A number poem about being seventeen:
Seventeen is such a lovely age,
Ever on the edge of something new!
Vested in a multitude of plans,
Even as the calendar commands.
No choice has yet been made that one need rue,
Though soon, perhaps too soon, time turns the page.
Even at this sweet rehearsal stage,
Each must reduce the many to the few,
Needing dreams to comb through tangled strands.
© by Nicholas Gordon
Audio and Video Music: Lifting Dreams. By Aakash Gandhi.
Music free to use at YouTube.
A love poem about a new romance:
To love is to be naked to the wind,
Holding hands with someone you can’t know.
Invested in a bond that seems secure,
Resisting what seems graceless and less sure,
Trusting in a gift none can bestow,
You turn to one and leave the rest behind.
Nothing is more beautiful or pure,
Innocent, quixotic, gentle, kind.
Nor have you any hint how it will go
Except a will that this romance endure.
© by Nicholas Gordon
Audio and Video Music: Forever Yours. By Wayne Jones. Music
free to use at YouTube.
A poem, never sent, from a mother to a child whom she was forced to surrender:
My heart is like a symphony
That sings of only pain.
Of all that makes a life worthwhile,
Only you remain.
Only in the thought of you
Safe and cared for well
Can I find happiness within
My self-inflicted hell.
Only in my love for you
Is there sufficient grace
For me to want to live at all
In this forsaken place.
Ah, God! Were life not beautiful
And love not full of light,
I could, perhaps, embrace the rage
Of an embittered night.
But as it is, I cannot help
But hope for what might be:
That though I gave you up, you might
Someday, somehow love me.
© by Nicholas Gordon
Audio and Video Music: E Minor Prelude. By Frederic Chopin.
Music free to use at YouTube.
A Bastille Day poem about the dangers of allowing
inequalities between classes to grow too wide:
Beware of inequalities too wide
And chasms that cannot be bridged by dreams.
Societies fray first along the seams,
Then rip apart, exposing rot inside.
In chaos hopes for liberty abide;
Life in its Edenic newness gleams;
Longing is more brutal than it seems;
Ecstatic demons 'cross the wastelands glide.
Do, then, recall the day of the Bastille
As one whose burst of glory would reveal
Yearnings that would stain the turning tide.
© by Nicholas Gordon
Audio and Video Music: Bittersweet. By SYBS. Music free to
use at YouTube.
To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/bewar2.html.
For more Bastille Day poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/bastilledaypoems.html
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A poem for Independence Day (USA) about the importance of knowing
one’s nation’s history:
Identity requires memory.
No less than people, nations must recall
Days past, lest they wander witlessly,
Erased each moment, guided by the wind,
Pushed by lusts no wisdom can forestall.
Events are facts that one cannot rescind,
Nor can forgetting consequence forego.
Despite one's wish, the past is not behind:
Even now, it works its wayward will,
Nor can we understand what we don't know.
Contain your cavils, then, and snide thoughts still,
Even as we celebrate our story,
Described with all the clarity and skill
A scholar can sustain in heart and mind,
Yielding what for now is history.
© by Nicholas Gordon
Audio and Video Music: Borderless. By Aakash Gandhi. Music
free to use at YouTube.
To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/identi.html.
For more poems for Independence Day (USA), go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/july4thpoems.html
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A poem for Eid al-Adha about what it means to give a gift:
Everything we give was
never ours.
It was a gift, as was life
itself.
Dependent as we are, like
fragile flowers,
An unborn soul is seed upon
God's shelf.
Let yourself then meditate
on this:
A sacrifice can be no
sacrifice.
Death leaves one with
nothing one might miss.
How can one think one owns
what has no price,
As every gift one gives is given thrice.
© by Nicholas Gordon
Audio and Video Music: Pachabelly. By Huma Huma. Music free
to use at YouTube.
A Father’s Day poem to the almost-father of several miscarriages.
Fear not, for the world is full of beauty,
And love’s the song that brings it all to life.
Those who don’t have children often might
Have other songs to sing of
joyful duty.
Even so, one ought to feel the longing
Reverberating through one’s canyon walls
‘Mid all the other lost dreams one
recalls,
So that one’s sorrows might enrich one’s singing.
Days like these remind one of the loss,
Allow one to feel pain without remorse,
Yielding to the loveliness of being.
© by Nicholas Gordon
Audio and Video Music: No. 2 Remembering Her. By Esther
Abrami. Music free to use at YouTube.
