Spontaneous Poems

BBB
Spring to Life strikes a real cord with me. Your aunt's enthusiasm on all of her works is infectious.

i dance along the cove
the waltz of the hours
dancing with the wolves
the mushrooms and the flowers
dancing like the wind
coaxing the gentle one that cowers
coming not to rest
dancing through the showers

I should have been a pair of ragged claws,
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas

I like typing those words on occasion and what better place to do so than the poetry thread.

Just wanted to get that out of my system.

Carry on.

My Joy
MY JOY
By Luella Trumley Doering

O you who hold my heart within your clasp--
O you whose soul keeps mine in covenant--
Ah heart before whose shrine I hourly lay
My offering of faith, to whom each day
Of life I send a dream world visitant--
This is my wine of joy--your love so vast,
So mighty, yet so quiet in its power,
Has chosen me, yea, me!--to keep its golden dower.

But when the busy hands of your career
Draw you away, and keep you day on day
(in other cities, or in hamlets near
Or far) from me, I sit and watch the gray
And then the dark of night obliterate
Familiar walls and roofs. "I am alone."
I softly say, and from my hidden weight
Of memories (almost my blood and bone)
Reach out the dark insensate hands of Pain,
The hands of loneliness which knew my tears.
They lay their phantom whips on me again
Across these laughter-echoing two years.
With them the old defense I used so long
Rises again, the old defense of song.

I fill the emptiness with little rhymes
And broken rhythms, that I may not look
Too long upon those desolate dark times.
Then you come home! Forgotten rhyme and book---
Forgotten loneliness, forgotten all,
All but yourself, your kiss and your embrace,
Your greeting echoing across the hall,
And the delight of homing in your face.
And so I make no songs when you are here----
What need have I, when in my broken sleep
I need but reach my hand to feel you near.
What need have I for song when love is sweet?
What need when day is swift and night is deep,
And love and you are mine to serve and keep.

But this one day of tingling air and sun--
Of hillside set ablaze by biting frost--
Of feeling life slip singing in the run
Of blood throughout my muscles, faint embossed
Upon my smooth, hard body; this one day
Is worth a million that no one can know
For certainty to life beyond the gray
Tranquility to which we everyone one must go.
So I shall live this day with a sure touch
Upon the garments of all loveliness,
And with its fading, having had so much
Lie down to sleep in night's dark peacefulness.

Always a pleasure Gus.

I should have been a pair of rugged claws,
Scuttling along the floors of silent seas,
I should have been an eagle soaring high,
with cluttered aeries untouched by the trees.

Gus, that was too good to let go by..<smile>

BBB, I have never read your poet, but that was quite powerful

Letty
Letty, the poet is my Aunt Luella, who died four years ago at age 100+. Very few people have seen her poems. She gave me her files several years ago after I read some of them. They are hard to read because they are typed with faded ink on paper that has aged and is difficult to decypher. After my Aunt died in 2000, I spent several weeks entering her poems into my computer to save them, which helped me to heal from my grief. I finally had to stop as the task was very difficult. Now that I'm retired, I plan to revisit the files and continue to enter all the work remaining. I think they are worth saving and passing on to others. I'm not an expert in poetry, but I think she had a remarkable talent for her time representing the first four decades of the twentieth century.

BBB

I believe a published book would be in order if only the "right" editor could see these poems.

Hamlet
HAMLET
By Luella Trumley Doering

Thy sword, Laertes, had a duller string
Than this keen two-edge weapon, whose bright blade
Lived ever in my shrinking brain, and made
Sharp trust against its upright, balancing.
Two-edged, and perfect in its tempering,
One edge flung out 'against all that life arrayed
Or good and sweet, and in their depths displayed
The base and bitter for my poisoning
While to myself the other edge was strong
To leave my soul and torture tender flesh,
To demonstrate with surgeon's skillful thrust
My human impotence 'gainst human wrong,
And utterly cut through the fragile mesh
Of hopeful love I'd built upon a trust.

Yet there are rose-flecked days,
Those when I meet a one whose eyes
Flash out a message from a smothered soul--
One such as you, whose hand seeks mine
In comradeship--we two can stand
Unfearing, yet much awed and reverent
Before the tumult of our elemental lives
And never veil our eyes, nor step aside
In pretense that we have not known the tide.
Then it is good to live life honestly.
But for the most we fold our hands
And guide unwilling steps in paths laid out
In ordered gardens, cool and fresh perhaps,
But planned by man--and even then
The hot sun mocks their cool virginity.

Oh, I am sick of living a deceit!
Come, give me your hand, the world is wide!
Let us seek forests where the sun is dim,
And tall ferns crush against the giant trees.
Let us in fearfulness creep out across
Wide deserts, toss our voices to the sky.
Let us find cities where the air is old,
And glimpses of veiled women stir the mind.
Let us find color, light and song,
The perfume of magnolias in the wind--
Aught but this dreariness; this planless wail
And choked rebellion at dull colored life.

BBB, shades of Grandma Moses.

Still stunned.

Letty
Letty, my Aunt wrote these poems when she was young and hid them away for decades because she didn't think them worthy.

BBB

bbb. Emily Dickinson. Goodnight, my friends. I love the reading of the deep transparent...

The frozen life beneath the snow
will come to life and it will grow
when spring has sprung without delay
all winter thoughts will soon decay
it cannot get here all too soon
I crave the garden full of blooms
sweet morning grass all wet with dew
and days much longer than a few
barefooted on a warmer day
to take myself out to play
among my garden I will find
all thoughts of spring upon my mind

I look among the stars at night
and wonder what they tell
to gaze upon the wondrous sight
to catch one if it fell

to wish upon it by and by
what wishes would I make
to ponder life, and give a sigh
and give instead of take

Jason to Medea amendment
I've reposted the Jason to Medea poem as I found that my Aunt had added to it at a later date. The complete poem is now on the Jason to Medea post.

BBB

Discontent
DISCONTENT
By Luella Trumley Doering

I have seen mountains thrust their hands
Up high.
As though to grasp the fairy land
Of sky.
I have seen white mist robe a purple peak
In tenderness, then sweep with fingers fleet
A tiny cabin swiftly from its seat
Where up till then it safe had kept its feet
Miraculously.

I have seen deserts spread their sandy load
Afar.
Wide plains of gray, with ne'er a road
To mar.
Under the moonlight take they witchery
Of space and color, and majesty
Of sweep. The gray sage, stretching endlessly
In day, in moonlight is a purple mystery
Flung wide and far.

Much of the wonder of the land I've seen.
Rowed on its rivers, loved its gleaming sand.
The green
Of silent meadows, nestled in the lee
Of guarding hills-their charm to me
Is known. But yet, my dearest wish, to see
In all its surging strength, the ageless sea,
Has thwarted been.

When April Comes
WHEN APRIL COMES
By Luella Trumley Doering

Dear Love, what shall we to each other say
When April comes, when April comes?
'Tis easy now to go the separate way
But what of love when lilac blossoms sway
And April comes.

When all the locusts shake their clusters out,
(And April comes, and April comes.)
When crocuses and daffodils fling out
Glad arms, and tulips are a shout
And April comes.

And Bluebirds trill that love, that life is new,
(When April comes, when April comes.)
And youth makes singing in the morning dew,
Love, can you let me go away from you
When April comes?

the antlers in the meadow
calmly serenely enchant the eye
the memory of the meadow in later years
where those antlers had to die
i wish i had taken the gun
i wish i had no reason to cry

The Grandmother
THE GRANDMOTHER
(Family portrait series #1)
By Luella Trumley Doering

They put a slab of granite at her head,
Simple and plain, a shining-surfaced stone.
Granite she was for strength, but when all's said,
The polished slab but ill expressed the tone
Of her tenacity and molding power,
A dominance so oddly intertwined
With patient waiting for the ripened hour
To bring fulfillment to her striving mind,
Waiting and aching with a secret pain
The while her driving courage sought to hold
Her adult children in the old domain.
Involved and secret was she, but too old.
And now they say, "She's happier above."
I wonder--crying, crying for their love?

A MAN
(A family portrait series #2)
By Luella Trumley Doering

He wanders wistfully about the town
And finds no restfulness and no content
In his vague quest and searching up and down.
He carries a defensive armament
Of hearty cheer and careless badinage
That none may see his restlessness and pain,
Nor dream his discord with this eager age
With which he struggles futilely for gain.
He seeks for Beauty, but to him her face
Is dim with shadow, and there some no light
To tell him of her presence or her place.
He wanders, crying strangely, in the night,
Her unseen fingers tearing him apart,
Her wild voice calling, calling in his heart.

A WOMAN
(A family portrait series #3)
By Luella Trumley Doering)

The years closed in behind her in a chain
Of memory, the links both bright and dark.
There was but little there to give her pain,
And yet it seemed to her the years were stark
And pinched and frozen. All her fruitful life
Had gone, with inner protest, to the strength
Of those she loved, and now her thought was rife
With old desires held to tenacious length.
Her heart had known no aging, only flesh.
All the vague longing girdling the earth
Awoke anew in her and with its threash
Made chaos of her bravely cherished mirth,
And that her soul should never speak out plain
Was the one passionate and piercing pain.

THE GRANDFATHER
(A family portrait series #4)
By Luella Trumley Doering)

His bonds were frail, innumerable ties
Of heart and home, invincible firm strands
Against whose strong integrity, surprise
Of impulse, or the unforeseen commands
Of stifled longings for a sky unstained
By smoke of labor, fell as transient dust.
He was more firmly bound than one constrained
By bands of steel, for he was held by trust
And love, and tiny, helpless hands. And yet
No toil could blunt his high intrepid hope
In the horizon's pledge, and visioned set
Of silvered trees upon some wind-blown slope--
He was a free a man as ever strode
In gypsy fashion down a gypsy road.

A GIRL
(A family portrait series #5)
By Luella Trumley Doering

The wise ones wagged their heads and sighed apace
And said she was the devil's very own.
She heeded not. Her vividness and grace,
Her boundless rapture with the life had flown
(She thought) beyond their power to bruise.
Earth built its brightest fires in her. She saw
No thing too lowly for a lovely use--
Nothing as ugly save an outworn law.
She ran in rhythm with her beating heart,
And all the world to her was a wild song
That she heard secretly and longed to start
The rest to singing. But the old are strong.
They frowned on her and tarnished Life's fair fame,
Until she shrank and tears put out the flame.

PARTING
By Luella Trumley Doering

Morning shall crash upon a paling space
Out of the misted gray.
But I shall make to longing for your face,
You, to an empty day.

Night, and the shadowed shelter of dim rooms,
But I shall search in vain
For the familiar tenderness of glooms,
And searching, call your name.

Yes, I shall call, and calling, hush my heart
To hear your voice once more.
How can I learn to ease this ache and smart
And smile as once before?

Never again for us the even song,
Never the morning star,
Only for you the dark when day is done,
Only for me a scar.

(Note: This poem was written after Luella Trumley Doering was required to have her cancerous uterus removed to save her life, but depriving this beautiful young woman of having children.
---BumbleBeeBoogie )