Maurice English Poetry Award

03/15/2024

04/10/2023

This Wednesday!

11/18/2022

INDIA

Dissolving chords among the rainless hill
The bells take up the theme of sacrifice.

The daughter of the Indian dream comes by
Sailing the somber colors of her robe
Among the proselytes
-- -- whose ritual murmurs of,
Dusk makes a meaning music in the sky.

A lamentation among the rainless hills,
The bells take up the theme of sacrifice.

Squat gods on lotus leaves and gods withdrawn
In valor abstract, ruminants of time,
Mirrors suspent from ceilings of despair,
Watch the blind gestures of adoring gleam.

Dissolving chords among the rainless hills
The bells take up the theme of sacrifice.

And garbed in colors of the night and moon,
The virgin vessel takes upon herself
The old act of an expiatory lust.
* * *
Love the amazed betrayer when it dies
Stains with its ruddy symbol
even the Indian dust.

Reprinted from:
Maurice English, Midnight in the Century. Park Forest, IL: The Prairie School Press, 1964

In loving memory

Maurice English Poetry Award

08/22/2020

I
Stripping within the cove, but far enough
Back from the hunting waves,
He left it wedged between two lava rocks
With sneakers, shorts, a rucksack or whatever
Time ticked away, but he did not come back.
I wear it on my wrist now and
From time to time I raise it to my ear
To hear it tick his years away. Not mine --excerpt from OMEGA

12/22/2019

“I dreamed I was in Dog's Park, where
The sign reads: Curb your Master”
--from Four Parables, IV. The Warning,
published in Midnight in the Century, 1964

01/29/2017

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