Category: Poetry

I walk through a day dream
verbose and unreliable

incessant loss of chaos
finds me abandoned

in a dream

what privilege of wonder
camps the night before me?

be-sodden with light as
I flail the daybed white

a canvas of my own plight
ending the call into now

clamors for a moment’s
fomented attention like

prepotent grammar
inherent of diction

engendered of knowledge as
pedigree to pen and ink

© K. James Ribble

In bare presence a draft of
garden-light pours beneath me

lost radiance in half-lit truths
on soul-extoling cloud beams

each treecast of maples sifting
royal greens on bonfire reds

calling me in a lightness
like mountain vapor creasing

the day in effigy, an image
of oscillation and twilight as

a meeting of cabbage moths
dance at the edge of morning

I walk your garden in dawn’s
triumphant shadow of illumination

returning to our bed of lost forevers
as I watch you sleep
in the grace of dreams

© K. James Ribble

– *An ekphrastic expression of, ‘A Meeting of Cabbage Moths’, the title of a song-painting by Poemme, from her album ‘Arboretum’

The distance of a thought
from the moment of realization
to the fire of your emotions
burns blueness into night

yet we spin on this blue globe
in a sea of regret
lost in the stars of
our own birth

launched into life’s raging ocean
but seeing you turn your
gaze to me
in a lithe cross of

sunlight buries me
in the nostalgia of late summer
where August leaves
begin to fall now

as a gentle wind carries
your smile to my heart
a floating leaf dances
in a southern breeze

© K. James Ribble

just to hear your voice

I listen to the trees speak in the aire
and whisper the tongue of Vesper

day long faire in whelm and elegance
sets lightly on your face before me

under the camphor dressed in
sun’s light as your eyes bring the night

to the close of our ancient mirth
shaded by the twilight of Corvus

now made element in the scar of winter –
for these lands speak of us in muted

voice yet sing serene the depths
of my devotion to your hand

now confessed in the day-end
crescendo of time’s reign of mist

as the sky utters its truths in nimbus grays
you are a song I cannot stop singing

© K. James Ribble

The crest of August
is forthcoming without
fail
steps beside me and
walks these halls
against the grain of time
fills me with Knowing
as the moments
dovetail into
each one beveled
in a cornice of light
augured obscuration
flush with insight
my impatience rivaled
forever in your eyes

© K. James Ribble

catastrophic from all angles
there’s no other way to
see to it – that

the gentle lull of life
bathes me again and again
over a pinnacle of light

always bright to be
just like you,
beautiful to behold in a

yellow sun aghast at the phrase
in this, yet the river flows of me,
as clarity of moment unfolds

in the copper brown of
a wiser moon – central to the
core of my hope, my love for you –

 

© K. James Ribble

this, my heart in
willowed movements,
now – us as one,

like a vast and open atrium
our time shrouds me
(on the scale of Earth)

invoking incantations
like a periphery of life
as I let it pass

extant and severe;
all of this is you, like
mapping the aftercrush

at the edge of summer
your voice calls to me in these
woodlands of lake and marsh

becomes the sunder of
my onyx devotion
an open realm, a ridge

of beige that longs for the
russet quiet of these merewinds
as corners of doubt

and trust are vanished
in the virgin merge
of aspen, elm and moss –
the night has gathered us
collecting our dreams

© K. James Ribble

forgive me for the
thought that I could hold
you bracing past alliances

yet still

holding on to
a peaceful desperation

shimmering gold aligns
with my heart a thread and
thimble, in a theater of Notion

breaching past the sun
across eons before the
light began: our line to now, is.

I know I’ve known no rest
and the days are long despite
the throw of loss –

But you wanted to go
And I tried, rang forgiveness
Pierced by the cobalt
drum of light and pain –

Always there was you
And then you were gone.

© K. James Ribble

 

I clear the path for my way, at
The periphery of time – a wanton
Disregard for calm and clamor

In phase of pines standing
At the lake as mirror among
Temples of the crying wind

Of belonging taxon and adrift in
Legion with the glow of rose

Of fecund petals, light-ghosts
Dancing on the sleeve of a
Beige and bracken love

Bring me in time to an
Open door before the
Day expires where we walk

Grasped in the grace
of silent surrender

© K. James Ribble

 

for every day I’ve lost
there’s an hour bending
towards the light of you
in a ravel of silent tears
majestic like the rainfall
in the morning sun of ecru
all a counterflow as afterlife
surrounding me bathed in
this haunting glow and sounds
drenched in ambers of chiffon
and the raucous
rage of thunder

 

© K. James Ribble