Author: Michael Burch

Indescribable our love and still we say With eyes averted, turning out the light, “I love you,” in the ordinary […]

She is wise in the way that children are wise, Looking at me with such knowing, grave eyes I must […]

She was very strange, and beautiful, as the violet mist upon the hills before night falls when the hoot owl […]

I, too, have stood paralyzed at the helm Watching onrushing, inevitable disaster. I too have felt sweat (or ecstatic tears) […]

She gathered lilacs And arrayed them in her hair; Tonight, she taught the wind to be free. She kept her […]

The earth is full of rhythms so precise The octave of the crystal can produce A trillion oscillations, yet not […]

… Among the shadows of the groaning elms, Amid the darkening oaks, we fled ourselves… … Once there were paths […]

See how her hair has thinned: it does not seem / Like hair at all, but like the airy moult […]

All the dull hollow clamor has died And what was contained, Removed, Reproved Adulation or sentiment, Left with the pungent […]

There is a Rose at Auschwitz, in the briar, A rose like Sharon’s, lovely as her name. The world forgot […]

A rhinestone skein, a jeweled brocade of light,- The city is a garment stretched so thin Her festive colors bleed […]

Walk here among the walking scepters. Learn Inhuman patience. Flesh can only cleave To bone this tightly if their hearts […]

You came to me as rain breaks on the desert When every flower springs to life at once, But joy […]

Serene, almost angelic, The lights of the city attend Upon lumbering behemoths Shrilly screeching displeasure; they say That nothing is […]

To at last be indestructible, a poem Must first glow, almost flammable, upon A thing inert, as gray, as dull […]