Category: Poetry

The simple sound of my song
Inside the complexity of my Heart

I stand aside the mountain within and
Transport my Self along its crest

Venture familiar valleys deep with
Unencumbered love like the Grace of

Each day I walk run and ramble
Its pathways the coastline revealing

A shore that does not end it has no
Limit just as the longest day of the year

Has no claim on my beginning and there
Are no reservations on my only hope

That my journey never ends as I collect
My vision of the love I have embraced

Captured by the Sounds of the Day
While evening surrounds my thanksgiving

© K. James Ribble

Like prompters in the
Street-Corner-Gutter-Box
I move in rhythms all my own,
Intercept myself and
Succeed shadows of Spring
Like the acquaintance welcome
Of an old friend.
Like the shadow brush
On my window sill
It’s a wonder’s moment:
 Love;
In time,
 winter-born
 with no poetry
 in rhetoric bliss

I’m like canyon canons
In rhythms all my own.

© K. James Ribble

I glimpse the magnificence of your memory
With unwanted present day awareness
As if the thought of reuniting once again
Obstructs the view of my future
Like a commoner among royalty. . .

This windfall of emotion cannot conceal
Any ordinary mention of love nor can it
Catch the mastery of my heart’s only notion:
To memorize forever this taste of you
Inside the callousness of times repentant core . . .

The epic boldness of my dream reveals
A light far too orderly and crisp within
The senescent pallor of a day gone by on
The edge of all that I had hoped for
Quenched by the harshness of my own choices . . .

Rather it relinquishes its vision to the delicacy of hope
Where I am fraught with heaviness for heavens
Standard humbled by headlines bearing a day
Just like weather forecasting
My remaining lifetime of healing and rebirth.
 
© K. James Ribble

I have found that it is only you
Who knows who I really am
Inside that cathedral of my heart
Where it always rains in the south of summer

It is only you who knows the fullness of my character
Even more than I know myself
Brushing past the allegory and alliteration
Noting all the inflammatory purging of pneumatic emotions

Please preserve that memory of who I was remembering
My constant struggle to regain what I have lost
Spilling past the Carthage of the carnage inside of myself
Relinquishing only the distrust of clarity too prudent to be wry

For when the time comes to reconsider who I am
I know you will preserve this memory with great care
As if to recoil on instinct the touching of the flame
So quick am I to shelter all that I have become
 
© K. James Ribble

Songs of Laughter in this
House Made of Dawn Light

Where we run with the light
Feel its Joy — its Life

As if we are water pouring
Out of ourselves, catching the sun

I follow myself
Watch my Light become Time

Board the ship of my Heart
Sundial on the Deck of Abandon

Now Time becomes light becomes
Heart becomes myself and I ride

Into the Day into my Home
Into this House Made of Dawn Light

© K. James Ribble

[Inspired by the music of Douglas Spotted Eagle]

In spite of all
That I have chosen
Along the path
Of my own heart
Eclipsed by the
Shattered dreams
Of my own Way,
I have never wavered
From the sanctity
Of our friendship
Nor its precious
Innocence and clarity.
This vision
I will hold for eternity
That line of purity
Connecting me
To the One True Self
Of who I was
And at its other end
There is only you
Who witnessed my birth
By way of Blind Naïveté
And utter self-forgiveness.
There, I (we)
Walked through a door
Of what was otherwise
A deserted path
That led to Now
And once again,
I am whole.

Building temples Galatia saw fit to idolize Augustus
In a gesture to show loyalty
Whereas my own heart builds a monument to Love
As a motion to embrace the only God I will ever know

I dedicate that building that venerable structure
To my loving Father who brought me to this Life
His gift beyond all reason, unfathomable in its depth
Human understanding undone by its breadth and scope

So I stumble to conquer my fears of living without creating
Attempt at all costs to emulate Him and all the ways
In which I can fulfill my own dreams yet find
Notion that vilifies the very seed of that creativity

It breaks my heart to think that I am not alone
In finding my skills to build among men once again
A bleak and lonely path to self-revelation wherein
My premonition is a reflection of the very building
I live in by my Self
 
©  K. James Ribble

On the broadest sky, in the bluest tempera of ocean,
I envision a wooded hiker’s trail leading to my heart
Opening the wind to the sweet touch of summer
Like the fine grain of oak in the sparkle of my hand

Where this path creates a place inside my dreams
And I am transformed, an image, a man
Of alloy and cloth placed on a field of greenery,
Lined with cedars for truth and lilies for compassion so

That hill after hill, the mountains speak in chapters,
The pungent grace of memories fill me with
Aromatic strength finally released from the sky,
Returned to me with the capstone of my home laid down

Just like the Spring and I am melting, melting
Flow from ice to the arctic camber seen only by the
Sun and the night all too high for any season tempest,
Fiery lacquered stations to the arbor from my mind

 
 © K. James Ribble