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Stories and Poetry
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Contemporary Poetry 3
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LAST SONG
Knowing that the end is drawing near
She grabs her child and holds him to her breast...
Sings a lullaby to quell their fear,
As bombs explode around her shattered nest.
She only has a minimum of learning,
Yet knows that endless war is always wrong.
In her heart, she feels a sudden yearning...
And prays for just Allah to make her strong.
Colors streaking blindly through the sky
Light up her child’s face with ghastly light.
They finally surrender with a sigh,
But she finds comfort in her last insight:
Though bullets soon will shred their flesh apart,
No missile can destroy the human heart.
BUCK I got the invitation
on an
ordinary day.
I sat to write this poem,
not knowing what to
say.
The picture on the card
Shows a man I never
knew,
With a cocky kind of grin
That I haven't seen on
you.
now,
your smile is softer
your hands
rougher
from years spent
fixing barns,
brushing
horses,
dressing children,
painting sunsets
your bright
blue eyes
glow with wisdom
not mischief
the
plant
surpasses
the
seed
WARNING
We
should be on high
alert-
It is an orange
day.
What,exactly,does that
mean?
Ah, that they
cannot
say...
They say...
"Life must go on
as
usual,
We can't give in to fear.
Yet still, we must
be
vigilant-
The terrorists are here!"
And yet I pause,
and
ask myself,
"How did this war
begin?
Is the enemy
outside of
me,
Or buried, deep
within?"
Ruth Powers is an American poet living in our
actual world of today - that is implicit in her poetry. She has an extensive
background in music and visual arts, as well as writing.
Here we present two
of her best free verse poems and one modern sonnet. Her free verse poem, Buck, is a poem dedicated to one of her
friends on his 65th birthday. The author expresses her feelings in these lines
with vivid images of a man near his sunset, but this friend is only her starting point
to view life from a higher level as noted in the last stanza.
In the following poem, Warning, Ruth Powers expresses in no uncertain
terms, how the outer world affects her inner one - the fear that could be
seizing people. Fear is the key word. Fear is the new invisible weapon used by
some insane, discontented people to impose their ideas against certain
political positions to rule the world. In the meantime, the man(or woman) on the
street is the major sufferer, and in some cases it even brings an entire nation
to its emotional knees.
Mrs. Powers, in this later poem, discloses first the overview of the entire
nation (and by extension, the rest of the world) with an objective viewpoint,
and then in the last stanza, she shifts to the subjective and questions her own
inner self. She is quite sincere, not speaking for one side only, but for both.
And what are the answers? Who knows the answer? We all want to know, too.
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