by Andreas Gripp
featuring a comprehensive collection of favourite poems revisited plus brand-new offerings.
Release Date: August 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9739932-8-8 / 184 pages / Trade Paperback
$ 12.00
Click here to Read Reviews for Anathema
The guy that's
on this record
took his life
in '94,
his bitter voice
a pitch
off canyon
cliffs,
ensnared beyond
the speed
of racing light,
my ears,
telescopic
in our history's
sticky web.
The actor
in this movie
swallowed pills
in '62,
yet here she is,
lovely,
radiant,
as if her hair & eyes & flesh
existed still
upon her bones,
as though there were
no coffin
housing skeletal
remains,
no headstone as a
coda,
monolith to mark
finis.
Stay with me tonight,
you restless, roving
spirits,
in the spheres
of yesteryear,
your tunnels tied through
tubes,
transmitted
to the screens
of our invention,
to the speakers
by which we hear.
Let me feel no fear
as our sun gives way
to stars,
with windows
now ajar,
when crickets
are the choir
that accompany
your performance,
and the owls' wave of wings
the applause
for which you're due,
their hoots of encore,
encore
crossing through
my crooked blinds.
(c) 2009 Andreas Gripp
The earth has learned the virtue
of turning the other cheek,
of letting bygones be,
of being slow to wrath.
Sure, she has
her bouts of temper,
her quakes and lava flows,
her pelts of bruising hail
and her roar
of whipping winds,
but when all is duly said,
when we've torn
her groves of hair
out from her crown
of muddied hills,
when her lungs
are filled with soot,
her pools of sight
with sludge,
she refuses
to let us go,
let us float
to cosmic realms
where we'd meet
our dying breath,
thereafter start
her time of healing.
Perhaps she simply needs
our presence,
the sound
of Celtic harps
within her caves,
the times
we're not so bad
and shower love
upon her babes,
the pups,
the kittens,
the birth
of a million birds
who soar like kites
on her many strings.
(c) 2009 Andreas Gripp
Unlike bells of marriage,
friendship has no pomp,
is without a clergy's blessing,
is void of ceremony
and a contract signed with quills,
has no pronounced beginning
though it can end
with prevailing winds:
blown like dust
with gossip's tongue,
cast as dross
with a secret's leak.
Friendship grows as a fetus,
limbs and eyes
and pumping heart
fully birthed
when it is ready:
through without
the labour pains,
those instead are saved
for its untimely,
grievous loss --
through sudden death
or mounting lies
or the tremors
of earthly change,
the "going our separate ways"
that sometimes circumstances
state --
no one's willful fault
but stretching time.
And when a friendship ends,
there are no funeral rites,
no eulogy draped in black,
no tomb to house its body
or chiseled dates
inscribed in stone.
There is a pool of promise,
baptismal font
and passage,
when listening
grasps our hearing,
holds a clenched
and shaking hand,
when a hug
bestows its comfort
and a shoulder
absorbs the tears;
confirmation
of a whispering kind,
a pledge to rise
past selfish:
a never-too-busy-to call,
a wobbly, winter skate,
a bowl of steaming soup
when one is sick
and dearly missed.
(c) 2009 Andreas Gripp
In this warmer than normal winter,
the trees are budding early,
in January's
rain instead of snow.
I feel I ought to go outside
and bring some soothing tea,
play a tranquil song
for harp and strings,
be the sandman for a spell,
send the rousing leaves-to-be
back into their shells,
lest the winds return from the north,
puddles freeze over,
and greening branches waken
to a bird-less lie of ice.
(c) 2009 Andreas Gripp
And Then There Was Light,
Aurora Borealis, and much more ...
to return to main page