In my dream, I fell through the floor,
Whispers of a father I can’t ignore.
His hands were warm, but his eyes were cold,
Behind that mask, a truth untold.
I reached for him, but he slipped away,
A shadow where his love should stay.
A laugh that shattered, sharp and cruel,
The mask of love, a twisted fool.
Am I alive, or just a ghost he made?
I can’t recall the promises he betrayed.
All that’s left is the hollow air,
But the mask? Oh, it lingers there.
Throughout the coldest days of the mighty winter
Think of a sweet spring and dream of a mild summer
During the harshest hours of the wintry night
Think of flowers and dream of a pleasant sunlight.
Season comes, remains a bit and then flees
Life goes through a circular event like the bees
Like the moonbeams dancing around Mother Earth
In order to charm, embrace and kiss her to death.
چھوٹا سا اک گاؤں تھا جس میں
دیئے تھے کم اور بہت اندھیرا
بہت شجر تھے تھوڑے گھر تھے
جن کو تھا دوری نے گھیرا
اتنی بڑی تنہائی تھی جس میں
جاگتا رہتا تھا دل میرا
بہت قدیم فراق تھا جس میں
ایک مقرر حد سے آگے
سوچ نہ سکتا تھا دل میرا
ایسی صورت میں پھر دل کو
دھیان آتا کس خواب میں تیرا
راز جو حد سے باہر میں تھا
اپنا آپ دکھاتا کیسے
سپنے کی بھی حد تھی آخر
سپنا آگے جاتا کیسے
There is a quaint town, where
Were lesser lamps and darkness,
Many trees and houses some,
Covered by vast distances.
These are lullabies I have written over the years, as poems. Some of my poems have been set to music and thus have become actual songs and lullabies.
For a Ukrainian Child, with Butterflies
by Michael R. Burch
Where does the butterfly go ...
when lightning rails ...
when thunder howls ...
when hailstones scream ...
when winter scowls ...
when nights compound dark frosts with snow ...
where does the butterfly go?
These are love poems by Michael R. Burch. Some are poems about love in desert places where Bedouins have learned to do without. The poems include everything from heroic couplets, sonnets and villanelles, to free verse and haiku.
Sonnet: Once (a confirmed bachelor recants)
by Michael R. Burch
for Beth
Once when her kisses were fire incarnate
and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame,
when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes,
leaving me listlessly sighing her name ...
These are my modern English translations of Holocaust poems by Paul Celan, a Jewish poet who wrote the original poems in German.
Todesfuge ("Death Fugue")
by Paul Celan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Ono no Komachi translations
These are my modern English translations of the ancient Japanese poems of Ono no Komachi, who wrote tanka (also known as waka) and was renowned for the beauty of her verse as well as for her physical beauty. Komachi is best known today for her pensive, melancholic and erotic love poems. Her bio follows the poems.
If fields of autumn flowers
can shed their blossoms, shameless,
why can’t I also frolic here —
as fearless, wild and blameless?
—Ono no Komachi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Golden silence reigned supreme
in my nightmare and her dream.
9-2-2021
Keywords/Tags: silence, gold, golden, golden silence, dream, dreams, nightmare, nightmares
I
I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side.
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God's death were but a play.
Another Troy must rise and set,
Another lineage feed the crow,
Another Argo's painted prow
Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
The Roman Empire stood appalled:
It dropped the reins of peace and war
When that fierce virgin and her Star
'God' is composed of letters three,
But if you put an 'l'
Before the last it seems to me
A synonym for Hell.
For all of envy, greed and hate
The human heart can hold
Respond unto the devil's bait
Of Gold.
When God created Gold to be
For our adorning fit,
I little think he dreamed that we
Would come to worship it.
But when you ruefully have scanned
The chronicles of Time,
You'll find that lucre lends a hand
