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About AK

I am an amateur writer, but have been writing poetry as long as I can remember.  By luck, my poems were accepted to Bread Loft Writer's Conference in my teens.  Bread Loaf is the oldest writers' conference in America, started by Robert Frost in 1926 (for US that is old).  I think poems give room to write about things that you normally would not express and give you the opportunity to think thematically in order to connect the sounds and thoughts as if pulled together in a string.  For a person, whose English is not her native tongue, I felt that poetry was an easier medium of writing than regular stories.  I am really bad at telling stories and writing things in length, short attention span I guess but I'm working on it on my non-fiction & fiction section.  Here is the link to Bread Loft if you are interested:

http://www.WritersConferenceBreadLoft.history

 

The Mended Hour

 

What is this face heavy with plans for tomorrow

Where waiting depends on absence of luminosity?

No boats floating to or away from you here,

Skimming on water next to bobbing candles,

Cant scare the blind fish away

At this ludicrous and useless speed.

 

Star-shaped clocks, with its sharpened hands scratching the surface

Of the broken hour, where you put together the chipped enamel

To spell out the days that are coming.

Weaving in and out the tangled nets of dreams

You catch the pops and tears as it happens in sequence;

Put it back together in remembrance of things you wished

In figure of July 4th lights fading fast.


Creamed top-heavy waves push up your lead-weighted eyebrows,

Staring at voices above that catch on the corner of rooms,

No lack of this or that in this place

All seems like fashionable semblance of moods and colour;

Gone before it fits

Into a dazzling array of weightless tumbles.

What was said?

 

Hearing you and me talk of things,

Changing the air around us to keep us awake.

Lacking no such things,

Leavening the air around us to keep up the temperance

Of situation fertile

For things to become.

 

The Bend

 

To change it is said, a welcoming but frightful thing.

What is changed is never lost,

An avalanche of thoughts turning ajar

Leaving out the things that are forgettable, but holding in all.

 

About, regarding and is just a bend,

This thing that is recognizable, but estranged by time;

Like walks you used to take,

Where the bend in the road is carved out

Into a useless rotary that ends when it is too late.

 

Often it happens, the old woman trying to raise her head

Like a dying sunflower top-heavy with black seeds,

Dark tears that feed the beasts.

Woman with her aching back, tries to pick

Up the dust of her gardens,

As if lost in her itinerary.

 

The Ending

 

So it seems that there is a pause

In your listless dreams you rest a bit,

Calls from conch shells, awaken your senses

Perhaps a development with details

That have yet to be revealed, fully;

A gossamer in front of your eyes

Gone and melted into the skin.

What is it you try to capture

When no one is around you,

What was it you remember

When no one asks you;

In plum red streets in the dark

There is a call,

Of something

An entrance to

And fro, and perhaps an ending.

 

And there you hang

A smile that is haunting

You revive it so

With drops of sacred oils,

 and such;

To the youth, the reverent youth

Where innocence is but a scent

That fades not,

Where laughter never means more

And warmth fails not

 

The ending is soft,

Inviting a hunger;

Like morsels,

Larger than crumbs

Left by frivolity of life

And its cushy blocks.

Assembled again,

A complete vision

Of a life that is to become.

 

An entrance to

And fro, and perhaps an ending.

 

 

 

 

 

Northern

 

Pegging me into

That corner,

A traveled Yankee corrects,

Naples is in the South.

Without real consent,

I reply ,

yes.

 

For those of us from

That deep South,

We view from where we are.

 

Puglia, my adopted Puglia,

Is really in the South.

So is Calabria, Basilicata and

Sicily, all in the South;

With Naples in its Northern place

Geographically and more. 

 

Puglia Salentine peninsula, the boot,

Faces both the fair Adriatic and Ionian,

So unlike Napoli and Rome facing the Tyrrhenan  Sea.

Yes, dirty Napoli is our North.

 

All the Andalusian lands, and lands of South

 

Twenty years in New England,

Without real consent, I reply and correct myself

From South Korea, but not Seoul,

But the South

More like Malaysias kind folk

Than them cold Northeners.

 

FALLING STARS

 

She walks besides the currents,

Moon illuminating her soft tresses;

T'is the night when sweet birds sleep

In their silver-tipped down,

Breath touching the still air,

Perfumed much by sweet wisterias

That hang about her.

 

Without a sound, the channel flows

To this sea;

It washes away

The wings of butterflies

Torn and abandoned.

 

Without a sound

The steps quicken

                         towards

Waves that deliver no answer.

 

 

She disappears slowly,

And stars above

Observe her sinking mass disappearing.

 

 

The stars burn bright, as to reveal this moment;

But one by one

They can only fall

     for

          her.

 

The Liking

 

First the idea fits

Then it turns aside to be taken

Considered to be good

Then understood to the Other

That it may foot the bill.

 

 

Gentle Gentry and His Gentleman

 

Wonderful it seems this gentry;

Should I further my cause to his liking?

Polite good bredding of a specimen for my purpose

Should be of gentle nature,

As long he has

His gentleman;

For fetching my wishes.

 

One cant have one without the other,

As all my kind supports,

As long as his monthly allowances per annum be fitting,

To me, the fair thing.

My white fur coat be warned

No sucking leech should be too well-combed.