We’re continuing today with our wonderful stash of Jack Harvey’s work. Eloquence abounds.
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Saintly Day by Jack D. Harvey
For my own saintly day,
I shall be martyred
on a great white cross-
shaped bird, borne away
high, fast and bleeding
to the upper regions
where Mark the lion roars,
where the tiger rolls
in lamb’s fleece
and angels serenely sing.
In keeping with the primal myth
crucified like Christ,
each of my hands
and feet punched
with a hole.
Why not?
Do it up right.
Flying high,
up, up and away,
open-mouthed
in my ecstasy;
for a moment
going aloft
and then falling
like an impaled Titan
fraught with perils
from the failed war
with the new gods;
doomed to dark Tartarus,
doomed forever
under the unspeakable weight
of an earlier younger earth.
~~
Stuck by Jack D. Harvey
With the muse upon me,
fanciful colloquies with dead
Pindar and his peers,
rhapsodies unimagined,
tuneful momentous metaphysical
speculations, the sound of far-off music
stronger than the wind, Calliope
in her white robe floating
above my head, seeming so close;
no use her divine presence
her favoring grace,
I can do nothing.
I sit stuck here below,
struck dumb as a post
and look at my fat thumbs.
~~
_____
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. He was born and worked in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.