Notre Dame de Paris

To me the social architecture of a cathedral outstrips its aesthetic wonders. A cathedral is a monument to a community, to a way of life, to a view of things bigger than one's own little world. It was Victor Hugo's novel, Notre Dame de Paris, that led me to understand a cathedral's power, and this one in particular. I think the high dynamic range of this photo brings out that sense of the glowing presence this building has had in Paris and in the imagination for centuries.

Notre Dame de Paris

by Gideon Burton

Great ribs of stone rise romanesque, then vault

Into the dark and airy transept's top.

Two vast and colored windows, round, will halt

And heat the light to rosy hues, not stop

The sight of heaven that two hundred years

Brought pious masons, carpenters and all

The cutting grinding laborers so near

To godly mystery, its silent pall

Uplifting with the buttressed walls of mass.

A vision, wafer thin and ruddy red,

In sweaty time to sons from fathers passed

Who saw God's finished house when they were dead.

       She marks the tomb of peasants, and the times,

       Part sepulcher, part temple, part sublime.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Image: flickr - xelcise

Light Years

Light Years
by Gideon Burton

How is it that our ranging minds across
Both time and space can freely, widely roam,
As though it lay within our means to toss
The years of light aside as waves do foam?
The tides of sluggish time for us will rise
But half a sigh and then return us low
Despite those worlds we compass with our eyes,
Regardless where our starry dreams will flow.
My grandfathers, like distant planets, shine
Across the inky fabric of my past
In dimming rays, and I have yet to find
My kin, beyond one generation vast.
       Our minds behold what never we can touch;
       Our time, our space, three pebbles in our clutch.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Image: flickr - kern.justin

Varanasi

I wrote this sonnet based only upon vague impressions about the Ganges and its geographical and cultural settings. Then, years later, I visited Varanasi and went out on the Ganges river to explore the ghats and watch the pilgrims bathing and the ashes of corpses floating alongside the tea lights set afloat. I decided my sonnet pegged it. Nice when that works out.

Varanasi
by Gideon Burton


Is this the thin descent? The liquid way
of gossamer and fear? The curry blows,
the crocodiles upset the Ganges flow
enough–not quite enough–to breathe the play
of wind with daylight. All that Muslims pray
ascends in minarets of spice below
the smear of yellow-gray that ebbs and grows,
that closes over India to stay.
The echo of the desert comes to rest
against the twining granite idols, mute
and patient on their broken bases. White
absorbs whatever we had stated best,
and salmon tigers prey upon our brute
reflections, sharpened past the point of spite.


Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Image: flickr - pyjama

Respite

Respite
by Gideon Burton


He’ll lessen these encumbrances. In time
you’ll find the dust to be the least of these
despite its progress: eyes to throat to knees,
the burdens empty every step you climb
along the cloudy mountain crags. The brine
you swallow thins its gruel and the fleas
that chew in grinding rhythms will release
their little jaws, will leave your skin, your spine.
But there’s no telling what might also go–
the bandage gone, the skin too pink and raw.
There can be curses heavier than mud.
But meanwhile in the curling currents’ flow,
be careful of that sharp and gripping paw
releasing you to silent, whitened blood.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Image: flickr - angela7dreams

The Wordy Wormy Path to God

The Wordy Wormy Path to God
by Gideon Burton

With warm abstractions fortune bathes my hopes,
as though the sound of words could baptize time,
could fast adhere to heaven’s dangled ropes;
as though her breath could cause the deeps to shine.
I also summon words and with them pray
to God, expecting, reasoning my way
to fond conclusions.  I have felt their sway
and thought I could with words cause peace to stay,
or at the least some mandate send on high.
But Babel speaks so clearly to my mind,
I fear the house I'm building as I ply
some wordy, wormy path to God. Resigned
to crudest tools, these forms of ink and air;
I wield them, spend them, send them, foul and fair.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Image: Generated through Wordle.net from the words in this poem.

The Tentacles of Syllables

The Tentacles of Syllables
by Gideon Burton

Hold on – too many curling tentacles
of syllables.  The fusions didn’t hold
so well. I fear we may have grown too bold;
a smoking film upon the spectacles
betrays the oil of fingerprints.  This spread
of mumbling circumstance beyond the reach
of twine and knots, or these parentheses
(mean-spirited or kind) the last degrees
of nervous breath will still attempt to teach
old molecules to quicken from the dead.
The feint and wavering of upper boughs
suggesting second choruses (or more)
cannot achieve the crease that evening scores
along the sober whisperings of now.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Tricky

The Plow of Time

The Plow of Time
by Gideon Burton

The plow of time, a cosmic blade that scores
the paths of Jupiters and wobbling moons,
that trenches passive galaxies, that bores
its twilight augurs into day's cocoon.
The scalpel time, irreverent and crude,
repulsing pulses, bleeding rhythms pale
and panting, corpses stiffening and mute,
the oxygen of oxygen grown stale.
The sickle seconds subdividing breath,
pretending order, overturning light
or black or shivering silence blue with death,
with thatched and snapping neurons, darkly bright.
    You bend or measure, clocking endless noon,
    too late, too thin to rhyme with now or soon.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Lynn

Sea Floor

Sea Floor

by Gideon Burton

I’ve gathered every tentacle, I’ve swept
the ocean byways clean of every shell
and licked the patient coral reef. I’ve kept
each salty grain intact and swimming well,
and now I can at last return to sleep,
though far above the circling seagulls cry.
Just listen to the bony lobsters creep
their way to darkness, cool, before they die.
We’ll walk together, if you will, along
the sediments that ease our common steps.
Ignore the coarser currents, right or wrong,

but pause to feel what plankton swarms inflect.

Domesticated, still the waters flow
more deeply than the very fishes know.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Raleene

Renaming Water

Renaming Water
by Gideon Burton


As strange as this may seem – no doubt it will –
the water must receive another name.
Not what its color is or how it spills
across the oldest stones or how it frames
the patterned desert with its silent, white
abandon. No. Perhaps its oil, its crude
antiquity, the way it stains with spite
the spongy tongues we multitudes of rude
imbibers couple to its coolness. It's alive,
you know, malicious with its salty tides
for eons grinding sand the way the hives
of hornets prick the evening with their sides.
A name as sharp to sting, but in degree
sufficient for this moon that rips it free.


Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Stuck in Customs

Retreat

Retreat
by Gideon Burton


I will retreat to quiet words and few
enough to tender novel names for rain,
for sleep, for islands washed by rivers through
the thin conclusions of this season's vain
recital of the fragment elements.
They shape themselves to moister paths and long
conveyances of sound, the echoes spent
and spent again compounding in the strong
and warming currents, mouths inside of mouths
along these thin agreements, breath by breath,
by any reckoning a distant south
to thought, as chilling in its focused rest
as sleeping burdens waking, fog and mist,
a melding image, tongueless pushing fists.


Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - tanakawho