Resurrection (1)

In honor of Easter, I'm posting several connected sonnets on the theme of resurrection. This one centers on the theme of connecting creation with resurrection

Resurrection (1)

by Gideon Burton

Unto thy Son the molding of the sun;

Into His care the careful craft of earth;

By Jesus Lord, who privilege first had won,

Came all the world's creations into birth.

Thou didst unto His able hands bestow

The sculpting of the mountains, rivers, skies;

The planting of all growing things below,

The raising of them tender as they rise.

The sinews, organs, tissues of thy seed

Did Jesus bind together, blood and bone;

His patient, able hands met every need--

Creation's power to Him was giv'n alone.

         Yet Father, distant God of shadowed power,

         Did come to heal Creator in his hour.

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

Not only in the center but the seams

Not only in the center but the seams

by Gideon Burton

Not only in the center but the seams

where hydrogen will tear the cold, the black

of quiet space like cellophane that cracks

or curls to cinders in the sudden steam

of fission, or the sharp and mute attack

of first creation: brooding doves and streams

of errant magma wide as devils' dreams

where elements dissemble, vapors stack

and twist to igneous confusions, grey

with sudden sinking, sullen age, or dumb

allowance for the hovering pregnant dove.

Not only in the vagaries we pray:

the pressing wish to bleed and to succumb,

to wash with ashes snowing from above.

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

Her hands have washed my children's skin

Today I'm thinking about my stressed out wife, too busy to recognize how awesome she is. So someone's got to step up and testify. 

Her hands have washed my children's skin

by Gideon Burton

Her hands have washed my children's skin

a thousand times.  Her eyes have traced their moods,

supplying comfort like a healing food.

Her arms have ferried loads of laundry in

and out of closets, washers, dryers.  Quick

to clean, and slow to salve a sobbing cheek.

Her skin has flushed with bright and ruddy heat

from ordering our little world.  The thick

and thin of rearing offspring, fixing meals,

of stroking fevered foreheads, making peace

amid the rhythmed din that robs our ease

--I haven't known a wound she couldn't heal.

     All this, as much as all her youthful glory,

     adds chapters thick to this our loving story.

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

unholy sonnet

Here's something new. I've remixed the form of my sonnet, putting it into a Prezi presentation. If you haven't heard of Prezi, it is an amazing zoomable presentation tool that puts PowerPoint to shame. I don't know how much its artistic possibilities have been exploited, but this is a shot at rethinking an old form within a new one. I've made a movie out of the Prezi, which you can play, or you can click here to go to the Prezi presentation itself, which you can click through at your leisure (sequentially or not). You can also copy and remix the presentation for your own purposes if you wish. All in the spirit of remix culture!  Anyway, I'd love feedback from anyone on how this works. How does experiencing the sonnet in these different forms change its feel, its effect?





unholy sonnet
by Gideon Burton

to try to trace this rivering desire
to face this shivering of fire and ache
this trembling to require a bloodied blade
a muddied, scabbed, persistence of desire

oppresses me it presses me a shade
of wanting haunting me with buried fire
a darkly embered orange smoke a choir
and chorus, coarsely chanting sooty fate

I taste I waste a prey of praying's grace
unwieldy, not so wholly holy, ghost
and knotted flesh compounding tears and time

and time again to groan toward his face
with blinking stutttered broken breaking hopes
I claw the bread I claim the spilling wine

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. (This goes for the Prezi presentation, too!)

I know I have explained the crimson waves

I know I have explained the crimson waves
by Gideon Burton


I know I have explained the crimson waves,
the troughs of lucid pigment washing stain
across the iris, through the lens. The caves
of light that safeguard what is cool and plain
ascend, they say, but in the oily depth
the heated ink congeals against the doors
of what we plumb. Not even eels can guess
the thinning length of it, the rocky floor,
the tepid surface moonlight floating weak,
unfiltered by the viscous undergrowth,
the staid and steady vessel where the creak
of new antiquities relinquishes its smoke.
At least, I know we swam this course before:
no water, not a ship to claim the shore.


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

John Donne: Holy Sonnet VII

Since this week leads up to Easter and celebration of the Resurrection, today's sabbath sonnet comes from John Donne, whose Holy Sonnet VII so vividly imagines the return to bodies.

Holy Sonnet VII
by John Donne


At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there.   Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood. 


Photo: flickr - globevisions

Believing other messengers: the tide

Believing other messengers: the tide

by Gideon Burton

Believing other messengers: the tide
alive with curling currents; moons in phase
across a summer; waving wheat in wide
complacence greening through the warming days.
Confessing awkward liberties, the stilts
of bored flamingos, limestone hollowed walls
that crevice desert canyons in the guilt
of sad arroyos. I await the call
of constellations bending their arrays
to novel polygons of wonder, stark
and sensuous where ether creatures play
among the distances of quiet dark.
More sleepy now, more settled snugly firm,
the soil is boiling, chewed by silent worms.


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

Who knows what trances, what pale ash, what tin

Who knows what trances, what pale ash, what tin
by Gideon Burton


Who knows what trances, what pale ash, what tin
Remittances escape in vapored questions,
A marbled weakening along the thin
Allowance embered in the evening, lessened
By azure remnants, scraps of afternoon
Abandoning their grasping tones, and sheared
By capillaries branching hot and soon
Among the aspen summers.  Can the clear
Desire of animals or patient rock
Embalm the ebony again?  Can God
Bring texture to the lands he mocks?
The cubes of oxygen, the evens odd
Along the furrowed waves?  Who knows the deep
Enameling, the place where iron weeps?


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

A labyrinth of flame and heated air

A labyrinth of flame and heated air

by Gideon Burton

A labyrinth of flame and heated air
above the canopy of oxygen:
it writes in silence, finding clouds to tear
with cable strands of light.  The sunset blends
along the ocean’s border with the sea
itself, and shimmered water breaks its glare,
then carries cups of salted fire to me
along the dimming shore.  I can’t compare
the island stars, though dense with gassy heat,
to all this dance of color, water, air;
nor will the still of midnight ever meet
the melodies the lapping wavelets share.
  Accompany me seaward as all dims:
  the water warms, the sail of evening trims.

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

Snow

Snow

by Gideon Burton

It is a shaken spice, a moist and sweet 

relief to slake the blandness of our souls.

It is a heavy ripened grain, the wheat

that in the ether grows until we’re whole. 

It is the feathers of our mothers’ prayers 

returned fulfilling which the angels shred 

as gossamer, as grace redundant, layers 

of frozen time as we lay still in bed.

It is the cracking of the darkest sky,

soft meteors, the billion stars descend;

all victims cease from aching, asking why

the dirt, the noise, the gross confusion ends.
    What had been frozen thaws beneath its coat;

    what weary, rests, while worries grow remote.

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