunt trees that loomed like fiends between us, by the songs of owls like phantoms hooting: Who? Who? Who? And if that night I looked and smiled at you a little out of tenderness . . . or kissed the wet salt from your lips, or took your hand, so cold inside your parka . . . if I wished upon a frozen star . . . that I could give you something of myself to keep you warm . . . yet something still not love . . . if I embraced the contours of your face with one stiff glove . . . How could I know the years would strip away the soft flesh from your face, that time would flay your heart of consolation, that my words would break like ice between us, till the void of words became eternal? Oh, my love, I never knew. I never knew at all, that anything so vast could curl so small. Originally published by Nisqually Delta Review Eras Poetica II by Michael R. Burch “... poetry makes nothing happen ...”―W. H. Auden Poetry is the art of words: beautiful words. So that we who are destitute of all other beauties exist in worlds of our own making; where, if we persist, the unicorns gather in phantomlike herds, whinnying to see us; where dark flocks of birds, hooting, screeching and cawing, all madly insist: “We too are wild migrants lost in this pale mist which strangeness allows us, which beauty affords!” We stormproof our windows with duct tape and boards. We stockpile provisions. We cull the small list of possessions worth keeping. Our listless lips, kissed, mouth pointless enigmas. Time’s bare pantry hoards dust motes of past grandeurs. Yet here Mars’s sword lies shattered on the anvil of the enduring Word. The Higher Atmospheres by Michael R. Burch Whatever we became climbed on the thought of Love itself; we floated on plumed wings ten thousand miles above the breasted earth that had vexed us to such Distance; now all things seem small and pale, a girdle’s handsbreadth girth ... I break upon the rocks; I break; I fling my human form about; I writhe; I writhe. Invention is not Mastery, nor wings Salvation. Here the Vulture cruelly chides and plunges at my eyes, and coos and sings ... Oh, some will call the sun my doom, but Love melts callow wax the higher atmospheres leave brittle. I flew high: not high enough to melt such frozen resins ... thus, Her jeers. Old Habits Die Hard by Gulzar loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch The habit of breathing is an odd tradition. Why struggle so to keep on living? The body shudders, the eyes veil, yet the feet somehow keep moving. Why this journey, this restless, relentless flowing? For how many weeks, months, years, centuries shall we struggle to keep on living, keep on living? Habits are such strange things, such hard things to break! Having Touched You (The Boy in the Bubble) by Michael R. Burch What I have lost is not less than what I have gained. And for each moment passed like the sun to the west, another remained suspended in memory like a flower in crystal so that eternity is but an hour and fall is no longer a season but a state of mind. I have no reason to wait; the wind does not pause for remembrance or regret because there is only fate and chance. And so then, forget... Forget that we were very happy for a day. That day was my lifetime. Before that day I was empty and the sky was grey. You were the sunshine, the sunshine that gave me life. I took root and I grew. Now the touch of death is like a terrible knife, and yet I can bear it, having touched you. I wrote this poem as a teenager after watching "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" with John Travolta playing a young man with a defective immune system who risks death for a chance at love. Published as the collection "Poems about Things that Break" Keywords/Tags: break, breaking, breakings, shatter, shattered, shattering, fragility, fragment, touch, cruelty, brutality, abuse, stress, love, pain, relationships, society
© 2021 Michael R. Burch |
StatsAuthor
|
|
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Subscribe
Flag Writing