meter & rhyme

In a final homage to National Poetry Month, Inside Moravian asked students to submit their own work, and we received some remarkable verse. Enjoy!

 

Strangers

Two strangers

Meet, chemistry ignites

Noah’s Ark built seemingly overnight

Only to let the flood seep in, jade

And make jagged our hearts

Until we’ve turned from partners

Into parting ways, but

Let’s blame fate

 

For spiraling us backwards

Into an unknown world

Where you and I were always

Destined to be

Lost souls

Never to have our chance

To amount to anything more than

Two strangers

--Jonathan Clark

 

A Kitten’s Existential Crisis on a Sunny Day

Paws outstretched, belly upturned

The sun’s digits reach down to caress-

‘Tis better than the touch of those bald brutes,

O sunshine, my loving sunshine

Engulfed in soft vibration and blank bliss,

To lay in the sunshine, this is life.

 

But why is it life?

 

Is lying in the sunlight

All I amount to?

All my existence is?

To move about this domestic landscape,

Shifting from patch to patch

To the next paltry paradise

The next bit of joyous impermanence-

It shall inevitably move again, and again.

Is this nomadic path all that I am?

Will I only ever sleep, slink, and shift

Until I slouch my way to the grave?

These naked beasts will find me,

Cold, yet still soft.

They will find me in death as peaceful as in life.

That will be all-

Some crying, a day or so-

Then they will move on.

Forget that I was their pet,

The fuzzy patron of their affection.

They will get another

Just like me- and I am gone

I will be nothing

Nothing to them, my family

Nothing to this, my world

Nothing to the universe

I am nothing-

 

O that golden goddess,

Provider of my pleasure

She must warm millions of others.

That whore runs her fingers

Through the fur of every feline,

That harlot kisses the deserts

Giving them their golden dryness.

She bounces upon the waves and embraces celestial orbs.

She does not care for me-

I am nothing-

A solitary kitten in a world,

A universe that knows nothing of me-

 

Well, if I am nothing, at least I’m not a human.

--Nathaniel Decker

 

Sunday Brunch at the Hotel Bethlehem

Waiters in white scurry between tables

And clear the diamond-cut dishes, as invisible

As the breeze and as silent as mice. The piano

Player’s fingers dance across the keys, music

Floating over the din in the hotel’s ballroom,

While women in their Sunday best chat

With men, their tailored suits black

And clean. Like children, they play

Make-believe. They are Carnegie

Enjoying a lavish meal, Audrey Hepburn

Having breakfast, Eloise

At the Plaza, but for only an hour

Or so, until the piano stops playing,

Until the dishes are cleared and the waiters

Remove their constricting ties. They button

Their coats, brace for the cold, and venture

Outside where time unfreezes from

Its elegant hold and passes once more.

--Keri Lindenmuth

 

A Haiku

The shell is shattered, 

And the Bright Bird flies away 

To create a new World.

--David J. Baurkot

 

Stray Cat

My heart is a stray cat

It has no home of its own

It is left in the cold

I try to find comfort in girls 

But they leave me alone

Not allowed in the home

The leave me in these streets

Never in their sheets

And since I’m stray

Backyards and driveways is as close as I can stay

Until they shoo me away

Letting the hose and water bottle spray

We’re just friends is all I hear her say

So I run away

Find myself in clubs dark as alleyways 

Where I find girls that are looking for boys who have been pushed away and have never found pleasure

Guess I fit the requirements 

She requires this

This broken heart not to listen

But to connect our bodies in different positions

So I treat those girls as prey to fill my needs

But see

This isn’t the nourishment that I need

It’s a cheap substitute 

Filling me temporarily is all it can do

But hey my hearts is a stray cat

This is the pain that it goes through

--Keyshawn Griffith

 

Stem Cell

I’ve found a comfort in red hair,

In this prison cell that reeks of pestilence.

The daylight flutters over stray cherry wisps,

And lands on the tip of my nose,

With a scent reminiscent of oranges

Peeled in my parents’ kitchen

For salad.

 

Disease makes me more aware of flickers of hatred on faces,

But when faces come through this room

There is a chance that they will kill me.

 

I don’t see many faces anymore.

 

Instead, there are masks with voices

Telling me everything is okay,

But how is anything okay

When if the mask slipped down

And you breathed in this room

I would die?

 

My eyes are bloodshot.

Red, like blood, but not.

Veins pirouette around my pupils,

Like those courses of red hair.

 

Like my slow beating,

Swollen heart.

--Patrick Donahoe