Welcome to the Second installment of poems from GM Palmer, as part of our celebration of National Poetry Month. Like what you see here? Be sure to check out the first installment, and GM Palmer’s new book, With Rough Gods, available now from Amazon and other places.
Translated from the Greek
for Alicia Stallings
Ripped moorings drift within your reach
as you save wordlings from their fate
like children plucked from stranger fires.
Phrases arranged to hide or teach
condemn or love in measured weight
unhidden from ancient pyres
sing out of shattered aspirations
to rise and fall at your command.
These words you wean from mother tongues
stumble into foreign nations
ignorant of their master’s hand;
they fight with the fury of the young
shoring the fragments of our ruin
against a broken civilization.
On the Sixth Day
I blinked and you were born
Unlike me and yet the same
Your smile and eyes the first
I saw; you were my mirror,
My opposite, my end.
We glowed in the green day
And I gave you all my names.
The gift of you alone
Bested all creation.
But the light failed and we
Grew blind together, lost.
And then i lost you; limp,
You hung your silent head
To never laugh again.
I was too dumb to know
That night would turn to day.
This Fond Imprisonment
Bloody sense fell out of time:
impractical to find,
easier to lose.
Abdicating the need to choose
we stare into unmoving
planets, locked in the purple
burdened sky, unable
to follow the clock’s quick hands.
Trapped out of time because
no one believes that signs
are not debatable,
a billion gods, each failing
to sustain his lonely world,
cast a cause upon
anything but skin.
Let us live within this world
unburdened by the need
to master anything.
Hold me in this entropy,
the strong force integral
and infinite between us.
G.M. Palmer preaches, teaches, and wrangles children on an urban farm in Northeast Florida.
His criticism and poetry can be found throughout various blogs and magazines, both in print and online. His children can be found throughout the neighborhood or at their grandmother’s house. His notes can be found on legal pads and spiral notebooks. His first book, With Rough Gods, is now available from Amazon and other retailers. His business cards can be found with neat little poems on the back of them.
Burlesque Press 