Sample Poems by Bruce Meyer
In Sand, To A Daughter Approaching Seven
You wander away when I’m talking to you
because grass and trees and growing things
know that the only real distance between sun
and leaf is the distance of a split second
when the earth moves through enormous space
leaving the past behind.
And when we sat on the beach and castled
our checkerboard with knights and pawns,
building up and tearing down again, you
left footprints on way to the water’s edge
and they pointed to a distant shore as if
they could almost reach it.
A handful of sand scattered on the wind,
a blessing of spirit moving upon the earth,
fingers once held you no longer need,
an empty branch in winter reaching out –
oh, if I had touch to make the springtime come
closer I’d pull the sun.
I whisper in your ear each night a prayer
like the angel asking Caedmon to sing –
a word of beginning but never farewell,
you wander away but you can still hear me
because grass and trees, all growing things
desire to become themselves.
The Bay of Bengal
It is not a question of what you dream
but how far you can will your vision.
Believe in the ability to make everything seem
not what it is but what it might redeem.
Here a beach on Lake Huron; here its elision.
It is not a question of what you dream.
Let the sand, sun and each sparkling beam
sunlit on wave choir into an expression
of desire. Running to madness the truth may seem
a continent away, so far away a moonbeam
shining on a temple leaves the impression
of eternity. Desire’s what you think you dream.
A god opens his eye, loosing a natal scream.
His voice crescendoes to a kyrie eleison
and love is born to make everything seem
all everything can be, love that can transform
the meaning of a summer day’s expression
into a grain of sand, the beautiful and supreme
vision that brushed by you in a dying dream.
The Odysseus Limericks
I counted the endless waves
as songs released from staves.
The notes that were drowned
were the last siren sound
of a mind that constantly raves.
I dreamt my sailors were living,
pulling on oars and still thriving,
and in each watered eye
they implored the stark sky
for mercy the gods are not giving.
Having journeyed and found but desire
I longed for my hearth’s dying fire.
Though I take to the grave
all the world I can’t save,
the truth will make me a liar.
So I went ashore to find peace
but the sea wouldn’t give me release;
each night as I woke
the moon and tide spoke
your wanderings never shall cease.
I’ll shoulder my winnowing fan
declare I’m a lucky man,
find a grove or a garden
where I’ll seek the sea’s pardon
make amends and begin again.
There once was a man from an island
a lover of cities, a brigand.
When life slaughtered hope
he found he could cope.
He survived, but he can’t understand.
The Shells
Mornings after fierce storms when the sea
was smooth as ice and melting before our eyes,
my mother, grandfather and I would be
in shorts, on the beach, wading to our thighs
through shallows, the white light of heavenly
non-complicity reflected in our faces to reprise
a rainbow innocence among shards and debris.
It was the rare time we saw each other’s legs –
my grandfather’s thin and worn from a century
of having stood against the violent dregs
of change, my mother’s beautiful and girlishly
white, and mine like fragile saplings, little twigs
driven into the sand, absurd as a gull’s spindly
pylons – and for what we found we gave thanks.
Jingle shells, moon snails, quohogs and clams,
dwarf welks and angel wings, widow’s purses
and sand collars – we’d be clothed in shams
of riches, stuffed pockets full, gently nurse
the most delicate finds, arrange them in lines
on the kitchen table to await their next curse,
a new death, living under assumed names.
Instead of the voice of the sea within them
they would live by the stories we would tell,
how jingle shells were coins struck for Neptune,
how angels shed outgrown wings that fell
to earth like snowflakes. A smooth pink moon
shell in our hands was equally celestial,
driving tides toward the inevitable too soon.
And when they had no stories left to offer,
when dust settled on them and grew tired
of the same thing, seasons, the endless winter…
when our footprints became shards and melted
into the farthest place from live sea air
leaving not a wrack behind, our voices expired,
oceans persisted without us, imagining who we were.
The beauty of stories is the beauty of change;
tidelines strewn with treasured remains
after a night of flux and rearrangement;
the life still found in death that explains
why I listen to a shell for its strange
ruminations, echoes of tides, the pains
of passage, time’s novel estrangement.