Chimes at Midnight

When I’m too old to toil too young to die

I’ll write some lines while my brain’s still spry

Not say in English gone fishing but Greek

a private joke only scholars find wry 

Sing to me muses in tongues I can’t speak

Tone poems in languages I can’t name

Crystallize images happy or bleak

so my words can attribute blame or fame

Translate your meaning so I get your drift

Let me hear your music framing your chords

Picture meaning in words I can make shift

into metrical patterns weaving your words

Sing to me muse with voice universal

Each time I recite without rehearsal

Tell me some tales you never told before

Tell what the future may take from its store

To challenge every species to find

a way forward preserving its own kind

From one day’s generation to the next

sunrise to sunset moonrise to moonset

high tide low tide morning and evening

never knowing what the future may bring

Some more sentient others much more dumb

some with levity cavalier hamstrung

by prejudice innate humor heartless

original sin anything worthless

Sing to me muse with voice universal

Each time I recite without rehearsal

Now make me bolder now make me stronger

Let me be ready to face a danger

Let me project my voice through time

Never let me struggle to find a rhyme

Or fill a line with requisite meter

Choosing my own form from time to time

Trampling iambic feet with anapests

Spontaneously spiking a spondee

Into the dactyl hexameter drone

And making it squeak with dubbed track of glee

Canned laughter cued on demand by a script

Written in the latest language fashion

Launched to the cloud from nondescript notebooks

Noticed by no one except by the swarm

Sing to me muse with voice universal

Each time I recite without rehearsal

Dick Russell © 2024

 Richard M Russell

                   For Those Who Fought and Died

                                                With My Grandfather

                                           

 

In Memory of Henry Friend Russell

                      Killed in France, May 23rd, 1918


much loved grape vines pendant with purple fruit
hands reaching to harvest through fragrant air
reaching two meters down those long rows root
vines heavy with palpable pinot noir

savoring sweet juice plucked for first pressing

for champagne pinot gris battlefields not far

daylight starlight touching forgotten names
arms out stretched forever upwards
never reaching sunlight feeling moonlight
all babies nursed once at a mother's breast
war dead in Alsace war dead at Verdun
roots fed by lives lost where trenches were run

Copyright © Dick Russell

Richard Michael Friend Russell
              2018






 

Two Sonnets

Did ever a day smell as fragrantly

in John Keats' Hampstead?  An ode to honeyed

summer     John Keats might write    blatantly

rhymed with clanging Cockney chimes    unworried

by consumptive coughing

and if Keats were living in modern times

writing verse    quickly spotting sheets with ink

his frame less frail    his complexion ruddy

his first love for Fanny    like his first drink

long forgotten

perhaps his life would be like this

alders ripple with tree's quiet laughter

someone's footprints have tracked the dew

Fanny long ago?     or his own daughter?

                  *

Alders gleam most for a moment at sunset

growing together in woodland clearings

while here under a locust tree    tiny leaves

begin to shine as if lit by a paint brush

heed well the blind    who know only darkness

who never saw light through a prism

when squalls scattered sunshine among some branches

then left all golden    crowned by a rainbow

if time is measured by light's decay

then time may stand still for the sight less

or time runs on

                                     transmuted as sound

touch

 a fountain splashing or waves lapping

but time flows on for all unceasing

a wake widening astern    keel of bright words

© Dick Russell, 2013