Halloween – haiku by Dennis Allen Lange

—
It’s the night
A skeleton crew
Works the streets.

—

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photo by Lynne Lancaster at
http://www.rgbstock.com/photo/mgIRT5c/Bat+Moon+Maroon

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* The haiku I write are lines of 3-5-3 syllables instead of 5-7-5.

See Haiku article here for explanation, if needed: https://thebardonthehill.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/haiku/
——————–

© Dennis Allen Lange and thebardonthehill.wordpress.com, 2016.

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Gonna Make It by Dennis Allen Lange

The hills are high, the slope grows steeper;
…Don’t think I’m gonna make it.
Then I’ll be loser, not a keeper.
…Could I fool some – just fake it?

The way is hard and it grows darker;
…Don’t think I’m gonna make it.
I’ve only passed the half-mile marker
…A failure?  Can I take it?

I’ll bow my neck, keep persevering,
…And when doubt comes, I’ll shake it.
I’ll win the race; I’ll hear the cheering.
…I think I’m gonna make it!
—

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© Dennis Allen Lange and thebardonthehill.wordpress.com, 2016.

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Dead Man’s Dump by Isaac Rosenberg

The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended—stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! have they gone into you!
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul’s sack
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
Those dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
The impetuous storm of savage love.
Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

A man’s brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer’s face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie,
The lid over each eye,
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead;
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said,
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight.
So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face.

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Look Closely, Or Not – haiku by Dennis Allen Lange

When this close,
A hot air balloon.
Far – lantern.

—

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photo by coolhewitt23 at
http://www.rgbstock.com/photo/og7978y/old+dragon+lantern

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* The haiku I write are lines of 3-5-3 syllables instead of 5-7-5.
See Haiku article here for explanation, if needed:

https://thebardonthehill.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/haiku/

——————–

© Dennis Allen Lange and thebardonthehill.wordpress.com, 2016.

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Nice Little Kitty – anonymous

There was a young man from the city
Who saw what he thought was a kitty.
…He gave it a pat,
…Said nice little cat –
And they buried his clothes out of pity.

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This Is No Case Of Petty Right Or Wrong by Edward Thomas

This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
Can judge.  I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: –
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches’ cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday.
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix  broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so:
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.

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What Drew The Crowd? by Dennis Allen Lange

I once saw a case of too many
(But maybe I was just a ninny).
…I knew not the facts;
…I just saw the acts.
But eight seemed much more than just plenty.

Eight coppers to do the arresting
Of one who seemed quite uncontesting
…Was more than enough
…For any young tough.
Were donuts free there for ingesting?

—
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© Dennis Allen Lange and thebardonthehill.wordpress.com, 2016.

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Into Battle by Julian Grenfell

The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun’s gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze;
And life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting has increase.

The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from glowing earth;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run
And with the trees to newer birth;
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fulness after dearth.

All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their bright comradeship,
The Dog star, and the Sisters Seven,
Orion’s belt and sworded hip:

The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridges end.

The kestrel hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they,
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

The blackbird sings to him: “Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
Brother, sing.”

In dreary doubtful waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers; —
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And only joy of battle takes
Him by the throat and makes him blind,
Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.

The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

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Overlapping – haiku by Dennis Allen Lange

—

Two seasons
Autumn and Winter –
Fire on ice.

——————–

photo by Marja Flick-Buijs at
http://www.rgbstock.com/photo/meRdgn2/Winter+colors

——————–

* The haiku I write are lines of 3-5-3 syllables instead of 5-7-5.
See Haiku article here for explanation, if needed: https://thebardonthehill.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/haiku/
——————–

© Dennis Lange and thebardonthehill.wordpress.com, 2016.

 

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Epitaph On Holy Willie by Robert Burns

(I will attempt to substitute some words
where I can to make it more readable,
but some words I cannot “translate”.)

Here Holy Willie’s sore worn clay
…Takes up its last abode;
His soul has ta’en some other way,
…I fear, the left-hand road.

Stop! there he is, as sure’s a gun,
…Poor, silly body, see him;
No wonder he’s as black’s the grun,
…Observe what’s standing with him.

Your brunstane devilship, I see,
…Has got him there before you;
But hold your nine-tail cat a wee,
…Till once you’ve heard my story.

Your pity I will not implore,
…For pity you have none;
Justice, alas! has gi’en him o’er,
…And mercy’s day is gone.

But hear me, Sir, devil as you are,
…Look something to your credit;
A coof like him would stain your name,
…If it were known you did it.

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