Two poems/songs by Norman Ball

Two poems/songs
by Norman Ball

Editor's note: The following are the poetry/lyrics to two songs written and sung by contributor Norman Ball. The You Tube video links are included in the titles.

Bones

If bones like autumn are overtalked
how then to drape them best in lyric shroud?
Bones interred in ashen white
uneased companion to the fiery orange sublime

Litters of dead leaves ignite
beside these unsheathed walking sticks
marched dead, abstained of color.

Bones that could hope to dance
again in sinews of a poet's song
are made to sing the flesh of words,
a spoken sun which could yet raise a grin in them
or gild a pallor to their white decided.
Unvoiced, they hasten dust's demise;
words, their sun of last rising.

These bones lie still but cling
to matted leaves, expectantly like Lazarus
cocked for graveyard song.
Before, chalk-washed from white to blank,
the elegaic kneels their stance forever.

Indulge the song of Swinburne
a sumptuous death, funereal and bold with pageant.
And if their dance strikes jaundiced ears
as overly excited or worse, the tin of overreach,
more life to them I say, however they come by it.
To the dead, a rake of brash and frantic color!

We resist this dance for fear
of some embarrassment.
With irony the bones are made to dance
a double-death of Frost's colloquial sigh,
a spare New England stiff
with measured pyres, a pallid rhyme
of idiom and corner-talk.

Bones deserve the lies of romance
as they will lie unspoken for soon enough.
Dance to the song of sweet poetic lies
and may some poet out-of-time
lie for us besides.

++++++++++++++++++++

Season of Affliction

The words to this song can be found on the video.


Author bio:

Norman Ball is a Virginia-based writer and musician whose writing has appeared in Liberty, Clamor, Hazmat, Identity Theory, Noo Journal, Epicenter and others. You may view his You Tube videos at Desert Run.