Poet Writer Author Albany NY
“They have lost the metaphysical sense
Of the future, they feel themselves
The end of a chain
Of lives, single lives
And we know that lives
Are single
And cannot defend
The metaphysic
On which rest
The boundaries
Of our distances.”
~ George Oppen
There are some days when I would just like to go to sleep for a hundred years and wake up in a better world where there is really good free coffee, no more wars, no more death and where poverty no longer exists. I also wouldn’t mind it if it was a world where poets and poetry were once more recognized for their work and good poetry once again in history got the attention it truly deserves.
~ R.M. Engelhardt
Poetry is not something scattered like the wind, but an individual journey for the writer. A path, and not a competition. What is written is the truth of the poets life. Which is like a religion, sacred to that person.
~ R.M. Engelhardt
CAST
From the wreckage
And the great unknown
Come I,
Cast back unto it
Again
From beneath, the mire of
All good works
Which once wrought heaven,
You, closer to thyself
And…thy sight.
The poet
Now lost
Without words
Cast in shadows
From the edge of stars
“Silence.”
__________________
~ R.M. Engelhardt, 2009
In this dream.
You are a painting by Thomas Hart Benton with luxurious black hair and beautiful pale white skin
Asleep.
An old hillbilly a mid-west aging Pluto attempts to touch you, looks at you from around the corner in awe and sublime wonder and its obvious and plain to see that he is complete and completely in love with you as you lie in a Cinderella-like ecstasy naked in the middle of a rural Kansas field. Persephone he is softly saying, Persephone. But you cannot hear him speak and he cannot bear to take you into the underground of his place, and his hell. In the background there is a wheat thresher and FDR’s America, there is a wide open blue & empty sky full of white clouds and depression era beliefs, and you are Beautiful he murmurs Beautiful because Cupid has overtaken him and you have overtaken all his senses and he cannot ever leave.
So in this dream. …. you are a painting
In this dream you are the spring and the awakening of all ancient wonders and all ancient things, hidden away among the fears and jealousies of all men who cannot see
The very things that makes you beautiful
“You”
~ R. M. Engelhardt
