Poems by Huck Fairman

May 19th, 2015  |  Published in May 2015

City Of Brotherly Love

 

Blocks of reddish brownstones

and brownish red blocks

measure flat black streets

and white walks

where sooted particles,

urban eddies of them,

sweep the ankles

of wrapped figures

hustling between doors.

 

Doors facing streets

carrying faces pacing paved squares

connecting thoroughfares that vanish

in neighborhoods of vacant stares.

 

Reddened dwellers

staggering through the winter gales

seeking themselves in store windows

proclaiming final` sales.

Within the buildings lives rush on

from floor to floor, reaffirming selves,

collecting ever more fine wares,

while out on the streets whooshing here and there come their shepherd Chevrolets, seals of the civilized, whether four doors or more, carrying bundled goods and bodies through this windowed world

where living is in the pane.

 

 

 

 

Medievil  II

 

Floating, little touches the horizon,

clouds at the end of a silver sea,

sun that is only a pearl

sinking below a harvest field,

brown leaves hanging still upon the trees.

 

Walls of a stone chapel

silent in the air, waiting for the ice rain

to silver-coat its modest spire.

Colors dangle from spear shafts,

whose spearheads are driven deep into the earth,

as figures in chain mail pace back and forth

before the doors, awaiting word,

the final call from on high

that will send them far away.

 

In the morning flickering,

two dark figures cross the dawn,

shadows on their horses passing over frosted fields,

swords swinging at their sides.

Behind, a dark column hovers in the gloom,

then glides across the trampled land,

into the forest dark, soon swallowed by the trees.

Whispers spoke of their fate in distant lands,

which survivors alone could sing,

sing above to heaven, rising from their knees.

 

 

 

 

 

Childhood Candor

 

Among selves other and inner

in moments of candor

trip questions of ambition and bread,

and roads chosen and fallen

from those selves see they have tread.

 

Recall a fall red riven forest road.

Observe its run waste not at the horizon or bend,

but where yesterday’s leaves and pebbles blend

into the fog of the day before,

and see at your feet

where all would be clear,

in the fresh air of the Spring of our year,

a turning haze of patterns

in wood life and your life

leaving no lines,

just colors, pastels,

of inscrutable translucence.

 

From infancy images of pain:

a small boy snapped by a toy whip

wielded with watchful, fearful glee by his brother,

while I stared safely held by the hand

of my father in the park.

Or sitting bent-kneed

on our fourth floor window sill

when they told me I might fall

but did not move me,

and I fell into wonder who close

had I come, how close would they let me?

 

 

Schools of gray walls and cinderblock halls,

always-closing classroom doors,

the remove of large teachers,

signaling officially, inexorably,

without ever consulting me,

the end of infancy,

and I walked with the crowd

into the following room,

leaving my fun dumb

on the green grass fields,

still to the toll of the three o’clock bell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

OLD LETTERS

 

Reading old letters

which are now old words

and never were

what I dreamed

and oh they were once so full

 

I find those words

did flow around and thrust

at all, then, I did know.

But knowing not

they were only words,

and people wind-blown reeds

leaning in half circles

round stems of inner seeds.

 

Real feelings reel here and now,

were reeling long ago, it’s true –

bright blinding Suns in crossing orbits –

yet no different if then I knew.

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