Pleasures Come and Go; Love Abides

September 28, 2020

Dear Subscriber:

Each week we examine a theme from a variety of points of view. The theme for this week is love.

I welcome comments on my poems at https://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com.

A love poem that compares love to pleasure:

Pleasures come and go; love abides.
Joy comes only at the risk of pain.
The wise know well the rhythms of the tides.

For love, just like an organ tone, resides
Beneath the ebb and flow that it sustains.
Pleasures come and go; love abides.

One loves beyond the need for choosing sides,
Beyond the calculus of loss and gain.
The wise know well the rhythms of the tides,

Know well the passions, purposes, and prides,
The wills and wishes that must wax and wane.
Pleasures come and go; love abides,

The truth within the truths that chafe and chide,
The truth that after truths expire remains.
The wise know well the rhythms of the tides,

The anguish and the happiness that ride
The waves' wild wash across life's sandy plain.
Pleasures come and go; love abides.
The wise know well the rhythms of the tides.

© by Nicholas Gordon

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/pleas7.html. For more love poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/lovepoems.html .

This week’s theme: Love
September 28: Pleasures Come and Go: Love Abides

Lucy Has a Smile That Lights My Sky

September 27, 2020

Dear Subscriber:

Each week we examine a theme from a variety of points of view. The theme for this week is fate.

I welcome comments on my poems at https://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com.

A name poem in which love, as is often the case, seems fated:

Lucy has a smile that lights my sky.
Upon my life, I cannot tell you why.
Comely, sweet, and gracious, she's the one
Yon fates have singled out to be my sun.

© by Nicholas Gordon

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/lucy2.html. For more name poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/namepoems.html .

This week’s theme: Fate
September 21: Maybe There Is Solace in the Sunshine
September 22: Forty-Five Walks Along the Shore
September 23: The Wind the River Roils Well
September 24: Destinée Finds Destiny Appealing
September 25: Time Passes like Music
September 26: Stillness Is a Quality of Mind
September 27: Lucy Has a Smile That Lights My Sky

Stillness Is a Quality of Mind

September 26, 2020

Dear Subscriber:

Each week we examine a theme from a variety of points of view. The theme for this week is fate.

I welcome comments on my poems at https://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com.

A philosophical Season’s Greetings poem about an experience beyond time and fate:

Stillness is a quality of mind
Enduring for a brief eternal moment,
A mirror of pure being beyond time,
Stripped of love and joy, desire and torment.
One's lungs and heart must breathe, of course, and pulse,
Not free of change, of want, of need, of wear.
Still, one can be One, and nothing else,
Given space to be no more than there.
Remember, though, the reason for this state,
Entering again the everyday,
Embracing your contingency and fate,
The wanderer that time will take away.
If one can strip oneself of self and be
No more than being, here eternally,
Glancing at the bed beneath the stream,
So might one be both dreamer and the dream.

© by Nicholas Gordon

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/stilln.html. For more philosophical poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/philosophicalpoems.html .

This week’s theme: Fate
September 21: Maybe There Is Solace in the Sunshine
September 22: Forty-Five Walks Along the Shore
September 23: The Wind the River Roils Well
September 24: Destinée Finds Destiny Appealing
September 25: Time Passes like Music
September 26: Stillness Is a Quality of Mind

Time Passes like Music

September 25, 2020

Dear Subscriber:

Each week we examine a theme from a variety of points of view. The theme for this week is fate.

I welcome comments on my poems at https://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com.

A philosophical number poem which compares free choice and fate to creating a melody against a given harmony:

Time passes like music, a tangle of voices
Harmonious, dissonant, yearning, resolved.
In turn it is passionate, calm, poignant, tearful,
Rhapsodic, despondent, a tumultuous earful,
The score of which leaves one with chances and choices,
Yet gives form and function to all those involved.
Sing, then, with love, as harmony dictates
Each note in a melody wholly your own.
Voices find freedom in shaping their own fates,
Even as each would sound poorly alone,
Needing the chords to make sense of each tone.

© by Nicholas Gordon

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/timepa.html. For more philosophical poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/philosophicalpoems.html .

This week’s theme: Fate
September 21: Maybe There Is Solace in the Sunshine
September 22: Forty-Five Walks Along the Shore
September 23: The Wind the River Roils Well
September 24: Destinée Finds Destiny Appealing
September 25: Time Passes like Music

Destinée Finds Destiny Appealing

September 24, 2020

Dear Subscriber:

Each week we examine a theme from a variety of points of view. The theme for this week is fate.

I welcome comments on my poems at https://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com.

A philosophical name poem about a woman whose fate is less than she had hoped:

Destinée finds destiny appealing
Even as she knows that she is free.
Success then brings her to the granite ceiling
Telling her what is, or not, to be.
Immensities return her quiet keening,
Nor more nor less than what she knows is true:
Eventually, she must surrender meaning,
Exactly as it was her fate to do.

© by Nicholas Gordon

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/desti2.html. For more name poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/namepoems.html .

This week’s theme: Fate
September 21: Maybe There Is Solace in the Sunshine
September 22: Forty-Five Walks Along the Shore
September 23: The Wind the River Roils Well
September 24: Destinée Finds Destiny Appealing

The Wind the River Roils Well

September 23, 2020

Dear Subscriber:

Each week we examine a theme from a variety of points of view. The theme for this week is fate.

I welcome comments on my poems at https://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com.

A philosophical poem in which the wind is a symbol of inexorable fate:

The wind the river roils well
And rocks like shells the boats offshore.
Reeds and cattails thrash and turn
As willows loose their streaming hair.

Soon the storm shall strip them bare
And wash downstream the whiplike ferns.
The river past its banks shall pour
And misery reduce to hell.

So do we all await the power
That rises with the rising wind.
The air electric sings of woe,
And darkness like a dirge descends.

Well do we know our fate depends
On more than we will ever know.
Nor will nor prayer that fate rescinds
Though grace attends each anxious hour.

© by Nicholas Gordon

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/thewin.html. For more philosophical poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/philosophicalpoems.html .

This week’s theme: Fate
September 21: Maybe There Is Solace in the Sunshine
September 22: Forty-Five Walks Along the Shore
September 23: The Wind the River Roils Well

Forty-Five Walks Along the Shore

September 22, 2020

Dear Subscriber:

Each week we examine a theme from a variety of points of view. The theme for this week is fate.

I welcome comments on my poems at https://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com.

A number poem about the nostalgic beauty of looking back at what fate and choice have wrought:

Forty-five walks along the shore
On which the years of fate and choice have thrown him,
Relishing the beauty they have shown him
Though looking out to sea for something more.
Yet he knows that life has much in store.

Feeling sings nostalgically within.
Infinity bursts weeping out of time.
Vivid memories come over him,
Each a fragment of some lost design.

© by Nicholas Gordon

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/45c.html. For more number poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/numberpoems.html .

This week’s theme: Fate
September 21: Maybe There Is Solace in the Sunshine
September 22: Forty-Five Walks Along the Shore