Mary Barnet

Mary Barnet

Horizon

howling in the mind's eyes

mountainous rising, reaching

a sky whose equinevision

enlarges the earth

whose inhabitants are giants

whose foot-long fingers touch the clouds

living in the rolling hills, within the mind

tight, tense with fending off today

that arises skyscraper-like

from foggy yesterday

we like woods that ooze

and flow, with words that blaze and blow

sometimes cold, yet with living warmth

our worlds glow

a mist of green

a tiny slime upon this earth

bouncing ball in a greater league

galactic contest in which

wiser eyes

see us tangled in earth-wide throws.

QUESTION OR ANSWER

What question is it?
Or which answer
Reveals itself in the wind?
Whistling past this house
Howling from out our windows,
Changing to quietly falling snow?

ARTIST

I like to sit and think
In the evening
When it is quiet ---
To make my typewriter go rat-a-tat-tat.
I imagine myself a central figure:
King-pin of the dream factory
Clarifying major questions
About the source of life itself,
Mor important than death,
Overcoming all obstacles to eternity.

I stand with gifts
Before the giant door.

OLD TOM-CAT

The last old Tom-Cat ---
The one you daren't spay ---
His age made him delicate.
He was set in his ways.

White in color as in age
Puahed out of the kitchen and his meal.
The Exterminator came today,
On his poison can he broke the seal.

The dog old too:
Dirty and sick;
Confined to basement and yard.
The house only for cats to sit by chimney bricks.

Lying prone
In sleep as in death;
The same life as mine
Gives you, my lovely pet, your breath.

ESCAPING OLD PAIN

I learn to treat myself as a success in this life:

like I can sing Godly tunes

and never be alone

I want time to remember me...know my suffering;

the final joy of these years stretched out like pearls

on the horizon...poems like a thousand suns and moons:

all I know and love;

that you, I pray...the children I never had

will remember me and smile.

I am not an island.

no promontory reaches this far, I'll grant you

yet the ocean is my blood !

the birds come to feed,

green turtles crawl up on the beach to lay their eggs

then return to the sea. I am not alone.

GOD'S HANDS

Always beginning

Now passing midpoint

In this human race

A journey whose end we try not to think of

Whose rhyme and meaning

Are in reality the only

Possible and noble completion.

For even if we die alone

Happy or humiliated

Saved or lost

This and only this ending

Completes the tune God has played

Weaving our lives into the fabric of this world.

THE WEARY STRUGGLE

I cannot hold a portion

of this universe in my hands.

sometimes the beauty and the grandeur

are more than I can stand.

until, as the weary animal

filty from fighting

I stand before a world

Unencompassable in few words or many;

for like a sieve

my poetry cannot grasp the glorious smell of strawberries

Or catch the drops that fall on my tongue in a rain shower:

cannot hold the torrents from the sky

which slip through my fingers.

I, sinner, never may grasp

The Promised Land.

Return always to rejoin humankind's war-like band,

camped in tents

traveling out over the fields.

resting in small groups

here and there along these grasslands

where all the creatures roam

and summer's warmth and winter's

Cold wind withstand.

Searching out something more

than human sleight of hand:

Some answer......

Some sacred place....

Some real deliverance.

THREE VARIATIONS

1. MOMENT

are these white blossoms of the cut Gladiola living ?

is this

Spring dying ?

are these dead flowers ?

isn't it Spring somewhere always ?

and what lives a moment yet a part of life.

2. GLADIOLA

green stemmed Gladiolas :

pistils protrude from the largest silk white bloom.

soft green leads up the stem to buds

which may or may not blossom

to give off the sweet smell

before the stem dies.

3. INFANT

budding flowers

as white as the deliverer's white coat.

a trumpet for a New Year the world does not hear.

calling out from the womb of life

a bud like an infant whose cord has been cut :

will she grow to bloom ?

GREAT BLACK HOLE

I saw the darkness opening

To gobble me up,

Once again I was a child

Alone in the night.

In that dark, empty well

In the musty, moist depths

I have found no bottom

As in the deepest place within me

There is no home

Only the coldest air - the great black hole

Rushing in through a broken window of my mind.

Poetry Magazine